Constructive Criticism

I'm sorting out some ideas I might post to Facebook.  If they turn out to hang together, I'll just post them here.  It may take a while, but I hope that before too long I'll finish venting and can return either to slacking off or writing on other subjects.  For now I'll try to be entertaining, at least.

It's easy enough to pick on people who are upset because Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at a small restaurant in Virginia.  I've tried to explain why they are fundamentally wrong, but it might help to suggest how they could do a better job.  A better job of framing the problem and the controversy, if you will.

For example, instead of fixating on the nonexistent injustice Sanders suffered, let's try a different perspective.  Having been ejected, civilly and politely, from the Red Hen restaurant, Huckabee Sanders decided to use her bully pulpit as White House Press Secretary, her government Twitter account, to stomp on the restaurant and its owner.  A worker at the restaurant had already posted about it on Facebook, but most of the corporate media didn't pick on it until Sanders notified her vast audience that she'd been treated with disrespect.

If a journalist really wanted to raise the alarm about civility, he or she could have begun by pointing out that, inconvenient and unpleasant as it was to be refused service, it was incomparably more unpleasant for the Red Hen to be put in the crosshairs of the Trump base, and vastly more uncivil for Sanders to put it there.  So a really fair journalist might say something along those lines: We sympathize with Mrs. Sanders for having her dinner plans interrupted, though of course she is completely in favor of less godly persons being refused service, but civility and indeed democracy are under threat when a powerful government official takes petty revenge on a small business for putting her to inconvenience.

My Right Wing Acquaintance, RWA1, lamented on Facebook that "We are all the losers" when this kind of incivility takes place.  He was not, of course, referring to Sanders's abuse of her office to trash a small business, though one might have thought that as a (retired) small business owner himself and a critic of big-government abuses (when they hurt the wrong people, that is), he might have thought of the chilling effect her behavior could have on small business owners who dare to disrespect POTUS and his crew.  He might write something like: I would never refuse service to anyone, but Mrs. Sanders's conduct is uncivil and inexcusable, even if she does feel that she should have been served.  As a believer in small government, I shudder to think that small business owners should hesitate to exercise their rights for fear of being attacked by some unaccountable bureaucrat in Washington.

The important thing is, this never seems to have occurred to either RWA1 or the centrist pundits who've been piling on the Red Hen with Sanders.  It's not surprising, of course: RWA1 and his kindred spirits always side with the bigots first.  They may pay lip service to the bigots' targets, but only on the way to offer comfort to the already comfortable, who suffered so greatly by not receiving the obedience and servility that is their due.

RWA1 was very indignant, for example, when Ben Carson encountered resistance to his giving a commencement address at Johns Hopkins and decided to forego the honor.  "I'm for gay marriage," RWA1 commented as he linked to a fatuous and mendacious essay by the centrist writer Michael Kinsley, "but Kinsley is right about PC heresy-hunting in academia and elsewhere."

Carson took flak for a Fox News appearance in which, among other pleasantries, he compared same-sex marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.  He addressed these themes further soon afterwards on MSNBC.  In addition to declaring that they don't make homophobes like they used to, Kinsley pointed out that Carson is a distinguished neurosurgeon and not your stereotypical toothless redneck bigot.  As if he suddenly realized the absurdity of that defense, Kinsley doubled back and acknowledged that even a university-educated military officer of impeccable pedigree can be the commandant of a death camp, but hey, this is America and we should be tolerant of bigots as long as they have advanced degrees and dress nice.  Kinsley also claimed that he and Andrew Sullivan invented gay marriage in 1989, I suppose to establish his bona fides as an Ally, howbeit a delusional one.  That claim was revised in the online version, but only the first time (of two) he made it; as far as I know, the second instance is still there, later in the text.

But I dissected Kinsley's claims at length at the time.  What I still find interesting is that 1) though antigay bigots must know by now that they will get in trouble if they compare homosexuality to bestiality on national TV, they just can't seem to stop themselves from doing it; 2) though apologists for bigotry will admit the absurdity and viciousness of the bigots' discourse, they will still insist that no one should get upset about it and the bigots should suffer no consequences whatever ("why can't [gays] just laugh off nutty comments like Carson's...?" Kinsley asked); and 3) RWA1, who is not as stupid as he often seems (though as time goes on, I'm beginning to reconsider that judgment), could still post Kinsley's gabbling as an exemplary diagnosis and refutation of "PC heresy hunting in academia."  I was going to wonder just how vile someone would have to be for RWA1 and his ilk to refuse to defend their freedom of expression, but then I remembered the Westboro Baptist Church: RWA1 is always ready not just to place them behind the pale, but to deny their First Amendment rights and to hint coyly that it would be nice if someone were to shoot them in the face or something.  So there are limits, but only for "demon-possessed preachers" and unruly rabble on the left.

There's the consistent pattern in the centrist-media outcry about the death of civility in America, into which people like RWA1 fit comfortably: they always side with the bigots first.  Their balanced, but-on-the-other-hand analyses may admit that perhaps the bigots have gone too far now and then, but that's no reason to say mean things about them or make them uncomfortable in public.  This is a consideration that they do not extend to left-wing agitators, let alone the bigots' targets.  We are supposed to grow thicker skins; the bigots and their apologists can feel a pea through thirty mattresses, and that sensitivity is protected by all the norms of democratic society.  It doesn't take an advanced degree to detect where their sympathies lie.  They're entitled to lay their sympathies wherever they like, but so are the rest of us, and if they want to be taken seriously, they should start being honest about their real allegiance.

The Poverty of "Moderation" and "Civility"

The media haven't yet found something to distract them from the horror of Sarah Huckabee Sanders being refused service at a little restaurant in Virginia, and far be it from me to wander away from the fold.

I'd wondered if any of my Facebook friends would have anything to say about it yet, but so far most of them haven't, as far as I've seen.  My Right Wing Acquaintance did not disappoint: he weighed in with a lament about the lack of "civility" in our society today, and the divisiveness we face.  I pointed out that Sanders was treated civilly by the owner of the Red Hen, and that refusing service is not in itself considered incivility by the Right as long as the right people are refused service; in that case, it's objecting to the refusal of service that is uncivil.  I also pointed out a couple of instances of RWA1's own incivility, along with the example of Ronald Reagan: a bigot and recreational liar much like Trump, whose attacks on the poor and other safe targets delighted his base in his day.  We haven't gone beyond that yet.

As for divisiveness, Jon Schwarz tweeted yesterday that the Right "never imagined that their all-out attack on America might one day have the most mild consequences imaginable."  Conservatives have been at war with most of their fellow citizens, sometimes literally, for most of American history.  When Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post editorial page, tweeted "Breaking up families is repugnant.  But hounding public servants in their private life isn't the right response," among the replies he got were these:

Invoking "consequences" is slippery, though.  It's a popular move on the forced-birth Right, when they say that a woman who has sex needs to take responsibility for the consequences of her sin.  I put it ambiguously there because, though they prefer to forget it, most women who get abortions are married and already mothers.  Just having sex, in their eyes, is the offense for which a woman must be punished.)  It was also popular at the height of the AIDS epidemic: if you engage in dirty sodomitical sex, you must live with the consequences.  They never imagine that their own actions might have consequences that make them uncomfortable.

At the same time, I'm wary of using their own move against them, because it relies on the fallacious assumption that "consequences" are always a natural result of someone's action, rather than something imposed on them by the judgment and choices of others.  (It's a variant of the mind game "See What You Made Me Do," identified by Eric Berne.)  Those who want to impose consequences on Sarah Huckabee Sanders or other Trump team members must remember that they (we) are deciding what the consequences ought to be, and take responsibility for their (our) choices.  I can say, more in anger than in sorrow, that I'm not seeing much of that.

It's like karma, which despite all the caveats and disclaimers, seems always to be invoked for other people.  If I understand the concept correctly -- of course there are many formulations -- it includes not only what other people bring on themselves, but on how we choose to respond to their actions.  If I burn down your house because you're a bad person, I might be an agent of your karma, but I'm also building up bad karma for myself.  One could, I think, make an excellent case that the presidency of Donald Trump is the karma not just of America generally, but also specifically of those Democrats who arrogantly assumed that such a loser could never beat Hillary.

With that in mind, and with considerable fear and trembling, I agree that it's appropriate to put the GOP in the hot seat.  Which doesn't mean I'm approving in advance every sadistic or violent "consequence" liberals and progressives decide is appropriate for the Trump team.  Nor should we forget that Trump and his base will strike back.  That's the trouble with starting a fight: your opponent will hit back.  You need to think about how you'll conduct yourself after that happens, and it seems to me that few people do, especially among those who are nominally on my side.

Still, it's worth remembering that the American Right has been at war, sometimes literally, with most of their fellow citizens for a long, long time.  There are many possible responses to them, but it must be remembered that verbal "combat," even pretty heated, is acceptable.  So are shunning, exclusion, refusing service or fellowship.  I wrote yesterday that if Sarah Huckabee Sanders were starving, I would feed her -- but she's not starving.  If she were homeless and living rough, I would favor giving her shelter and proper clothing -- but she's not homeless; she's all too comfortable.  If Donald Trump were lying in the gutter on fire, I would not piss on him: I would try to put out the flames and call an ambulance -- but he's not (alas?) on fire in the gutter.  I think it's important not to trade in irrelevancies, like mocking people's appearance -- but even if someone did, it's not as bad as separating children from their parents and putting them in cages.  I would deplore fat-shaming Sanders, for example, but I'd still have a sense of proportion in my criticism of the tactic.

And I'm worried about the panicky and yet weirdly complacent irrationality I see among many liberals and progressives, even leftists.  It seems that they feel that Trump's crimes license them to do anything in retaliation, without any bounds.  I've quoted before Walter Kaufmann's paraphrase of Freud, "Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal."  I don't have my copy of Without Guilt and Justice at hand now, but that sentence occurs in the context of a discussion of the human impulse to punishment.  The law of talion, "an eye for an eye," not only demands punishment, it limits it: no more than an eye for an eye.  Kaufmann noted that historically and cross-culturally, this limitation has often been needed, that people delight in inventing and executing baroque, sadistic tortures on people as a "consequence," as what they "deserve."  He also critiqued the very concept of "deserving," though not only with regard to punishment.  Given some of the gleeful fantasizing I've been seeing in social media the past few days about what Trump, Sanders, and other people "deserve," I worry about my putative allies' lack of self-awareness and its consequences.  This is not because I believe that we should be nice and give warm fuzzies to the Nazis (the straw man so beloved of many), but because failing to think about what we're doing will result in innocent people getting hurt.  We've had enough collateral damage already, thank you very much.  I can believe all this while rubbing RWA1's nose (figuratively) in the dirt and reminding him that Sanders got (a much milder version of) the same kind of behavior she defends and supports for other people.

It's pointless to squabble about "who started it."  I attack the Right for what they say and do, and I won't let them cast themselves as victims.  At the same time, the Mom's response to "He started it!" is "And I'm ending it."  We also need to think about ending this.  We won't get a better society merely by punishing, trampling, humiliating the Right.  Again, this has nothing to do with warm fuzzies, though there's nothing wrong with warm fuzzies per se: the point is that punishing and humiliating your enemy won't work.  You just get a punished, humiliated enemy who will plot revenge, waiting until your back is turned to restart the fight.  (Paradigm cases: the US Civil War and World War I.)  It's even open to question whether humiliating your enemy will make you feel better in the long run.  But leave feelings out of it -- the real challenge is how to end a conflict without just setting up the pieces for the defeated enemy's payback game.

I also remember that any pushback against our not-so-Shadowy Overlords is unacceptable to them and their lackeys.  Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic is busy chiding the uncivil on Twitter right now: "If civility were more highly valued in our political culture Donald Trump would not be president. If it becomes significantly less valued in the next two years he is a shoe-in [sic] for reelection."  When challenged he replied "on the 'civility works better' side I cite Ghandi [sic] and MLK and Nixon’s re-election. What would you cite for 'incivility gets it done'?"

Friedersdorf is conveniently confusing civility with an avoidance of conflict. Civility is how you handle conflict.  Granted, the Civility Police prefer it that our rulers never face repercussions or any kind of pushback at all, but they shouldn't get their way.  He's also buying into the confusion of moderation of tone with moderation of substance, which is beloved of apologists for harmful policies. E.g., it's okay to kill children with drones as long as you do it politely as Obama did, not nastily like Trump does. Since Friedersdorf's a Christian, he should remember a saying that goes "Because you are lukewarm, I will vomit you out of my mouth." Or look at MLK's remarks about extremism in the letter from Birmingham jail, addressing white moderates who sounded a lot like Friedersdorf does today.

His citation of Gandhi (why is that name so difficult for many people to spell, by the way?) and King is actually absurd. Both men were radical troublemakers whose activism was seen as extremely uncivil by the nice, moderate public servants they opposed and by their servants in the media.  The civil disobedience King practiced was deplored by reasonable moderates while he lived -- I mean, the sit-ins, interfering with Bidness, so extreme and uncivil!  I feel sure that if he'd been active then, Friedersdorf would have lectured him on it.  King embraced the label of "extremist" in his letter from the Birmingham jail, and his rhetoric there, while free of "fuck" and "cunt," was anything but conciliatory.  It's only in retrospect, with considerable deliberate amnesia, that King and Gandhi can possibly seen as "civil" by Friedersdorf's standards.  It might be possible to make a good argument against the Red Hen owner's ejection of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but so far I haven't seen one.

Two Words: Accurate Analogies. You Won't Even See Them Coming.

Jon Schwarz returned last week to a subject he's addressed before, the apparent scarcity of conservative comedians:

This is a Weird Opinion, but I believe there's a connection between conservatives' inability to construct accurate analogies and the near-total lack of competent conservative comedians. That's because constructing accurate analogies is a key comedic skill.

Well, um, you know, I don't think so.  First, I don't think that analogies have to be accurate for audiences to find them funny.  Humor is not a rational, evidence-based phenomenon.  I also don't think that, as a group, liberals or leftists are any better than conservatives at constructing accurate analogies.  But the accuracy (weird word, actually) of analogies isn't an either/or matter anyway.

Take what I hope is an easy example; certainly, it was at Jon's blog, A Tiny Revolution, that I first encountered it.



Writers from The Daily Show reportedly helped Obama write his routine, so even if you don't consider Obama a liberal (I don't), even if you want to deny that the people who laughed at his performance are liberals  (I don't), I think this counts against Jon's theory.  I'm not even sure where an analogy comes in: the point of contact would be death by predator drone, but aside from that, what?  The Jonas Brothers correspond to American children?  One commenter under the blog post drew an analogy between the Jonas Brothers and a 60-year-old Brit slavering over a teenaged girl at a wedding.  (No permalink; just look for N E, a reliable Obama toady at that site.)  The weakness of any analogy involved didn't keep a lot of liberal Obama fans from finding the gag a kneeslapper, though they've mostly preferred to stuff it down the Memory Hole in years since. 

One commenter on the YouTube video wrote, "It IS a dark joke... but if Bush can joke about not finding WMDs (and thus mocking all the people he sent to their deaths based on a lie), then Obama can joke about this." That's exactly the point: people who criticized Bush for joking about not finding WMDs defend Obama for joking about killing kids with predator drones. It's contemptible. It also says something that the commenter focused on "the people he sent to their deaths", presumably US troops, rather than the many more Iraqis he killed: only American lives count.

Of course there are other examples I could give; Hillary Clinton's "We came, we saw, he died," for one.  Clinton's not a liberal either, but liberals didn't object, either to the terror bombing of Libya (disastrous for Libyans, not so much for the US) or to the lynching of Qaddafy.  The analogy in this one is clear: Clinton is casting herself as Julius Caesar, not a great example of democracy or human decency.

Several responses to Jon's remarks from liberals and leftists struck me as clueless.  Such as this exchange:

"Modern conservatives"?  Like conservatives were any better in the past?  Vastleft's reply is even odder.  Smarter people than I have been trying to discover and explain the nature of humor for millennia, but there's considerable acknowledgment that humor isn't empathetic, it's mean even when it's playful.  As Mel Brooks says: Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Dayv also wrote:

Much depends on who's the target of the satire.  Was "A Modest Proposal" empathetic toward the English?  No; it was savage to them.  And I have plenty of reason to doubt that liberals or progressives understand what satire is anyway.  Personally I think that good satire should make me wince (whether as author as as consumer) as I laugh, but I also think that's a refinement for pansy-ass intellectuals like me or Dean Swift.  The base of satire is mockery, and any empathy involved is used to make the target squirm harder.

As Ellen Willis wrote in 1979, "Humorless [is] what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls.  It carries no imputation of humorless if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth."  But that's about as predictable as it gets.  Quite a few men, including me, find her definition funny.  Others, like my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, pull a long glum face at it.

RWA1, significantly, was extremely upset by Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few weeks ago.  (Transcript here.) It was tasteless, it was awful, it was going to hurt the Democrats' chances of getting Trump out of the White House.  Concern-trolling again, you see.  It wasn't even his ox that was being gored -- he hates Trump as only an establishment Republican Never-Trumper can -- but I suppose that was the problem: true, she mocked Trump, but she also mocked establishment Republicans and Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the #Resistance, and the respectable media, which was Inappropriate, So Unnecessary, and definitely Going Too Far.  He seemed not to have noticed that the White House Correspondents Association was as unhappy as he was. Personally, I think he was revolted by all her references to lady parts, which always make him queasy.

Does the widespread disapproval of Wolf's performance indicate that her analogies were inaccurate, or that they were accurate?  I thought she was on-target most of the time, but obviously not everyone agrees.  The accuracy of analogies is as subjective, I would argue, as humor itself.

I could also mention the popularity among liberals and progressives of fag jokes about Trump.  If I were feeling charitable, I could suggest that their motivating impulse is at base conservative, but I'm not feeling charitable.  What I think bothers me most about the distinction Jon drew is that it buys into an assumption that "conservative" and "liberal" refer to actual discrete types of human beings, perhaps reflecting innate biological differences: They are fundamentally different than Us.  Their many errors can be blamed on their nature, as our adherence to Truth is due to ours.  Something wrong with that; call it a failure of empathy.

Incidentally, today is the eleventh anniversary of this blog.

Kicking Away Tiny Tim's Crutch Because His Father Voted for Trump

Just last week I realized that it has been less than a year since Donald Trump became President.  It seems like so much longer.  And we have at least three years more to go.

Today Corey Robin, whom I've begun following lately, posted this on Facebook, referring to this tweet from Eric Alterman.  (Doug Henwood also noticed the tweet.)  I'm glad I'm not the only person who's noticed the behavior he's talking about:

I'm surprised when liberal writers and journalists say they're fine with Trump voters losing their jobs, health care, access to potable water, and so on, because they had it coming to them. Since jobs, health care, and clean water are critical to one's survival, such calls are essentially an endorsement of death on the installment plan for one-half the country. Imagine the reaction of these very same writers and journalists if the radical left were to call for—or endorse—the death of their domestic political enemies.

Or if the radical right were to do so.  Recently my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One gleefully linked to an article about child malnutrition in Venezuela, sneering at that country as a "worker's paradise."  Of course, those children had voted for Chavez and Maduro, so they had brought their misery on themselves.  A day or so later RWA1 linked to a story about Roy Moore's attack on the gay son of his victorious opponent Doug Jones; RWA1 declared that Moore, like the late Fred Phelps, was of Satan.  I commented that RWA1 needs people like Moore and Phelps so that he can pretend to be a moderate while he does a happy dance at the plight of starving brown children.  I might also have pointed out that child malnutrition is a serious problem in the United States, thanks to the policies of both parties over the past few decades; but I doubt RWA1 cares about that either, since those children probably voted for the "aspiring Mussolini" Barack Obama.

Robin's post sparked some discussion, with a few people actually defending Alterman's remarks.  Some denied that anyone besides him had expressed such sentiments; a couple doubted that he or any other liberal could actually mean such a thing.  That excuse could probably be made for many Trump voters, though.  Later in the thread Robin added:

This country has had a large anti-democratic element since its founding. If anything, I would say the size of that element is considerably smaller (and less violent) today than it was the year I was born. I also think comments like the one I posted are not symptoms of populism; they're symptoms of tribalism. Party tribalism, where your team is the good guys and the other team is the bad guys. Even tribalism is too fancy: it's just groupiness and cliques. That again is why you see a lot of heated rhetoric from this quarter but no action.

I was glad to see that he too has noticed the limitations of the word "tribalism."  This, as Henwood noted, is why liberals are so popular, and as one of Henwood's commenters remarked, it's how to win elections.

Unlike Corey Robin, I'm not all that surprised by Alterman's sentiment, since I've seen so much of it already -- just extremely pissed off. But it also makes me feel a bit more hopeless, because it means that the people who are supposedly, nominally, on my side are really not, which means that there may be hardly anyone to make common cause with. In the US at least. As a result, I get called a nihilist, which is funny but stupid - and also depressing since it comes from people who are nominally on my side. Well, you live and learn.

And Then a Step to the Right

The other day I saw one of those memes about Nazis and the "Big Lie," which typically and conveniently ignored the fact that the Nazis accused other people -- the Jews, the English -- of using the Big Lie; they of course claimed to be honest. (Hahaha.) So I was interested by this post by emptywheel on Brexit, answering someone who claimed (a Big Lie? a Little Lie? a Noble Lie?) that "we now live in a post-factual democracy." Emptywheel asked:

Still, what does it mean that we live in a post-factual democracy? I thought, at first, that the US is just ahead of its cousin, in that we’ve had WMD and birther lies for over a decade. But the UK had the very same WMD lies. Indeed, both countries have proudly lied about national security secrets for decades, centuries in England.

Plus, as I thought back in US history, I couldn’t get to a time when democracy didn’t depend on some key, big lies. Remarkably, they’re still some of the very same lies mobilized in the Brexit vote. You don’t get a United States, you don’t get a British Empire, without spewing a lot of lies about the inferiority of black (brown, beige, continental) men. You don’t get America, as it currently exists, without the myth of American exceptionalism, the unique national myth that has served to root an increasingly diverse former colony. You don’t get Britain without certain beliefs, traced back to Matthew Arnold and earlier, about the ennobling force of British culture.

Those myths are precisely what have driven the democracy of both countries for a long time. They were a way of imposing discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion such that less privileged members of those included in the myth would buy in and tolerate the other inequities without undue violence.

But then, you don't get any empire, any nation, any tribe, any family without lies to impose discipline, privilege, and selective cohesion.  One commenter replied:

What I think is the tipping point of a post-factual democracy is that there’s no fear of being held accountable for deliberate lies and for simply making things up on the fly. There’s an irony that in a day and age when every word a public figure says is recorded for playback, they no longer seem to care. In this post-factual democracy, the complex issues aren’t only being compressed into sound bites, they are being reduced to undetectable puffs of breath in speeches that nothing but crowd pleasing gibberish.

This is fantasy.  Was there ever really any "fear of being held accountable for deliberate lies and for simply making things up on the fly"?  I can't remember such a time.  Emptywheel had suggested that "[p]erhaps we’re moving closer to a fact-based democracy. Access to rebut sanctioned lies is more readily accessible," and I agree.  Contrary to the popular cliche that it's harder to verify quotations (and other information) in the age of the internet, it's actually much easier than it used to be.  Of course you have to apply critical thinking to your findings, and nobody likes that.

(By the way, I happened on this tweet today:

Tyson really should stick to astrophysics.  But look at that: five thousand retweets, ten thousand likes.  Someone like Donald Trump would probably get more, but still.  Tyson's popularity [notoriety] has litle to do with science, rationality, or evidence.)

But I divagate.  The right-wing reactions to Brexit have been as revealing as the liberal ones.  My Right Wing Acquaintances were pleased of course.  RWA1 linked to an article from National Review, and exulted that the "unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels" had been given notice.  RWA3 and others posted similar sentiments.  Which is funny, because as Etienne Balabar wrote a few days ago,

As we know, comparisons aren’t everything. But how could we fail to note that in the recent history of European politics national or multi-national referendum results have never been put into effect? Such was the case in 2005 and 2008 with the "European Constitution" and the Lisbon Treaty, and even more clearly in 2015 with the memorandum imposed on Greece. Very probably the same will be the case here, too. Above and beyond the personal conflicts that led to a difference of tactics, the British ruling class is manoeuvring to push back the deadlines and negotiate the terms of "exit" as best as possible.

RWA1, like most right-wingers (including the Democratic Party leadership) holds voters and accountability in contempt when they want the Wrong People to be accountable.  He's posted a lot of hostile material about Donald Trump, for instance, who like Brexit represents a lot of people who are hostile to "unaccountable bureaucrats" in Washington (a position RWA1 also holds as long as the Right People will be left in charge).  He has been eager to see the mutinous rabble of Venezuela and other Latin American countries crushed for daring to reject the dictatorships that had ruled them for the benefit of multinational corporations.  He seems to have been ambivalent about the 2015 Greek referendum, linking favorably to a National Review article that warned against "Greeks casting blame," attacking the "grand project of an increasingly centralized and integrated European super-state" and the "outrageous" "rhetoric of Greek's [sic] far-left leaders", quoting "Seyed Kamall, the British leader of the euroskeptic wing of the European Parliament" to the effect that Greece should "take advantage of devaluation and become a more attractive destination for investment and tourism." RWA3 doesn't have RWA1's intellectual pretensions, but she too celebrated the outcome as a victory for self-determination -- for the right white people, of course.  Self-determination for the Brits, but not for the Arabs and Pakis; they should go back where they came from, though we have to control their countries too because they're sitting on top of our oil.

RWA1's the guy, you may recall, who posted outside his store:

Nor should we listen to those who say, "The voice of the people is the voice of God," for the turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity

--Alcuin, ca. 800 A.D.

But when the turbulent mob vents its insanity in a direction he approves, it's fine with him.  Which is typical of both parties and probably most people: the wisdom of the People must not be denied -- until you don't like the candidate or question they voted for.

Racism wasn't the only factor driving the Leave vote, and I'm as disturbed by the liberals and leftists who could see only racism in it as I am by the racist conservatives who denied that it played any role at all.  The denial is usually couched in familar dog-whistle terms, that the Leave voters were just simple English country folk who don't recognize their country anymore because of all these immigrants, they just want to preserve the England they know -- i.e., racists.  Fussing about culture and language is nothing new for the English: they've been demonizing each other on grounds of accent, vocabulary, and class for centuries before all the Pakis and Poles arrived.

The vaunted right-wing concern about secure borders and immigration is probably funnier in the US than in the UK, but the US exists because Britannia scattered its sons and daughters across the sea.  Building an Empire also meant violating other countries' borders.  New immigration has always inspired nativist fury among the children of previous immigrants in the US, and not entirely without reason, because business interests push for more immigration to drive wages down.  Again, though, within the US there has been hostility to migration by Americans within our borders, encouraged by business to drive wages down, and the fury directed at African Americans and poor whites isn't that different from the fury directed at immigrants.  The same is true elsewhere: for example, the Taiwanese writer Pai Hsaio-Hung's Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants (Verso, 2012) tells the stories of people desperately looking for work in their own country; they could easily be the Okies of The Grapes of Wrath.

Anti-immigrant sentiment tends to confuse "legal" and "illegal" immigrants, as I've noted before.  A common line is "My grandparents came here legally!  They entered the country according to the rules!" and so on. This is open to question if we ask "'Legal' according to whom?"  At first the pre-Columbian peoples weren't opposed to the arrival of Europeans, but when it became clear that Those People Were Taking Over, as they pressed west and claimed ever more territory, driving the Indians off their land by violence, the Indians would no doubt have liked to close and secure their borders, but by then it was too late.  The immigration standards weren't set by the Indians but in Washington, D.C., by the same people who were stealing their land.  Imagine that Mexican Americans, descendants of the people whose land was stolen from them by the Anglos in the nineteenth century, set up their own immigration bureaus along the border and claimed the authority to decide who would come over.  It's certainly fair to ask how legitimate was Washington's claim to the land, and to flood it with more Europeans to further displace the indigenous people.

But that was then, this is now.  The immediate fuss over Brexit seems to be dying down, replaced by an attempt by right-wing Labour leadership to remove Jeremy Corbyn from his post as party leader -- a coup so laughably bungled as to discredit the rightists all over again -- and by more discussion and negotiation about what in fact is going to happen.  Another acquaintance of mine had a comment printed in today's newspaper, complaining that his investments had already suffered because of Brexit.  That's a fair complaint of course, since he's about my age and probably relies on those investments for much of his income.  But it's also fair to ask on whose backs his dividends are being earned.

Moderation

The worst thing about Donald Trump is the same as the worst thing about the late Fred Phelps: he's so obnoxious that other extremists can use him to seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.  So, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham has just denounced Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" who "doesn't represent my party."  Now, any observer of the American political scene knows that race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigots are the backbone of the GOP, which deliberately wooed them away from the Democrats during the Nixon administration.  Just to limit myself to Graham, in 2010 the New York Times called him "this year's maverick," which is corporate media code for a frothing, shamelessly warmongering bigot that the paper wants, for some reason, to cultivate.  So, of course, my Right Wing Acquaintance No. 1 linked to Graham's denunciation of Trump, adding, "Trump is, indeed, a fascist."  RWA1 likes people like Trump and Phelps, for the same reason: he can use them to present himself as a reasonable, moderate person.

The second worst thing about Trump is that he's a safe target for liberal Democrats, who are flooding the Intertoobz with abuse of him.  As my new meme, above, suggests, this no doubt makes them feel better, but has no useful effect that I can see.  Admittedly, it's hard to know what would have a useful effect.  But I saw one enlightened soul refer to Trump as a "retard" the other day, thereby showing his vast moral and intellectual superiority to Trump and his supporters; a fair amount of the anti-Trump stuff does help drag down the level of discourse in our nation, as if it weren't already low enough.

Here's a better reaction to Trump, from an interview with the leftist Anglo-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali on Democracy Now! this morning.  Amy Goodman asked him what he thought of the move in Parliament to ban Donald Trump from England.  Ali replied:

And I, myself—Amy, I have to say that, you know, I’m not in favor of banning people, because once you start banning people from the right who are mouthing extreme-right rubbish, this then leads to similar bans against progressive people, people on the left accused of being terrorists, etc. It’s better to debate these people out rather than to ban them. That’s my opinion.

Mine too.  It's funny to imagine Trump hoist on his own petard, but liberals never seem to remember that the repressive actions they favor will eventually be used against them.

To The Best of My Mismemorization, Uh ...

This morning I noticed that the Onion had an item in their faux Person-in-the-Street feature, based on a report that former President George W. Bush had offered to officiate at a lesbian wedding in 2013, but had to back out because of a scheduling conflict.

Ironically, the Onion is pretty reliable in its references to actual news (as opposed to the satire it spins from it), so I looked around and decided to look at what the Daily Caller (one of RWA1's preferred sources) had to say about the report.  It turned out to be only the barest aside in a Boston Globe piece about Dubya's brother Jeb, and for what it's worth, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post that "While President Bush is indeed friends with Bonnie and Helen, he doesn’t recall making such an offer."  Which is a rather mild denial; it might well be true (that Bush doesn't recall it).  It's a sign of how much has changed, that rather than declare his eternal opposition to the destruction of holy matrimony by Teh Gay, Bush chooses not to remember anything about it.  I even believe that if he did offer and then withdrew, it really was because of a scheduling conflict, even if it was really a hangover.

I indulged in some snark on Facebook about the story, declaring that obviously Dubya isn't really a conservative after all! I think he was just misled by his advisors when he said he opposed same-sex marriage, just like Barack was.  (Or maybe not -- Obama denied the report.)  For that matter, Dick Cheney also pretended to oppose same-sex marriage while he was VPOTUS (via).  So they were just playing eleven-dimensional chess with the Christian right!  Bush did appoint numerous openly gay Republicans to important posts, after all.  I bet if Bush could have had just one more term, he'd have shown his true colors as the progressive social reformer he really is ... As so often happens, reality tends to leave satire behind it, gasping in the dust.

Incidentally, the Most Liberal Pope Evar continues to proclaim his inclusive message of love and inclusion.

Constitutionally Incapable

A liberal Facebook friend posted the link to this Daily Kos story about Bobby Jindal, the cute-but-dumb Republican governor of Louisiana, who recently demonstrated his ignorance of our Constitutional system of government:

“We’re a nation of laws, that’s why I said I want the Supreme Court not to overturn our laws,” he said on CNN’s “New Day” on Tuesday.

“If the Supreme Court were to do this, I think the remedy would be a constitutional amendment in the Congress to tell the courts you can't overturn what the states have decided.”

The friend who posted the link commented upon it thusly: "He's been drinkin' too much derp-entine. /
derp derp derp derp".  You see why I love liberals: they focus not on personalities but on issues, logic. and evidence.  And how do I know that?  Because they say so, and they wouldn't say it if it weren't true.

I made a snotty comment on my friend's post: "But then who does read the Constitution? It's old and irrelevant, just for rich white men."  My friend and I went back and forth a few times as he half-defended ("I think an argument could be made that the founders were people of means and the entire system was created to protect those same people")  the dumb slogan I'd sarcastically invoked, until I commented at greater length.

Yes, an argument could be made to that effect. In fact, it has been, quite a few times; I think I first encountered it in Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. The people I was thinking of were college undergraduates who were furious when the blog of a bigoted university professor wasn't shut down by the university because of the First Amendment. Their stupidity was perhaps understandable -- they were too young to remember how the First Amendment had been used to protect the freedom of speech of people like them, and where would they have learned the history? I suspect they'd picked up their position from some graduate TAs who should have known better, but I don't know for sure. And entertainingly, the same people wailed that a projected anti-gay-marriage amendment to the US Constitution would be totally unconstitutional. 1) When did they suddenly care about the Constitution, which was for old rich white men? 2) A Constitutional amendment, by definition, cannot be unconstitutional; it changes what is constitutional and what isn't.

I'm not a Constitutional historian, let alone a scholar of its interpretation, but I have read the damn thing, and I know a little of the history. I agree that it was intended to protect the affluent white men who wrote it, though they didn't "create the system", they inherited it, and one thing that strikes me when I read it is how jumbled and messy it is. After all, it was written by committee, and it's marked by numerous compromises. It also is incomplete. It says nothing about banking, for example, although the framers were very interested in that subject. Roger D. Hodge wrote in The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (Harper Collins, 2010), quite a good book by the way, that "banks were popular inside the [constitutional] convention but extremely unpopular outside it; leaving banks out of the document can be seen as a tactical maneuver, to eliminate a potential obstacle to ratification" (106).

It's true that the Bill of Rights is often ineffective in protecting the rights of the less well-off, though I think things improved in the second half of the twentieth century. (I wonder how one would construct, enforce, and sustain a system which really would protect the rights of those who aren't well-off.) Whatever the framers intended, and I don't think they were all of one mind, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been modified, extended, and used in ways they didn't foresee and probably wouldn't have liked. Ironically, the "oh, it's just for old rich white men" line is a kind of constitutional fundamentalism, not different in principle from the fundamentalism of 'original intent' jurists: the Constitution has an unchanging essence, which can be known, and which binds America forever. And while I do think it would be good if more people read the Constitution, that wouldn't eliminate our problems, just because it has no essence, and different readers will read it differently. (Even highly trained specialists come up with diametrically opposed interpretations, and the much-touted Constitutional scholar Barack Obama has uttered some idiotic howlers about it. So has Antonin Scalia, who like Obama is a product of Harvard Law School, but it's important to remember that they are both idiots, which is why we're doomed.) The Constitution is not only the primal text and its amendments, it is the corpus of laws and judicial decisions built around it over the past two centuries.

The ironies and the humor multiplied when I decided to read the entire Daily Kos article.  The author, one Laura Clawson, commented thusly on Jindal's remarks: "Hoo boy. First, Bobby, the Supreme Court gets to decide if a law is constitutional. That's its job. We're a nation of laws, and the Supreme Court has a role in determining those laws, which is something you might want to look into before spouting off."

I wondered about that, so I did the unthinkable: I read the relevant part of the Constitution, Article III, which sets out the duties and powers of the Supreme Court.

Section. 1.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
Section. 2.
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;— between a State and Citizens of another State,—between Citizens of different States,—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

In Ms. Clawson's words, "Hoo-boy."  I don't see anything there about deciding the constitutionality of laws, do you?  As I remember from my high school Civics class, that power, known as judicial review, was asserted by the Supreme Court in 1803 in the case Marbury v. Madison.  Judicial review has been part of the Court's "job" ever since, but it's not in the Constitution itself.  So, Laura Clawson is either lying or has not read the Constitution.

This is not a defense of Jindal, who is just another ambitious Republican clown.  As a writer praised by my Right-Wing Acquaintance RWA1 might point out besides, Jindal is not an Anglo-Saxon and therefore can't be expected to know "the Magna Carta and the freedoms passed down by their ancestors."  But let's not forget something the great Constitutional scholar Barack Obama said during a press conference in 2012: "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."  Not all that far from Jindal, and equally false; then-Attorney-General Eric Holder was given the unenviable task of backtracking from the claim, and the White House spun the usual web of obfuscation around itself.

Some time ago a right-wing Facebook friend posted a meme which declared that kids should start reading the Constitution in elementary school, and I agree.  Beginning in elementary school and continuing until graduation from high school would give time and opportunity not just to read the basic text but to learn something about how the courts work, how judicial interpretation builds on the Constitution, legislation, and case law, and so on.  Maybe such an ongoing program would make an impression on the students' minds, and they'd be ready to return to the sources when anyone makes a claim about the Constitution and what it says.  But I doubt it.  After all, my right-wing friend and probably my liberal friend had Civics class just as I did; and President Obama studied the Constitution at Harvard (as did Scalia, among others), and they still make absurd, unfounded statements about the Constitution and what it says.  I don't know if there's a remedy, but the problem is clearly not limited to one part or another of the political spectrum.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It's almost funny, in a horrible way.  Of course you all know that there's trouble in Iraq.  Last night my Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One was fretting over it, linking to an article from the Christian Science Monitor, which is a better source than NRO or The Daily Caller.  The "original invasion," RWA1 conceded, "was very badly handled," rather like an Obama cultist admitting that the President has in some ways been a "disappointment."  One of RWA1's friends advocated another US invasion of Iraq and of Iran and Turkey, to divide them by ethnicity and bring peace to the region; this, he said, would be "the best way we could help."  What could possibly go wrong?  It's good to be reminded that there are people even farther out of touch with reality than RWA1.

This morning I saw that liblogger Roy Edroso was having another hearty laugh at the Right's expense on this issue.  And true, there's plenty to laugh at.  Edroso quoted Slate columnist Reihan Salam, who wrote:

So why did the U.S. leave Iraq at the end of 2011? Part of it is that many within the Obama administration simply didn’t believe that U.S. forces would make much of a difference to Iraq’s political future.

Edroso invoked the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush/Cheney junta in 2008, which was the main reason the US left Iraq at the end of 2011, more or less, if you overlook the remaining American troops and mercenaries.  In other words, it was the Bush administration, if it was anyone, who "didn't believe that U.S. forces" blah blah blah.  But Edroso neglected to mention that Obama tried to modify the SOFA to allow US forces to remain in Iraq past the negotiated date.  (I looked over the first 70 comments on Edroso's posts, and none of his readers mentioned the facts either.)  The Iraqi government refused to grant "legal protection" to US troops who committed atrocities and other crimes, so Obama had to keep his campaign promise to end the war, which must have been painful for him.

The facts are unpalatable to either party.  Obama fans have made much of his supposedly ending the war, trying hard to forget that the end was negotiated by the Bush administration.  Republican Obama opponents have tried to forget that the end of the war was Bush's doing, not Obama's.  As in so many other areas, the parties have constructed a fantasy version of recent US history.  We live in the United States of Amnesia, darlings.

Richard Seymour posted his take on the matter:

I see it's time to get back into Iraq. It's been a while and, let's be honest, we've all felt the absence of imperial omnipotence registered in daily beheadings deeply. Last time, the US promoted some Iranian clients, installed them into a new patrimonial state, trained up their death squads - and then complained like fuck when Iran seemed to make some strategic gains in the situation.

True.  I guess things have been too quiet lately, or something.

At The American Conservative, Daniel Larison did a neat dissection of one writer who called for immediate US intervention in Iraq:

Jeffrey leans very heavily on creating the impression of impending catastrophe, but that appears to be alarmist exaggeration aimed at scaring people into endorsing the very dubious idea of sustained military action in Iraq for months and perhaps years to come. Once we think through what Jeffrey is proposing, we should all be able to see that an air campaign would be just the sort of stupid, knee-jerk reaction to a crisis that the U.S. should strive to avoid.

Of course we should, but will we?  Our rulers are looking desperately for another chance to use our superb military, which requires ginning up popular alarm.  It's a harder sell than it used to be, but sooner or later they'll find a workable pretext.  ISIS is an imminent threat to America!  If we don't act now, these scary Islamic terrorists will pour across the undefended US/Iraq border and conquer us, raping our cattle and stealing our women! These dirty pacifists don't care how many innocent people are massacred by the bad guys (as opposed to the good guys, namely us). We've got to do something! 

I'll be back home in the morning, after an overnight flight from San Francisco.  I don't know how long it will take me to get back in the groove, but I'll do my best.

You Say "Tomato" and I'll Say "Sequester"

Robert Reich (economist and Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor) posted this on his Facebook page today:

Dinner last night with Alan Simpson (for those of you who don’t remember, he was a senator from Wyoming from 1979 to 1997, during which time he served as Republican whip and Assistant Republican Leader). Alan and I don’t see eye to eye on much of anything – figuratively or literally (he’s 6’7” tall). But he’s one of my best friends in the world. He’s witty, big-hearted, able to listen and willing to change his mind if he thinks he’s wrong, and incredibly generous. (He and his wife Ann trekked from Cody, Wyoming to San Francisco yesterday to help raise money so Jake Kornbluth, who directed "Inequality for All," and I can make more videos and films.)

Simpson and I respect each other’s different points of view, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. Why is it so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans do this anymore?

This is the kind of thing that gives liberals a bad name. Simpson, for those of you who don't remember, was appointed (along with Democratic Senator Erskine Bowles) by President Obama to co-chair his Catfood Commission, intended to provide a rationale for the destruction of Social Security and other vital social programs in the name of lowering the Federal deficit.  Though on one level it failed -- the Commission couldn't muster the votes needed to ratify the desired conclusions -- on another level it succeeded, for the co-chairs wrote their own report, which President Obama and most other politicians and the corporate media media accepted as the "conclusions" of the Commission.  Despite this, "during the spring of 2012, a Budget Resolution based in part on the Simpson-Bowles plan was voted on in the House of Representatives. The plan was voted down 382-38" (via).  A later consequence was the "sequester," which imposed spending cuts that were deplored by just about everyone, including its chief architect.  As you can see, it's not so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans to laugh together after all, as long as they're laughing at the plight of the general public under their policies.

But enough of the dead past.  Professor Reich is, I must say, confused.  No one is obligated to respect anyone else's point of view, only to respect their right to hold and express their point of view.  As the philosopher Paul Feyerabend put it,

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism ... is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

I don't consider myself a liberal except in the limited sense Feyerabend adumbrated here.  (It comes from his reply to criticism from his fellow-philosopher Ernest Gellner, which -- the reply, I mean -- was reprinted in Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society [Verso, 1978].)  Reich, however, does, and as a political scientist he should know better than his remarks indicate.

I myself have friends whose politics are sharply opposed to mine.  I don't pretend to respect their opinions, nor do I expect them to respect mine.  In general we agree to disagree, and if we enjoy each other's company we can agree not to discuss our differences.  This can become tiresome in time, and it has its perils.  The Peck's Bad Boy of academia, Stanley Fish, toured college campuses with the corrupt right-wing political hack Dinesh D'Souza in 1991-1992, debating Political Correctness and similar chimerae.  Fish remarked (I believe it was in the book where his half of the debate was published) that they got along well, to the extent that Fish danced at D'Souza's wedding.  That's touching, I guess, but Fish allowed their bud-ship to compromise his critical judgment, when a decade later he contributed a blurb to one of D'Souza's books, calling it "witty, informed, learned and lively," committing four errors in five words.

There have been quite a few famous odd-couple friendships that crossed political or other divides.  Hunter S. Thompson and Pat Buchanan were drinking buddies.  Need I mention James Carville and Mary Matalin?  The writer Brendan Gill and the academic Joseph Campbell were friends for many years despite Campbell's racism and anti-Semitism, though unlike Reich, Gill didn't feel obligated to respect his friend's point of view:

His bigotry with respect to Jews was of an equal odiousness [equal to the bigotry he displayed toward blacks, which included agitating -- unsuccessfully -- against their admission to the college where he taught] and seemingly uneradicable.  By the time I came to know him, he had learned to conceal a few of its grosser manifestations, but there can be no doubt that it existed ... He avoided manifesting his anti-Semitism in my presence in order to avoid my attacking him, but a friend we had in common told me that Campbell, proud to be a member of the New York Athletic Club, often recounted the tricky means by which Jews were prevented from becoming members.  This was ironic because, apparently unbeknownst to Campbell, the New York Athletic Club in earlier days had been every bit as violently opposed to Irish Catholics as to Jews.  Campbell's father had been in a position to arrange for his son to become a member only because, in the Great Depression, the club had come so close to bankruptcy that its WASP members had grudgingly consented to elect the first of an army of what they called "the Irish swine" [Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others (Poseidon Press, 1990), 48-49; bold type mine].

I've shown insufficient respect to my own racist friends, which they reciprocated.  One, for example, a woman a few years younger than I who attended the same high school, was fond of posting racist memes on Facebook.  I criticized the memes, and her for posting them, to her indignation.  But we continued chatting with each other online, pleasantly enough, mostly about our respective sex lives.  I said I'd take her out to lunch the next time I came up that way.  Last winter she was in a terrible auto accident that nearly killed her, and the posting and the conversations stopped while she was in a coma in the hospital.  But a few weeks later, the racist postings resumed, and after some hesitation I decided that if she'd recovered enough to post this crap, she'd recovered enough to take heat for it.  She was, again, indignant: Why do you have to keep talking about politics? she demanded.  I replied that if she didn't want to talk about politics, she shouldn't post political stuff to her timeline.  She unfriended me, as did a mutual friend who said I was being mean to her and I needed to develop a sense of humor.  I have a sense of humor, but I was being mean to her, just as I'd be mean to anyone who talked about shooting Mexicans for the target practice.  Maybe Robert Reich wouldn't like my attitude, but it seems to me that not being mean is a two-way street.  I suppose that Simpson keeps his politics out of their socializing.  Since my friend refused to do so with me, I saw and see no reason to respect her point of view -- more important, no reason not to disagree with her.

This has some suggestive implications for some recent controversies, such as the protests against Condoleezza Rice's delivering a commencement address at Rutgers, which have engendered an ocean of crocodile tears about freedom of speech among the chattering classes.  (No doubt the same people who declared their intention to protest a commencement address by Eric Holder at a police academy in Oklahoma City, leading Holder to back out.  And no, I hadn't heard about it either, until I read the Los Angeles Times article I just linked to.  RWA1, for one, who was furious about the opposition to Rice's appearance, was silent about that one.)

How much respect am I obliged to give to people whose opinions I not only disagree with but oppose?  As I asked not long ago, must I vote for a Tea Party Republican political candidate just because he happens to be gay?  Are liberal-ish gay political groups required to endorse and support such a person, just because he happens to be gay?  Must I buy Condoleezza Rice's books just to show how even-handed and open I am to differing views?  How about the works of Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Ann Coulter?  Must I subscribe to, say, The National Review?  And if I must, aren't all the right-wingers I know obligated to subscribe to The Nation or In These Times, and to invite Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton to speak at their alma mater's commencement?  No, freedom of speech is all very well, but that would be going too far.

I do business with RWA1, despite his politics; I've even worked, part-time and irregularly, for him from time to time.  But I also disagree with him, as he disagrees with me.  I have no idea whether he respects me or my opinions; I know that I don't respect his.  I suppose there's some mutual personal respect, but that doesn't seem to oblige us to treat each other's politics with kid gloves.

On the other hand, the blogger Ampersand was upset during the Brendan Eich controversy when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!

I haven't been able to find the comment by someone who attacked other people for seeking out people with unacceptable views to pick on.  This is a common distracting tactic, I've found.  But no one cornered the owners of that grocery and grilled them about the purity of their politics: they went out of their way to publicize their views.   What do same-sex marriage and sexual orientation have to do with running an organic food mart?  We queers are often accused of dragging our sexuality into everything, usually by people who are obsessed with our sexuality and won't shut up about it.  (We're also often accused of looking for bigotry.  Alas, we don't need to go looking for it -- it comes looking for us.)

Ampersand drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business.  It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. Ampersand argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, Ampersand doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

Along the same lines, am I being punitive if I run for office against an incumbent because of his or her policies?  Or even if I work in the campaign of their political opponent, or merely vote for someone else? Wouldn't I do better to try to persuade Alan Simpson or Hillary Clinton to change their views, instead of punishing them by throwing (or keeping) them out of office?  This may seem absurd, but remember the right-wingers who say exactly this about right-wing gay or female candidates: their critics and opponents are hypocrites who don't really believe in diversity, or we'd vote for them!  And it's not that far from the Dems who attacked Obama's left critics by accusing them of racism, of giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs, of not voting and of trying to stop others from voting.  I have no doubt that we'll see the same behavior in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for the Presidency.  The idea that one could vote for a candidate, perhaps as the lesser evil, yet still point out their faults, is unthinkable to party loyalists.  I think Reich is probably coming from a similar place.

I'm not sure there's a correct solution to this, in the same sense as the right answer to an arithmetical sum; we need to think about it, and discuss it, if possible with the people on the other side.  That's why it's bad when a Condoleezza Rice or a Brendan Eich or an Eric Holder refuses to engage in debate, just takes their ball and bat and runs home.  Luckily, the debate goes on anyway, without them.

This Smart, But No Smarter

When I wrote Friday's post, I hadn't yet started reading Elvin T. Lim's The Anti-intellectual Presidency (Oxford, 2008), though I had a copy in my reading pile and the subject was clearly on my mind.  It turned out to be the right book to read.  Lim's thesis is that presidential public language has been progressively simplified and evacuated of most content in an effort to make it seem that the President is just a regular Joe talking to John Q. Public, man-to-man, in a commonsense way; and not a long-haired, pointy-headed intellectual out of touch with the real America.  His argument is based on analysis of presidential communication since George Washington, plus interviews with those former presidential speechwriters still living and a study of the writings of earlier ones.  He found that Flesch readability scores of presidential speeches have dropped (becoming more easily "readable") ever since Washington, and has become more oriented toward sloganeering and emotive cheerleading than substantial content.  The evidence of the speechwriters indicates that this trend was a conscious and deliberate project throughout the twentieth century, as speechwriting became assigned to specialists rather than the President himself and his advisors, and as the speechwriters lost access to the President, so that their speeches had little connection to actual policy.

Unfortunately, The Anti-intellectual Presidency was published in 2008, just as that year's presidential campaign was heating up, so Lim's analysis ends with George W. Bush; but some remarks in the concluding chapter indicate that Lim saw both McCain and Obama continuing the tradition he describes.  When I have a chance I'll look at Lim's blog and see what he's had to say during Obama's presidency.  (Hm... this post indicates that Lim fell under Obama's spell: "this is not a president willing to mince his words any more."  No, Elvin, when any president uses that trope, it's another example of the plain-speaking man-of-the-people smokescreen you've analyzed so well -- and Obama's no exception.)

Lim touches on issues that have interested me for some time.  For example, he is not saying that the presidents themselves have become less intelligent: rather their rhetoric has become more anti-intellectual, which is another matter.  He distinguishes between "intelligence" and "intellectuality," arguing that the former is generally respected or at least paid lip service, while the latter is everybody's favorite whipping boy.  (He also points out that "rhetoric" originally referred to discourse in general, and to the study of how to use language to communicate and persuade.  Usually nowadays the word is used pejoratively, to refer to empty verbiage and propaganda, but as Lim indicates, that tactic probably goes back to Plato at least.  I am eloquent and thoughtful, a humble artisan of language; you deploy sophistical rhetoric, hiding your elitist emptiness behind flowery, fancy-pants words.)  There was a spike in the trend during the Nixon administration, after marketing and media consultants were brought in to help Nixon overcome his poor media skills, and except perhaps for Carter, presidents since then have followed Nixon's example.  Still, this is a difference of degree rather than one of kind, since orators have always been accused of manipulating their audiences with rhetoric.

Lim describes how presidents would demand that their speechwriters simplify the rhetoric in their productions, so that "speechwriters in turn have observed a Janus-like quality in their bosses, who are articulate, formal, and sophisticated in private, but decidedly casual and simplistic in public" (42).  This applies even to Eisenhower, who before Reagan was probably the paradigm of "casual and simplistic," i.e. dumb, presidential self-presentation.  It takes a lot of work, through endless drafts and revision, to remove all the intellectual content from a speech.

What I want to talk about today is something else, though, namely how intelligent Americans want their presidents to be.  As Lim says, citing Richard Hofstadter's classic book, anti-intellectualism is a hallowed American tradition.  It's pretty clear to me that the right wants to be led by people who aren't too bright.  In 2008 I heard a right-wing co-worker, annoyed by students' derision of Sarah Palin, splutter, "At least she's normal!"  Palin was probably the closest to a "normal" American to run for such high office in my lifetime, but as a state governor she was still hardly as regular a gal as she pretended.  When she was tapped as John McCain's running mate, moreover, she went on a Party-funded spending spree on clothing to spiff up her image; she knew, no less than the Beltway city slickers, that looking too normal would hurt her with the voters she hoped to win over.  It's worth recalling that her attackers included not only snobby liberals but the same conservatives who at other times would praise the common people and denounce liberals for supposedly looking down on them.

I have the impression that American rightists are willing, even eager, to believe that their heroes are "normal" even when, like Reagan, they are wealthy former movie stars in the pay of big corporations, or like Bush, they are spoiled brats from rich and corrupt elite families, sporting post-graduate Ivy League degrees.  At the same time, a Tea Party favorite like Paul Ryan peddles himself as a "wonk," a technocrat if not necessarily an intellectual, and right-wingers like my RWA1 waver between being elitists and populists.  (Randy Newman captured this right-wing ambivalence perfectly in his song "Rednecks": College men from LSU / Went in dumb, come out dumb too.)  Bill Clinton worked this side of the street too, and Lim found his speeches to be high on the anti-intellectual scale despite his Fullbright Scholar / Oxford accomplishments.  I was brought up short, though, when Lim constrasted Bill with Hillary in that department:

According to one observer, "Bill Clinton sounds intimate and conversational when he’s discussing energy policy.  Hillary Clinton sounds like a policy wonk when she talks about her mother’s childhood struggles" [76].

Wait a minute -- I distinctly remember Bill being attacked by the Right (and sometimes celebrated by his fans) as a "policy wonk" himself as well as for being trailer trash, of course.  True, he was good at fake compassion, but his policies were something else.

Democrats, by contrast, now largely identify themselves as the smart party -- smart, at least, compared to the Republicans, which doesn't set the bar very high.  They make much of Obama's intelligence, signaled by his Ivy League education and his status as a Constitutional scholar, but they also embrace his vacuous sloganeering rhetoric and object strenuously to any application of critical thinking to his speeches or policies.  Their interest in intelligence, or in the intellect, is largely virtual, a partisan token.  Like evangelical Christians who've pointed to C. S. Lewis as evidence that you can be Christian and smart, Democratic loyalists use Obama's vaunted intelligence vicariously: he's smart so they don't have to be.

Lim does a good job countering the claim that it's "elitist" to object to anti-intellectualism in politics:

My objection to presidential anti-intellectualism is not a knee-jerk moral panic provoked by an elite suspicion of mass involvement in politics, but it emerges from the assessment that the theories of the anti-intellectual presidency are, at multiple levels, impoverished.  Americans need to be politically educated so that they develop the intellectual and moral capacities that are necessary for competent citizenship, among them, a capacity to look beyond individual interests toward collective interests, and an ability to think through and adjudicate the various policy options that their leaders propose.  While we do not expect democratic citizens to be policy experts, there is a threshold level of political knowledge below which their ability to make informed and competent civic judgments is impaired [113].

Paradoxically, anti-intellectualism is largely an elitist tactic.  Those who defend it will claim that ordinary folks can't understand complex foreign-policy or economic issues, and should just be left to live their little lives, taken care of by the benign folk at the top of the pyramid.  In practice, however, those at the top and their toadies don't necessarily know what they're doing, but even more, they hold the ordinary voter in contempt, especially when she doesn't vote for their candidate. It's not that they want to translate complex issues into simple language, it's that they want to tell the public what they believe we want to hear:

The manmade teleology of presidential anti-intellectualism stems from the perceived benefit of going anti-intellectual, which is nearly universally felt, as my interviews have shown.  I say “perceived,” because there is no reason to think that these calculations are objectively true; we know only that presidents and speechwriters appear to believe them true.  As each president and his team of speechwriters seek to simplify his public rhetoric even further, the effect of such efforts is cumulatively felt even if each administration does not feel individually responsible [48].

Lim points to those who claim that anti-intellectualism increases public "participation" in politics, but "participation" here evidently means that the public cheers when the Leader gives a speech.  If that were so, Hitler and Mussolini would have been great democratic leaders.  He quotes the Reagan speechwriter and hagiographer Peggy Noonan on

the groupthink behind contemporary speech craft: “It is simplicity that gives the speech its power. … And we pick the signal up because we have gained a sense in our lives that true things are usually said straight and plain and direct” (original emphasis).  But simplicity does not guarantee the truth, only the semblance of sincerity.  Paradoxically, in heeding Noonan’s advice, presidents have to be untruthful or duplicitous – altering their innate speech patterns – in order to appear truthful [47].

But this fits with the myth of American meritocracy, the belief that those at the top earned their status through innate superiority expressed in grit, hard work and street smarts.  In practice, again, we may doubt the superiority of elites, either in work capacity or in intelligence.  The best and the brightest, every time they've been handed the reins of power, have screwed up repeatedly, from John Dewey's campaign to get the US into World War I through the bipartisan technocrats who engineered the US invasion of Vietnam to Barack Obama playing eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents.  Because of this I'm skeptical of Lim's assertion that "Americans need to be politically educated" by their leaders.  We need to educate ourselves, recognizing that our leaders are people just like us, as given to wishful thinking, irrational hopes and fears, and incomplete information, as the rest of the citizenry.

The hard but crucial question, I believe, is: How intellectual do we need to be?  If there is a valid distinction between being intelligent and being an intellectual, as I believe there is, it's largely a difference of degree rather than kind.  My personal definition of an intellectual is someone who works with ideas, the same way a mechanic works with machines.  But everyone does that to some extent; we just don't all do it equally well, and it's not surprising that some people have more talent for the job and more interest in it.  As Kath Weston said of "theory," everyone -- not just professional theorists --  has theories about human nature and how society works.  "The question then becomes: What kind of theory do 'we' want to do?  And who occupies themselves with which sort of theory?"

I've observed that the same people who despise intellectuals and "theory" often love arcane and convoluted systems, like Gnosticism (which maybe I should call neo-Gnosticism, since its present-day adherents have no real connection to the original movement) or Tibetan Buddhism with their multiplication of heavens and deities and angels and devils. They may admire imaginary worlds like J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek universe, with their many peoples and cultures and invented languages, and may aspire to world-creation themselves.  They can be intensely attentive to and critical of weaknesses or contradictions in those systems.  But when it comes to the real world, they're not interested.  My third right-wing acquaintance -- a former schoolteacher with at least a bachelor's degree -- has told me that she simply chooses to believe the news slant she likes; she's not interested in questioning why she likes it, and certainly not in examining for logic or factual accuracy.  So she sees herself as a bold skeptic, just as most of my liberal friends do, because she disbelieves reports and analyses she doesn't like, but is utterly credulous about those she likes.  In this I believe she differs in degree, not in kind, from many more "intellectual" people.  I don't ask how she (or they) should be "educated" by others, by their leaders or by me; that won't work.  Besides, she is if anything too willing to be educated by her leaders.  I think that's the real problem with public political discourse.  What to do about it, I have no idea.

Democracy is sometimes defended (or criticized) as the belief that the People, given a chance, will make better decisions than elites will.  I disagree, since I don't think the People are any smarter, or dumber, than the elites.  I can't remember who (Paul Goodman, maybe?) said that the real reason for democracy is that people are affected by events, and by government policies, so they (we) have a right to a voice in the making of them -- and to accountability when they turn out to be wrong.  Accountability, of course, is not very popular, except as something to demand for the other guy, and then what is usually meant is punishment, not accountability.  I believe that most people are capable of critically examining their own beliefs and ideas as well as those of others, to varying degrees.  Whether enough of us can learn to do it well enough (and what is well enough), I don't know, but I don't think anyone does know.  It's always a good time to begin.