Conniption Accomplished

RWA1 has returned, with a link to a Washington Post column by George Will denouncing Obama's celebration of the American military in his State of the Union speech. "Americans are not bloody likely to be marching in lockstep with our aspiring Mussolini this fall. the continuum from Teddy Roosevelt to Mussolini is not as far as American 'progressives' like to think," RWA1 commented.

My jaw literally (by which I mean "figuratively," of course) dropped when I read that. I guess it has been long enough now since the shooting of Gabby Giffords that the Right can start calling their opponents fascists again. Why, it was almost exactly a year ago that RWA1 was whimpering, along with his fellow-travelers, "It is time to retire analogies to Nazis and fascists once and for all." Even then, though, it was clear that this stricture applied only to Democrats and liberals, not to the Republican fringe. And anyway, that was then, this is now.

Still, I'm amazed by the Right's attack on Obama for indulging in some very routine military-stroking. Stuff like this:

At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.

Compared to Bush's Commander Codpiece performance on the USS Abraham Lincoln, or his chest-bumping with Air Force Academy cadets, Obama's just going through the motions. (If he hadn't praised Our Troops, the Right would have attacked him for that.) Roy Edroso did a post this weekend on the right-wing legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg's attack on Obama's remarks. I imagine that with George Will also on the case, we'll see more of it. As with Republican criticism of Obama for using a teleprompter (a Reagan standby), it makes no sense, since Republicans have never hesitated to drape themselves in the flag and hide behind our fighting men, who got hurt protecting our right to dissent, which is why we should just shut up. (Which, again, means that we should not criticize Republican presidents. Sheer banshee howling against Democratic Presidents, including those who are Republican except in name, is okay.)

Elements of the Right have been stumbling on the mandatory worship of Our Troops lately, though. It's okay to hate them openly if they're sons of Sodom, for example. As with Newt Gingrich's sex life, this is only of interest because of the hypocrisy involved. I don't really care how many wives or mistresses Gingrich has had; what I do care about is the way he expects others to overlook his tomcatting while he continues to attack other people, gay and straight, for screwing around.

As for the rest of RWA1's remarks, I'm not a fan of Teddy Roosevelt, who was a blood-and-soil racist. (For anyone else besides TR, though, RWA1 protests that they're just trying to defend their culture.) Yup, it's true that Democrats and progressives have been big boosters of American imperialism (a term you'd better not use around RWA1 and others of his ilk), as shown by Richard Seymour in The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008); hell, Noam Chomsky has been describing and condemning for years the American progressive push to get the United States into World War I, and their pride in spearheading the propaganda campaign to bring it about. But I never heard a peep from RWA1 or most of the Right about Bush/Cheney's militarism and trampling on civil liberties at home; I guess it's only bad when Obama does it. Bush's critics were denounced by the Right as the Islamofascists' fifth column, or their "useful idiots." Now Obama's apologists attack his critics in similar terms, which is a reminder that Partei -- oops, party loyalty and leader worship are the deciding factors here.

For all of that, though, RWA1, like the Right generally, can't bring himself to criticize Obama's actual policies and practice, not surprising since they are mainly Bush's policies and practice. Such criticism -- like serious criticism of Obama's SOTU militarism -- is the province of the Left. I don't recall RWA1 posting anything about Obama's arrogation of the power to kill and detain Americans without due process; nor could he bring himself to oppose the NATO intervention in Libya. What he thinks about Iran I don't know; I suppose that like most of the American Right and "center" he toes the Bush/Obama propaganda line about Iran as nuclear threat, but that's just it. Instead of going after specific cases, which he probably approves -- or will approve, as soon as we can get a Republican president into office -- he picks on some comparatively innocuous boilerplate in a State of the Union address.

As for "Americans are not bloody likely to be marching in lockstep with our aspiring Mussolini this fall," that has to be whistling in the dark. I suspect that for most Americans, the sentiment is bloody likely to echo our attitude during the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment: we know that the Republican candidates -- our aspiring Hitlers, I'll call them just this once, since RWA1 has brought the analogy out of retirement -- aren't attacking Obama because they care about ordinary citizens or the nation. It's primarily because he's a Democrat, second because he's black, third because he remains popular despite (or because) of the vitriol the Right throws at him. (I mean, look at me: I'm defending Obama against Republican attacks, and not because I support Obama but because the Republicans are so blatantly dishonest.) The sheer derangement of their accusations is a signal that not only that the Republicans should not be trusted with political office, it's a wonder they can find their way out the door each day. The scary part is that Obama's Democratic defenders, instead of responding sensibly, generally prefer to echo the Republican dementia.

Conspiracies for You and Me

RWA1 has been letting me down lately: I rely on him for links to wacked-out rightwing spew, and I wasn't getting anything I could use. The best was a link to an article about David Mamet's self-touted conversion from liberalism, with RWA1's comment "It will be interesting to see what this gifted writer has to say. I went down this journey 50 years ago." I didn't write about that one because I've seen little of Mamet's work; what I have seen, however, not only didn't interest me much but supported what numerous people have said online: Who knew Mamet was a liberal?

There was also a link to a piece by Stanley Crouch attacking Cornel West. Not exactly daring, since West has been getting a lot of flack from liberals for his attacks on Obama. RWA1 commented, "Stanley Crouch has him dead to rights. The man is a charlatan, down to his shiny gold cufflinks. Liberal guilt has gone too far in accommodating him." I've read more Crouch than I have Mamet, and mainly remember Crouch's homophobic attacks on James Baldwin. I've got my own differences with West, but I wouldn't call him a charlatan. But remember, RWA1 thinks David Mamet is "gifted", that Jay Nordlinger's mind is "worth spending time with," and that George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Joe Rehyansky are sober, rational political commentators.

Anyway, today RWA1 linked to this article, with the comment "The Internet is speeding the spread of arrant nonsense." I can't really argue with that; the Internet has made it possible for all kinds of material to spread with greater speed than ever before, and there's no reason why arrant nonsense should be an exception. But still, RWA1's own fondness for arrant nonsense makes his complaint seem rather ungrateful. He gets lots of nuttery for free from the Right's propaganda mills and -- also for free -- links to it on Facebook to help speed it on its way.

Even better, after another of his friends made a little joke, RWA1 added: "Apocalyptic hysteria is always cropping up, but the conspiracy fantasies are really getting out of hand with the internet." That's especially ungrateful, given his fondness for conspiracy theories. (NPR must continue to receive government funding so he can listen to opera, despite their liberal anti-American news programs.) RWA1 has always been scornful of religious "Yahoos" as he likes to call them, though as with Dan Savage's fury over hearing that being gay is a choice, I find myself wondering why he takes apocalyptic hysteria so personally.

And what does apocalyptic hysteria have to do with conspiracy theories? The Truthout article RWA1 cited, "Theories and Hoaxes Are Blurring Reality", by one Greg Guma, began with a trendy comment on Harold Camping's failed prediction of the Rapture, but moved quickly from there to "offbeat" theories:

There are so many out there. Obama is a secret Muslim – millions of people believe that, secular humanists want to repress religion, and liberals are plotting to confiscate people’s guns and push a “gay agenda.” At the opposite end of the political spectrum, there is the assertion that 9/11 was an inside job and all that this entails. No offense meant. I’ve been called a “conspiracy nut” myself, specifically for saying that we should know more about the attack on the Twin Towers. Still, a modern-day Reichstag fire at multiple locations does qualify as a radical conclusion.

I think Guma is somewhat confused about what a theory is. (To say nothing of "radical.") Believing that Obama is a secret Muslim, or even that he grew up in Kenya where he was trained in anti-colonialism doesn't qualify as a theory. The theory would lie in who conspired to hide Obama's true background, and how they did it, but the claim itself isn't a theory. The 9/11 Truthers have some theories about what happens or doesn't happen to tall buildings when airliners strike them, and they believe that the Bush-Cheney administration carried out the destruction of the Twin Towers to justify the War on Terror they wanted to start. In some broad sense of the word that could be called a theory, I guess.

Calling an idea, a belief, or even a theory a "conspiracy theory" is an easy way of derailing a debate. In the first place, conspiracies do happen, so speculating about conspiracy is not like claiming that the Second Coming is near. The hard part is finding evidence that a conspiracy did in fact happen, and the burden of proof lies on the advocate of any given conspiracy theory. But some nutty claims, such as the one that the US government has been involved in the narcotics trade, or that the Reagan administration conspired to evade Congressional prohibition of military aid to the Nicaraguan contras by selling weapons to Iran, or that the US tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, have turned out to be true.

In the second place, there are perfectly mainstream conspiracy theories, like the one that a network of Islamic fanatics around the world is conspiring to destroy Western freedom. When I was growing up in the 1950s, anticommunist conspiracy theories were part of the mainstream. And indeed, there were Communists who spied on the US for the USSR, just as there were American spies who spied on the USSR for the US. The difference is that these conspiracy theories were promulgated in the mass media, from the Reader's Digest to the TV networks; or by groups like the American Legion, the Roman Catholic Church, and the FBI, who had access to schoolchildren. Even after the decline of McCarthyism, the US left has never had such access to media.

That's leaving out the less respectable, but still popular beliefs that circulated widely, some of them still current on the Internet. The atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair has a petition before the FCC to ban all religious broadcasting, and if Bible Believing Christians don't send them a million postcards, the Word of God will be driven from the airwaves! The United Nations has created a World Bible with all reference to the saving blood of Jesus Christ removed, because "we do not wish that any man be saved"! Hippies spat on Vietnam War veterans! Rock music contains secret messages recorded backwards that will turn listeners into devil worshipers! Paul McCartney died in a car accident and was replaced by a guy called Billy Shears, but the Beatles scattered hints about the matter throughout their later work. (Many people who don't believe that Paul died still believe that the hints are there.)

The funny part of RWA1's comment about conspiracy theories is that the Right generally is quite fond of conspiracy theories. Muslims are stealthily imposing sharia law on America! Liberals are filling TV with gay teen propaganda so teenagers will want to get gay married! Liberal scientists invented the theory of global warming and the liberal media are trying to scare us with it so that ... what? I'm not sure what the Right thinks is the secret, anti-American payload of global warming theory. (RWA1 is scornful of creationists and the Academic Left for their rejection of science, but he freely denounces science that doesn't suit his politics.) The liberal media are suppressing news about the Tea Party Movement and trying to make Sarah Palin look bad! Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11! President Bush had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons that were an imminent danger to the US! President Clinton had to bomb Iraq because Saddam had expelled the weapons inspectors!

The biggest irony, though, is that this griping about the spread of conspiracy theories is itself a conspiracy theory. So is Guma's conclusion, after he concedes that there is something to some of the nutty claims that have been going around:

In short, some theories may be distractions or even deliberate deceptions, but others are worth considering, as long as we stipulate that they aren’t necessarily facts and resist exaggeration. The problem is that it’s becoming more difficult to tell the difference in an era when facts have been devalued. There are so many possibilities, the standard of proof appears to be getting lower, and theories tend to evolve, expand and mutate rapidly in unexpected ways as they circulate through cyberspace. As yet, there is little follow up to see whether new facts reinforce or discredit a particular idea or prediction. Corruption of truth meanwhile contributes to social division and civic decay. Yet there are apparently no consequences for stoking paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a premeditated hoax.

"Facts have been devalued," Guma says, but by whom? Them, I guess, the bad guys who want to distract and distort and devalue facts. He doesn't consider the possibility that many people don't trust the US government because the US government has lied, often, about matters of great seriousness. The Bush administration, with a lot of help from the corporate media, stoked paranoia, intentionally confused speculation with fact, and perpetrated a premeditated hoax about Weapons of Mass Destruction in order to get support for their invasion of Iraq. The human cost, in terms of lives lost, refugees fleeing into exile, and the destruction of a country was staggering, yet there still have been no consequences for the perpetrators. Nor was Iraq an isolated case: similar distortions and "corruption of truth" attended most if not all American wars. (I specify American wars because of American exceptionalism, which freely admits the lies and aggression of other countries, but denies that the US would do such awful things.)

But are things any worse than they used to be? I don't know of any reason to think so, and Guma doesn't give any.

Grumpy Old Man

Oh dear, was I being grumpy again?  I promise you, I didn't mean to be, I was trying to be upbeat for a change.  The other day, a liberal friend on Facebook (not the law professor; this one's a local commercial artist) remarked that I must be on vacation, because I wasn't in "the grumpy chair" about one of his posts.  But that very same day he approved of my being "grumpy" about a right-wing GOP meme.  So it's only risible grumpiness to criticize right-wing Democrats; got it.

But what I meant to write about was my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One's return to the political fray; apparently he's begun to recover from the devastating trauma of Obama's reelection.

Or maybe not.  He posted a couple of links about the "looming fiscal cliff crisis," one of which claimed that the real danger comes from the "looming debt crisis."  On this one RWA1 remarked "There is the real crisis, and the Democrats pretend it that it's all taken care of."  Of course the Fiscal Cliff is largely manufactured by the corporate media and their allies in Washington, including Obama himself.  I'm ready to blame the Democrats for their role in our economic troubles, but that role mostly consists of collaborating with the Republicans.  I pointed out that as far the debt goes, the Republicans raised the debt ceiling for Bush and Reagan, so their present concern about the debt is as deceitful as their concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.  RWA1 ignored this, mumbling something about what will happen when "the Chinese stop buying our debt."  But it's all the Democrats' fault, even though the Chinese bought a lot of our debt from the Bush crime family.  That's a benefit of being on the losing side in a major election: you can blame everything on the other guys, though as the past four years show, even when you win you can blame everything on the other guys.  It's no substitute for thought, of course.

The other link, to an op-ed, called for the GOP to "force Obama's hand," with no comment from RWA1.  I remarked that I'm all for the GOP continuing to self-destruct, since it would leave the Democrats no excuse for screwing things up.  RWA1 replied, "I foresee a mess, as there is a paucity of courage on all [!] sides."  That was nice and vacuous, but also willfully irrelevant.  (Though "foresee" also means "I hope I hope I hope."  Apocalypse is a typical right-wing fantasy; it never seems to occur to them that a catastrophe could affect them too.)

As with principles, courage doesn't mean anything in itself if you don't exercise it in a good cause.  It's no recommendation to have the courage to destroy the economy; the deficit hawks of both parties have shown numerous times that they do have that courage.  The weird thing is that like so many people on both major parties, RWA1 overlooks the fundamental agreement between Obama and the Republicans: cut government spending, including on social programs; don't raise taxes on the wealthy too much; lower the deficit at all costs.  The main difference between them is that Obama is more willing to raises taxes on the rich.  He has already lowered spending (a disastrous policy in a troubled economy) more than any recent president; he has put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block; he appointed a bipartisan commission to make recommendations on cutting the deficit, packing with deficit hawks -- and when it failed, even so, to reach conclusions, he accepted the report of the two chairmen.

I don't know what RWA1 thinks would be the courageous thing for "all sides" to do.  But it's clear that Obama is ready to do most of what the Republicans say they want done, and to defy his base in doing so.  It won't matter to him, since he doesn't have to appease voters to be re-elected again.  If the Democrats do badly in 2014 because of Obama's policies, the damage will have been done to the economy and it will be hard, nearly impossible, to repair.  I'd suspect that RWA1 still hasn't recovered from the elections, but he's consistently attacked a fantasy Obama for the past four years, so that can't be the explanation.

I confess, I didn't read either article he linked to; what interested me was what RWA1 was saying.  It's the same old swill.

The same day, my liberal law-professor friend linked to this Paul Krugman column, where he frets and whimpers about rumors that President Obama may already have sold the farm.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

I also hope the rumors turn out to be false, but I'm not betting anything on it; Obama has such a long record of selling out his base to his right-wing allies and donors that the rumors seem entirely too plausible.  And what does Obama care about future attempts to get out the vote?  That is not his problem anymore.  The only question is what can be done to block him, or to punish him afterward if he does it.  "Disillusionment on the Democratic side" and a dollar will get you on the bus, and if Obama does queer the deal, I fully expect all the Obama cultists out there to fall into line behind their guy, as they always have before: If Barack says it, it must be right.

I asked my friend why Krugman was undermining POTUS, though.  Even his timid and reserved criticism of President Obama could hurt the Democrats in 2014.  Nothing less than total devotion will do, or the Republicans will take over, and where will we be then?

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.

Trouble and Turmoil, and Reagan's Third Term

If I hadn't been off my feed for the past couple of weeks, my Right Wing Acquaintance 1 was giving me plenty of fodder for blog posts, like his link to this National Review Online article on Hugo Chavez, to which he added this comment:

Venezuela is in for trouble and turmoil, whatever Chavez's health. He has been Castroizing the country with the help of experts from Cuba, and the opposition is systematically being jailed, intimidated, and suppressed. It is probably not too late for the opposition to resist, but the situation looks precarious. This is caudilloism under the red flag.

The usual sack of lies. If Chavez really were a dictator -- a Mubarak, a Pinochet, a Suharto, a Duvalier, a Saddam Hussein -- RWA1 and the National Review crowd would be behind him all the way, with perhaps some faux-fastidious concern about his going over the top now and then but you can't be too fussy about a little torture and murder because he had to do something! Chavez isn't a patch on people like Mubarak or the usual run of Latin American dictators, and RWA1 was not happy to see Mubarak go. I doubt he even knows what Venezuela was like before Chavez came along. The prediction of "trouble and turmoil" for Venezuela is of course a hope, not a prediction: gotta punish those grimy yahoos for trying to throw off the benign yoke of American corporations and their local friends.  Give 'em a bloodbath, a constructive one, to teach them obedience.

Soon after RWA1 put that story up on his wall, I learned that the Guardian, the most liberal if not left of mainstream British newspapers, had tried to smear Noam Chomsky for writing a letter critical of Chavez (via). It wasn't the first time the Guardian had misrepresented Chomsky, either.

Chomsky said:

It's obviously improper for the executive to intervene and impose a jail sentence without a trial. And I should say that the United States is in no position to complain about this. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is. The president in fact intervened. Obama was asked about his conditions and said that he was assured by the Pentagon that they were fine. That's executive intervention in a case of severe violation of civil liberties and it's hardly the only one. That doesn't change the judgment about Venezuela, it just says that what one hears in the United States one can dismiss.

(RWA1 has been silent about Bradley Manning, on Facebook at least. And it's not irrelevant that Human Rights Watch, which has criticized Chavez, also has called for an investigation of Bush-era torture by the US, which President Obama has no intention of doing, but of course Human Rights Watch are just a bunch of backward-looking extremists when they can't be used for US propaganda against its official enemies.)

Chomsky also told the Guardian:

We may compare [Venezuela's record] to Colombia next door. Colombia's human rights record is incomparably worse. The judges in the constitutional court have been investigating cases of corruption, crimes at the highest level, and they have been intimidated. They have received death threats, and they have to have bodyguards and so on. And apparently that's continuing under [President José Manuel] Santos.

RWA1 has been silent about Colombia too; but hey, human rights violations in countries that enjoy massive US support aren't news, it's like dog bites man. Besides, our allies around the world are under attack by Communists and terrorists -- they have to do something!

But it was RWA1's link tonight that was the most amusing: an opinion piece, "Winning Moderate Millennials," by one Elise Jordan. It's mostly a review of a book by Herbert Hoover's great-granddaughter Margaret.

... To attract the next generation of Republicans, Hoover says, we need to re-brand conservatism or risk extinction.

"Re-brand" -- you can tell RWA1 is depressed when he doesn't jeer at an article with that kind of marketing jargon in it.

Hoover nails how Millennials — that next generation of voters, ages 18 to 29 — view the GOP’s brand as almost exclusively socially conservative. She discusses what she calls “conservative tribalism,” the labels — neocon, crunchy con, paleocon, lib-con, and theocon — that are tearing the party apart in the absence of a unifying leader. She points out that when Millennials look at the infighting, they see only the most socially conservative ideas winning. But if we were to focus on conservative principles embodying individual and economic freedom, we could actually tap into this fifth of the electorate. Hoover’s message is that there are conservative issues that should be a priority — such as education reform, expanding legal immigration, and combating radical Islam — and there are those that should not — fighting gay rights, pushing intelligent design, or denying climate change.

But here's the punchline:

[Hoover] points out that Reagan himself was very “impure” — he raised taxes, left Lebanon, and cut deals with Tehran — yet he was still the most successful conservative president — thanks to his pragmatism, not in spite of it.

So let’s be on the lookout for the next Reagan, not the next Trump.

Um, the next Reagan is in the White House, right now. Of course he's wearing the wrong brand, but he's on record as admiring the Great Communicator and his party, and he's worked very hard to show that he means it.

I'm reminded of the way that some liberal writers have been wringing their hands over Obama's political future, and what will happen to the Democratic party. For party loyalists (and RWA1 is a party man, just like Elise Jordan and Margaret Hoover), the letters D and R trump everything, including the good of the vast majority of human beings.

American Blog Posts Shall Receive No Titles from Kings, Princes, or Foreign States

First, something green for St. Patrick's Day:

Swiped from my Facebook sister's photos. Not sure where she got it from. Somewhere on the Intertoobz.

Today the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to cut federal funding for NPR. RWA1 promptly linked to the bad news on Facebook, and declared:

On to the Senate. Forget Nina Totenberg; I want my Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Harmonia, Pipe Dreams, etc. The culture is going down the toilet fast enough as it is.

Here's a free-market solution for RWA1 and other right wingers who want the nanny state for themselves but for no one else: Pay for your Metropolitan Opera, Symphony, Harmonia, Pipe Dreams, etc. instead of demanding that the public support your Old-Europe fetishes. I've actually talked about this face-to-face with RWA1. He is aware of the contradiction, he just doesn't care: he wants to be able to tune in to the opera every Saturday afternoon, and if it's not commercially viable, then he wants the government to pay for it, free-market principles be damned. (P.S. I forgot to mention: amazingly, RWA1 has told me that donating to the local station is 'paying for it.' Not while our socialist totalitarian government is holding a knife to the throats of decent Americans to extort their tax dollars to subsidize effete elitist Old Europe culture, it isn't. A free-market solution means economic freedom means no taxpayer support.)

Notice also that last bit, that the "culture is going down the toilet fast enough as it is." This marks RWA1 out as one of the NPR elitists he professes to despise, as when he linked to this article with the comment, "untimeliness of academic snobbery torpedoes NPR below the waterline". Say what? Of course the Right has its own pseudo-intellectuals (George Will, David Brock), but what can be wrong with elitism when eighty percent of Americans believe themselves to be above average? Elitism is a populist value.

Which reminds me of this quotation from Katha Pollitt by way of Michael Berube (who's better on cultural politics than on politics politics, if you take my meaning:

The stress on high-end conservative pundits is beginning to show. These are people, after all, who belong to the Ivy-educated, latte-drinking, Tuscan-vacationing urban elite they love to ridicule and who see themselves, however deludedly, as policy intellectuals and grown-ups. They’ve written endlessly about “excellence” and “standards.” McCain’s erratic flounderings, and Palin’s patent absurdity, have driven David Brooks and George Will to write columns so anguished I’d feel sorry for them had they not made their bed by spending the past eight years rationalizing the obvious inadequacies of George W. Bush.

Berube went on to mention that pointy-headed intellectual Charles Murray had declared that "The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government."

The Right is still tying itself in knots over this; it's entertaining to watch, as when RWA1 linked recently to this piece at the Daily Caller, which wouldn't be worth mentioning if not for the fact that the author's first name is "Dr." -- honestly, white people give their children such ridiculous names! how are they ever going to succeed in American society? - and this first comment on it:

America is now split close to 50/50 between the working class who generate wealth, and the parasite class who confiscate it through fees, fines, taxes, and mandatory union dues, and use it to buy political influence to maintain the status quo. A big part of this is the dependent class who are pandered to with hand outs and programs to influence their vote. Liberalism is a LIE. We are now converging on the Soviet model of government!

That leaves me almost speechless with admiration. It's a remarkable confirmation of author Dr. Blake's lament about "the widespread failure of American academia to advance civic learning." Well, of course. The last thing we need is more pointy-headed intellectuals coming out of academia! Dr. (I'm sure he won't mind my calling him by his first name, I feel that I know him so well already!) also conveniently neglects to mention the fact that Ron Schiller's slighting remarks about the Tea Party were his paraphrase of some highly placed Republicans who felt that their party was "going down the toilet", to borrow a handy phrase. That quite a few such Republicans felt that way enough not only to vote for but to publicly endorse Obama in 2008 is simple fact. Many of them clearly feel the same way now. If it's elitism, it's Republican elitism. If it represents a lack of civic learning, it's Republican lack of civic learning.

And remember, RWA1: the Soviets also had government support of the arts, and look where it got them!

I'm serious, though. NPR is already subordinate to the big corporations. Their news department is worthless. The defunding bill will probably be defeated in the Senate, but even if it isn't, I don't think NPR is worth saving.

Prole for a Day

My Right Wing Acquaintance RWA1 is on a crusade to try to stop our local NPR affiliate from removing the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast from Saturday afternoons, and replacing them with talk shows.  Though he's not alone in this enterprise, he and his allies evidently don't have enough clout to make the station back down.  The station's operation director told the local paper that after "Car Talk" and "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me" (from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays), listenership drops off dramatically, and he wanted to get those numbers back up.

This would be fair enough if public broadcasting were supposed to be about selling airtime to the highest bidder.  It's supposed to run programming that isn't necessarily commercial or popular.  There's also the problem that the decision was made by management at the top, so to speak, and presented to the public as a fait accompli.  The manager said he welcomed a "lively discussion," but as another local critic complained, "a 'lively discussion' following a decision already put into force is not the same as one before. And that’s worrisome."  It reflects the great corporate dependence and commercial orientation of NPR (and PBS for that matter) over the past couple of decades, as government support has dwindled under pressure from the Right.  RWA1 would prefer not to see that trend as having anything to do with him, of course, but it does.  Free markets are for other people, not for him -- especially when it comes to forcing the decadent culture of Old Europe down American throats.

That is the big irony for me.  Last year RWA1, in a conniption over May Day protests around the country, wrote this on the dry-erase board 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.

He kept it there for months, when his usual practice was to change those messages every few weeks.  It still hasn't occurred to him that he's one of the turbulent mob, close to insanity, and the station management probably sees him in just those terms.  Why not leave the running of the station to experts, to professionals?  They and not the ignorant rabble know what's best.  I'm being sarcastic, of course; it's entertaining to watch RWA1, like so many right-wingers, flipflop between playing the elitist and playing the prole.  But he's used to being part of the elite who runs things like the local Republican Party or classical music scene.

RWA1 went so far as to join the hippy-dippy self-esteem Left by starting a Change.org petition against the programming change.  It has, so far, four signatures.  I don't feel any particular Schadenfreude about that -- in fact, I just looked at the page for the first time and was mildly shocked to find it had gotten so little response.  I know he has more allies than that: RWA1 knows a lot of people connected to classical music, and Bloomington is a good town for it, what with the IU School of Music here.  I'm not an opera queen, though I like a lot of Euro-American art music, but I'm concerned about the state of public media in this country.  I support our community radio station, and I don't think that listenership (or sales) should be the only deciding factor in what is available to audiences.  The low response to the petition, combined with the failure of efforts to reverse the decision, indicates that support for the Met broadcast is far lower than I expected.  I'm amazed that so few people cared enough to bother.

Opera used to be popular music, but that's what happens to popular taste.  I wonder if, in a couple of centuries, there will be a similar dust-up over the cancellation of a Classical Hip-Hop program from a public station -- if we even have radio stations by then.

I Know I Am, But What Are You?

What would I do without RWA1, my right-wing acquaintance who enlivens Facebook with the most amazing-yet-predictable outbursts against Teh Left and Teh Liberal Media? Tonight he linked to a commentary by P. J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard, announcing that The New York Times has "lost it." RWA1 commented: "The NY Times has become a partisan rag in its political coverage of this country, the equal of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader or Pulliam's Indianapolis Star." Like he considers that a bad thing?

The Times has always been partisan, though not in the way that RWA1 means. It has always represented the political "center," and spoken for the ruling elites. When Ronald Reagan was turning Central America into a charnel house in the 1980s, the Times dutifully passed along the party line. (Ironically, it was right-wing publications like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal that exposed Reaganite lies.) When Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas after a decade of US-sponsored and managed terrorism, the Times printed a banner headline on their front page, "AMERICANS UNITED IN JOY," which as Noam Chomsky said was "the kind of headline you'd see in some weird, exotic, totalitarian state, like Albania." When it came time to make war on Iraq again, the Times not only went along with Bush, its reporter Judith Miller helped invent the propaganda.

Of course there were occasional lapses, like the publication of the Pentagon Papers almost forty years ago; we don't have a controlled press in the US, so adherence to the party line is not complete. This causes fury among folks like RWA1, to whom I once recommended Mark Hertsgaard's fine book On Bended Knee (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), which documented how the mainstream American media knowingly and deliberately collaborated with the Reagan administration from the start; RWA1 was nonplussed, because media submission had not been total, and all he could see were the deviations from perfect discipline. Happily, the Moonie Washington Times became the Reagan administration's house journal, setting a standard of partisanship that the New York Times couldn't hope to match.

Now we also have The Weekly Standard, an overtly right-wing rag that is nothing if not partisan; but that doesn't bother RWA1, nor does the equally blatant partisanship of the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, or National Review Online, or Commentary, or the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are his main sources on Facebook. Is it that he expects better of the New York Times and the Washington Post? I find that hard to believe. He clearly thinks that P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Rehyansky, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and the other modern Demosthenes whose work he cites are sensible, sober commentators, speaking truth to power. It's great to have these constant reminders that the "sober" Right (as opposed to the flamingly deranged Right, the regular beat of Roy Edroso) is still so completely dishonest, as to make even the Obama Administration look halfway sane by comparison.

Operatic Justice

To my surprise and pleasure, our local public radio affiliate reversed its decision to remove the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts that have aired every Saturday afternoon for many years.  It turned out there was more support for the Met than had at first appeared, and station management had to back down.  Not too surprisingly, they weren't happy at having lost this battle, and I'm sure it was totally coincidental that an IU Music School alum and former music director and "director of new media," whatever that means, for the local station, wrote a letter to the editors of an online magazine "for people in public media" to denounce the reversal.

The reversal may have been a victory for classical-music lovers of Bloomington, but I see it as a serious setback to the station and new evidence that WFIU is being held captive by a small group of listeners who put their own interests over the station’s public-service mission ...

Bloomington is a well-educated, mostly affluent, highly connected college town. But WFIU broadcasts to a large swath of southern Indiana, with translators extending its reach to largely rural communities such as French Lick. Many of these communities are, or are in the process of becoming, news deserts, with limited local news coverage, lower broadband penetration and less access to online news. Over-the-air broadcast still really matters to these communities.

Even if we ignore the metrics-based, hard-business case that calls for WFIU to introduce more news coverage to its broadcast service and focus solely on its public-service mission, the station management’s decision to devote more of the weekend schedule to news and information was the right one.

In principle this sounded reasonable enough, until I remembered that the programming changes had little or nothing to do with "news and information": rather, they involved replacing the opera with mostly game-show programming -- middle-brow game-show programming, to be sure, but still hardly the noble mission the writer tried to make it seem to be.  If the station management wanted to go by a "metrics-based, hard business" criterion, why not add some sports programming?  Why not a hip-hop program?  (That would probably have caused strokes among the largely geriatric Met fans, creating some openings on the Community Advisory Board.)  I'm sure there was no ventriloquism from the Bloomington affiliate's management to the Director of Technology of the Investigative News Network in Columbus Ohio; this is just a matter of number-crunching technocrats thinking alike, and control-obsessed managers outraged that the rabble dared to challenge their decisions, and won.  The divide between his pious pretensions and the actual new programming was a giveaway of the extent of management's distance from the ethos of public media.

My Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, one of the classical-music mavens who led the opposition the change, was furious.  He linked to the letter on Facebook, and fumed:

This is outrageous. If the Saturday programming had actually been "news" instead of the pop cultural swill that it was, it would not have been so bad. Dinner Party Download? Really?!!! How in the world does that suport [sic] the educational mission of Indiana University?

The link set off some discussion in comments, and in answer to one of his friends who hadn't bothered to look for the letter-writer's biographical information -- listed not only as a note but in the body of the letter -- RWA1 wrote that the writer

was once a music student and WFIU techno person who has gone full time into a variety of media consulting. I think he has been seduced by the dark side of IT and techno people and forgotten his roots. That clown posse seems to be determined to dismantle western civilization brick by brick until all we have left is ragged shreds of "light classics" barely covering an emaciated torso of half-educated "wits" and chattering news mavens. Public radio forsooth! For this we are to be paying taxes when there are hundreds of channels of half-wit entertainment and political chatter? Fie!

That's a mind running on autopilot.  I called RWA1 out a week or so ago for this kind of frothing, quoting one of his own rants back at him: "Apocalyptic hysteria is always cropping up, but the conspiracy fantasies are really getting out of hand with the internet."  As you can see, RWA1 is fine with apocalyptic hysteria and conspiracy theorizing when he's the one doing it.  (But who isn't?)  So we have a "clown posse" on the "dark side" seducing innocent music-school graduates into "dismant[ing] western civilization brick by brick," etc.  I considered posting an allusion to authentic frontier gibberish to the comments, perhaps modifying it to something like "authentic right-wing gibberish," but I realized that such sniping, while fun, wasn't really what I wanted to do.  This time.

As I ruminated on this while out for a walk, though, I tried to figure out where the gap between reality and fantasy lay here.  In general, the kind of people RWA1 was attacking don't see themselves as trying (or wanting) to dismantle western civilization.  The letter writer began his polemic, predictably enough, by professing his love for classical music, and I believe him.  He probably doesn't see Western art music as RWA1 does; when he attended the Jacobs School, it was probably as a performer -- and classically trained musicians see their music very differently than their audiences do.

But then I remembered that many people on the American political right do hate "Western civilization."  If they profess allegiance to it, they're generally coming from a position of profound historical and cultural ignorance, preferring edifying myths about both history and culture.  Remember the Right's ebullient contempt for "old Europe" when European governments didn't fall eagerly into line with Bush/Cheney's war on terror?  Lawrence W. Levine showed in The Opening of the American Mind (Beacon, 1996) that educated, elite Americans have always been ambivalent about Western civilization, and often tried to cast America as a new, independent cultural force in the world.  And there's always been a strong streak of philistinism in American society, combined with a vague feeling that art is good for you, like sunshine.  You don't have to understand it, or think about it -- thinking is dangerous, and probably leftist -- but just being exposed to it builds strong bones.  (But hey, it can also cause cancer.)

In particular I thought of the Right's campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Though its public-relations arms focused on scandalous avant-garde work like Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" (whose title alone could cause the veins in Republican foreheads to throb painfully) or exhibits of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, a lot of public support for the arts goes to local-level arts education.  Shakespeare, for example.  Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation in 1996 that

The Bard's popularity is not entirely due to his own fabulousness, after all: A rather elaborate network of educational and community resources has ensured that hundreds of thousands of students in secondary school are introduced to the plays in an exciting, intelligent way.  Around the country, though these programs -- the teacher-training projects of Massachusetts's Shakespeare & Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library, which also runs a celebrated monthlong summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute; the school performances of Washington's Shakespeare Theatre -- are struggling under federal and state cutbacks, including major slashings at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education.

These federal agencies are held in horror, of course, by canon defenders, who fought long and hard and apparently successfully to delegitimize them in the public eye.  Defund the left -- remember that slogan -- by defunding education?  Talk about destroying the village in order to save it!  But who points out that Lynne Cheney and other canon conservatives are depriving students of the ability to appreciate the very literature they claim to care about?  [reprinted in Katha Pollitt, Subject to Debate (The Modern Library, 2001), 101].

But the ginned-up hysteria (NSFW!) over Mapplethorpe's "Man in Polyester Suit" (ditto!) was really just cover (see, I've got my own conspiracy theories, but this one is a fairly open one) for a general attack on the Commons, on public institutions and services generally.  The Right doesn't care whether American public schools are failing: they oppose public education altogether.  The Right doesn't care if public broadcasting is too "liberal": it opposes public broadcasting altogether, though right-wingers have been happy to use PBS when it gave them a podium.  (Much as RWA1 is willing to put up with NPR's fantasized liberalism in order to get his taxpayer-subsidized opera fix.)  Ratings-obsessed managers and consultants would probably have gained a foothold in public radio stations in any case, but the Right's successful campaign to cut support for public broadcasting -- thus throwing it on the mercy of corporate "donors" -- helped them to legitimize their perspective.

So RWA1 is experiencing the backwash of his party's war on the Commons, much as the Tea Party's corporate sugar daddies are worrying now about their beneficiaries' shutdown of the US government: they are perfectly happy to attack the government, as long as it doesn't hurt their business.  Since they are inextricably tied to and dependent on government services in myriad ways, there is no way a failure of the government could fail to hurt them; but it never occurred to them that their creatures would ungratefully injure the Libertarian billionaires who helped them get started.  Attacking public broadcasting was bound to affect the cultural products that people like RWA1 value, but No One Could Have Foreseen that.  Elitists always imagine that they'll be taken care of, and usually they are.  They enjoy siccing the mob on competing elitists, because it never occurs to them that the pitchforks and torches might someday appear outside their doors.

Wake Me When It's Over

After a bit of a lull, RWA1 has been linking again. Much of it of course was about the deaths of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel (nothing about the death of Kim Jong-Il, though -- yet), but the fun part was this article at The New Republic, "Why Obama's New Populism May Sink His Campaign," by William Galston, a hack from the Brookings Institution. "Vain hope that this will be heeded," wrote RWA1, a single tear poignantly staining his cheek. (It did occur to me that the "vain hope" referred to was Galston's, but that's not RWA1's style.)

This, class, is a paradigm example of the phenomenon known as concern trolling, where a partisan pretends to be concerned that his or her opponent may be shooting himself in the foot. Oh noes! cries the loyal Republican: Obama might lose in 2012 if he pursues this self-defeating strategy! Usually I associate this tactic with the Right -- homophobes lecturing us that flamboyant Pride Parades will hurt our cause, for example -- but lately I've been seeing it on the Near Right, with many Democrats sincerely concerned that none of the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants has a chance against the God-King, shouldn't they find someone electable?

Galston's argument is built on some recent Gallup polls which allegedly show, first, "that the number of Americans who see American society as divided into haves and have-nots has decreased significantly since the 2008 election"; second, "substantial majorities of Americans saw expanding the economy and increasing equality of opportunity as extremely or very important. Not so for reducing income and wealth gaps"; third, as "Obama nears the end of his third year in office, the people are more likely to fear government, and less likely to fear business, than they were at the beginning of his administration." The poll question was presumably put in terms of "big government," not just "government," but hey, what's the difference?

Since this was a magazine piece posted to the web, rather than a blog post, it contains no links to those polls, and it took me a while to find them for this post. And I noticed something interesting, which is why it's always a good idea to check claims at the source: Galston paraphrased the second question as "Respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives as extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important." But the actual question was "how important is it that the federal government in Washington enacts policies that attempt to do each of the following" (italics added) -- that is, the respondents want the big government, which most Americans consider a greater threat than big labor or big business, to enact those policies.

That's a common problem with polling, of course: how the question is put will affect, and may even determine, the answers received. I'm not at all surprised that a majority of Americans would say they fear big government, and charitably understood it's not an unreasonable fear. Put in those terms, I and many another leftist would share that fear: of indefinite detention, surveillance of personal communication, and vast military spending in the service of empire. But most Americans also want big government and the services it provides: the social programs, like Social Security and Medicare and disaster relief, that the Right (including both my Right-Wing Acquaintances) hates and want to eliminate for the good of the American people, are very popular. That's why the same politicians who denounce the Nanny State are first in line to demand big government aid when disaster strikes their states. That's why you hear laments from both sides of the Congressional aisle about Social Security being a political "third rail" -- because politicians who touch it with hostile intent will get badly burned, not by lobbyists or special-interest groups, but by the public.

That's why, when polls ask more specific and concrete questions, they get results that appear to be at odds with Gallup's. A recent Pew poll, released at the same time, found (via):

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts — 51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%)...

While there may be some cognitive dissonance here, I don't think it's serious. Most Americans, according to Gallup, want big government to enact policies to expand the economy and increase equality of opportunity. I admit I don't see how people can simultaneously reject the idea that America is divided into haves and have-nots and believe that there's too much power in the hands of a few rich people, but I also have to admit they are two different questions, and I think Pew's version is less abstract. I'm wary of big government, because I know how easily it can get out of the control of the people it was supposedly founded to serve. (And did you notice? There's not a word here about reducing the deficit, which obsesses the government and media elites, but doesn't concern most citizens that much.)

Anyway, these polls indicate that Obama won't be hurting his chances of re-election by talking a "populist" game; that's why he's doing it, after all. (Whether he'll do more than talk is another question.) Especially since it's well-known by now that Democratic politicians, including Obama, do best with their base when they sound "populist"; they only get into trouble when they demonstrate that it was just talk. So do Republicans, for that matter, who also pretend to be populists, but in terms that appeal to a different base. Don't all the Republican candidates claim that they are the ones who really care about the good of the people? The original Tea Party movement talked populism too, speaking for a Republican minority that hadn't voted for the Kenyan Usurper and never would, but still thought he should do what they wanted. But it's a safe bet that Obama is making sure that his real base, the corporate donors, know that the speechmaking is for the proles, and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

What surprises me, or would surprise me if I weren't used to it by now, is that RWA1 misses all this. Why doesn't he make fun of Obama for pretending to care about ordinary people, or if he must pretend that Obama isn't pretending, shouldn't he hope piously that Obama will be defeated next year so that he can't carry out his socialist, anti-business, anti-America agenda? It could be partly because of RWA1's elitism; he considers most of his fellow citizens to be rabble, yahoos who are flushing a great culture down the toilet, putting his NPR opera programs at risk. But if this country is in trouble -- and I certainly agree that it is, but in different ways and for different reasons -- isn't it important to understand what is going on? Especially if you consider yourself to be intellectually superior to the dirty canaille? The TNR writer Galston, by the way, doesn't seem to be concern trolling: he seems to want Obama's re-election. RWA1, like so much of the educated (or least schooled) Right, doesn't seem to know what he wants.

Some of it must be party loyalty. The rational thing for the Republican party to do would be to embrace Obama, nominate him their 2012 candidate, and end the game of pretending that there is a wide gulf between the parties; but more important than rationality is the brand name, which as with other commercial brands, necessitates inventing nonexistent differences. (The GOP! Gets your whites whiter! Produces a longer lasting shine without yellowing! Gives you fast fast fast relief from tension headaches!) Of course the Democrats wouldn't accept that either: they've spent the past three years cheering Obama as he embraced and extended the worst Bush-Cheney policies. Everything they attacked Bush for doing is now the proof of Obama's greatness. Now they've got their own websites defending him against his critics -- of the left; we may be crazy and numerically insignificant but we are still a threat -- in terms borrowed directly from the hydrophobic Republican fringe.

One Gallup poll result I can go with, though: 70 percent of Americans can't wait for the coming elections to be over.

Moderation In All Things, Including Moderation

No, I didn't go to Jon Stewart's party in Washington yesterday. For one thing, as I've already mentioned, I had a prior engagement. For another, what "sanity" does Stewart propose we restore? This country has always been batshit crazy. For yet another, Stewart early on called his project a "Million Moderate March," which leaves me out: I'm not a moderate, and that puts me in good company -- better company, I'm afraid, than Stewart.

I realize that Stewart's call for sanity may be as tinged with satire as Colbert's corresponding call for fear. But only tinged. (This morning I heard someone on NPR say piously that Stewart's closing "sincere moment" showed that satire can go beyond entertainment to have a serious meaning. Duh! Satire is supposed to have teeth, and sink them deep. If it doesn't, it's just mockery pretending to be satire.) That was shown by Stewart's early announcement (also quoted in the Times) that

The purpose, he said, is to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric. He tarred both parties with that charge, mentioning both the attacks on the right against President Obama for being everything from a socialist to un-American and on the left against former President Bush for being a war criminal.

Numerous people jumped on that last clause. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Stewart's exemplary extremes were bogus, citing a McClatchy story which reported that

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

(See also this post at the Comedy Central website, and notice the second comment under it, by an Administrator.)

But, well, maybe that Army general is an extremist. But any number can play that game. To wit: Some extremists say that George Bush should be sainted. Other extremists say he should be flayed alive with hot rakes and disembowelled publicly before being drawn and quartered. As a moderate, I say he should merely be hanged, as Saddam Hussein was hanged with his approval. If you disagree with me, you're the kind of extremist who has ruined political discourse in this country.

Actually, that whole paragraph from the Times was bogus, in the Car Talk sense of the word. What is laughingly known as political discourse is dominated by the corporate media, who by dint of owning the media infrastructure and spending large amounts of money get to define and occupy the Center. The extremists would be those who "reflexively" opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq, who want a single-payer health care payment system (or better yet, a National Health Service), who now oppose Obama's war in Afghanistan, who opposed the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bank bailout, who do not (contrary to recurring corporate media claims) worry about the deficit as much as they worry about jobs, and -- do a lot of yelling, but are mostly not heard except by ourselves. True, the corporate media have given disproportionate coverage and support to the Tea Party Extended tantrum, but that's because calls for "smaller" government, lower taxes for the rich, and the demolition of social services and the Commons, are part of the great Center. (Greenwald also showed that "Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP", not just in its fringes.)

I get weary when the Tea Party is treated as if it were something new in the US. Surely I'm not the only person old enough to remember the "New Right" that gave us Ronald Reagan in 1980, that considered William F. Buckley Jr. a liberal if not a leftist, that was going to sweep away liberalism like a tsunami, stop abortion absolutely, put prayer back in the schools, make us proud of our Flag again, end welfare, limit government, and roll back Communism?

The hysteria of the Democrats, who warn that a Republican victory in November will usher in a new Dark Age, is more than matched by the hysteria of the Republicans, who gleefully anticipate the new Age of Light that will bless the Fatherland when they supplant the Democrat scalawags and give America back to We the People. Just like they did in 1994!

So my right-wing acquaintance (that's RWA1) keeps linking to prematurely triumphalist articles in USA Today, plus the usual Obama ankle-biters from the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and National Review Online. (That WSJ article was mildly amusing. It was an attack on some Democratic house scribe who wanted to depict Barack Obama as a philosopher-president. I hope I needn't reiterate my own low opinion of Obama's intellect, but I'm old enough to remember [as is RWA1] when the Journal was trying to present Dan Quayle as a serious intellectual, a reader of Plato and Aristotle, full of gravitas. Or as Richard Nixon told the New York Times, "He's a very different man than the intellectual midget that has been portrayed in much of the media.… I think he's going to make an excellent Vice President, and I believe that he's going to be a popular Vice President just as soon as the people of this country see him as he is." Riiiight.)

RWA1 also linked to this WSJ story on the birth of the Tea Party Movement, "a good account," RWA1 said, "of the movement without the hysterical baggage in the partisan media." It's nice to have a non-hysterical account of a hysterical movement, I suppose, though Fox News is surely "partisan media" and has been highly supportive of the Teabaggers, as have the corporate media generally. (It happens that NPR's This American Life did a show on the Tea Party, very sympathetic and non-hysterical, just today.) RWA1, who also went berserk over the firing of Juan Williams by NPR, considers himself a sober conservative (but don't they all?), but he isn't that different from someone like Jon Stewart in wishing to see himself as the reasonable, rational middle. And truth be told, they are probably not as far apart politically as either would like to think.

Glenn Greenwald also pointed out something important that I've noticed before.

One other point about this fixation on the "tone" of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious -- much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity -- but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas. The same is true for war criminal John Yoo, who also appeared, with great politeness, on The Daily Show. Moreover, some acts are so destructive and wrong that they merit extreme condemnation (such as Bush's war crimes). I don't think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it's usually the ideas themselves -- not the tone used to express them -- that are the culprits.

I wrote about the acrimoniousness of American political discourse here, and about the way that liberals / moderates confuse calm tone with moderate substance here. And the firing of Juan Williams, which led to a lot of caterwauling in our political discourse, reminded me of a piece that the late Ellen Willis wrote for the Village Voice in 1990 when CBS' cracker-barrel philosopher Andy Rooney was suspended for making some stupidly vicious racist remarks -- but not for making stupidly vicious homophobic remarks. I haven't been able to find Willis's article on the Web, but her argument has stayed with me through the twenty years since. She argued that instead of suspending Rooney, CBS should have required him to have an on-air conversation -- debate, even -- with anti-racist and anti-homophobic writers and thinkers, to actually discuss the issues instead of merely suspending him and letting him make a typically empty apology for offending people. Willis recognized, of course, that such an exchange would never happen in the corporate media, who are dedicated to homogenizing, flattening out, and simply ignoring the issues the world faces. To address them would be, like, upsetting. Extreme. Better just to discuss Michelle Obama's shoulders, and complain for the thousandth time that the Democratic Party hasn't moved far enough to the Center.

[The photo at the head of this post comes from Roy Edroso's alicublog. I like the sign, which suggests that someone at the rally might have had irreverent thoughts about the undertaking. But the New York Times article I quoted above mentions that "Mr. Stewart also promised to supply the crowd with signs if they did not bring their own, including as examples, 'I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler,' and 'Take It Down a Notch for America.'" The sign in the photo seems like more of that, but I still like it. Some other signs can be seen at Band of Thebes.]

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.