Gingrich: Dorian Gray.
Politics
The Democratic Deficit in Europe — Another View
From Dani Rodrik’s Europe’s Next Nightmare in Project Syndicate:
The challenge is to develop a new political narrative emphasizing national interests and values without overtones of nativism and xenophobia. If centrist elites do not prove themselves up to the task, those of the far right will gladly fill the vacuum, minus the moderation.
That is why outgoing Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou had the right idea with his aborted call for a referendum. That move was a belated attempt to recognize the primacy of domestic politics, even if investors viewed it, in the words of a Financial Times editor, as “playing with fire.” Scrapping the referendum simply postpones the day of reckoning and raises the ultimate costs to be paid by Greece’s new leadership.
A more moderately-worded view of Europe’s delusions. Then again, Rodrik doesn’t need to shriek — he isn’t looking directly down into the abyss. He’s over here on this side of the Atlantic, where we have our own problems with democracy. There are many pathways to the legitimacy conferred on a government by the consent of the governed. Europe can’t seem to find any of them, while we seem to have given up looking. Given that modern history hasn’t tolerated either form of benign neglect for very long, there doesn’t seem much point in preferring one over the other.
Not a Fool, but a Democrat
Today, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung online, an editorial by Heribert Prantly which makes, among others, the following point:
In der Spitzenpolitik wurde dieses Referendum diskutiert, als habe Premier Papandreou vorgeschlagen, die Demokratie in seinem Land durch ein russisches Roulette zu ersetzen – und als gelte es daher, dem Premier die Waffe wieder aus der Hand zu winden; das hat man denn auch getan. Dabei hatte Papandreou nichts anderes versucht, als die Demokratie in ihr Recht zu setzen: unzulänglich sicherlich, undiplomatisch, ohne zuvor an Angela Merkel und Nicolas Sarkozy wenigstens eine SMS geschickt zu haben.
Er hätte sein Vorhaben früher ankündigen, es besser vorbereiten, es hätte Teil des Euro-Rettungspakets sein müssen. Aber auch mit der falschen Verpackung und falsch dargereicht bleibt eine Medizin eine Medizin; man muss sie besser einsetzen, zur richtigen Zeit und in richtiger Dosierung. Eine Volksabstimmung ist kein Allheilmittel, sie ist aber auch kein Gift. Wer in einer Demokratie das Volk, den Demos, befragen will, ist zunächst einmal kein Narr, sondern ein Demokrat.
Or, as I translate it:
In senior political circles, this referendum was discussed as though Premier Papandreou had proposed replacing democracy in his country with Russian roulette, and as though it would therefore be appropriate to wrest the weapon out of his hands, which was in fact what was done. But in acting as he did, Papandreou had sought to do no more than give democracy its due — inadequately, to be sure, undiplomatically, and without having so much as sent Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy an SMS beforehand.
He should have announced his plan earlier, prepared it better, it ought to have been part of the Euro rescue package. But even in the wrong wrapper, and improperly administered, a medicine remains a medicine. One need only introduce it more properly, at the right time, and in the right dosage. A plebiscite is no cure-all, but neither is it a poison. In a democracy, he who wants to submit a question to the people, the demos, is first and foremost not a fool, but a democrat.
I agree completely, and can only add that it never ceases to amaze me how thoroughly people who consider themselves the intellectual and moral elite of their respective countries, the custodians of our modern, post-industrial civilization, discount this simple truth. Poke them a little, and none of them actually believes in democracy. That’s their right, I suppose, and no doubt they have their reasons, but I’d have more respect for them if they didn’t expend so much energy trying to convince me otherwise.
Eminently Good Sense
Listening to Noam Chomsky for the first time can be a little like discovering a new species of orchid sprouting in a Wal*Mart parking lot. We think we know where we are — everything looks and sounds the way it’s always looked and sounded — and then, suddenly, familiar perspectives seem to shift. It’s not that Chomsky’s take on things is entirely without precedent, but it’s a genuine shock to encounter anything like it in the familiar American here and now. If you’ve ever thought about looking for an antidote to all those hours of mindless pontification from Washington Week in Review, or Charlie Rose, this Noam Chomsky interview isn’t a bad place to begin:
Our Common Destiny, However Much Finessed
According to Martin Wolf, Mr. Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. Does he really? Well, as someone who wishes to be a citizen of a country which does not exist — yet — I suppose I ought to feel some sympathy for a fellow traveler nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Sadly, I do not.
The Republican Alternatives
Bachmann: Why can’t somebody as ignorant as me make a good President? Think about it.
Perry: I’ve always liked tearing the wings off flies, and setting fire to cats. I’m exactly what America needs right now.
Romney: I only used to be somebody. Now I’m just like you, so it’s okay to go ahead and vote for me. Honest.
Paul: I don’t like black people, or women, or abstractions. I also don’t like war.
I could go on and on, but why bother? Fox News will take care of it.
Fuggedaboudit
Never mind. I definitely will NOT be calling you next Fall to urge you to vote for President Obama. He may very well be the lesser of two evils, but I just donated my shares in the evil-measuring business to the two Davids, Plouffe and Axelrod, who stand to gain far more from them than I ever will. (And they’re much better at phone-banking anyway, or so I’ve heard.)
A Tinkerer’s Damnation
Originally appeared as a comment on Autonomy for All. Reposted here with minor changes.
Tinkering…. As good a word as any for a dearth of political will. I hate to bash Brad DeLong, who’s one of the good guys, and doesn’t really deserve a snarking, but he’s a classic case of the technocrat who believes in all the seemingly correct policy solutions, yet is left as helpless as the rest of us by the madness of Realpolitik, not to mention the madness of people who wouldn’t recognize realism if it bit them in the ass.
Here’s Professor DeLong, who’s as smart as we make them these days, waxing ironic:
And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now the global market economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of high unemployment and slack demand. We know the cures–fiscal stimulus via more government spending, monetary stimulus via provision by central banks of the financial assets the private sector wants to hold, institutional reform to try once gain to curb the bankers’ tendency to indulge in speculative excess under control. Yet we are not doing any of them. Instead, we are calling for “austerity.”
It may make for decent theater, but irony is hardly the best defense against the limitations of the intellect in situations like the one we all find ourselves facing today. Neither is cognitive dissonance, as in the governor of Wisconsin — Wisconsin, for Christ’s sake — threatening to use the National Guard to shoot public employees who object to being beggared by a nasty right-wing ideologue. Or, if you’d rather read about the problems of furriners, this: The Arab World’s Triple Crisis.
If Professors DeLong and Krugman can’t handle the political implications of our manifold current crises, who can? My answer is that no one can, not and remain unscathed. Our future is no longer strictly a mattter of policies good or bad, and no matter how much we might wish it to be otherwise, the outcome has become unpredictable.
21st Century Partisanship
The national coalition of misanthropes which is making war on me and mine clearly believes that honesty is a form of mental retardation. Unfortunately, liberal luminaries like Barack Obama, the Clinton dynasty, Rahm Emanuel, Jamie Dimon, and a glittering host of others in the Democratic Party and its affiliates seem to share that belief. They aren’t my allies. At best they’re placeholders; at worst, they’re part of the enemy’s baggage train.
As many of our disgruntled and downtrodden have already observed, this makes partisanship in the new American century something of a bore — when it isn’t downright dangerous to our future health, well-being and sanity.
So when I call you, and urge you to vote for President Obama next year — which it seems very likely I’ll feel compelled to do — please do consider the subtext.
The Triumphal March of SB 1070 Supporters
A guest essay by Stephen Williamson, first published as a DAILY KOS diary on July 24, 2010, and reposted here, in slightly altered form, by permission of the author.
For activists in Arizona the fight over SB 1070 has been something between riding a roller coaster and watching a train wreck. If you are wondering what happened to Arizona, the crazy has always been with us. But two years ago we had a Democratic Governor, Janet Napolitano, to veto the worst bills passed by Republican dominated legislature.
AZ Republican elected officials have long been extreme. Russell Pearce and his supporters would like to deport every undocumented person, all 11 million, from the US. They neither see nor fear unintended consequences. Will it split up families? Too bad! Arguments based on compassion or moderation do not give them pause. Republican candidates are selected in a primary by about 25% of the voters — the hard right. Pearce is now the AZ Republican mainstream. The Tea Party has gone after conservatives who are not conservative enough, and moderate Republicans office holders were largely purged from the party by 2006.
When Napolitano was governor and used her veto power, anti-immigration bills had to become propositions and be put to a vote. Anti-immigrant props have won in past years by high margins. Even here in Sedona, considered a Democratic town (registration is very slightly Republican but both Kerry and Obama pulled in about 55% of the vote) past anti-immigration bills got about 70% of the vote.
SB 1070’s passage and response has come in stages. You’ve seen them in the news, but let me recap the situation from the AZ prospective:
(1) “Oh my God! it’s going just as bad as we thought it would be with Napolitano gone!” SB 1070 passes without a single Democratic vote in the State House or Senate.
(2) Will she or won’t she? She does. Governor Brewer had conversations with officials in which they got the impression she knew SB 1070 was bad law and might not sign it. But she’s running for election in November and not signing SB 1070 would have led to a primary defeat.
(3) Passionate opposition to 1070. The AZ Democratic Party condemned the bill in no uncertain terms. So did our local Democratic club. National boycotts are declared. AZ Towns like Flagstaff oppose the bill and plan to join the lawsuit against it. More importantly, none of us had seen the Latino community so uniformly outraged. Illegal immigration has had its Latino opponents, but even so 1070 struck very deeply and very broadly.
(4) The counter attack on critics of the bill. The dominant meme cluster that was recirculated again and again through the AZ MSM. “It’s not as bad as they say. Critics of the bill are enemies of AZ. It’s just like the Federal law. Everybody has to carry identification to drive a car anyway.”
(5) The triumphal march of SB 1070 supporters. Polls show tremendous support for the bill both in AZ and beyond. The latest Rasmussen poll in AZ: 65% in favor, 27% opposed. Word goes out to Democrats and Democratic candidates to be very very careful. Obvious attempts are made to slap down those of us vocally opposed to 1070. I’m not ranting against the Democratic establishment. They are not wrong (as far as it goes) about the level of support for 1070 or the damage it can do to Democrats in the upcoming election.
(6) The triumphal M=march of SB 1070 supporters continues but the lawyers take over. Recently there has been a huge if uneven improvement in reporting about AZ and 1070. Both bloggers and the MSM have gotten a better handle on what’s happening here. Knowledge of AZ developments goes national much quicker. We find out about Pearce’s plans next year to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born in the US and the news goes national within the week, not a month or two months later. You are getting good reporting on what’s happening here. But I want to bring up some points that I haven’t seen mentioned or emphasized elsewhere.
SB 1070
(1) The bill is an attack on the whole Latino community. Latino kids and their parents were out with signs the next day. The main reason for their outrage, which extended to the most conservative elements of the community, was the idea of being singled out for racial profiling. But there are other reasons that haven’t been talked about as much. (1) Legal immigrants, illegal immigrants and citizens are very often interconnected in the same family, extended family, and social groups. An attack on illegal immigrants hits your uncle or your dad but not your mom or the guy who cuts your hair. (2) It’s an attack on collective Latino institutions — the newspapers, beauty shops, markets, thrift shops, clothes stores, churches, bakeries, car dealers. Some estimate that up to a third of the illegal immigrants have left already, and Latino institutions have been hard hit. “The aim is to weaken the Latino community politically, not just deport the undocumented. The fears are deep. We are being overrun! The white town has too many new brown faces. Mexicans want Arizona back. They contribute nothing and are sucking our economy dry.”
(2) Self deportation. In AZ we suspect much of SB 1070’s intended impact is what supporters gleefully call self-deportation. It’s never been clear to us though exactly how much Pearce and crew were counting on self-deportation. The people actually writing the bill are from a professional anti-immigrant foundation. They have been around the track few times and have fashioned a bill they hope is bullet-proof in its constitutionality.They built in a massive amount of preemptive defense, still they knew the bill would be challenged. 1070 was still so far from the mark that they had to immediately amend it after passage. It’s a very odd-sounding bill if you read the details. It’s a thugs’ law, written and passed by thugs, using intimidation and inviting selective and dishonest enforcement. Look at the section making it illegal to block traffic to hire workers who might be illegal. How many times does someone actually block traffic hiring somebody to do lawn work at an informal labor exchange? The aim is to intimidate and provide a legal cover to arrest people. It’s AZ, and for us there’s no question who a jury is going to believe — you or the cop. Pearce himself may sincerely simply want to expel all undocumented folks now in the US. But some SB 1070 supporters are gleeful at the amount of damage it has inflicted on Democrats, the Obama administration, and the even the Federal government by forcing them on the opposite side of a popular bill ginned up by social hysteria. It’s wedge issue time. For many supporters it’s a win win situation, even if the bill is unconstitutional. Anti- administration anti-government side effects of the bill are a big dessert more delicious than the main course.
(3) State Enforcement of Federal law. SB 1070 relies on a federal law written 70 years ago that is seldom enforced. And what was happening in 1940? Germany was invading Norway and Poland, occupying Paris. The Nazis were bombing England. It’s in response to all this — the fear of German and Japanese agents, spies and propagandists — that the law was passed. Two years later the US interned 150,000 Japanese residents — talk about ethic or racial profiling. And the Supreme Court said that was just fine. The law passed in a fearful period and was modified not by being rewritten, but by practice, an evolving interpretation of when and how to enforce it. State enforcement ignores 70 years of legal precedent. Will the police use racial profiling? Of course, they could barely stop if they wanted to. But they are being taught how to frame their arrests so they can’t be attacked for profiling.
(4) Arizonans, like the rest of the population, have had it with illegal immigration. The situation with illegal immigration reminds me of the welfare debate years ago, where Americans had simply not signed off on permanent welfare for the able bodied. If the problems with illegal immigration are not fixed humanely, they will be fixed inhumanely. At the time outrageous lies and exaggerations about welfare queens and benefit theft flooded the media, and trying to clear the air didn’t have much impact because the American people were fed up with the welfare system. They are fed up now with illegal immigration.
And so the current nonsense and lies. Governor Brewer’s citing of headless bodies.The non-existent Southern Arizona crime wave. Claims that illegals are hardened criminals. The conviction that we’re being overrun, even as the undocumented population has dropped precipitously. Facts don’t get through. At some level they don’t matter. So what if ninety-six of those arrested for being here illegally have no prior record. Doesn’t matter. A widespread complaint is that they are not paying taxes. Of course they are, although most don’t earn enough to pay federal or state income taxes because the least good jobs in the country don’t pay very well. Arizona relies almost entirely on sales tax anyway, and immigrants are paying the same taxes as everybody else.
Will they racially profile? Of course they will, they could hardly avoid it. The law as originally passed authorized racial profiling — it just couldn’t be the only reason. Consider that Sheriff Joe is most popular voter-getter in the state. Are the supporters racist? My sense it that they are largely people who can’t identify with folks who are not like them. It’s nationalism or tribalism as politics. There is a vast ocean of resentment and fear among white Arizonans about perhaps no longer being the majority or the clear “winners”. There are rivers of resentment flowing through generations, among family and social groups. One far right friend told me his father had been unfairly replaced by an incompetent black woman from his job as an accounting teacher because of federal law. The resentment is passed down from one generation to the next. His whole family moved to the far right largely because the government is for “them” not us. As Rachel Maddow put it, they see it as a zero sum game.
Illegals are the problem? They are mostly rural folks leaving dire poverty and the dimmest prospects and coming to the US without permission to take the least good jobs at the lowest wages. That’s the illegal part of “what part of illegal don’t you understand”. These folks are being combined emotionally and politically with violent drug and people smugglers and the vast carnage going on right on the other side of the border.
(5) AZ opposition to SB 1070. It’s primarily liberals, progressives, most Democrats, civil rights groups. The usual suspects. I’m deeply embedded in Democratic and liberal circles, but what I actually hear most, outside those circles, is objections to 1070 from people who have a relationship with undocumented immigrants or their families, sometimes going back decades. Employers, co-workers, friends, fellow church members. Sometimes years have passed and they have never asked people whether they are here legally or not. And they are not about to. It would be a personal betrayal. What I’m seeing is some version of Harvey Milk’s insight that anti-gay measures would meet opposition from the friends and families of people who were gay. There is not as often a family connection, but still that is where the non political opposition to 1070 rests. It’s personal loyalty. The other thing that’s very odd is lack of ethnic tension. I’ve seen a lot of different interethnic situations, but here the Mexican and Anglos get along well. Again, they are mostly undocumented, rural people keeping their heads down and working their butts off. The odd thing is they have a good reputation; even the stereotyping is positive. And yet we have the social hysteria that is overriding everything else. The other opposition to 1070 comes from compassionate people who just don’t like persecuting people who have basically done no wrong.
(6) Far right extremists. The Tea Party is strong here. It may have astroturf money, but it’s a mass movement. (I’m glad we are done with the MSM nonsense about who they are– they are far right wing Republican conservatives.) They are not stupid, they have picked up new issues before, as they once did abortion, that weren’t part of their original tool box. They have found what they think is new branding and a new tool box, and are convinced they can ride the free floating anger and skepticism about the federal government to power. If you look at page after page of tea party portraits on the Phoenix-based Tea Party web site what do you see? White folks, mostly older. But what you see beyond that is attitudinizing– adopting hats, posture, clothes that would lead you, and them, to believe they’ve always been here in Arizona. That this is their land, whereas in fact most people in Arizona are relative newcomers with roots elsewhere. As I understand it, many undocumented immigrants have been in the state longer. Far right extremists need to make it clear that they are the legitimate residents of Arizona, not latinos. The Tea Party and the Republican right collects them together and validates that emotion.
(7) What next? There is currently a race for governor in Arizona. Terry Goddard, the current Democratic Attorney General, is the personification of intelligence, competence and professionalism. He recently received the distinction of being selected as the outstanding AG by his fellow Attorney Generals. On the other side we have Jan Brewer, a mediocre conservative opportunist, who is leading Goddard by 20 points. If Goddard continues with his current conventional campaign he is going to lose badly. The AZ Democratic Party has a decent ground game here. It’s a well organized party. I’m a member, but I’m a member because I’m convinced that the AZ Democratic Party is a decent organization. Full time paid OFA organizers who work between elections is something we only dreamed about a few years ago, yet we have them in Arizona. You are going to see more of a fight here than you might expect. The ground game will turn out Democrats despite the enthusiasm gap. It does look, however, like the wave of righteous anger may very well prevail.