111TH CONGRESS

1ST SESSION H. RES. 867

Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ in multilateral fora.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

OCTOBER 23, 2009

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN (for herself, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, and Mr. ACKERMAN) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs

RESOLUTION

Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ in multilateral fora.

Whereas, on January 12, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed Resolution A/HRC/S–9/L.1, which authorized a ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ regarding Israel’s conduct of Operation Cast Lead against violent militants in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009;

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Whereas the resolution pre-judged the outcome of its investigation, by one-sidedly mandating the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ to ‘‘investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by . . . Israel, against the Palestinian people . . . particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression’’;

Whereas the mandate of the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures;

Whereas the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ included a member who, before joining the mission, had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public letter on January 11, 2009, published in the Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions ‘‘war crimes’’;

Whereas the mission’s flawed and biased mandate gave serious concern to many United Nations Human Rights Council Member States which refused to support it, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Whereas the mission’s flawed and biased mandate troubled many distinguished individuals who refused invitations to head the mission;

Whereas Justice Richard Goldstone, who chaired the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’,

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told the then-President of the UNHRC, Nigerian Ambassador Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, that he intended to broaden the mandate of the Mission to include ‘‘all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after’’, a phrase that, according to Justice Goldstone, was intended to allow him to investigate Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians;

Whereas Ambassador Uhomoibhi issued a statement on April 3, 2009, that endorsed part of Justice Goldstone’s proposed broadened mandate but deleted the phrase ‘‘before, during, and after’’, and added inflammatory anti-Israeli language;

Whereas a so-called broadened mandate was never officially endorsed by a plenary meeting of the UNHRC, neither in the form proposed by Justice Goldstone nor in the form proposed by Ambassador Uhomoibhi;

Whereas, on September 15, 2009, the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ released its report; Whereas the report repeatedly made sweeping and unsubstantiated determinations that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead;

Whereas the authors of the report admit that ‘‘we did not deal with the issues . . . regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and secondguessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers ‘in the fog of war.’ ’’;

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Whereas in the October 16th edition of the Jewish Daily Forward, Richard Goldstone, the head of the ‘‘United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’, is quoted as saying, with respect to the mission’s evidence collection methods, ‘‘If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.’’;

Whereas the report, in effect, denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense, and never noted the fact that Israel had the right to defend its citizens from the repeated violent attacks committed against civilian targets in southern Israel by Hamas and other Foreign Terrorist Organizations operating from Gaza;

Whereas the report largely ignored the culpability of the Government of Iran and the Government of Syria, both of whom sponsor Hamas and other Foreign Terrorist Organizations;

Whereas the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from what it called the ‘‘Gaza authorities’’, i.e. the Gaza leadership of Hamas;

Whereas, notwithstanding a great body of evidence that Hamas and other violent Islamist groups committed war crimes by using civilians and civilian institutions, such as mosques, schools, and hospitals, as shields, the report repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon that claim;

Whereas in one notable instance, the report stated that it did not consider the admission of a Hamas official that Hamas often ‘‘created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the mujahideen, against [the Israeli military]’’ specifically to ‘‘constitute evidence that Hamas

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forced Palestinian civilians to shield military objectives against attack.’’;

Whereas Hamas was able to significantly shape the findings of the investigation mission’s report by selecting and prescreening some of the witnesses and intimidating others, as the report acknowledges when it notes that ‘‘those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of or conduct of hostilities by the Palestinian armed groups . . . from a fear of reprisals’’;

Whereas even though Israel is a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press, the report of the ‘‘fact-finding mission’’ erroneously asserts that ‘‘actions of the Israeli government . . . have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions . . . is not tolerated’’;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations Human Rights Council endorse its recommendations, implement them, review their implementation, and refer the report to the United Nations Security Council, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations General Assembly for further action;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations Security Council—

(1) require the Government of Israel to launch further investigations of its conduct during Operation Cast Lead and report back to the Security Council within six months;

(2) simultaneously appoint an ‘‘independent committee of experts’’ to monitor and report on any domestic legal or other proceedings undertaken by the Government of Israel within that six-month period; and

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(3) refer the case to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after that six-month period;

Whereas the report recommended that the United Nations General Assembly consider further action on the report and establish an escrow fund, to be funded entirely by the State of Israel, to ‘‘pay adequate compensation to Palestinians who have suffered loss and damage’’ during Operation Cast Lead;

Whereas the report ignored the issue of compensation to Israelis who have been killed or wounded, or suffered other loss and damage, as a result of years of past and continuing rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in southern Israel;

Whereas the report recommended ‘‘that States Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 start criminal investigations [of Operation Cast Lead] in national courts, using universal jurisdiction’’ and that ‘‘following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted’’;

Whereas the concept of ‘‘universal jurisdiction’’ has frequently been used in attempts to detain, charge, and prosecute Israeli and United States officials and former officials in connection with unfounded allegations of war crimes and has often unfairly impeded the travel of those individuals;

Whereas the State of Israel, like many other free democracies, has an independent judicial system with a robust investigatory capacity and has already launched numerous investigations, many of which remain ongoing, of Operation Cast Lead and individual incidents therein;

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Whereas Libya and others have indicated that they intend to further pursue consideration of the report and implementation of its recommendations by the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and other multilateral fora;

Whereas the President instructed the United States Mission to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva to vote against resolution A–HRC–S–12–1, which endorsed the report and condemned Israel, at the special session of the Human Rights Council held on October 15–16, 2009;

Whereas, on September 30, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the mandate for the report as ‘‘onesided’’;

Whereas, on September 17, 2009, Ambassador Susan Rice, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, expressed the United States’ ‘‘very serious concern with the mandate’’ and noted that the United States views the mandate ‘‘as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable’’;

Whereas the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ reflects the longstanding, historic bias at the United Nations against the democratic, Jewish State of Israel;

Whereas the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ is being exploited by Israel’s enemies to excuse the actions of violent militant groups and their state sponsors, and to justify isolation of and punitive measures against the democratic, Jewish State of Israel;

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Whereas, on October 16, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 25–6 (with 11 states abstaining and 5 not voting) to adopt resolution A–HRC–S–12–1, which endorsed the ‘‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ and condemned Israel, without mentioning Hamas, other such violent militant groups, or their state sponsors; and

Whereas efforts to delegitimize the democratic State of Israel and deny it the right to defend its citizens and its existence can be used to delegitimize other democracies and deny them the same right: Now, therefore, be it

1 Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

2 (1) considers the ‘‘Report of the United Nations

3 Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ to be

4 irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consid

5 eration or legitimacy;

6 (2) supports the Administration’s efforts to

7 combat anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, its

8 characterization of the ‘‘Report of the United Na

9 tions Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’ as

10 ‘‘unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable’’,

11 and its opposition to the resolution on the report;

12 (3) calls on the President and the Secretary of

13 State to continue to strongly and unequivocally op

14 pose any endorsement of the ‘‘Report of the United

15 Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’

16 in multilateral fora, including through leading oppo

17 sition to any United Nations General Assembly reso-

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1 lution and through vetoing, if necessary, any United

2 Nations Security Council resolution that endorses

3 the contents of this report, seeks to act upon the

4 recommendations contained in this report, or calls

5 on any other international body to take further ac

6 tion regarding this report;

7 (4) calls on the President and the Secretary of

8 State to strongly and unequivocally oppose any fur

9 ther consideration of the ‘‘Report of the United Na

10 tions Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’’

11 and any other measures stemming from this report

12 in multilateral fora; and

13 (5) reaffirms its support for the democratic,

14 Jewish State of Israel, for Israel’s security and right

15 to self-defense, and, specifically, for Israel’s right to

16 defend its citizens from violent militant groups and

17 their state sponsors.

I have two questions for President Obama: Now that Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Government of Israel have responded to your speechmaking, what will you do? What can you do?

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing — Vince Lombardi

Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I hate football metaphors, and I’m none too fond of football coaches either. It may be because I went to high school in the late Fifties, when every coach seemed to be a survivor of Iwo Jima, with a white sidewall haircut, a whistle around his neck, and an exaggerated idea of the value of military discipline in ordinary life. Also a sadist. Also an ignoramus. Kind of like Vince Lombardi.

Playing left tackle for one of these guys, as I did, was enough to turn me into a life-long Jacobin. I suspect that there were a lot more of us Jacobins than conventional wisdom admits, but at this point in my life it’s hardly worth arguing, except to say that I’m now an Arsenal fan, and have no idea whether the Green Bay Packers or the Dallas Cowboys still exist, let alone which of them is actually America’s Team.

Even so, I’d have to be a fool not to acknowledge that in America, football metaphors — and coaches — are always relevant. Lombardi may have been a man of few words, but in the quote above, there’s little doubt that he wasn’t talking just about football. He was also talking about life, and if he was confused about which was which, his confusion has come to be a very American confusion. As subjects of our post-war empire, we’re inclined to believe — you might say that we’re afraid not to believe — that once the inessential adornments of compassion and altruism have been stripped away, reality is essentially brutal.

We should reconsider. As a philosophy of football, particularly for a coach in the professional leagues, who’s constantly in danger of losing his livelihood if he loses too many games, Lombardi’s laconic Summa Theologica undoubtedly has some merit. As a philosophy of life, or of politics, it’s about as useful as a sledgehammer in a watchmaker’s toolkit.

This, unfortunately, hasn’t prevented it from being adopted by the leadership of both major American political parties, with consequences which it now seems that even they can’t escape. What will happen to them — and to us — once our electoral process has been reduced to a perennial War of Assassins, and what’s left of our democracy has been replaced by an empty recitation of principles which no longer govern anyone’s behavior? This is a question worth asking. In fact, in the context of our present politics, it may be the only question worth asking.

Is anyone asking it? Certainly not the Republicans. They already have their answers — all of them — and no matter how deep and abiding their unhappiness, they’re unlikely to look for new ones. The Democrats are a different story, although at the moment it appears that their traditional story, in which they appear as the defenders of the downtrodden, will soon be coming to an unhappy end.

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Rahm Emanuel doesn’t look like a football coach, and he certainly doesn’t act much like one, except for the apparent delight he takes in bullying people, but like Karl Rove before him, he appears to be as uncritical in his worship of victory as Vince Lombardi ever was. In his days as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he fashioned himself into the first and foremost champion of the idea that power, not policy, was the real concern of a political party, and that getting Democrats elected was the only legitimate goal of the Democratic Party.

Most Democrats agreed that he had a point. In the Spring of 2006, it was already painfully obvious from the outcome of the previous three elections that the Democratic Party had become tragically adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and that something drastic had to be done about it. Opinions varied about what that something should be.

As Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, with his fifty-state strategy, took the position that a systematic effort should be made to strengthen the party even in states where at the time it wasn’t competitive. The rump of the Clinton mafia — Emanuel, Terry McAuliffe, and James Carville — argued that Dean’s strategy was a waste of resources, that money spent in organizing and opening offices in red states would be better spent in targeting swing states, where independent voters held the key to electoral success.

After the successes of the 2006 election, the supporters of Dean’s fifty-state strategy congratulated themselves that they’d made their point, but by 2008, it was clear that the old ways were back in force. Barack Obama made effective use of of the fifty-state strategy, but only at the expense to the party of converting its attempts at building a viable infrastructure in red states into a de facto cult of the personality. Under the influence of Rahm Emanuel and others, he also abandoned the strategy in states such as Alaska, North Dakota and Arizona as November drew closer, and as polling results indicated that he couldn’t overcome his natural disadvantage in those states. After the election, Howard Dean was shown the door, and the cult of Obama – Organizing for America – replaced the fifty-state strategy. It may seem a churlish question, especially when posed by a more or less loyal Democrat, but it has to be asked: How does this process serve democracy?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. Political parties may be first and foremost instruments of power, but in a democracy, they are also — or ought to be — the organized focal point of communications between the people and its elected representatives, the conduit through which needs influence policy.

When the leaders of a victorious party, as Rahm Emanuel did in 2008, smugly tell their internal critics that you can’t make policy if you can’t get candidates elected to office, what they leave unsaid is that a political party represents nothing if it doesn’t represent a consensus on fundamental political principles, serves no purpose if it doesn’t develop policy ideas which express that consensus, and cannot legitimately govern if it gets its candidates elected on the basis of propaganda rather than an honest and detailed statement of where it stands on the issues of the day.

If a party leaves voters and its own rank and file ignorant of its actual policy preferences, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether its propaganda is true or false. The fruit of its victory will inevitably be – must inevitably be — a government which sees itself and its large donors as its only legitimate constituency, and forces the rest us to endure the spectacle of elected representatives who spend more time picking drapes for their offices than they do studying legislation, and are more adept at drilling holes in the bottom of the ship of state than they are at manning an oar.

I have just two questions for fellow Democrats who are puzzled and dismayed that they voted for a presidential candidate who, after more than nine months in office, hasn’t kept, and doesn’t look likely to keep, any of his major campaign promises. What is our victory worth now? Is it could be worse an answer we’re willing to accept for as far as we can see into the future?

According to the available sources, the Obama campaign spent between 700 and 800 million dollars getting him elected. If we want to gauge the future of our democracy, we should ask ourselves where any of us is going to come up with that kind of money. There may come a time when a presidential candidate can be persuaded that populism trumps a billion dollars, but that time hasn’t arrived yet, and certainly won’t arrive so long as our party leadership believes that winning is the only thing, and we are content to let them believe it.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Politics and economics, in this view, are now settled issues, except in the more backward regions of the world, and conflicts in such remote places needn’t concern us, so long as we can isolate them behind a kind of cordon sanitaire, through which we are able to extract such raw materials and human talent as are needed for our own more advanced civilization. Eventually, of course, we’ll get around to extending that civilization to them as well, once we’ve finished tidying up closer to home.

Admittedly, not all formulations of  the end of history are as arrogant as I’m making them out to be here, but the idea that the major problems left in the Twenty-first Century are problems, not of politics, but of management, is common to all of them. In my view, this is not only a profoundly anti-democratic idea, (I’d even go so far as to call it un-American, if I were speaking only theoretically) but it’s also just plain wrong. What it leads to — has led to, in fact — is not a managerial state which selflessly wields the key to the greatest good for the greatest number, but a corporate state, which isn’t the same thing at all.

To see the difficulty, one need only consider that a state which manages things must also of necessity manage people, and that to do so without politics, it must resort within its own borders to demagoguery and propaganda at the very least, while outside them, when it can’t persuade other states to see the world as it does, it must resort to force. To believe otherwise, one must ignore not only much of what has been known for centuries about human nature, but also much of what is already happening in our not-so-shiny new century.

To be fair, Fukuyama doesn’t actually speak of replacing politics with management; he asserts instead that Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government. I would argue that as far as the United States is concerned, this is a distinction without very much difference, in that our version of Western liberal democracy has, since the end of World War II, evolved into something which is notably neither liberal nor democratic.

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What isn’t liberal about it? Here’s a partial, but telling list:

1. The chronic and systematic underfunding of public education. The government has withdrawn funding for the public school system while creating a tax structure which favors the creation of privately-run academies, in many cases religious or ideological in nature, to compete with it.

2. The abandonment of any pretense of support for independent public institutions. The Federal Reserve Bank has become a captive of what, in more candid times, we rightly called the moneyed interests. The balance sheets of banks, however chimerical, are guaranteed, and the effect of those largely unconditional guarantees —  a shortage of capital available to the real economy of small business enterprises and wage earners — is ignored. The reports of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration are censored by appointed political commissars. So are the programming choices of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the funding choices of the National Endowment for the Arts.

3. An economic war on our wage-earning classes. For almost eighty years after the need for it became apparent, the government has steadfastly refused to create a publicly funded health insurance system with mandated universal coverage. At the same time, it has ignored evidence that employer-provided health insurance covers progressively fewer people, has gradually restricted the treatments it will pay for, and in its latest form, has an execrable cost-benefit ratio. Unforeseen medical expenses are now one of the most significant causes of bankruptcy in America. The response of the government has been to change tort law to limit the liability of defendants in malpractice cases, and bankruptcy law to favor creditors.

The government is actively hostile to labor unions. It has outsourced thousands of civil service jobs to private non-unionized corporations, and assisted in the destruction of unions from the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization to the United Auto Workers. It has also refused to enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act or to pass the Employees’ Free Choice Act. In its zeal to deny workers their rights, the government has made it far more difficult than it should be to organize new unions, or to defend the contracts of those which already exist.

4. Abdication of the government’s regulatory responsibilities. Federal and state agencies charged under existing law with the oversight and regulation of banking, environmental protection, food and drug safety, military procurement, and communications — to name but a few — are routinely placed in the charge of former executives and lobbyists from the industries which they are mandated by law to oversee. The results have been predictable, from the collapse of the housing market, to the e-coli in our hamburger, to superfund sites which haven’t been, and never will be cleaned up, to the billions of shrink-wrapped dollars gone unaccountably missing in Iraq.

As with the liberalism of our American version of Western liberal democracy, so also with its democracy:

1. Gerrymandering. This is no longer merely a dark art; in recent years, it’s become a remarkably well-funded and rigorous science. Its only function is to protect incumbency, and when circumstances are such that one party can gain a clear advantage for itself — as, for example, in Texas in 2002 — it can be devastating to the opposition. Even when circumstances don’t favor one party, both are happy to collude in creating districts which make it difficult for any non-aligned candidate to successfully challenge an incumbent of either party. Couple this with the systematic and deliberate undercounting of minorities and the poor by the decennial census, and we’re faced with a political reality in which any significant change in the status quo is difficult to imagine without a full-blown revolution.

2. Offenses against free speech and the right of assembly. When the American media refers to the events in Tienanmen Square in 1989, a ritual reverence for the rights of free speech, assembly and petition is always in evidence. When it reports on is told about the use of informers, agents provocateurs, intrusive surveillance, preventive detention, and the intimidation of accredited reporters at an an American political convention, it remains largely silent. Likewise with the transformation of the idea of free speech into a series of cages for dissenters and protestors set up for the convenience of police at a distance from the object of the protest — such things are rarely mentioned, and then only to dismiss them as unavoidable necessities. All of this has become a commonplace of American politics in recent decades, even though it can be — and has been — argued that it represents a fundamental perversion of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

3. Institutionalized disrespect for the rule of  the law. An American President who employed the full powers of his office to conduct what was, for all intents and purposes, a secret war on an opposition political party, was allowed to resign from office when his crimes against democracy were revealed, but was immediately pardoned by his successor. An American Vice-President has openly boasted, on nationally-broadcast television programs, of ordering acts defined as war crimes by American laws and treaties, yet despite his brazen confession, there isn’t the slightest chance that he’ll ever be prosecuted for his crimes, even though he’s now out of office. When compared to the fact that the United States currently incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any other Western liberal democracy, or many totalitarian states, for that matter – mostly for drug offenses, and mostly poor, or members of minority groups, or both — there’s ample reason, surely, to ask whether or not justice in our country is truly blind.

4. The militarization of law enforcement. Helicopters, combat uniforms, flak jackets, night vision goggles, automatic weapons, armored vehicles, training in counter-insurgency techniques by Blackwater Xe — even the police forces of modest-sized towns and the sheriff’s departments of depopulated rural counties lust after such toys, and many already have, or soon will have them, thanks to the generosity of their fearful neighbors and the rapacity of our ever more diversified defense industries, (While admittedly the Israelis, African dictators and nervous ex-Soviet satellites have more money to spend, capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism if it lost the knack of expanding its markets.) The new equipment and training will, of course, be accompanied by new responsibilities, prestigious and important ones, such as domestic anti-terrorism surveillance, and the enforcement of immigration laws.

No doubt it’s a new and more dangerous world which we inhabit, particularly as we live out the final days of our imperial pretensions, and our egregiously misnamed war on drugs, but surely it wouldn’t hurt if we were a little more careful about what we wished for. In my own town, population 10,000, the newer, beefier police force seems to be engaged mostly in pursuing and harassing teenagers and people who look like Mexicans, and in beating up black people who inadvertently find themselves on back roads after sundown. I’ve encountered any number of such incidents myself. Here’s just one example: eight fully-equipped police cruisers — eight of them — strung out along the shoulder of the road at a major intersection, with the sixteen cops who’d gotten out of them them surrounding what appeared to be a single middle-aged farm worker of Mexican descent in a 20 year-old station wagon with shot piston rings, and all of his personal belongings stuffed into the back. What genuine democracy considers scenes like this an unremarkable part of its everyday landscape?

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When I consider a list of achievements as dubious as these, I’m afraid I see neither the end of history, nor the triumph of Western liberal democracy over any possible future politics. What I see instead is power attempting to disguise its appetites as rationality, which is precisely the maneuver which history most often records as the prelude to political chaos.

This is neither an accident, nor — as Fukuyama seems to believe — an unavoidable but temporary station on some uniquely Western via crucis. We’re all creatures of history, and as such capable of accumulating knowledge over the course of generations, yet despite our powers for good or ill, anything even remotely resembling omniscience remains beyond our reach. The impressive intellectual and physical resources now at our disposal are indisputable, yet we’re clearly every bit as vulnerable as our less capable ancestors were to events which we can’t foresee.

For us it doesn’t actually matter whether nemesis arrives as irreversible global warming, a world-wide pandemic or grain harvest collapse set in motion by unsafe economies of scale in agriculture, or even as the failure of the light of reason in our struggle to reconcile irreconcilable differences among the world’s major economic and political powers. What matters is that when nemesis does arrive, it’s unlikely that a managerial state which has already proven itself to be part uncontrollable dynamo and part house of cards will be able to fend it off.

I consider myself a faithful child of the American Constitution. Like many other Americans who share my faith, perhaps even Fukuyama himself — particularly since he’s come to see the moral and intellectual flaws in neoconservatism — I feel a certain native contempt for oligarchs and imperialists, for demagogues and fanatics. Much as I despise them, though, I don’t think that they deserve the blame — certainly not the exclusive blame — for the mess we’ve made of our heritage. Our problem isn’t a lack of virtue in our governing classes, it’s a failure to understand the role of scale in determining the viability of human institutions.

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The population of the United States is now more than 304 million. In order to live the way we’ve become accustomed to living, we consume almost 21 million barrels of oil a day. The figures for natural gas and electricity consumption are similarly daunting. In this context, speaking of governance in terms of representative democracy requires more than an act of faith, it requires some knowledge of the dynamics of control systems.

When a society relies so absolutely on a technological infrastructure as large and as complex as that implied by the current energy consumption of the U.S., the legitimate question to be asked is whether it serves us, or we serve it. This isn’t a new question; Marx asked it, Sartre asked it, and so have many others who aren’t embedded philosophically in Fukuyama’s end of history. Frankly, the answers to date have not been reassuring.

It’s hard to understand, after all, how interminable wars in distant places benefit us, why universal health care is unnecessary, or what’s so unique about our modern age which makes civil liberties a luxury we can no longer afford. The real answer, the only answer, in my view, is that democracy has come to be seen as an inconvenient way to manage the large systems — economic, technological and political — which we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution. Since Word War II, this perception has in fact become the governing subtext of our politics, regardless of how scrupulously we avoid mentioning it either in public or in private.

Those charged with the responsibility for managing large, complex enterprises interest themselves primarily in how to accomplish their goals; questions of why they should have such goals are at best treated as diversions from the task at hand, and at worst as irresponsible — questions of interest only to fools who have no real responsibilities, and therefore have the time to waste on trivialities. This is understandable, but it’s also dangerous.

Consider just one example: once a national consensus is established that the key to continued prosperity lies in increasing our consumption of affordably priced fossil fuels, the mining of coal by mountain-top removal in the Appalachians may be looked upon as a welcome innovation. The expense of maintaining the largest mobile military force on the planet, however insupportable, may come to be considered a worthwhile investment, if it guarantees us access to oil which lies, for the most part, in remote and contentious parts of the world.

When, later on, evidence mounts that the negative consequences of this earlier consensus might outweigh the benefits — destruction of the Appalachian ecosystem, a possibly disastrous rise in the Earth’s average temperature, and a Global War On Terror which has revived colonialism and re-legitimized torture, among its other evils — we may find, to our dismay, that the original consensus has hardened into  a military-industrial complex. We may also find an army of lobbyists with satchels full of cash camping out in the halls of Congress, none of whom have any interest in anything except defending what their masters have built.

Even worse, decades of media consolidation now allow the machinery of the status quo to employ all the techniques of mass manipulation pioneered by the advertising industry, and perfected by the unlamented totalitarian governments of the last century, to smother any meaningful discussion of reforms which might threaten its interests. Not all have been as crude as Glenn Beck’s assertion that believing in global warming is treason, but taken as a whole, they’ve been tragically effective.

The problem is that when representative democracy becomes a shadow play, and the supremacy of those who ask how over those who ask why is complete; as the conventional wisdom narrows, and the status quo advertises itself as a self-fulfilling prophecy, we’re all at risk from events which we may be able to see coming, but have lost the power to deflect.

I’m sorry, Professor Fukuyama, but what we have now in no way represents the end of history, unless by the end of history we mean Armageddon. It’s far too monumental, far too brittle, and far too fond of looking admiringly in the mirror at itself.

A true post-industrial politics, one which might be flexible enough to restructure even its most dominant, and most resistant institutions in the face of impending calamity, cannot rely on the benevolence or expertise of a managerial class, be it capitalist, socialist, or teetotalitarian. We must invent new technologies of decentralization, and rediscover the benefits we once understood to be exclusive to democracy — its openness to the contributions of all, and in the collective, its clear-eyed view of the world as it is, unencumbered by the baggage of either privilege or ideology.

If we don’t, we might not be facing the end of history, but what remains of it is unlikely to be as pleasant as you imagine.

What James C. Dobson, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter want is Afghanistan under the Taliban.

What William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer (foreign policy) and Pat Buchanan (domestic policy) want is Germany under Hitler.

What the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Federal Reserve want is England under the Stuarts.

What the Democratic Party and foreign policy establishments want is Rome under Augustus.

Since we’re not even certain that it still exists, except at the annual reunions of a shrinking handful of octogenarians, what the Republican Party establishment wants is unknown.

What they all say they want is Athens under Pericles. What we’re most likely to get, if we continue on our present path, is Spain under Philip II, and that only if we’re very, very lucky.

Never fear, we’ll eventually reach port — Lord willing, etc. In the meantime, have a look at this:

The Triple Revolution

In the course of refreshing my memory for the new post, I went and dug it up after more than forty years. As an example of both the prescience and the foolishness of mid-Twentieth Century American liberalism, it would be hard to top.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, it’s all hands aloft to shorten sail.

What he said desperately needed saying, and I have no doubt now that he means it. How could I, when it resonates with so much of my own thinking? My doubts lie elsewhere. His deeds so far, with the possible exception of his hardheadedness on the issue of expanding Israeli settlements, seem to belie his words.

If he does what he said he’ll do, I’ll support him in every way I can, no matter the cost. If he doesn’t, I’ll oppose him with as much energy I can muster, knowing full well that what comes after him might be even worse. Time is short, and the issues confronting us are grave. This necessarily narrows the ground on which we can base genuine compromises, and threatens us with conflicts which all of us would prefer to avoid. For that reason, if for no other, I hope that the President was telling the truth about what he intends. If he was, I’ll happily pray for his success.

The media commentary on his passing is mixed. Some say he was a nice man, and some say he wasn’t, which is about what you’d expect for a public figure, particularly one who spent as much time as he did being controversial. Although I was around when he was making headlines both as a quarterback and later as a Congressman and Republican functionary, and was as aware as anyone at the time of his public persona, I have no opinion to offer about his personal qualities. The one thing I will say about him is that he mistook Arthur Laffer for an economist. The consequences of that simple bit of ignorance have cost the country dearly, and I believe that they ought to be taken into account when assessing his accomplishments.

Kemp wasn’t the only advocate of the Republican tax-cutting panacea to come to prominence in the Seventies and Eighties. Howard Jarvis, and his sidekick Paul Gann, the principal cheerleaders for Proposition 13, were also making headlines, and of course, Ronald Reagan, the Godfather of Voodoo Economics, made it all the way to the White House, and had Laffer’s Trojan horse dragged right into the Oval Office behind him, where it occupied the place of ideological honor for the entire eight years of his presidency.

It was Kemp, though, who was the true believer. He was the one who incorporated Jarvis and Gann’s dismay at seeing old folks taxed out of their homes, and Reagan’s instinctive aversion to seeing his wealthy patrons inconvenienced into a sweeping set of ideological generalizations about the benefits of free markets, and the evils of government intervention. It was he who found Arthur Laffer, and convinced him to provide the ribbon to tie this disparate collection of resentments, half-baked economic theory and boosterism into a coherent, if not intellectually respectable package. It was also Kemp who sold it, with a charm as misguided as it was relentless.

The bill for this folly has now come due, and Jack Kemp has escaped paying it. That’s a great pity, I think. If he’d been able to delay his exit for another five years or so, no doubt this week’s eulogies could have been more fair and balanced, if not more sincere.

Garrison Keillor, of all people, thinks that prosecuting the miscreants who attempted to square the circle on torture would be victor’s justice, a pallid, sour mockery of the real thing. Let’s have the truth, he says, then forget about its implications and go back to chuckling with the stolid, unflappable Protestants of Lake Wobegon, who never hurt anyone, and can endure anything if it doesn’t interfere with the return of Spring.

I like Garrison Keillor, and I’ve never doubted that his folksy wisdom is, in fact, wisdom, but here we part company. If you let people get away with murder, then murder will come to seem unexceptional, routine even. And then what? Do we just sweep the bodies up off the streets every morning, along with the horseapples, and go about our business proud that we can handle anything?

I think not, not while I have anything to say about it anyway. Refuse to criminalize policy, and as sure as God made little green apples, you’ll get policies which make the Swensons and Ericsons of Keillor’s fictional home town rue the day they were born.

Yes, torture is as old as the human race is. Yes, we might any of us resort to it if sufficiently provoked. No, you can’t trust public piety to be an accurate reflection of what’s really going on. So what?

We’re trying to build a decent, humane civilization here. We’ve been at it for centuries — God knows with mixed success. Garrison, you’re not helping.