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Category: Political Philosophy
Reason magazine had an excellent piece yesterday on the “Advil menace” and the extraordinary measures taken to ensure that 8th graders haven’t “adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with international narcotrafficking”. Both funny and pathetic. Well worth a read.
[digg-reddit-me]One of the core magazine of the Republican conservative establishment has this explicit message to Ron Paul supporters:
[G]et lost. There should be plenty of room for [all of you] in Obama’s big tent.
The Republican party seems to be making no attempt to woo or otherwise capture the energy of Congressman Ron Paul’s supporters. I admired Mr. Paul’s campaign – even if I felt I could never support him. I believe that Mr. Paul’s campaign got some of the biggest issues facing America right – with regards to federalism, the balance of power, and executive overreach. On many other issues, I think he argued from a principled and insightful stance – one that those Republicans – and many Democrats – in power today do not take into account. In foreign policy, he was a military isolationist; on currency, he was against all regulation. These stances are radical – but reflect the reality of America less than a hundred years ago. Although many of those in power ignore this, there are still many fringe aspects of America that they ignore.
Now, the Republican party is rejecting the many young supporters of Mr. Paul – presumably because these elites see these supporters as part of the unwashed masses that get to have a say every four or so years, but who are essentially dumb creatures. There is a contempt for Mr. Paul’s supporters that is hard to fathom – especially for a party that is in decline.
I agree with Mr. Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard though. Barack Obama has many positions at odds with Mr. Paul. But I think Mr. Paul’s supporters can find something to support in Mr. Obama’s platform. And they are welcome in Obama’s big tent.
Here’s a grand liberal-libertarian alliance this November and beyond. (Do you hear me Kos? Freedom Democrats?)
ka1igu1a over at the Freedom Democrats writes with regret that Mr. Obama will soon take what he refers to as a “loyalty oath” to the United States in response to the Rev. Wright controversy. ka1igu1a believes that the core element of this controversy is the conflux of race and patriotism.
What ka1igu1a would prefer is that Mr. Obama declare that rather than being devoted to the United States, he is devoted to liberty itself as Sam Adams did when he declare, “God damn the King!” He concludes:
But this Libertarian can’t help but to think, why, yes, God Bless Thomas Jefferson, God Bless the Cause of Liberty, but God Damn the United States.
I appreciate ka1igu1a’s point; and I do believe that principles must be placed over nationalism. But I do not believe the two are mutually exclusive – and I believe I too love my country – abstract notion that it may be.
It is because I believe in the possibilities of America that I care about ensuring that the principles I support are practiced by our government; it is because I care about the abstraction that is America – not despite it – that I am critical. Based on Mr. Obama’s comments, this seems to be what he believes as well.
[digg-reddit-me]“We are the Democratic party.”
I really hate to use profanity like this on the blog – but I think it is called for under the circumstances. The New York Times is reporting that:
…influential fund-raisers for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton have stepped up their behind-the-scenes pressure on national party leaders to resolve the matter, with some even threatening to withhold their donations to the Democratic National Committee unless it seats the delegates from the two states or holds new primaries there.
According to the Times article, Ms. Clinton’s donors have donated just under $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee – and they are threatening to stop supporting the Democratic party if the DNC doesn’t cave in to their demands. I have some hope that Howard Dean will not give in to Ms. Clinton’s bullying. But he undeniably is being pressured, bullied, strong-armed. And big donors today have an outsize influence in the DNC.
So far, the DNC has been lagging behind the Republican National Committee in fundraising. This is exceptional considering the money advantage both Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama have had over any of the Republican presidential candidates. I support the DNC – and no matter who the Democratic presidential candidate is, and no matter who wins in November, I want a strong Democratic party.
But today, I am donating to show that Ms. Clinton’s backers do not own the Democratic party. I may not be able to donate $63,500 like Paul Cejas – and I won’t try to hold the Democratic party hostage to my personal views. But I am donating $50.00 right now to make a point. I hope you can show your support as well.
Mr. Dean has not taken sides in the current primary battle – but is trying to enforce the rules that Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama explicitly and publicly agreed to last year. Ms. Clinton’s backers are now trying to bully the DNC to break the rules and hand Ms. Clinton the nomination against the will of those people who have voted so far.
This is outrageous. We are the Democratic party. Let’s show Hillary’s big money pals whose party this is.
(If you just want to donate to the DNC without showing support for Mr. Obama’s candidacy, try here. Otherwise, to show support, donate here to “We are the Democratic party.”)
(I am not a big fan of Ms. Clinton – but I don’t hate her. This post is not about Ms. Clinton herself – but about my outrage at the tactics of her supporters. Shame on them.
And Ms. Clinton – if you don’t condemn these anti-democratic and anti-Democratic tactics, shame on you.)
Updated: Let me be clear – I support Barack Obama in the primary – and have since before he won more states, more delegates, and more votes than Ms. Clinton. But if Ms. Clinton were in the position Mr. Obama was in – I would not want Mr. Obama to win by extortion.
2nd Update:
The Drudge Report is highlighting the news – which means that it will likely dominate the news cycle tomorrow. Obviously, most commentators will say that the tactics of the Clinton campaign are wrong. But nothing would prove them wrong more than a donation to the DNC – allowing the Democratic party to ignore the powerful individuals who are trying to hijack the party.
3rd update: NJ Mom over at dKos interprets the story in much the same way:
I’ve been concerned for a while that the Obama/Clinton contest is becoming a surrogate battle between the Dean and McAuliffe wings of the DNC. It is a battle between those that believe in the “important states” vs. “the other 40”, between DLCers and DFAers, between an addiction to corporate/special interest money and those that believe that small donors in vast numbers are democracy at its most powerful.
What I read in the NYT today, makes me concerned that McAuliffe and those that he represents are trying to ambush Dean using Clinton donors.
The NetRoots helped Dean get where he is today. With the DNC coffers very low right now, he is under attack. He needs us.
N.B. This post was written in the midst of an obviously contentious election campaign – one in which I had strongly considered supporting Senator Clinton but after careful evaluation, had come to the conclusion that Barack Obama was the only candidate suited to our current challenges. While I stand by the content of the post, in retrospect, the tone is a bit overheated.
Linda Chavez wrote in an article that originally appeared in the New York Post about “Liberal patriotism” that real patriotism understands these simple facts:
Our elected officials don’t make America great, nor do temporal policies. America is great because of its people, its defining institutions and its freedoms.
As a liberal and a patriot, I agree with Ms. Chavez. At least in this instance. But somehow, Ms. Chavez manages to praise America’s “defining institutions and its freedoms” ((Which must obviously include the Congress, the courts, the laws of the land, and the Bill of Rights.)) while endorsing the power of the executive branch to break the law, violate the freedoms of its citizens without due process, violate the Bill of Rights, and even torture. Ms. Chavez’s understanding of patriotism itself is so tortured that she manages to decry – at a full column’s length – a candidate’s spouse’s off-the-cuff remark as demonstrating a nefarious anti-freedom-ism while applauding that the Attorney General, in his considered testimony, refused to reject “cruel and inhuman treatment” of prisoners as is Constitutionally required of him.
Somehow, “freedom” – in the sense Ms. Chavez uses the term – has nothing to do with violating civil liberties. And upholding the “defining institutions” of America sometimes requires breaking the law. Those who seek to uphold the law – or who are embarrassed by the blatant lawlessness – are not considered patriots. Instead, they “put politics before the national interest” and give “aid and comfort to the enemy” while trying to “hamper the military’s ability to fight…effectively.” There is a more sympathetic way to view Ms. Chavez’s inflammatory and extreme rhetoric but she certainly doesn’t encourage anyone who disagrees with her in the slightest to attempt to find it.
To some extent, I ask myself: why do I even care about what this woman is writing? She may be wrong; she may be using her position as a syndicated columnist to promote lies and unfairly attack good people. Isn’t it a standard “conservative” line that liberals are in fact traitors by their very nature? ((See anything Ann Coulter has said in the past decade, and much of what Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have said.)) But at this point, is it even newsworthy that a “conservative” political commenter regularly calls the majority of Americans “America-haters” – and worse?
Maybe not. But it is worth pointing out again – and again – that as these hacks drape themselves with the Stars and Stripes, they undermine the very freedoms and attack the very people they claim to admire.
There is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of torture, law-breaking, and freedom-impingement. But it involves compromises our core values in the face of enemy aggression. That’s an argument no hack wants to make.
The debate over torture and the many other instances of law-breaking that have become the modus operandi of the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism has been distorted from the start. The liberals and libertarians who opposed warrantless wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, and other legal, but questionable, tactics used by the Bush administration were – from the start – painted as giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” The Republicans continue to say: “We just want to make America safe.” This is usually paired with an explicit or implicit message that, “Those who oppose us are weak.”
Liberals and libertarians have yet to find an effective way to respond to this argument – at least on a national level. I think the best approach is to point out that the Republican “strategy” is to preemptively surrender American liberties and the primacy of the rule of law out of fear. Acting out of fear is weak. This line of attack puts us back on the path to the argument we should be having – about the balance that needs to be struck between liberty and security.
It has become an aphorism that in order for a government to succeed in the fight against terrorism, it must win 100% of the time; but for a terrorist to succeed, they only need a single victory. Any counter-terrorism expert will concede that it is impossible to prevent terrorism 100% of the time. In trying to determine the balance we need between liberty and security, this must be a factor. For if we decide to give up certain rights temporarily to prevent terrorism – when there is another attack, it will be presumed that the government will need to go yet another step in taking rights to prevent the next attack. It is a cycle that leads – inevitably – to totalitarian government.
This is why for the good of the American experiment, for our way of life, we need to ensure that arguments over national security do not devolve into questions of “Who is passively supporting terrorism?” The Republicans – by launching this line of attack – are paving the road to serfdom in a way that any true conservative knows we must avoid. By framing the issue in this way – presumably merely for temporary political gain – they are preparing the American people to accept further deteriorations of liberties.
If one is to view the Republican’s position without context – as they defend the near indefensible – you can see how it is effective. By focusing on our worst fears, morality becomes skewed. But the Republican line of attack – even without proper context – inevitably raises tough questions: Would torture be moral if it was done to prevent a nuclear disaster? Would assassination? Would murdering an infant? If the stakes are so high – morality and legality become irrelevant.
By applying the “one percent doctrine” of acting as if one’s worst fears were imminent when there is an infinitesimal chance of these fears being realized, the Bush administration has taken the most extreme circumstances that might justify an exception and made them into normal policy. The Bush administration’s policy reflects fear rather than due consideration.
Republican commenters always bring up the “ticking time-bomb scenario” to justify torture. They say: under these circumstances, if your family and tens of thousands of others would die if you didn’t torture this man, wouldn’t you torture him? ((I am trying here to view the argument in favor of torture as sympathetically as possible. I know – and have written before – about how torture has generally been used to get confessions rather than to ascertain the truth. I doubt the efficacy of torture; psychologically, it makes little sense that it would cause individuals to “tell the truth”. I have yet to see any significant studies of the effects of torture to wring the truth out of individuals – although I can see how it would be a difficult field to study. You can’t very well torture people in a scientific study.))
I would.
And if the President of the United States believes that tens of thousands would die if he or she did not order the torture of an individual, would you expect the president to follow the law and refrain from torturing?
No – I would expect the president to order the person to be tortured.
But though Republicans make this argument to show that torture should be legal, it proves no such thing. Under either of the two above circumstances, the individual who made the decision to break the law should be held accountable to the law. If the president has ordered that a man be tortured because he thought it was necessary, he should go before the American people – and a duly constituted court of law – and explain what he did, and why he did it. If he does not do so, then until this is corrected, we cannot be considered a constitutional democracy – a nation where laws are above all individuals, no matter their position.
The biggest problem with the Republican arguments is that they are trying to make the exceptional circumstances the policy of the American government. What we must strive for instead is a balance between liberty and security.
Mark Steyn of the National Review proves once and for all that he has no idea how liberals, Democrats, or non-ideologues think with this surreal observation:
With hindsight, the oral sex was a master stroke. Bill Clinton likes to tell anyone who’ll listen that he governed as an “Eisenhower Republican,” which is kind of true — NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. If you have to have a Democrat in the Oval Office, he was as good as it gets for Republicans — if you don’t mind the fact that he’s a draft-dodging non-inhaling sex fiend. Republicans did mind, of course, which is why Dems rallied round out of boomer culture-war solidarity. But, if he hadn’t been dropping his pants and appealing to so many of their social pathologies, his party wouldn’t have been half so enthusiastic for another chorus of “I Like Ike.”
Mr. Steyn’s proof of this rather unusual point: “Hillary is what the Clintons look like with their pants up” – and she is losing. Therefore, most liberals supported Mr. Clinton because of his sexual escapades.
The logic used here is impeccable.
Eric Schneiderman of The Nation has a must-read article for all aspiring political strategists, and all those who cannot explain their strong support for Mr. Obama called”Transforming the Liberal Checklist.”
The essence:
I respectfully suggest that if we want to move beyond short- term efforts to slow down the bone-crushing machinery of the contemporary conservative movement and begin to build a meaningful movement of our own, we need to expand the job descriptions of our elected officials. To do this, we must consider the two distinct aspects of our work: transactional politics and transformational politics.
Transactional politics is pretty straightforward. What’s the best deal I can get on a gun-control or immigration-reform bill during this year’s legislative session? What do I have to do to elect a good progressive ally in November? Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It’s all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.
Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year–or five years, or twenty years–will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities. It requires us to root out the assumptions about politics or economics or human nature that prevent us from embracing policies that will make our lives better. Transformational politics has been a critical element of American political life since Lincoln was advocating his “oft expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion.”
Reihan, guest-blogging on Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the possibility of Lawrence Lessig running for Congress:
I think of Lessig as an almost paradigmatic Obamacrat, a smart and accomplished professional interested in reforming and revitalizing government for the betterment of all Americans through the embrace of disruptive technologies and, um, cherished American principles. If this is the animating impulse behind the new liberalism, the new conservatism that will rise to challenge it will be sharper and more forward-looking still.