Motley Moose – Archive

Lately, frumforum.com has been on my daily internet menu.  David Frum is, for obvious reasons, one of the most popular neo-con apostates among progressives.  Mr. ‘axis of evil’–yeah, he’s the one that coined that term–has shown great intellectual courage over the past few years, especially since he was ejected from the Heritage Institute in the most weasley of manners.  They didn’t even fire him.  They just informed him that they would no longer pay him or suppply him with office space or any resources.  What a bold stand they took in the face of his critical and pragmatic brand of conservatism.  Now he’s marginalized, and his sphere of influence doesn’t seem likely to expand anytime soon.

Here’s a bit from this morning’s top post:

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off – not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people – but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination. After all, if almost every elected Republican leader of the past 100 years save Reagan fell short of conservative  principle, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the next Republican leader will also fall short of conservative principle. In which case, conservative principle has become a vehicle for guaranteeing eternal conservative disappointment and alienation. Unhealthy, no?

http://www.frumforum.com/marco…

Now, it’s obviously refreshing to hear conservatives take on the Tee Party.  Frum isn’t the only one to do so.  But what I find both refreshing and somewhat saddening about Frum is that he remains an unabashed conservative.  He adheres to basic conservative principles but reads widely in economics and policy analysis.  He conceded that the rationale behind main conservative points of opposition to marriage equality hasn’t been born out in the real world while defending the principles upon which it has been misguidedly based.  On the other hand, he has failed to acknowledge how much that opposition is based on bigotry.  But at least he dropped his own.  

As I read his blog, mostly his own posts but other writers as well, many of them young, I get very sad.  Was it really that long ago that we had sincere–as opposed to shallow and zealous–conservatives with who we could work and, more importantly debate.  The agon has become agony.  And it impoverishes progressivism as well as conservativism when there is such meager opportunity to give and receive critical input in a vigorous and reasonable manner.  It makes clear that the Tee Party hasn’t just seized the GOP by the throat.  Rather, in doing so, it is also strangling the public sphere.  It’s not that I am looking for ‘common ground.’  It’s that the extended and broad symposium that public life in a  democracy is supposed to foster, and upon which it depends, is being degraded, primarily by one constituency.  And let’s not get into the false equivalency game.  Fair-mindedness doesn’t necessitate crediting all positions and actions equally.  The Tee Party has no progressive counterpart.  No matter what they imagine and spin.  Not MoveOn.org.  Not DKos.  Not the unions.  Not the NOW.  Not the ALCU.  Not the Academy.  Not any of the progressive boogie people they promote to justify their aggression as the rightful defense of persecuted victims.

My point is that we cannot reinvigorate the market place of ideas in this country from only one side.  Right now, there’s a group of deranged screamers in the agora.  

Perhaps the way forward for us is to stop responding to the Tee Party.  They are basically attention starved and power hungry.  Let’s instead reserve our responses for those conservatives with whom we can speak.  Maybe we should spend more time reading and debating conservatives like Frum.  That might increase his status, though I doubt it, and attract others from his side.  Giving him a frequent platform on MSNBC enhances the discussions there.  But it might just work against us.  It’s turning him into a more intelligent version of David Brooks.  Increasing traffic on FrumForum might just do something.

How should Moose respond when someone injects historical misrepresentations and over-simplifications into a discussion and refuses to recognize corrections?

How should Moose respond when someone takes an entire discussion and molds it according to the terms of an eminently falsifiable right-wing script?

How should Moose respond when someone makes a mockery of one’s cultural history and identity?

How does one remain an intellectually honest Moose in the face of persistent intellectual dishonesty?

These are real questions.  There has to be a place between Moose civility and tolerance on one side, and damaging distortion on the other.  “Thanks for sharing your perspective, though I don’t agree–would you care for another delightful crumpet?” just doesn’t cut it in egregious cases.  

There is one question, or set of questions, that I want Michele Bachmann to answer in a presidential debate, but no one will ask them:

Congresswoman Bachmann, do you subscribe to the doctrine of the Rapture, which suggests that the elect will be translated miraculously into heaven while the rest remain to suffer tribulation?  

If not, how can you pledge to serve the interests of all Americans faithfully?

The rapture differs from all other messianisms.  It proposes that the elect will not face apocalyptic upheaval along with the majority of humanity.  Those left behind–to employ commercially successful terminology–will include some who will eventually be saved and many who will not.  But all will suffer.  

Pre-millenial dispensationalism proposes that Christ will return and reign on earth before a final battle with anti-Christ.  Post-millenial dispensationalism envisions a period of earthly glory at the end of which Christ will appear and defeat anti-Christ.  In both situations, which posit a historical period between history’s consummation and the final, triumphant remaking of the world, humanity remains together.  Other Christian historiographical schema posit no such period.  Whoever lives at the time of the apocalypse will face its upheavals together.  Jewish messianisms operate in this fashion.  In all these situations, humanity remains together in the final stage of history.  Only adherents of the rapture posit a prior division between the elect and everyone else.  

It doesn’t matter that I don’t ascribe to any of these.  It matters what Michele Bachmann believes.  It bears upon what kind of commitment she is prepared to make to the American people.  If she believes she will be raptured, I want to know whom she proposes will govern in her stead.  And it doesn’t really seem like she can solve the conundrum of choosing the best possible person while being confident that person will not merit being raptured.

The difference could not have been more stark between Democratic and GOP reactions in the aftermath of yesterday’s passage of the debt ceiling deal.  Boehner gloated Mon. evening that he got “98%” of what he wanted and claimed to be “very happy.”  No question here that he dragged the ugly, singed, diminished and shapeless mass that is his speakership out of the Tee Party’s campfire.  McConnell doubled down on using the debt ceiling as an extortion device.  Most of the commentariat shook its head in dissatisfaction with the President’s negotiating performance.  One fascinating round-table with lefty academics I read focused on the question of whether Obama is weak or a neo-conservative who is little better than Irving Kristol (a bit hyperbolic, but some solid points were made all around, especially by Adolf Reed – http://coreyrobin.com/2011/08/… ).   Reid, Pelosi, and Obama, as well as other congressional leaders made cases ranging from “it could have been a lot worse,” “we protected entitlements,” “now we can focus hard core and tough on jobs,” to “we were the responsible ones” and “they gave up stuff too, the system worked and compromises were made on both sides.”  But this doesn’t really seem to match Boehner’s “98%!!!” and McConnell’s “extortion is awesome.”  

The fact is, the GOP held a match to our ability to function, to all our mortgages, to our ability to pay our military, our elderly, our teachers, and ultimately to Wall Street itself and extracted an economically harmful bill that will further burden the recovery.  This is what they have called “fiscal responsibility.”  It seems to me, given that the market tanked yesterday, that our credit rating is still in jeopardy, and that no economist believes that this will aid jobs and growth, that we would have been better off to declare defeat.  This was their victory.  We made mistakes that enabled them to victimize the American economy out of ideological zeal and with unethical tactics that can only be justified through ignorance or fanaticism or both.  We will not blink again.  They own this.  They have shoved us deeper into a crisis.  We knew they were extreme and that they fail to understand economics.  But we believed that they would hold the nation and the welfare of American families as sacred, not as hostages to implement their facile slogans and flatter their own ideological self-righteousness.  We will not make that mistake again.  Neither should you.

Next summer, as the recovery continues to founder, we should run that clip of Boehner gloating that he got 98% of what he wanted and ask whether people believe that we could survive the other 2%.

Never in history have we cut our way out of a recession.  No nation state in history has ever done so.  The vast majority of economists and historians have demonstrated this conclusively.  We need to grow our way out of this problem.

The deficit is a long-term problem.  We must address it by growing our economy while trimming spending only in ways that do not work against growth.  

We have cut taxes on the wealthiest to historic levels and still the private sector hesitates to invest in America by creating jobs.  Government must lead by creating jobs that will put money in the pockets of more Americans.  This will expand the market and encourage private sector job growth, enabling us to cut back public sector jobs once the economy is growing at an adequate rate.  It will also increase revenues to help support our investment in America’s future by increasing the number of Americans paying income tax to the federal government and sales tax to city and state governments.  Foreclosures will no longer force American families into desperate situations where they cannot contribute to the economy, nor will they threaten the solvency of our banks and financial institutions.

Our opponents cast government as a threat to liberty.  The history of the United States is revolutionary in that it demonstrated how the government of a Democratic Republic can increase liberty.  The US government has worked to guarantee personal freedoms, voting rights, property rights and continues to protect them.  Our government, representative as it is of the American people, our ideals and our traditions, is not a threat to liberty, but its primary advocate and guarantor.  It is our duty to continue to lead the civilized world by setting the finest example of Republican Democracy that we can.  We must continue to lead the way.  Attacking our own government with paranoid slanders, undermining our economy with a faith-based moral perspective that ignores historical precedent, as opposed to building ourselves back up with a faith in our ideals that helps us recognize the facts and lessons of our own history, is an abdication of everything good this country has represented since our founders replaced a tyrannical government with one subject to and in service to all its citizens.

The causes of our current crisis are neither moral nor pathological.  We have not lost our way, nor have we become beleaguered addicts to waste and corruption.  The causes are practical and the solutions must be pragmatic.  While government cannot be the entire solution, there is no solving this crisis without vigorous government leadership.

We engaged in wars without raising the funds to wage them.  No taxes were raised and no bonds sold.  We must bring these wars to a close as soon as we can responsibly do so.  

We stripped away necessary regulations that protected the parameters of our financial system.  We must restore those regulations that, like the rules in any competitive sport, enable players and teams to excel.  

Finally, we must address income inequality.  No society has ever been able to operate in a stable and peaceful manner without a reasonable distribution of wealth.  The wealthy, in hording far too much of our nation’s economic value, are threatening not only the rest of us, but the basis of their own prosperity.  They are starving the goose that has laid their golden eggs.  This must be addressed through comprehensive tax reform.

Our opponents want government to retreat precisely when we need it to lead.  Our opponents demonize government and claim to represent the American people.  They do indeed represent a percentage of the American people.  But not all of the American people.  Those who disagree with them are no less a part of the American people.  The American people elected a government to lead, not retreat.  Government office holders must both listen to all the people that elected them and that elected their colleagues and they must lead as they were elected to do.  Government must lead both responsively and responsibly.  Demonizing the US government is anti-patriotic.  It demonizes the people that elected that government.  

Taxes are neither evil nor sacred.  They are tools that must be used appropriately.  It’s easy to base an entire movement on hatred of taxes.  It’s easy to base an entire movement on hatred of a government bogey man.  It’s easy to scare people by telling them that government seeks to restrict their liberty.  It’s easy to pander to people with false analogies and flatter them with appeals to common sense.  Common sense cannot replace expertise when dealing with complex systems.  National economies are not simply larger versions of family and business economies.  They are the context that enables the functions of businesses and families.  Anarchy, the lack of government, does not protect families or the conditions in which businesses flourish.  Our national economy is not just a bigger system, but a more complex one.  

When you need surgery and your life is at stake, you want the most highly trained, skilled, and learned surgical team.  But you also need that team to explain to you why its diagnosis and plan for treatment is the optimal one.  Your surgeon and her team have this responsibility.  Our economic predicament is as complex a system as a human body.  We won’t solve it with platitudes and flattering lip service to our common sense.  Platitudes and flattery are a form of condescension.  We must turn to our leaders and economists and demand clear explanations.  We must join together to make prudent decisions.  Immediate, simple, miracle cures are nothing but snake oil.  We must have faith in ourselves and at the same time listen and learn with humility.  

Slogans and catch phrases will feed our anger and fears, not relieve their causes.  It’s time to put aside divisive rhetoric and easy slogans.  It’s time to pull together to solve our problems.  FDR taught that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  Bill Clinton reminded us that “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what’s right with America.”  If we shed our fear and look to what’s right with America, we will fulfill Ronald Reagan’s vision of a new “morning in America.”  Let us put aside our fretting and our fighting.  Let’s get to work.

The Tee Party’s economic arguments (if we grant sloganeering talking points the status of arguments) rest on two blatant fallacies that have been allowed to stand.

1. The economy of a nation state is the same as the economy of a nuclear family or of a small business, just writ large.  The relationship between them is of scale and quantity, of macrocosm to microcosm.

Refutation: This is a blatant confusion of difference in kind with difference in degree.  A difference in kind is an essential or fundamental qualitative difference; a difference in degree is quantitative.  Here are a few examples:

Asses and Elephants differ in kind; Liberals and Progressives differ in degree.  Brussel Sprouts and Peaches differ in kind; Brussel Sprouts and Cabbages differ in degree.  My wife and I differ in kind with regard to sex and gender; we differ in degree with regard to height.  

National economies differ systemically from those of nuclear families and small businesses.  They differ in kind.  Small businesses and families do not hold responsibility for the infrastructure that facilitates their operations or the legal system that structures them.  They only participate in these material and abstract mechanisms through paying taxes.  National economies are responsible for entire contexts and control the systems in which all of these economies operate.  They have different responsibilities and different powers.  They aren’t simply a macrocosm of your household budget.  They bear as much in common with your family’s economic operation as the ecosystem of a continental region bears with that of a single fishing pond.  Managing them requires a whole different set of skills, considerations, and calculations, which leads to the related second fallacy:

2. Common sense tells us that the deficit is unsustainable and spending is the problem.  

Refutation: Long term, these are both correct.  But to grasp distinctions between short-term and long-term considerations and to make decisions accordingly requires more than common sense.  This populist pandering, this rejection of any academic expertise as biased obfuscation, is nothing more than dangerous mis-education through flattery.  And flattery is a form of condescension.

As noted above, national economies differ from family and small business economies in kind, not degree.  Yet when voters are told that their relationship is that of microcosm to macrocosm, they think that they are smart enough to fix the US economy because they can balance a household checkbook or read a quarterly balance sheet.  They are wrong.  It’s like the father of a child who is in the midst of a pulmonary emergency overriding the advice of a thoracic surgeon because he knows how to change the oil in his automobile and “common sense” tells him that the surgeon’s approach to the problem is counter-intuitive.  Furthermore, that the surgeon is an elitist protecting his own privilege and making money of a runaway system that includes years of unnecessary and expensive training.  

Ever since Paine, recourse to common sense has been central to democratic operations.  We function as equal and enfranchised citizens because we posit a common ability to reason and participate.  It’s a crucial concept.  But it also leaves us vulnerable to arrogance. for instance the arrogance that leads someone to believe that all we need to do as a nation is balance our enormous national checkbook.  Ultimately, this is why people have argued that quality education is necessary for the healthy function of a republic.  We don’t need to be experts at everything.  But we need to be literate enough that we can and will seek out different specialized arguments and decide which is the stronger one.  We need to be literate enough that we can see through the pandering of politicians and demand real arguments about which policies will serve us best.

I watched both of the speeches last night and the most stark difference was how Obama stated his case in a way that left Boehner room to maneuver, while Boehner came with personal broadsides directed squarely at the President.  He laid out two options, either accept our narrative and cave to all our demands or we will force your veto-ing hand to flush the full faith and credit of the US (God I’m sick of hearing that phrase) down the proverbial toilet.

And the so-called liberal media is failing to call this what it is in consistent fashion: a concerted attempt to bring down a sitting president no matter who and what is damaged in the process.

There are conflicting reports about what went down at yesterday’s meeting.  Eric Cantor, the chief of the Republican Congressional Ideological Purity Police Force (RCIPPF), exited the meeting and immediately hurried to “divulge” to the American people how his president had scolded him and stormed out.  Ostensibly, Cantor has some credibility with regards to “storming out” maneuvers as he has demonstrated a real knack for it himself in previous weeks.  But according to him, President Obama lost it, became petulant and disrespectful in a manner unfitting to his office.  Democratic participants in this closed-door meeting contradicted Cantor’s account.  Nancy Pelosi extolled Resident Obama’s graciousness.  The counter-narrative emphasizes that this meeting was called by the President, lasted two and a half hours, and when the Republicans continued to refuse any sort of accommodation and compromise, when they refused to operate according to the necessary standards and processes of creating policy in a republic, Obama closed the meeting.  These negotiations are indeed crucial, but they do not represent the sum total of his responsibilities in presiding over this republic.  Given that the Republican controlled House of Representatives, under Speaker Boehner’s leadership, seems to consider passage of meaningful legislation on almost any issue a low priority, or at least an unattainable one, (Rachel Maddow continues to demonstrate this in great detail of late), they apparently saw themselves as having no other obligations.  As Obama was closing the meeting with remarks that were his prerogative, both because he called the meeting and because…well…because he is the duly elected PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED FREAKING STATES OF AMERICA, Eric Cantor, duly elected to represent a single district in the Commonwealth of Virginia, interrupted our president to ask for the umpteenth time why Obama will not consider a minimal deal that merely extends the crisis that Cantor has created to attempt to manufacture political advantage.  Obama cut him off, dressed him down (according to Pelosi with uncommon graciousness) and left the room.  Cantor then hurried to complain to the press.

Let me open with some predictions:

10 minutes before Obama’s Independence Day remarks are publicized, he will be slammed on FOXNews for revealing his disdain of America: “Never before has a President of the United States, whatever his skin color may be, treated his country with such total disregard for its heritage and traditions of liberty and freedom.”

10 minutes after his remarks are publicized, FOXNews will protest his politicization of our national holiday: “Never before in our history has a President, whatever his skin color may be, exploited our national holiday in such a cynical and shameless self-serving partisan manner.”

Happy 4th to all.  I recommend reading the Declaration aloud.  I do so every year, especially since I’ve had kids.  It really is the “Never Mind the Bollocks” of political rhetoric.  3 and 4 generation ago, my forebears arrived here in search of economic opportunity and civil liberty.  Things generally ended badly for their relatives who could not or did not follow.  

Since Romney has emerged as the early, early front-runner for the GOP nomination, and then Huntsman joined him, the issue of a candidate’s religion is being discussed again.  Should it matter?  I’ve heard several pundits sigh in weary surprise that it seems to in an America that elected Obama.  I guess religion is no more a choice than race, and no more determinative of views, agendas, and character in their eyes.  Of course, those opposed to marriage equality still view homosexuality as a choice that connotes an agenda…

The truth is that for many of us, religion is not much more a choice as cultural background.  We may choose whether or not to continue participating, but it does influence who we are and how we engage the world.  As such, it seems to me that it’s fair to consider.  I would expect any Jewish candidate’s perspective on Israel and Palestine to be fair game in considering whether to support them or not.  Any candidate’s view on this question would be relevant, but a Jewish candidate’s background and commitments beg the question in a different way.  I think it is fair to ask catholic candidates how and to what degree they are influenced by church teaching, how and to what degree it shapes their policy perspectives, and how they view papal authority.  I think an observant Muslim candidate (fat chance, I know) should indeed address how their faith informs their thinking.  No more and no less so than with an evangelical candidate.  The problem seems to be when people judge candidates according to assumptions about their faith and its influence.  But it’s a fair question.

Mormonism is an aggressively missionizing religion.  Just like Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelicals.  That in and of itself raises questions.  I don’t support the organized, institutional recruitment that is part of these door knocking religions.  My first question to door-knockers who show up at my home is: How is your koine Greek and western Aramaic?  When they inevitably cannot read a word of either, I ask them whether they would attend an undergraduate course on Homer with a professor who cannot read attic Greek?  Would they read Dante with a professor who didn’t know Italian or Pushkin with someone who was unversed in Russian?  The point is that these people represent institutions who claim authority and truth based on their doctrine, not their knowledge.  So, yes, I want to hear from any candidate of a proselytizing faith how that informs their perspectives on law and on historiography.  How does it inform their perspectives on sexuality and reproduction?  How does it inform their approach to poverty and human rights?  How does it affect their perspectives on other belief systems and cultures?  And if they think we are moving toward an imminent historically consummating encounter with divine justice, I cannot support them.

So yes, religion matters.  It matters in a different way than race or class or geography.  Some of the recent conversations in the public sphere suggest that this is bigotry.  But it’s only bigotry to make a decision without asking the questions.  

So what do the Moose think?  Is crotchety old Strum a bigot?