Blue People

A Lack of Passion

Once again Harper's has published an article that has a beneficial clarifying effect, this time on the "stab in the back" myth and the seeming failure of today's Right to deploy it successfully. In the final paragraphs the author gets very close to the central point, which is the detachment of the American public from the policies that should, in theory, concern them the most. Why, he asks, are there no important anti- or pro- war demonstrations, as there were during the Vietnam era?

This question has been addressed before, mainly by pointing out that during this war there is no draft, no matter how much the manpower might be needed. The lack of a draft means that a relatively small share of the population has a direct stake in the war, in the sense that they have a family member or friend on active duty, in harm's way. While this may be true, it doesn't go quite far enough, and the author manages to take that extra step, or at least part of it.

The fact is that Americans for the most part don't provide for their own way of life anymore. Almost all of the manufactured goods that we use (such as the computer that this is being typed on) are made overseas, typically in Asia. True, we still do some engineering, and of course we do the marketing and distribution, but that's not enough to support the deep connection that people need to feel between what they make and what they use. Americans are now mostly consumers, not producers, and it's becoming clear that consumption is not a platform robust enough to support a personal - or national - identity.

It is this psychic disinvestment that leads to apathy about the Iraq venture (I can't bring myself to call it a "war"), even though the soldiers killed there are just as dead as those who died in previous wars. It was, ironically, a proud WWII veteran, Bob Dole, who introduced into the vernacular the slang expression that has become the symbol of this apathy, this anomie: "whatever".

What's the Matter with Thomas Frank?

Without a doubt one of the best-known books to come in the wake of John Kerry's loss in the 2004 presidential election was Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?", an examination of how working-class voters have for some time now voted for conservative Republicans whose economic policies are, for the most part, seriously damaging to the interests of those working-class voters. Frank's brilliant rhetoric has been cited often enough that I need not do so here.

Not long in coming were papers and books by other analysts, claiming to prove Frank wrong in some respect. Some argued that Frank was mistaken to claim that working-class voters have in fact been abandoning the Democratic party, citing numbers which seemed to show that support for Democrats was as strong as ever among the working class. Others have argued that Frank was right, but also irrelevant, in that the group of working-class voters discussed by Frank is a shrinking portion of the electorate.

I would echo the analysis I've seen elsewhere, not necessarily in response to Frank, that argues that the increasing economic marginality (and desperation) of the white working class goes hand in hand with its increasing resentment and religiosity. What's happening is that the rising tendency to vote Republican among the working class is a second-order - maybe third-order - phenomenon. The root of it all is the increasing economic pressure that this group has been experiencing. This pressure results in an anxiety that then undergoes displacement in two directions: cultural conservatism for those whose anxiety is expressed mostly as anger; religious conservatism for those whose anxiety is transformed into defeatism and quietism.

Note that in neither case is anxiety expressed as an impulse to directly confront those who imposed this fate upon them, which is clearly what Thomas Frank would wish. This is at least partly due to a factor that has been noted both by me and by others, namely the tendency in our current culture to privatize everything, to scorn the idea that widespread problems may have solutions that can be promoted through collective public action.

Immigration: A Postscript

It is said that the influx of immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, has put downward pressure on wages at the low end of the spectrum. We hear horror stories of Americans, who typically won't work for less than the minimum wage, being laid off and replaced by illegal Mexican immigrants who will.

I can't question the veracity of these reports, since at least some of them are backed up by serious research. However, another question needs to be addressed, which is: why do Americans need a certain wage level?

It is at this point that the question of this country's extreme levels of economic inequality enter the picture. Those at the very top, who are receiving a vastly disproportionate share of nation's total income, are able to casually bid up the prices of almost everything, most especially those goods and services which are high in labor content (education, health care, etc.). If the rich can easily pay extraordinary amounts for tuition at selective universities like Harvard or Stanford, these universities will go ahead and charge those amounts, thereby making these schools largely unaffordable for those who have the academic credentials but not the money. And in fact we have seen tuition at these (and many other) schools drift steadily upward to the point where only the wealthiest parents can afford them. Recent studies have shown that, at selective schools like Harvard, the percentage of students coming from the highest income percentiles has been growing steadily.

In the case of health care, the rich don't need insurance, and don't care about it, which first of all deprives the insurance pool of their direct contributions, and which secondly ensures that the rich will oppose politically any attempt to institute a national single-payer system, a system which they probably won't be able to avoid contributing to, even though they have no intention of using it. As we know, legislators in Congress are far more likely to do the bidding of the wealthy than of the non-wealthy (even if blatant quid-pro-quo situations are fairly rare).

So, the non-rich need a certain level of income simply in order to buy ordinary necessities, the prices of which are out of sight compared to those found in countries with less inequality and better systems of public provision.

Is small government possible?

As a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog, the "Daily Dish", I've been impressed by Sullivan's ability, almost unique among those on the Right, to reexamine, and sometimes modify, his beliefs when presented with new evidence. This is an exercise that requires considerable fortitude and humility, more than is usually on display in the blogosphere (on either side).

In this spirit, I'm going to investigate the question posed in the title of this article, mostly in response to not only Sullivan's openness to change but also to his consistent defense of "limited government". I think most people, at least most Americans, would agree with the notion that "limited government", a la Thomas Jefferson, is a certified "good thing", that the expansion of government should have a really compelling justification. A corollary is the idea that much of what our government does today lacks such a justification, with a notorious example being the "bridge to nowhere" that was - and may still be - scheduled for construction in an almost-deserted area of Alaska.

The question is, in a society like ours, which features high levels of education and technology, and an almost incomprehensibly-fine division of labor, is small government really possible? My initial answer is, "probably not". I'll provide a couple of reasons below, and maybe more in subsequent essays.

Let's start with the libertarian proposition that the only real crime is the initiation of force or fraud, and that the only legitimate task of government is the administration of justice when societal actors break this code and initiate force or fraud against one another. All interpersonal relations, including but not limited to economic relations, are governed by contract, and it is the responsibility of government to see to it that all parties live up to the terms of the many contracts in which they are involved. Note that many, but not necessarily all, contracts are explicit; there can be such a thing as an "implicit" contract that exists even though no one has actually prepared or signed a document that expresses the contract.

Could such a government be "small"? It seems to me that the size of this contract-enforcing government would be directly proportional to the number and variety of contracts that people enter into, and in a society like ours that number would be huge. Keep in mind also that in this type of society there would be no regulation to keep tabs on peoples' behavior on a regular basis; there would be only lawsuits after some kind of harm has been alleged. There would be little incentive to actually live up to one's contracts, because it would be up to the harmed party to prove that harm was caused, and maybe even intended, by my behavior. This can be a difficult standard of proof to achieve.

So, inevitably, a regulation regime would tend to creep in, a regime whose charter would be the regular inspection of peoples' behavior even in the absence of any allegations of wrongdoing, simply to ensure that people are behaving well. This type of development would also be encouraged by the recognition that, in many cases, harm can be irreparable, and therefore waiting until harm has been done, and then charging the wrongdoer, can fail to produce justice for the aggrieved. Consider, for example, someone who in good faith takes a pill which ends up inflicting permanent damage on their heart. Clearly it would be better if the tendency of such a pill to cause harm were detected before any harm was actually inflicted in the wider world.

In a subsequent article we'll take up the role of government in promoting and facilitating the smooth operation of the kind of free-market economy that is favored by pundits like Sullivan.

Immigration

It's become pretty much de rigeur to weigh in on the immigration "controversy". This is a case that, unlike so many of our current problems, is relatively unambiguous. As others have pointed out, one can rant and rave about "illegals" until one is thoroughly exhausted, but none of it will change the brute underlying fact, which is that immigration - illegal and legal - is driven almost entirely by the gigantic disparity between living standards in the USA and that found in many countries to the south (notably Mexico). As long as this situation persists, the poor of these countries will feel a strong motivation to emigrate to the USA, and many will be willing to take great risks to do so. There is no wall, no police force, able to contain these forces.

A couple of parenthetical points:

1. While the bulk of the angry nativist rhetoric focuses on the "illegals", and their resemblence to vermin, I strongly suspect that most of these ranters are equally uncomfortable with legal immigration. What drives them is the fear of losing their culture, the fear of feeling like an alien in one's own country. It's the experience of driving through certain neighborhoods in certain cities and seeing all the signs in Spanish, and realizing that places exist in the USA in which one is not at home. This syndrome will be provoked by any immigration, of whatever legal status.

2. At some level, even the nativists understand that the same forces that drive today's Latino immigrants almost certainly drove their own ancestors. It's a well-worn cliche, but the USA really is a "nation of immigrants", and everyone who was born here can easily, and often without having to go back very far, trace their family tree to another country somewhere. Today's immigrants for the most part want for themselves and for their descendants the same things that the immigrant great-grandparents of today's nativists wanted.

3. In what sense is it right to legalize, even promote, the flow of capital from the USA to Mexico, in order to take advantage of the low labor rates available there, and wrong to permit the flow of people from Mexico to the USA, in order to take advantage of the higher labor rates found here?

Now, having dismissed the nativist case, what is my solution? I will defer to others, such as Anatol Lieven, who have recently offered some very wise proposals. All I wish to point out is that this whole North-South disparity has only begun to play itself out. The rich countries are going to have to find a way to share, a way to promote wealth-creation among the poor countries themselves, and I don't believe that the current "globalization" model fits the bill. All that globalization has done is take some very poor farmers and convert them into slightly less poor factory workers who are no less lacking in any independent way of improving their lives.

We cannot make these tensions, these disequilibria, vanish by passing laws or building fences.

More on a "progressive faith"

The stream of articles urging a progressive embrace of religion goes on, as in the recent issue of "The Nation" which featured, among other offerings, an article by Rabbi Michael Lerner in which he once again trots out the distaste for religion exhibited by secular progressives. While I disagree largely with his discussion of "scientism", I have to agree with at least the distaste part of his analysis.

As I've written before, I don't think religion as presently understood is intellectually respectable, and therefore I am not obliged to show respect for those whose worldview is driven largely by religious faith. Lerner talks about "spirituality", and "meaning", and ethical behavior, as if the experiences signified by these words are unavailable to non-believers.

I have news for Lerner: even atheists have experiences that they can honestly describe as "spiritual", and atheists just like others seek meaning and guidelines to morals and ethical behavior. They just don't happen to believe that these "spiritual" experiences involve any insight into the nature or existence of a supreme being; they are simply among the vast repertoire of psychological and emotional states which are available to humans, certainly among the more positive and desirable ones. This doesn't mean that we value these experiences any less.

If spirituality and meaning were all that religion was about, there would be little to object to. However, as we all know, religion as currently practiced is rarely content to stop there. Instead, we have preachers forbidding all kinds of perfectly blameless behavior, from eating certain foods (which naturally are different for different religions) to gay marriage. Consider that guy in Afghanistan who found himself the target of a death sentence when the (Muslim) authorities learned that he had converted from Islam to Christianity, thereby becoming that most hated figure, the apostate.

Even in cases like this, it's possible to accept that religion is justified to concern itself with diet and sex, even though by doing so it may be interfering with some peoples' efforts to attain spiritual enlightenment. But no, the religionists can't stop there either. We also have to contend with preachers who insist that the universe was created 6000 years ago, that all species were created more or less at once, and have remained unchanged (and presumably non-extinct) for the duration. And they insist that this drivel be taught in tax-supported public schools.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this is two big steps too far when it comes to my ability to accept religion as a legitimate contributor to political debate. The main difficulty is the simple fact that religion is inherently dogmatic and absolutist, lacking completely the humility and openness that is necessary to actually achieve some degree of spiritual enlightenment. That's right, you heard me: if spirituality is what we're after, then the first thing we need to do is ditch religion and then get on with it.

The things that Lerner mentions are good things that are obviously good even to non-believers, and therefore we need not confuse the matter by introducing talk of faith, or religion, or God. Let's just do the things we know to be good, and accept the fact that it is our humanity that tells us they are good, not some so-called "holy book". Yes, the authors of the Bible knew a thing or two (not sure I can say that about the Koran), but there's plenty that we know that they didn't, and we need to celebrate that just as much if not more. It means that there can be such a thing as moral progress, and what could be better or hopeful news than that?

What's the matter with religion anyway?

It's been awhile, but I've been unavoidably (and productively) busy elsewhere.

Ever since Bush supposedly won the 2004 election on the backs of the so-called "values" voters, Democrats have been urged to "get religion". Prominent spokepeople for this position are Jim Wallis, Michael Lerner, and Amy Sullivan.

The idea is this: it's not religion that's bad, it's the right-wing fundamentalism associated with the likes of Pat Robertson and Rod Parsley that's bad. A religious progressivism has been a prime factor in any number of welcome developments in the country's past, most notably the black civil rights movement, which featured the heavy involvement of the black church and ministers such as Martin Luther King.

Today, we can supposedly put together a message that provides faith-based support for certain policies dear to the progressive heart, such as a sounder tax system, universal health care, a higher minimum wage, environmental protection, and so on.

While that's true, I worry about getting in bed with religion mainly because of my belief that we want to keep religion and politics separate as much as possible, even if religion can be drafted in support of progressive causes. The nightmare that plagues the world right now is the injection of religion into public life, most blatantly in the case of Islam, but also here in the US, where the effort to legislate Christianity as America's "public religion" is ceaseless.

Politics and religion clearly have points of contact. Most religions have some sort of moral teaching, and morality is a major element in much civil legislation. Therefore, to the extent that both religion and politics deal in morality, there will be an overlap, and the temptation to simply carry over the moral teachings of ones religion into the political domain is palpable. In Islam, a central teaching is the inseparability of religious life and civil life, thus we have the insistence that sharia double as civil law, backed by the coercive power of the state.

Yet there is a major incompatibility between politics and religion, namely the fact that politics is based on negotiation and compromise, while religious beliefs tend to be absolute and non-negotiable. Any attempt to inject religious content into the political process thus inevitably leads to an impasse, as those who sponsor religious initiatives refuse to participate in the natural process of political compromise. This is a practical objection.

More troublesome is the actual nature of religious faith itself. Now there are many people I respect who are religious, to one extent or another. However, it is my considered opinion that religious belief is simply not intellectually respectable.

Any serious and unbiased analysis of religious belief can only conclude that people become religious out of a need to feel safer in the world. The cold hard fact of the matter is that the natural world is completely and utterly oblivious to the concerns of living beings, including humans. The physical processes that drive nuclear fusion in the core of the sun, that govern the motion of the planets, stars, and galaxies, are entirely unaware of the many dramas that pervade human existence. A person dies, somewhere else another person is born, and meanwhile a few billion more hydrogen atoms are fused into helium.

This is reality, and it's a reality that many throughout the ages have found indigestible. The response is to interpose a layer in between the individual consciousness, seeking meaning, and the natural world, which offers none. This new layer, itself entirely a creation of the human mind, is fully aware of, and sympathetic toward, all of the various human needs: love, comfort, justice, and so on. The name given to this synthetic boundary that we insert between ourselves and reality is "God".

In this new configuration, the indifference of nature to our hopes and fears is greatly mitigated. Nature may not care about how badly we want that promotion, but God does. Nature may not care about our grief in losing a loved one, but God cares. Nature doesn't care how angry we are to see egregious criminal behavior go unpunished, but God cares, and even better, God will see to it that those who escape punishment in this life will receive it in the next.

God, then, and religion, is a device for converting an unbearable situation into one which is considerably more palatable. This is accomplished at a cost, namely the occasional but necessary denial of reality. In most cases, the Gods that people believe in aren't merely fuzzy and indistinct bundles of love and affirmation. No, these Gods are highly verbal, often spelling out all kinds of very specific codes of behavior, frequently touching on such carnal topics as food and sex. We also find sacred writings which insist on the truth of certain scenarios in the physical world which we now know, many decades after these writings were first committed to paper, are false. The world wasn't created in six days. Eve was not created from Adam's rib. None of these doctrines can be regarded as even remotely true, except in the vaguest symbolic sense. And there are many believers whose interpretations of scripture are anything but symbolic, tending instead toward the rigidly literal.

So, with religion, we have a belief system that is partly, but unavoidably, predicated upon a denial of reality. Such a system is absolutely incompatible with a political decision-making process that must begin by comprehending reality as it is, not as we might wish it to be, or even as some believe it to be. No, the nature of reality is an empirical question, not a psychological one, at least as far as politics is concerned (though not, say, literature).

If there's one lesson that we in America have learned, it's the importance of privatizing religion. It is only when religious belief is kept separate from politics that the political system can function, unimpeded by the intrusion of non-negotiable demands originating out of religious belief. Indeed, it is only by privatizing religion that religion itself can be kept free, free that is from the coercive intrusion of the State. As I've said, I don't believe that religion is true in any sense except possibly the emotional, but at the same time I don't wish to impose that particular opinion on others, and I hope and expect that society will reciprocate.

So, even though I appreciate that a religious case for certain progressive policies can be made, based on the teachings of Jesus, I find it necessary to reject the idea that we should proceed on that basis. Progressive policies must be promoted whether or not Jesus might agree, and whether or not the audience for those policies happens to believe in Jesus. Progressive policies are either right or wrong, on the merits, without reference to religion, and if they're right they should be viable even if no scriptural support for them can be found.

I Was There First

This month's Harper's has a lead story about the distinctions between "workers" and "players". Very good article, but I would like to point out that I had the basic point quite a while ago, when I was talking about "fault lines". At some point I talked about how George W. Bush and the Republican Party were on the wrong side of "the most fundamental fault line of all, that between those who have to work for a living and those who don't". That one sentence doesn't do justice to the whole of the article, but it's a good substitute if you only have a bumper sticker to write on.

On a related note: the new "American Prospect" has an article about some polling (and analysis) done by a couple of progressive entrepreneurs, which looks like it is finally making sense about the confusing and contradictory vectors that are driving American culture and politics today. This could be the real deal, the framework that finally allows progressives to make some electoral progress in an environment that often seems truly forbidding.

I'll have more after I've read the entire article.

The Threat

One of the things that very distinctly separates the right from the left is in their assessment of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. The right - with some help from sometime leftists like Peter Beinart - treats the threat as existential, as the only issue worth discussing. Clearly George Bush takes this line, as he argues that he can circumvent any legal or constitutionl restraint on presidential power as long as he can credibly claim to be acting as "commander in chief".

While those on the left are equally serious - witness Simon and Benjamin's new book "The Next Attack", they don't believe that terrorism can threaten the very existence of the USA, not like the Soviet Union could, with its arrays of ICBMs. Not only that, but most on the left don't believe that we should warp our very identity as a nation in the effort to combat terrorism, thus the opposition to certain provisions of the "Patriot" act. Some like to quote Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death".

The question that needs to be asked of those on the right is: if the threat is everything you say it is, why are you so averse to an honest and in-depth analysis of how that threat came to be? Too many - like Bill O'Reilly - are totally unwilling to consider the possibility that our own foreign policies had anything to do with the rise of Islamic terrorism, which leaves them in the curious position of shouting vociferously about a threat whose existence they are totally unable to account for. They just "hate us", no reason given, and apparently none needed.

Well I'm sorry, but as the bombs keep exploding and the people keep dying (almost 200 in just the past two days), that's just not good enough. It's clearer than ever that we - by which I mean Bush and company - are completely out of our (their) depth in Iraq, that we've created a situation that is rapidly devolving into sheer anarchy, and that we have neither the intellectual, moral, or physical resources to improve the situation. We are going to have to get on our knees and beg the world community to step in and provide the kind of assistance that is quite obviously beyond us at this point. I don't think anyone wants the instability of Iraq to spread to any of its neighbors, one of which is, lest we forget, Saudi Arabia.

The Ticking Bomb

Everyone is getting all exercised about the "ticking bomb" scenario, apparently because some commentators (seemingly including NPR's Diane Rehm) believe that it is an unanswerable argument in favor of torture.

Let's leave aside for the moment the extreme implausibility of the situation. We've learned that a nuclear device is planted in an American city, set to explode at some unknown time. Furthermore, we've captured a terrorist who we know for sure knows where the bomb is and when it will go off. All of this begs the question: how did we learn all this yet fail to learn the exact location of the bomb? How do we know that the terrorist knows, but not what he knows? All of this is fanciful in the extreme.

But let's go further. If you were an al-Qaeda cell planning this attack, don't you think that you would:

a) set up all kinds of blind alleys for investigators to follow and get bogged down in;
b) make damn sure that all of your operatives with critical knowledge were well away from the scene, say, in the mountains of northwest Pakistan, before the event was imminent?

Lastly, and simplest of all: the argument that even a saint would engage in torture under these circumstances is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not torture should be legal. Our policy should be very simple, along the lines suggested by John McCain: torture is illegal, period. If in some extreme circumstance operatives of the US government find it necessary to torture someone in their custody, they will do so knowing that they risk prosecution.

The option of clemency is always there if it is the only way to serve the larger interests of justice.