Think again

Big Media Matt points us at the Think Again feature in Foreign Policy discussing Middle East democracy. The canards debunked are:

The Middle East Is the Last Holdout Against the Global Democratic Trend

Democracy in the Middle East Is Impossible Until the Arab-Israeli Conflict Is Resolved

The United States Wants Democracy in the Middle East

The War in Iraq Advanced the Cause of Democracy in the Middle East

Islamists Are the Main Obstacle to Arab Democracy

Arab Countries Have a Historic Propensity Toward Authoritarianism

Promoting Women’s Rights Is Crucial for Democratic Change

Arab Democrats Are the Key to Reform

Middle East Democracy Is the Cure for Islamist Terrorism

Nothing too surprising in the comments on each of these points, mind you, but it provides a nice, clear overview, if you find this sort of thing interesting.

Sushi pillows

Really.

That's pillows that look like sushi, rather than made of sushi or for letting your sushi rest comfortably.

Via Collectivus

China

DeLong makes a trenchant observation.

Let me try to state this clearly and concisely: the U.S. has a *massive* national security interest in encouraging the industrialization of China as fast as possible. A poor China is an unstable China, and unstable countries ruled by oligarchies often turn to aggressive expansion as a way of using nationalism to slow the crumbling of their rule. A world sixty years from now in which Chinese schoolchildren are taught that the U.S. did what it could to speed Chinese economic growth is a much safer world for my great-grandchildren than a world in which Chinese schoolchildren are taught that the U.S. did all it could to keep China poor.

It seems that being a patriot and being a cosmopolite are very compatible in a shrinking world. Especially when China is involved.

Bagel buddhism

My mother reminded me recently about these silly aphorisms of "Zen Judaism". Though not all of them are Buddhist ...

The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.

One in particular reminded me of someone in particular.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with posture like that.

You know who you are.

Remember health care?

Several months ago, DeLong blogged about the war over Clinton's health care plan, and pointed me to this quote from a PBS story, making the point that Republicans opposed the plan not on the merits but simply because they wanted to deny Democrats the victory.

December 2, 1993 --- Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" --- not amend --- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends. The timing of the memo dovetails with a growing private consensus among Republicans that all-out opposition to the Clinton plan is in their best political interest. Until the memo surfaces, most opponents prefer behind-the-scenes warfare largely shielded from public view. The boldness of Kristol's strategy signals a new turn in the battle. Not only is it politically acceptable to criticize the Clinton plan on policy grounds, it is also politically advantageous. By the end of 1993, blocking reform poses little risk as the public becomes increasingly fearful of what it has heard about the Clinton plan.

More recently, Digby quotes at length from the PBS story's timeline. Instructive reading for the patient and politically obsessed.

Beinart

Meme-du-jour for lefty wonks is Peter Beinart's “An Argument for a New Liberalism: A fighting faith” published in The New Republic last week. Beinart argues that that Democrats have suffered reversals because they haven't come out as vigorous enough opponents of Islamist totalitarianism, having forgotten the lesson of Cold War anti-communism. It's long, chewy, and thought-provoking.

There's some grains of truth lurking in there. He points out that the left has been so panicked over the Bush administration's catatrophic conduct of the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" that we haven't managed to articulate a positive vision of a liberal response to the challenges of contemporary political Islamist movements, political totalitarianism, terrorism, and the various combinations of these three. Which is true as far as it goes.

But he doesn't show any awareness that though they are conflated in the minds of most Americans, political Islamism, totalitarianism, and terrorism are three distinct phenomena with distinct identities, even if they are often interrelated. Orcinus has a very good discussion of this point and its consequences.

Likewise, Beinart uses “communism” and “totalitarianism” interchangably in talking about the Cold War era. This is corrosive to the meanings of both important words. In the course of his recounting of the Cold War, he brushes aside awfully lightly how our simpleminded anti-communism was often counterproductive, put us in bed with countless right-wing totalitarian regimes, and brought us to the brink of a global thermonuclear holocaust. I'm not saying that opposition to Soviet totalitarianism, as a principle, was fundamentally wrong, mind you. I favour opposition to all forms of totalitarianism. But I am saying that our anti-communism was often boneheaded and dangerous.

George Will says that Democrats should take Beinart's advice, which is pretty much a sure sign that we shouldn't. And Digby has some choice words about how Beinart's use of the expressions “hard” and “soft” Democrat falls right into the psychosexual BS of rhetoric from the Republican Mighty Wurlitzer. (I've posted about the psychosexual dimension myself, and Digby's been working this theme again and again and again in recent weeks.)

For readers curious about the article but not brave enough to face the interrogation of the subscription robot at The New Republic, I have the text of the essay for you here.

---

An Argument for a New Liberalism: A fighting faith

Peter Beinart

The New Republic 2 December 2004

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, “consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.” Unless that changed, “In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... it is the right — the very extreme right — which is most likely to gain victory.”

During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard, members of the UDA met to expand and rename their organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, issued a press release that enumerated the new organization's principles. Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, “[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere,” America should support “democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.” That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology “hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great.”

At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals, saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA, it was virtually the only liberal organization to back President Harry S Truman's March 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet subversion.

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism, anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA's help, Truman crushed Wallace's third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) denounced communism, as did the NAACP. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: “Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism.”

Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a "historical re-education" has indeed occurred — replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s — a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda — even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative — against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions — most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn — that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

The Kerry Compromise

The press loves a surprise. And so, in the days immediately after November 2, journalists trumpeted the revelation that "moral values" had cost John Kerry the election. Upon deeper investigation, however, the reasons for Kerry's loss don't look that surprising at all. In fact, they are largely the same reasons congressional Democrats lost in 2002.

Pundits have seized on exit polls showing that the electorate's single greatest concern was moral values, cited by 22 percent of voters. But, as my colleague Andrew Sullivan has pointed out (“Uncivil Union,” November 22), a similar share of the electorate cited moral values in the ’90s. The real change this year was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of voters cited "world affairs" as their paramount issue; this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those who cited moral values. And it was largely this new cohort — the same one that handed the GOP its Senate majority in 2002 — that accounts for Bush's improvement over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in Slate, if you control for Bush's share of the vote four years ago, “a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect.”

On national security, Kerry's nomination was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11 world. In the early days of his candidacy, Kerry seemed destined to run as a hawk. In June 2002, he attacked Bush from the right for not committing American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora. Like the other leading candidates in the race, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not only pleased Kerry's consultants, who hoped to inoculate him against charges that he was soft on terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy advisers as well.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment that counseled the leading presidential candidates during the primaries — and coalesced behind Kerry after he won the nomination — was the product of a decade-long evolution. Bill Clinton had come into office with little passion for foreign policy, except as it affected the U.S. economy. But, over time, his administration grew more concerned with international affairs and more hawkish. In August 1995, Clinton finally sent NATO warplanes into action in Bosnia. And, four years later, the United States, again working through NATO, launched a humanitarian war in Kosovo, preventing another ethnic cleansing and setting the stage for a democratic revolution in Belgrade. It was an air war, to be sure, and it put few American lives at risk. But it was a war nonetheless, initiated without U.N. backing by a Democratic president in response to internal events in a sovereign country.

For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that embraced U.S. power. And September 11 validated the transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally felt it didn't go far enough — urging a larger NATO force capable of securing the entire country. And, while disturbed by the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, they agreed that Saddam Hussein was a threat and, more generally, supported aggressive efforts to democratize the Muslim world. As National Journal's Paul Starobin noted in a September 2004 profile, “Kerry and his foreign-policy advisers are not doves. They are liberal war hawks who would be unafraid to use American power to promote their values.” At the Democratic convention, Biden said that the “overwhelming obligation of the next president is clear” — to exercise “the full measure of our power” to defeat Islamist totalitarianism.

Had history taken a different course, this new brand of liberalism might have expanded beyond a narrow foreign policy elite. The war in Afghanistan, while unlike Kosovo a war of self-defense, once again brought the Western democracies together against a deeply illiberal foe. Had that war, rather than the war in Iraq, become the defining event of the post-September 11 era, the “re-education” about U.S. power, and about the new totalitarian threat from the Muslim world that had transformed Kerry's advisers, might have trickled down to the party's liberal base, transforming it as well.

Instead, Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan affair — defined in the liberal mind not by images of American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false claims about Iraqi WMD. The left's post-September 11 enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda — epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA — was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war. So, when the Democratic presidential candidates began courting their party's activists in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2003, they found a liberal grassroots that viewed the war on terrorism in negative terms and judged the candidates less on their enthusiasm for defeating Al Qaeda than on their enthusiasm for defeating Bush. The three candidates who made winning the war on terrorism the centerpiece of their campaigns — Joseph Lieberman, Bob Graham, and Wesley Clark — each failed to capture the imagination of liberal activists eager for a positive agenda only in the domestic sphere. Three of the early front-runners — Kerry, John Edwards, and Dick Gephardt — each sank as Howard Dean pilloried them for supporting Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the Iraq war.

Three months before the Iowa caucuses, facing mass liberal defections to Dean, Kerry voted against Bush's ^$87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. With that vote, the Kerry compromise was born. To Kerry's foreign policy advisers, some of whom supported the supplemental funding, he remained a vehicle for an aggressive war on terrorism. And that may well have been Kerry's own intention. But, to the liberal voters who would choose the party's nominee, he became a more electable Dean. Kerry's opposition to the ^$87 billion didn't only change his image on the war in Iraq; it changed his image on the war on terrorism itself. His justification for opposing the ^$87 billion was essentially isolationist: “We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in our own communities.” And, by exploiting public antipathy toward foreign aid and nation-building, the natural building blocks of any liberal anti-totalitarian effort in the Muslim world, Kerry signaled that liberalism's moral energies should be unleashed primarily at home.

Kerry's vote against the ^$87 billion helped him lure back the liberal activists he needed to win Iowa, and Iowa catapulted him toward the nomination. But the vote came back to haunt him in two ways. Most obviously, it helped the Bush campaign paint him as unprincipled. But, more subtly, it made it harder for Kerry to ask Americans to sacrifice in a global campaign for freedom. Biden could suggest “a new program of national service” and other measures to "spread the cost and hardship of the war on terror beyond our soldiers and their families." But, whenever Kerry flirted with asking Americans to do more to meet America's new threat, he found himself limited by his prior emphasis on doing less. At times, he said his primary focus in Iraq would be bringing American troops home. He called for expanding the military but pledged that none of the new troops would go to Iraq, the new center of the terror war, where he had said American forces were undermanned. Kerry's criticisms of Bush's Iraq policy were trenchant, but the only alternative principle he clearly articulated was multilateralism, which often sounded like a veiled way of asking Americans to do less. And, because he never urged a national mobilization for safety and freedom, his discussion of terrorism lacked Bush's grandeur. That wasn't an accident. Had Kerry aggressively championed a national mobilization to win the war on terrorism, he wouldn't have been the Democratic nominee.

The Softs

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into “hards” and “softs.” The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.

The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily communists themselves. But they refused to make anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the threat to liberal values came entirely from the right — from militarists, from red-baiters, and from the forces of economic reaction. To attack the communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil rights and economic justice, was a distraction from the struggle for progress.

Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: “There is no terrorist threat.” And he wonders, “Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?”

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naïvely consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either.

If Moore is America's leading individual soft, liberalism's premier soft organization is MoveOn. MoveOn was formed to oppose Clinton's impeachment, but, after September 11, it turned to opposing the war in Afghanistan. A MoveOn-sponsored petition warned, “If we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban, we become like the terrorists we oppose.”

By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with 9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman. One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to “[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the bombing,” and to “[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of global unity and support for international law.” Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for the CIA and the deployment of American troops to assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines. In October 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that the United States should have “utilize[d] international law and judicial procedures, including due process” against bin Laden and that “it's possible that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban.”

In the past several years, MoveOn has emerged, in the words of Salon's Michelle Goldberg, as “the most important political advocacy group in Democratic circles.” It boasts more than 1.5 million members and raised a remarkable ^$40 million for the 2004 election. Many MoveOn supporters probably disagree with the organization's opposition to the Afghan war, if they are even aware of it, and simply see the group as an effective means to combat Bush. But one of the lessons of the early cold war is scrupulousness about whom liberals let speak in their name. And, while MoveOn's frequent bulletins are far more thoughtful than Moore's rants, they convey the same basic hostility to U.S. power.

In the early days after September 11, MoveOn suggested that foreign aid might prove a better way to defeat terrorism than military action. But, in recent years, it seems to have largely lost interest in any agenda for fighting terrorism at all. Instead, MoveOn's discussion of the subject seems dominated by two, entirely negative, ideas. First, the war on terrorism crushes civil liberties. On July 18, 2002, in a bulletin titled “Can Democracy Survive an Endless ‘War’?,” MoveOn charged that the Patriot Act had “nullified large portions of the Bill of Rights.” Having grossly inflated the Act's effect, the bulletin then contrasted it with the — implicitly far smaller — danger from Al Qaeda, asking: “Is the threat to the United States' existence great enough to justify the evisceration of our most treasured principles?”

Secondly, the war on terrorism diverts attention from liberalism's positive agenda, which is overwhelmingly domestic. The MoveOn bulletin consists largely of links to articles in other publications, and, while the organization says it “does not necessarily endorse the views espoused on the pages that we link to,” the articles generally fit the party line. On October 2, 2002, MoveOn linked to what it called an “excellent article,” whose author complained that "it seems all anyone in Washington can think or talk about is terrorism, rebuilding Afghanistan and un-building Iraq." Another article in the same bulletin notes that “a large proportion of [federal] money is earmarked for security concerns related to the ‘war on terrorism,’ leaving less money available for basic public services.”

Like the softs of the early cold war, MoveOn sees threats to liberalism only on the right. And thus, it makes common cause with the most deeply illiberal elements on the international left. In its campaign against the Iraq war, MoveOn urged its supporters to participate in protests co-sponsored by International ANSWER, a front for the World Workers Party, which has defended Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong Il. When George Packer, in The New York Times Magazine, asked Pariser about sharing the stage with apologists for dictators, he replied, “I'm personally against defending Slobodan Milosevic and calling North Korea a socialist heaven, but it's just not relevant right now.”

Pariser's words could serve as the slogan for today's softs, who do not see the fight against dictatorship and jihad as relevant to their brand of liberalism. When The New York Times asked delegates to this summer's Democratic and Republican conventions which issues were most important, only 2 percent of Democrats mentioned terrorism, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. One percent of Democrats mentioned defense, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. And 1 percent of Democrats mentioned homeland security, compared with 8 percent of Republicans. The irony is that Kerry — influenced by his relatively hawkish advisers — actually supported boosting homeland security funding and increasing the size of the military. But he got little public credit for those proposals, perhaps because most Americans still see the GOP as the party more concerned with security, at home and abroad. And, judging from the delegates at the two conventions, that perception is exactly right.

The Vital Center

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would not have shared MoveOn's fear of an “endless war” on terrorism. In The Vital Center, he wrote, “Free society and totalitarianism today struggle for the minds and hearts of men.... If we believe in free society hard enough to keep on fighting for it, we are pledged to a permanent crisis which will test the moral, political and very possibly the military strength of each side. A ‘permanent’ crisis? Well, a generation or two anyway, permanent in one's own lifetime.”

Schlesinger, in other words, saw the struggle against the totalitarianism of his time not as a distraction from liberalism's real concerns, or as alien to liberalism's core values, but as the arena in which those values found their deepest expression. That meant several things. First, if liberalism was to credibly oppose totalitarianism, it could not be reflexively hostile to military force. Schlesinger denounced what he called “doughfaces,” liberals with “a weakness for impotence ... a fear, that is, of making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences.” Nothing better captures Moore, who denounced the Taliban for its hideous violations of human rights but opposed military action against it — preferring pie-in-the-sky suggestions about nonviolent regime change.

For Schlesinger (who, ironically, has moved toward a softer liberalism later in life), in fact, it was conservatives, with their obsessive hostility to higher taxes, who could not be trusted to fund America's cold war struggle. “An important segment of business opinion,” he wrote, “still hesitates to undertake a foreign policy of the magnitude necessary to prop up a free world against totalitarianism lest it add a few dollars to the tax rate.” After Dwight Eisenhower became president, the ADA took up this line, arguing in October 1953 that the “overriding issue before the American people today is whether the national defense is to be determined by the demands of the world situation or sacrificed to the worship of tax reductions and a balanced budget.” Such critiques laid the groundwork for John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign — a campaign, as Richard Walton notes in Cold War and Counterrevolution, “dominated by a hard-line, get-tough attack on communism.” Once in office, Kennedy dramatically increased military spending.

Such a critique might seem unavailable to liberals today, given that Bush, having abandoned the Republican Party's traditional concern with balanced budgets, seems content to cut taxes and strengthen the U.S. military at the same time. But subtly, the Republican Party's dual imperatives have already begun to collide — with a stronger defense consistently losing out. Bush has not increased the size of the U.S. military since September 11 — despite repeated calls from hawks in his own party — in part because, given his massive tax cuts, he simply cannot afford to. An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack those tax cuts not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless, but, above all, as long-term threats to America's ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today, however, there is no liberal constituency for such an argument in a Democratic Party in which only 2 percent of delegates called “terrorism” their paramount issue and another 1 percent mentioned “defense.”

But Schlesinger and the ADA didn't only attack the right as weak on national defense; they charged that conservatives were not committed to defeating communism in the battle for hearts and minds. It was the ADA's ally, Truman, who had developed the Marshall Plan to safeguard European democracies through massive U.S. foreign aid. And, when Truman proposed extending the principle to the Third World, calling in his 1949 inaugural address for "a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas," it was congressional Republicans who resisted the effort.

Support for a U.S.-led campaign to defeat Third World communism through economic development and social justice remained central to anti-totalitarian liberalism throughout the 1950s. Addressing an ADA meeting in 1952, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut called for an “army” of young Americans to travel to the Third World as “missionaries of democracy.” In 1955, the ADA called for doubling U.S. aid to the Third World, to blunt “the main thrust of communist expansion” and to “help those countries provide the reality of freedom and make an actual start toward economic betterment.” When Kennedy took office, he proposed the Alliance for Progress, a $20 billion Marshall Plan for Latin America. And, answering McMahon's call, he launched the Peace Corps, an opportunity for young Americans to participate “in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.”

The critique the ADA leveled in the ’50s could be leveled by liberals again today. For all the Bush administration's talk about promoting freedom in the Muslim world, its efforts have been crippled by the Republican Party's deep-seated opposition to foreign aid and nation-building, illustrated most disastrously in Iraq. The resources that the United States has committed to democratization and development in the Middle East are trivial, prompting Naiem Sherbiny of Egypt's reformist Ibn Khaldun Center to tell The Washington Post late last year that the Bush administration was “pussyfooting at the margin with small stuff.”

Many Democratic foreign policy thinkers favor a far more ambitious U.S. effort. Biden, for instance, has called for the United States to “dramatically expand our investment in global education.” But, while an updated Marshall Plan and an expanded Peace Corps for the Muslim world are more naturally liberal than conservative ideas, they have not resonated among post-September 11 liberal activists. A new Peace Corps requires faith in America's ability to improve the world, something that Moore — who has said the United States “is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe” — clearly lacks. And a new Marshall Plan clearly contradicts the zero-sum view of foreign aid that undergirded Kerry's vote against the ^$87 billion. In their alienation over Iraq, many liberal activists seem to see the very idea of democracy-promotion as alien. When the Times asked Democratic delegates whether the “United States should try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, or should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs,” more than three times as many Democrats answered “stay out,” even though the question said nothing about military force.

What the ADA understood, and today's softs do not, is that, while in a narrow sense the struggle against totalitarianism may divert resources from domestic causes, it also provides a powerful rationale for a more just society at home. During the early cold war, liberals repeatedly argued that the denial of African American civil rights undermined America's anti-communist efforts in the Third World. This linkage between freedom at home and freedom abroad was particularly important in the debate over civil liberties. One of the hallmarks of ADA liberals was their refusal to imply — as groups like MoveOn sometimes do today — that civil liberties violations represent a greater threat to liberal values than America's totalitarian foes. And, whenever possible, they argued that violations of individual freedom were wrong, at least in part, because they hindered the anti-communist effort. Sadly, few liberal indictments of, for instance, the Ashcroft detentions are couched in similar terms today.

Toward an Anti-Totalitarian Liberalism

For liberals to make such arguments effectively, they must first take back their movement from the softs. We will know such an effort has begun when dissension breaks out within America's key liberal institutions. In the late ’40s, the conflict played out in Minnesota's left-leaning Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, which Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy wrested away from Wallace supporters. It created friction within the NAACP. And it divided the ACLU, which split apart in 1951, with anti-communists controlling the organization and non-communists leaving to form the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.

But, most important, the conflict played out in the labor movement. In 1946, the CIO, which had long included communist-dominated affiliates, began to move against them. Over fierce communist opposition, the CIO endorsed the Marshall Plan, Truman's reelection bid, and the formation of NATO. And, in 1949, the Organization's executive board expelled eleven unions. As Mary Sperling McAuliffe notes in her book Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954, while some of the expelled affiliates were openly communist, others were expelled merely for refusing to declare themselves anti-communist, a sharp contrast from the Popular Front mentality that governed MoveOn's opposition to the Iraq war.

Softs attacked the CIO's action as McCarthyite, but it eliminated any doubt about the American labor movement's commitment to the anti-communist cause. And that commitment became a key part of cold war foreign policy. Already in 1944, the CIO's more conservative rival, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had created the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), which worked to build an anti-totalitarian labor movement around the world. Between 1947 and 1948, the FTUC helped create an alternative to the communist-dominated General Confederation of Labor in France. It helped socialist trade unionists distribute anti-communist literature in Germany's Soviet-controlled zone. And it helped anti-communists take control of the Confederation of Labor in Greece. By the early ’60s, the newly merged AFL-CIO was assisting anti-communists in the Third World as well, with the American Institute for Free Labor Development training 30,000 Latin American trade unionists in courses “with a particular emphasis on the theme of democracy versus totalitarianism.” And the AFL-CIO was spending a remarkable 20 percent of its budget on foreign programs. In 1969, Ronald Radosh could remark in his book, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy , on the “total absorption of American labor leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism.”

That absorption mattered. It created a constituency, deep in the grassroots of the Democratic Party, for the marriage between social justice at home and aggressive anti-communism abroad. Today, however, the U.S. labor movement is largely disconnected from the war against totalitarian Islam, even though independent, liberal-minded unions are an important part of the battle against dictatorship and fanaticism in the Muslim world.

The fight against the Soviet Union was an easier fit, of course, since the unions had seen communism up close. And today's AFL-CIO is not about to purge member unions that ignore national security. But, if elements within American labor threw themselves into the movement for reform in the Muslim world, they would create a base of support for Democrats who put winning the war on terrorism at the center of their campaigns. The same is true for feminist groups, for whom the rights of Muslim women are a natural concern. If these organizations judged candidates on their commitment to promoting liberalism in the Muslim world, and not merely on their commitment to international family planning, they too would subtly shift the Democratic Party's national security image. Challenging the “doughface” feminists who opposed the Afghan war and those labor unionists with a knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power might produce bitter internal conflict. And doing so is harder today because liberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.

Obviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the same. The USSR was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had mercifully little access to the instruments of state power. Communism was more culturally familiar, which provided greater opportunities for domestic subversion but also meant that the United States could more easily mount an ideological response. The peoples of the contemporary Muslim world are far more cynical than the peoples of cold war Eastern Europe about U.S. intentions, though they still yearn for the freedoms the United States embodies.

But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism — like Soviet totalitarianism before it — threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.

Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global jihad will be with us long after American troops stop dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what Schlesinger called “a fighting faith.”

Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most important is that national security can be a calling. If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn. As it did for the men and women who convened at the Willard Hotel.

---

Peter Beinart is the editor of The New Republic.

---

This article reprinted in full without permission for the purposes of discussion and review, as permitted by Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976

Violence

The best poem I've read all week, via Mark A. R. Kleiman.

Wile E. Coyote

Wile E. Coyote ---
super-genius,
western Daedalus or Icarus,
Prometheus or Tantalus unchained,
tortured less by the bird
than his own desire ---
has been edited
from his cartoon hell
of dry river beds,
boulders, and anvils,
treacherous hand-grenades
and fickle physical laws,
into a worse purgatory,
(not spared the mid-air
realization
that he has run too far,
the shock that the Sisyphean stone
is rolling back to him)
where he must fall,
pursued by half a cliff,
but never crash,
be crushed and crawl away,
impossibly alive and hungry
to try again,
by some who'd rather children read
of the slaughter of the Trojan War,
of Pyrrhus's words to Priam,
of Odysseus's hall spattered
with blood and the twitching
feet of his sluttish servants
hanged like doves in the garden.

That's right. We have to get our kids off this junk pop culture, and back to reading wholesome classics like The Odyssey, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Civility

Apostropher on civil discourse in today's divisive political climate.

Well, I'm just having me a grand old time reading all the tut-tutting from the right about how liberals look down on their fellow Americans and how our enduring nastiness and intolerance of conservatives is what keeps us from winning elections and so on and so forth. I supposed they might have a point, so I went back to check the right wing's record of bipartisan we're-all-in-this-togetherness, as reflected by some of their better selling books that were published during the long, polite campaign.

Go check out the list.

Architect X!

You know I try to resist blog memes, but who can resist a superhero identity? Pharyngula started it, but I found out through Majikthise, who has been collecting bloggers' superhero identities.

Personally, I like Majikthise's own super identity, as well as The Flamer and Mad Eye Julie, but it's spreading like wildfire so check out Majikthise's collection for yourself.

You can make your own using HeroMachine, one of the most seductive procrastination tools on the web.

Questions from Calpundit

Kevin Drum has a few questions for conservatives.

Considering how Iraq has gone so far, do you still think that American military power is a good way to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East? Has your position on this changed in any way over the past two years?

If that one amused you, he has eight more.

Unsolicited product endorsement

From Los Angeles Craigslist, I offer you Hey, Mr White SUV! By the time you read this it will be way too late

I quickly stepped backwards onto the sidewalk but not quickly enough to avoid your hitting my ...

Paintbrush.

No, wait; this gets even better

And oh, it does.

Social security

Michael Bérubé asks a vexing question.

It's funny about Social Security, isn't it? The only non-means-tested, universally-implemented social-welfare program in the country, and it's paid for by the most regressive tax on the books --- remember, not a single penny over the $87,900 income level is taxed --- and conservatives still hate it. Yes, it's a quasi-socialist program, but it's quasi-socialism American-style: paid for by working stiffs in the middle-income bracket and almost completely unsupported by wealthy wage-earners and the even wealthier folks whose income derives mainly from investments.)

Paul Krugman, in the course of debunking the argument for privatization, answers it.

They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

Not that I'm cynical.

Headline

MKB says that he has found a news article with the best headline ever.

Pirate divers face jail for looting Nazi ghost liner

Who am I to disagree?

Vampires + pirates

Roger Ebert didn't like Blade III: Trinity, but he is charmed and surprised that Parker Posey turns up in it.

Parker Posey is an actress I have always had affection for, and now it is mixed with increased admiration, for the way she soldiers through an impossible role that requires her to be the first vampire with an iPod. That's an excuse to get the soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi and RZA into the movie, I guess, although I hope she downloaded it from the iTunes Store and isn't a pirate on top of being a vampire.

Thank goodness he doesn't imply that vampires and pirates are enemies. I'm broken up enough about the ninja thing already.

Support our troops!

You can buy this thing. The ad copy reads

The Marine who killed the wounded insurgent in Fallujah deserves our praise and admiration. In a split second decision, he acted valiantly.

In case you've been living under a rock, this refers to an incident a few weeks ago.

A US Marine shot and killed a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, according to dramatic pool television pictures broadcast today
...
Sites reported that a different Marine unit had come under fire from the mosque on Friday. Those Marines stormed the building, killing 10 men and wounding five, Sites said. The Marines said the fighters in the mosque had been armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles. The Marines had treated the wounded, he reported, left them behind and continued on Friday with their drive to retake the city
...
The same five men were still in the mosque on Saturday, Sites said.

On the video, as the camera moved into the mosque during the Saturday incident, a Marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead.

The video then showed a Marine raising his rifle toward a prisoner lying on the floor of the mosque.

The video shown by NBC and provided to the network pool was blacked out at that point and did not show the bullet hitting the man. But a rifle shot could be heard.

The blacked out portion of the video tape, provided later to other members of the network pool, showed the bullet striking the man
...
[Journalist Kevin] Sites’ account said the wounded men, who he said were prisoners and who were hurt in the previous day’s attack, had been shot again by the Marines on the Saturday visit.

The videotape showed two of the wounded men propped against the wall and Sites said they were bleeding to death. According to his report, a third wounded man appeared already dead, while a fourth was severely wounded but breathing. The fifth was covered by a blanket, but did not appear to have been shot again after the Marines returned. It was the fourth man who was shown being shot.

I respect that the Marine in question was a scared kid in a dangerous situation. You could argue that this isn't a misjudgement for which he should be punished. But "acted valiantly" just is not an expression to use here. As Zenyap at Under the Same Sun reminds us it's unbecoming to wear a t-shirt celebrating American war crimes.

Imagine a wounded, unarmed marine being left to die in a church in, say, rural Montana by, say, the occupying army. A day later another group of occupier soldiers come back, notice one of the wounded marines is still not dead, and shoots him, point blank, on camera. Then, all they talk about is how the shooter had the right to defend himself from the unarmed, wounded, dying man on the ground ...

In this situation, how can we hope to accomplish anything other than more hatred for the US?

---

Update: Digby comments further on the shirt.

Democrats and Libertarians

Belle Waring observes that a lot of lefty civil libertarian Democrats are much better allies to Libertarians than the contemporary Republican party.

I support 2nd amendment rights, think drugs should be legalized, support means testing of social security, and think running permanent trillion-dollar deficits is a bad idea. What's more, I favor the elimination of all agricultural and industrial subsidies! And free trade! And abortion rights! I think people should be allowed to form unions, and also not form unions. I don't think it's good that the teacher's unions should forever stymie potential reforms in the US educational system, but I also think NCLB is an invasive federal program wedded to testing for its own sake, which imposes costs on the states and doesn't supply federal money to pay for them. I think market-based solutions to environmental problems, such as pollution credits, can be great, in the context of stern enforcement of existing environmental protections. I don't think the feds should subsidize grazing, logging, or mining on government-owned lands. I favor innovative traffic-mitigation schemes involving variable road pricing! Ooh, ooh, and I think prostitution and gambling should be legal! And I love gay marriage! Come here, gay marriage, I'm going to give you a big wet kiss. And the firm separation of church and state!

Hey, that's me, too! Come on, Libertarians, let's party!

Sed quis custodiet?

Clearly when Alan Moore cast a spell to bring him money, he didn't specify that if the money came from Hollywood good directors be attached to the projects.

The Hughes Brothers' From Hell was a tolerably good film, as a film, but one wondered why it bothered to conceive of itself as an adaptation of Moore's comic. The comic was a moody, discursive rumination on Victorian culture and economics, Masonic magick, and the challenges of trying to understand Jack the Ripper across the gulf of time and unsolved mystery. The scholarly endnotes threatened to run longer than the comic itself. The film was a nicely shot thriller focused on contemporary iconography of Victoriana --- gaslamps! fog! cobblestones! top hats! corsets! Yes, the movie scores points for letting Johnny Depp's Inspector Abberline smoke opium, but then loses them again by changing the book to make him into a psychic with visions that drive the plot. And while you might forgive a movie for giving us a Mary Kelly who's not quite as realistic as Moore's ragged, weary drab, sleeping in ropehouses and living on beer and stale bread, making Heather Graham the cleanest, best-groomed prostitute in history was absurd ... and then turning Moore's conceit that she and Abberline crossed paths a few times into and entire romance subplot was unforgivably stupid, even looking at the film on its own terms.

And The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wasn't even a good example of a stupid Hollywood blockbuster. It was just lousy. (Okay, when a thug discovers that Dorian Gray has mutant healing superpowers like Wolverine --- which I submit is a lame conceit that disrespects my man Oscar Wilde --- and asks him what are you? I'll grant that I chuckled when Gray responds, I'm complex --- but that was the only charming moment in the whole dreary thing.) That it borrowed a few fragmentary shards from Moore's witty, loving pastiche of Victorian literature only made the pain that much worse.

So now we learn that the film adaptation of The Watchmen will finally get made. The director of The Bourne Supremacy is at the helm. Sure, The Bourne Supremacy was nice enough, but to tackle Watchmen you need a super-genius. Recall that Terry Gilliam tried for years to do it, then finally gave up because he thought it was too ambitious. When the man who made Brazil decides that a film project is too ambitious to actually execute, you know you have some fundamental problems.

That said, let's play the casting game, shall we?

Rorschach has to be William H. Macy, who looks the part, can act up a storm, and would steal every scene he was in, as he should

Nite Owl could be a few different actors, but I quite like Alec Baldwin --- you get "famous hero aging gracelessly" for free

Ozymandias shoulda been Redford, but he's too old for it now, so I'd be tempted to cast against physical type and use Jeff Goldblum, the only actor I can think of who immediately conveys the idea of a character who thinks too much --- and I'd love to hear him read the line, "you know, that was another thing I wasn't sure would work."

Doctor Manhattan would be a good Johnny Depp role, since he needs to be both otherworldly and emotionally vulnerable

The Comedian could be Willem Dafoe: sure, he isn't a big beefy guy like he is in the comic, but he would immediately sell that the character is a creep dressed up as a hero, yet still be a bit sympathetic

Laurie Juspeczyk, the daughter of the Silk Spectre, unfortunately isn't much of a role, so any number of dishy actresses could do it, though it occurs to me ...

Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre, could be Lauren Bacall, which suggests ...

Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, really ought to be a Paul Newman cameo, so long as we're wishing

Preëmption

I'll need those desert goggles after all

I didn't go this year, and I was starting to think that I probably wouldn't again next year. But it seems I must make the trek to the playa for Burning Man, for I have received news as mind-boggling as Burning Man itself.

It begins with Chicken John (impressario of San Francisco weirdness and proprietor of the notorious Odeon Bar) and Jim Mason (hardworking artist). Frustrated with the state of art at Burning Man — and attributing this to the process by which the Burning Man organization sponsors and organizes art, they composed the We Have A Dream Petition.

We are the artists. We feel that this event which we made great has gotten away from us and we would like it back. We want the art to be spectacular again and we are willing to step forward to do the work to make it so. But for this to happen, we think the "art curation" should be put in the hands of rotating “Guest Curators” and funding decisions should be made through “Direct Vote” by the community of participants.

We petitioners require action on these very reasonable proposals or we commit to STOP CONTRIBUTING our art to Burning Man. Repeated discussions over many years have failed to result in meaningful change, so now we are resorting to more extreme measures. TOGETHER we can change things.

The petition garnered about a thousand signatures. Famed Burning Man founder Larry Harvey was impressed by the energy behind the petition, but publicly expressed his skepticism — at length — about the pragmatics of the petitioners' agenda, detailing the problems he perceived in their petition.

I see no evidence that the authors of this manifesto have imagined any of these problems. This is because they are accustomed to receiving grants from Burning Man, not giving them. I apologize for dwelling at such length upon these details, but even the writers of the manifesto seem to sense some details are important. I suspect that this is why they have done me the honor of appointing me to the Art Council that is proposed in their plan. This council would deal with “the details of funding decisions and general art logistics.” Other unspecified artists, I am informed, are to be appointed to this council (by whom, I'm not entirely sure). Since the group that has drafted this plan hasn't yet talked to me, I'm left to assume that the basic principle of radical democracy would require that these offices be filled through popular election. Which brings me to a broader and more fundamental point. I don't know how many people notice this, but as we pile vote upon vote and plebiscite upon plebiscite we are wading very deep into the world of election politics.

Chicken John, undaunted, wrote a bold response.

I feel so strongly about this that I would like to propose a small bet, Mr. Harvey. When Gentleman see no other way to settle a difference, a wager is what is in order.

I bet you that the people of the petition can make a system of MASSIVELY COLLABORATIVE RADICAL DEMOCRACY, with guest curators and voting and all that, and in the process inspire a volume and quality of creative work that you will envy and wish you were responsible for yourself. In fact, I find these ideas so strong, so self-evidently true, so INVINCIBLE TO STUPIDITY, that no one alive could mess up an experiment based on these ideas. The ideas are THAT strong.

I am so confident in these ideas, that I Chicken John (idiot) challenge you, Larry Harvey (leader of humanity) to a contest of curatorial methods. A bet of art facilitation and inspiration if you will.

In short, I CHALLENGE YOU TO AN ART DUEL.

I bet you that these ideas will work and the 1000+ petitioners will be successful in their designs. And when they are, I only ask that you CONSIDER changing the current Burning Man art system to better reflect the ideas and methods they used to achieve their success.

If I am wrong and the petitioners are unsuccessful, I hereby commit to sit in a dunk booth at next years Burning Man Decompression Party and let everyone soak my ass, all day long. And yes, I will sit there all day long- throw, after throw, after throw. Wearing a sarong.

Larry Harvey, I bet you my COMPLETE and UTTER HUMILIATION against your mild consideration; that is how confident I am that these ideas will work.

And Larry Harvey ... took the bet.

Dear Chicken, Jim and the other participants of the BORG2,

On behalf of BORG1, I, Larry Harvey, accept your bet. What is more is truly more. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a thousand schools contend!

To enter more fully into the sporting spirit of this contest, please let me rehearse the terms of the wager. You pledge to create a “massively collaborative” art installation achieved through "radically democratic means" in an allotted district of Black Rock City, and you will accomplish this feat entirely with your own funding. The art that you produce will then be matched against our own poor efforts at supporting and creating art. Should your woo woo trump our hoo ha on the playa, I pledge to reconsider my opposition to your radically democratic curatorial methods. Should our hoo ha make your woo woo look ho hum, you commit to sit all day in a dunking booth at next year's Decompression. Let Chaos Provide!

As to those things Chaos probably won't provide, I'll mention fire safety, camp placement, burn scar protection, clean up and any number of other small details, including the requirements of the BLM. BORG 1 and 2 will parlay to resolve these issues. In order to assure a level playing field, both parties must agree to honor all the rules of Black Rock City (Chaos also won't provide immunity from local, State, and Federal criminal laws ...

I predict a dazzling, gorgeous, epic failure. But I have to know how it all comes out. So I'm giving Jim and Chicken John a few shekels today, and scheduling my Burning Man vacation time at the office tomorrow.

Elections

I'm going to step into paranoia-land for a moment. The democratic legitimacy of our government is getting to be seriously compromised.

Now first things first: I'm not saying that Kerry “really” won the 2004 election. I don't have clear evidence of that. To the best of my knowledge, Bush won both the popular vote and the electoral vote.

The problem is, how good is the best of my knowledge?

There's good reason to think that the Florida results were fishy. There's scary evidence that electronic voting machines are as compromised as we have cause to fear. There was more chicanery in Florida. There's the mystery of why election results no longer match exit polls, a problem which some people take pretty seriously. And so on, on and on.

There's an epistemological crisis at work here. How can we know, as individual citizens, that the reported election results are correct?

Now step back to 2000. Bush was legitimately sworn in as President: an orderly, legal, and legitimate political process brought him there. But in terms of democracy, which means the will of the demos — the citizenry — our process failed us. Gore won the popular vote. He would have won a statewide recount in Florida using the “clear intent of the voter” standard, due to clear overvotes. We all know that, by the intended will of the voters, he would have won the initial count of the Florida vote were it not for a fluke of bad ballot design. In the process of sorting this stuff out, Bush took the Presidency by way of an outrageously nonsensical Supreme Court decision.

There's an ontological crisis there. Who is the “real” winner of the 2000 election?

Understand, I accept the results of both elections. Obviously, both elections were close, and given the flaws in the mechanics of the electoral process it's hard to confidently identify a clear winner within that margin. I don't see much to be gained from challenging the results at this point. With the current system in place and the genuinely split electorate, that way lies madness. How could any result from a challenge produce a winner who holds any better legitimacy in the eyes of the American people?

But on a deeper level, long-term, we cannot be making these evaluations with the caveat “given the flaws in the mechanics of the electoral process.” That breeds paranoia and distrust of the legitimacy of the electoral process as a whole. We need reform to eliminate the problems of both elections, and we're not getting it. The lack of reform, the lack of discussion, the lack of investigation — these are more corrosive than the electoral irregularities themselves.

If no one trustworthy is doing the detective-work, then citizens become susceptable not only to reasonable doubts, but also to bogus questions about the legitimacy of our elections. Which then makes bogus arguments proliferate, because they're easy to make. Which can create an environment in which a significant portion of the population simply rejects the legitimacy of our elections. We're already starting to see a lot of doubt, and a little bit of outright rejection of electoral results, out here on the left.

If that spreads, then there are two scary results. First, the legitimacy of the sitting government comes into question, because that legitimacy rests on the legitimacy of the elections that define it. Second, the legitimacy of popular election as a mechanism of democracy becomes questionable. If we cannot trust that elections work, then how do we define democracy? Do we believe in democracy at all at that point?

A modest proposal

It's a bit late for this, what with the election over, but I have to share a disconcerting thought experiment that Big Media Matt proposes.

How can a President Kerry scale back some of the more egregious abuses of power Bush has committed without getting blamed for being 'soft' on terrorism. Simply rescinding the 'enemy combatant' orders isn't good enough, since the viability of that strategy depends on the Democrats winning every election ever which isn't realistic. Plus, it makes Kerry 'soft.' But what if he were to order the entire Republican congressional caucus to be arrested, shipped to Gitmo, and held imcommunicado? Then he could tell the GOPers that they're free to go as soon as they produce a bill putting some limits on, and oversight of, executive authority in this regard.

It woulda been fun.

Bowling noir

The web contains pages on every conceivable subject, as well as most inconceivable subjects. Case in point:

A fedora-bedecked man stands in the shadows, staring out at the city lights. A match flares under his Lucky Strike. For a quick, chiaroscuric moment, we see his face: eyes haunted by recent murder, upper lip quivering with psychosexual conflict. He blows out the match. A backlit puff of smoke curls up from his silhouette --- a not-too-subtle brimstonic portent of the damnation that is his fate, beckoning to him like a dark-eyed siren lounging in a cheap cocktail dress on the rocky shore of lust. The man turns up his collar. Touches the warm gun in his overcoat. And steps out to face the night, his bowling bag clutched firmly in his fist.

His bowling bag?

That's right. Because this isn't just any film noir. This is that sub- of sub-genres, the rarest of the rare, the hardest of the boiled: bowling noir. Or, as the French might say: bowling noir.

What's that? You've never heard of bowling noir?

Remember, this stuff doesn't just grow like mold. Someone had to sit down at a keyboard, think, and type those words.

Four versions of Poppy Z. Brite

Even if you're not interested in the writer Poppy Z. Brite, you may enjoy her description of the four stages of her writing career.

Living in the French Quarter wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd always thought it would be, especially since I wasn't drinking alcohol at the time. (How I thought I could live in New Orleans and not drink is utterly beyond me.) Couldn't seem to get serial killers out of my system; in addition to the two novels, I made them the subject of several short stories and one comics script ("Becoming the Monster" in Weird Business, illustrated by Miran Kim) and pontificated obnoxiously about them in interviews. Big influences during this time included Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen, Dennis Cooper, Gregg Araki's movie The Living End, the Church of Euthanasia, and my own belief that I was some sort of nihilist rock star of the horror scene.

Personally, I don't recommend her writing from the period she's describing: Excuisite Corpse is a serial killer novel too dark and nihilistic even for me. But Lost Souls, from the stage before, is a trashy goth delight about adorable tortured gay goth boys in love (but haunted very literally by ghosts of the past, natch) --- and her short story "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves" is a true horror classic, poetically taking us through the streets of Calcutta in George Romero's zombie world.

Today's quote

From Patriotic High-Fructose Corn Syrup, a little review of National Treasure, which offers a terrific alternate ending to the movie. I haven't seen the picture, and I can tell you that this ending is better than what actually shows up in the movie.

Some day, they should make a movie that only has Sean Bean and Gene Hackman in it, and we could watch them betray each other recursively for 110 minutes.

I'd go see it. David Mamet should write and direct.

More on resentment of the left

Continuing on the theme of Mark A.R. Kleiman's observation about how many Americans feel that the left has unfairly imposed its views on them, that I blogged about a little while ago, Ezra at Pandagon points to the strategic problems with liberal victories in the courts when the legislative battle is intractable.

... the Democratic Party's problems stem from the backlash of a century of victories based on judicial fiat instead of legislative victory. The latter requires dialogue, debate, coalition-building and enough successful persuasion that Congress feels electorally safe supporting the change (not to mention the legislative Crate and Barrel Rule: If you pass it, it's yours to defend); the former is a proclamation from on high, full of the authoritarian, elitist resonances that backlash politics requires.
...
I comforted myself with the thought that the Courts, the Courts would save us. With them, though, the cure is worse than the disease. In the last century, liberals have beaten racial bigotry, evangelical authoritarianism and sexual discrimination through the Courts. And now we're paying the price. And we'll keep paying until we realize that the question isn't how to win the culture battles --- we've spent the last 60 years using judges to rack up a damn impressive string of victories. The question, rather, is how to ensure that 50.1% of America cheers our victories, rather than feels they lost the game on the umpire's call.

The challenge here, of course, is that if we can't win an important point in the legislature, can and should we let it slide in the courts, in order to prevent this problem in public perception? The issues actually on the table and the inherent dangers of corrosion of Constitutional protections make this a scary proposition.

Intellectual honesty

Mark A.R. Kleiman shows us what you do when someone takes pains to clarify something for you.

In addition to reminding me about the difference between Aesop and Prokofiev, a number of readers told me I was utterly and completely wrong about what's going on in Iran and what to do about it.

It's not unusual, of course, for me to be utterly and completely wrong, or for my readers to bring my errors to my attention.

What is unusual is that several of them made arguments and offered facts that seemed cogent even to me, and that all of them were polite.

I'm no expert, and they could well be right. So in lieu of a comments section, I'm posting some of their emails.

He's right; the email he got is very clarifying about how to handle a potentially-nuclear Iran. (Hint: if we rush in to kill people and blow things up, it will be counterproductive.)

Bitter

I've been saving all of the unfair, whiny, angry, ranting lefty stuff I've been seeing in the wake of the election for one big primal scream. If you care to see them, I have a collection of the best of the bitter ...

A lot of Americans just want to say they're sorry to the world.

Many wags joke about walking away. An anonymous successionist declares a new blue republic of California ...

We spoke to God, and she agrees that this split will be beneficial to almost everybody, and especially to us in the new country of California.

... which probably should be coordinated with this plan ...

For the past three years, we have, in conjunction with a handful of MIT engineers, been constructing a giant, cordless circular saw, which is now complete. With this saw, we plan to carve our thriving, prosperous eastern Blue nation away from the spreading infection of red America. We will then set a mighty sail, which will carry us around the tip of South America and allow us to join our Blue compadres on the West Coast.

... unless Californians decide to go it alone, or we all just join Canada.

And that's all I have that's good humoured. One guy gets angry and serious about dividing up the country, saying fuck the South.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves --- yeah, those are states we want to keep.

Ken MacLeod grieves and starts planning how to fight back.

Well, now the American people have legitimised the bastard. Of course many, perhaps most, of those who voted for the President didn't consciously and deliberately vote for all he stands for. This is because not all, but a substantial portion, were too fucking stupid to find out. These knuckle-dragging cousin-fuckers who are LIVING PROOF that Darwin was right and who were piped to the polls by shills for crony capitalists who are LIVING PROOF that Marx was right still think America was attacked by Iraq, and payback is a bitch. I have news for them. It is. My only problem with that, frankly, is that I love too many folks who don't deserve to be collateral damage.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden thinks that Bush voters only now realize how serious this all is.

You know what’s really happening? They’re seeing our reactions, and they’re scared. It’s like that moment where someone tells you what they’ve done, and it’s disastrously wrong, a complete catastrophe; only they haven’t understood that until now, when they see you stagger and turn pale at the news. And as you’re standing there steadying yourself, feeling your heart pounding and a terrible weight descending on your shoulders … you realize that the other person is preemptively yelling at you. They still don’t quite know what’s happened, but they can tell they’ve screwed up big time, so they’re screaming that they certainly hope you aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault, because …

They can tell we’re not just acting like we’ve lost an election. They know that politically, they haven’t been acting like responsible grownups. So now, their reaction is to raise and sharpen their voices, and say they certainly hope we aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault …

Well, yes. It is. They’ve been stupid and self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Timothy Burke says that Republicans have no one left to blame, now.

With eyes wide open, in full possession of their faculties, acting as sovereign individuals, around 51% of American voters leapt consciously and clearly into the abyss, taking us with them.

Are you one of them? The nation is yours, but you are not stewards generously preserving something precious to us all. You are destroyers.

And Big Media Matt says that "values voters" are not only wrong, they're chumps.

This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.

Or, rather, not nothing, in another sense it has wrought a great deal. Tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to Republican-friendly corporations and campaign contributors have proliferated faster than gay pride parades and pornographic websites. Back in Washington for his victory lap, Bush claimed a mandate from the voters and proceeded to outline his agenda for his second term -- tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for energy companies, tax shelters for the wealthy, a massive giveaway to the insurance industry, and a larger giveaway to the financial services industry. The faith-based agenda of his most loyal flock was left on the cutting room floor. Just as it always has been, and just as it always will be. The powers that be in the Republican Party are, as in Andrew Sullivan's memorable phrase, "closet tolerants," uninterested in the values agenda except as a hateful prop to be deployed at campaign time.

A large bloc of their voters are, meanwhile, chumps. Not because they support a party whose economic agenda departs from their interests, but because they support a party that consistently refuses to take action on the issues that matter to them. It's the product of the same warped worldview that led most Bush voters in 2000 to tell exit pollsters that it's more important to have a president who provides "moral leadership" than one who can "manage the government." Their conception of the presidency -- of politics itself -- is detached from the reality of what can be achieved through political action. The president is not the preacher in chief; he's the chief executive.

Okay, I feel better, having got that out of my system.

Taxes

If you're going to be following the coming political fight over tax code revision, Big Media Matt conveniently gives a capsule review of what W has proposed.

... once the estate tax elimination is fully phased in, if you happen to inherit a large fortune that provides enough income to live off of without working, you'll never need to pay any taxes at all. Note that if the problem with the Alternative Minimum Tax is that it was "designed to ensure that the rich pay income taxes but one that increasingly ensnares the middle class," the solution is to raise the threshold at which the AMT kicks in and index it to inflation so this doesn't happen again. Eliminating the AMT isn't a way to help the middle class ...

Go check it out; it will help energize your BS detector on this topic for months to come.

Making learning fun

Learn about software message exchanges by visiting Starbuck's! Not as much fun as A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but still pretty good.

More torture

Salon just ran an interview with Leila Sadat, a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom during the Clinton administration, about the Red Cross report on Guantánamo Bay. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's torture.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I am surprised that they were using torture at Guantánamo.
...
It's torture. A lot of these techniques have been looked at in other countries; there's been a lot of litigation about them. They seem pretty clearly to be prohibited by the torture convention and I suppose even those that don’t amount to torture would nonetheless qualify as cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment, and that is also a legal definition.

Which tells us that the use of torture isn't just a few low-ranking folks at Abu Graib, it's systemic. Not that I didn't already know that.

It's long past time that the President, in his rôle as commander-in chief, took responsibility for rooting this out. But that's hardly likely, given how he just promoted Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who wrote the infamous torture memo, to Attorney General of the United States.

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Update: Orcinus has more on Gonzales as a bellweather domestically.