The Gravy Train

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice piece talking about the rise of Dr. Benjamin Carson the new conservative "it boy."  It's largely about continuing search by conservatives for a "great black hope" to finally banish that tyrant Obama from the realms of men.  Coates points out that:

Some of the most committed black people I know -- in some other America -- would be Republicans. But in this America, this conservative movement, has a fairly nasty romance with white racism. There are black conservatives (some Republican, some not) who manage to steer clear of this -- Bill Cosby, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and possibly Tim Scott. And there are others who, to put it bluntly, profit from it. 

Coates is talking about African-American thought leaders/talking heads who use the conservative movement as a gravy train, but it's important to remember that a lot of people in the conservative movement do this (although by no means all).  We like to think about politics as being a big ideological struggle between opposing views on what American society should look like, and to some degree it certainly is!  It can also be a public arena for interest groups to fight it out for their differing agendas.  But it is also an industry and unfortunately some people can use the conservative movement as a way to gain fame, power and fortune.  It's true that there are some liberals who try and do similar things, Michael Moore comes to mind, but it just doesn't compare.  Glenn Beck went from being just another radio shock jock to being worth tens of millions of dollars by peddling bizarre conspiracy theories.  Maybe he really is crazy, or maybe not.

Today in Social Movement Theory

Matt Ygleisas raised an interesting issue today about the possibility that a large scale victory for marriage equality might lead to the decline of the social movement that created the win:

So something I wonder about is what happens if the marriage equality battle is won very rapidly over the next few years? Lester Feder writes for Buzzfeed that gay equality movements in both the Netherlands and Canada suffered large, nearly immediate losses in donations following marriage equality wins.

If anything I'd say Matt's summation is an understatment.  According to the orginal Buzz Feed article:

"After marriage passed in the Netherlands, the movement more or less collapsed," said Boris Dittrich, the former member of the Dutch parliament who won passage of the world's first-ever same-sex marriage law in 2000. After that, it was very hard to get people to engage on other issues the movement cared about, like discrimination against LGBT seniors in nursing homes and bullying in schools.

According to the article a similar thing happened in Canada in 2004.

This is pretty paradoxical, after all how can a movement's success lead to it's collapse?  I'd argue that the answer lies in social movement theory which is an interdisciplinary study of social movements in different societies at different periods in history.  One theory that has been proposed is that social movements need a sort of constant tension between reality and lofty goals in order to continue to function in the same way they need dedicated supporters, resources and leaders.  Think of social movements as a shark that has to keep swimming or, else die.

Indeed, if you look at the history of a lot of social movements they often go into a period of dormancy, reduced activity or even dissipation after big goals are achieved.  The women's suffrage movement is a classic example of this.  After the passage of the 19th amendment there was not a huge feminist revolution in this country, indeed many scholars of various women's movements have pointed to the period between the 20's and the 60's as being "doldrums" where the political activity of women was in many ways put on the back burner.  This pattern of passionate political activism leading up to a significant achievement followed by an ebb of political activism happened around the passage of the 26th Amendment that granted the franchise to 18-21 year-olds.

In addition, when a broad based political coalition, like a social movement, achieves a major goal it can often splinter as the various groups that made up that coalition move on to pursue their own agendas.  Every president is faced, often the day after inauguration, with once ardent supporters who now feel betrayed once the ease of campaign promises meets the harsh reality of the difficulty of enacting political change.  Liberal activists could easily think issues like climate change or drone policy are more deserving of their political efforts than anti-bullying legislation, for example.

This is not to say that a big victory for marriage equality will necessarily result in widespread decline in the gay rights movement.  Indeed I'd argue that such a victory is far from a sure thing.  But there certainly is precedence for this dynamic to recur. 

Oh Ye Liberals, Thine Courts Will Not Save Thee

While you weren't paying attention, the last of the great desegregation plans of American Public Education faded into history. And one of the great legal monuments of the 20th Century, Brown v Board of Education went with it. It happened in Boston, the home of JFK where later in the 60's and 70's, or as some say "some time ago" busing and desegregation was met with raw hatred. You can just watch that to 32 seconds and get a feel for the time, the first day of busing and court ordered desegregation, which was met with brick throwing and near riots, and platoons of riot police to enforce the court order.

Now things are a little different. Basically the Boston School Committee vote six to one to get rid of the last vestiges of desegregation busing program implemented in 1974, and instead focus on neighborhood schools. Boston's Mayor Thomas Menino, perhaps one of the most liberal mayors in the country, praised the plan as, "Tonight’s historic vote marks a new day for every child in the city of Boston..." This represents a remarkable change from the liberal ideals of the past, where large scale busing to desegregate schools was seen as a noble and achievable goal. While some liberals still call for this sort of the thing, the reality is that very few voters or politicians seem to care at all.

Looking back on the whole history of desegregation of public education in the past 50 years an interesting trend emerges. The liberal reforms enacted via the landmark Brown v Board of Education Decision led a short burst of radical, and highly controversial change, followed by a long period of roll back and retrenchment that has made many school systems as segregated now as they were 50 years ago. I'd argue that this was due to a fundamental flaw in the strategy that desegregation proponents advocated all those years ago. In short, they sought to bypass the problematic nature of public opinion and daily grind of politics and instead turn to a single decisive judicial decision to overturn a immoral and dysfunctional system. And while they did succeed in winning that pitched battle and getting the de jure systems of segregation formally ended they never succeed in changing the political, economic, governmental and social dynamics that now lead to de facto segregated public schools changed.

I'd argue that the lesson here is not to blame Obama, as Thomas Sugrue does in the link above, but to accept the reality that a judicial strategy to social change is not some panacea to our social and political ills.  Indeed if you look at the whole history of our Judicial Branch you see a profoundly reactionary group of institutions that impeded reform from the founding of the country to the 1930's.  And now this same branch is considering things like ending affirmative action in higher education.

This brings me to the marriage equality case that went into oral arguments today before the Supreme Court.  First of all, most of the predictions and "analysis" you read about the arguments are no more likely to be right than you just taking your own uniformed guess.  This is because trying to get inside the heads of Supreme Court Justices is just too hard and in reality there are a multitude of different routes the Court could take including just throwing the whole issue back to the Ninth Circuit.  In the end though, the idea of some judicial Superman coming to win the political battle over marriage equality in places like Mississippi and Utah simply is not a very sustainable strategy for long term social change.  Let alone the fact that basing a political strategy on what Anthony Kennedy may or may not do is far from a sure thing.  This is not to say it was wrong to pursue this court case, indeed it might turn out to be a good idea, we'll know more when the court rules.  But as a strategy for remaking American society it, like Brown, may prove to be lacking. 

The Triumph of Ayn Rand

There is an interesting internet fight because noted liberal blogger and purveyor of general awesomeness Matt Yglesias is getting criticized cause he and his wive recently purchased an expensive condo.  Well sort of expensive, 1.2 million for a three bedroom three bath join in Logan Circle.  To us peasants in the Midwest this might look unseemly, but that's how ridiculous property prices are in DC (because "historical preservation" is more important that economic development, but that's another story).  But ANYWAY conservatives are outraged because Matt and his wife bought a nice home.

The interesting thing I find here is the belief from conservative blogs and news organs that this thing is some sort of hypocrisy or outrage.  How dare some liberal be rich!  Of course these are statements of profound ignorance when it comes to American History.  FDR was as loaded as you could ever wish and the Kennedy's were not far behind.  Heck even Obama is a millionaire largely do to his book deals.  So why are people freaking out about the fact that a liberal blogger bought a house instead of living in the gutter?  I'd argue that it really doesn't make much sense at all our side of the ideology of Ayn Rand.  It's completely reasonable for conservatives to argue they don't think taxes should be higher or to end things like the Earned Income Tax Credit.  But such a conservative shouldn't automatically think that all rich people must believe these items of conservative dogma.

Rand is a very important figure in the development of 20th Century conservative thought that can still be felt to this day. None other than Paul Ryan has cited her as an important inspiration in his own political career (he has walked these comments back to some degree). Back in 2009 Jonathan Chait wrote a great article linking the emergence of new types of rhetoric in the age of Obama directly to Rand:

It [tea party rhetoric] expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand.

I won't go into the whole story of Rand here, it's much to long and much to boring for longwalkdownlyndale, but her core belief that rich people who don't become libertarians are some sort of hypocritical "class traitors" is one of the few ways to explain the anger against Yglesias.

If you do want to learn more about the weird world of Rand, I would recommend that Chait piece or this great film about her and her relationship with Allen Greenspan and other apostles of the Church of the Free Market. 
  

Me Me Me Me Me

I guess Andrew Sullivan reads this blog because he published a big mea culpa about the Iraq War today, I assume because he read my post yesterday. All kidding aside, it's a good piece and you should read it. It's very well written and contains a lot of self-criticism that is rare to see on the internet. Basically he admits that he supported the war for four main reasons:
1. Saddam was a wicked man.
2. His coworkers at The New Republic were mean to him after the whole election stealing thing in Florida back in 2001.
3. He was publicly humiliated after some scummy "journalists" published stories about his sex life.
4. He was horrified by 9/11.

Sully went to Oxford so he writes this in a much more fancy and better sounding prose than me, but all the points are the same:

My horror at 9/11, combined with crippling fear, compounded by personal polarization was a fatal combination. This is not an excuse. It’s an attempt at an explanation. And my loathing of the left had been intensified earlier that year by a traumatizing exposure of my own sex life by gay leftists determined to destroy my reputation and career because of my mere existence as a gay conservative.

Let me say that I am sympathetic to anyone who is willing to bare their soul publicly, especially a well known and polarizing public intellectual like Sullivan.  Let me also say that I am sympathetic to anyone who supported the Iraq War, simply because a lot of people supported it.  And I think he's a great writer with a great blog.  Let me also say that his mea culpa is frankly, bizarre.

This is a explanation for supporting (in Sullivan's case I'd say flogging) a disastrous war in which thousands of Americans died, tens of thousands were wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died and millions were made homeless by recounting how people were mean to him 10 years ago.  It is in short an explanation of his support of the war in a universe in which there is no war with no consequences, there is only Andrew and his feelings.

The worst part to me is that he seems to have learned nothing from the whole experience.  He hasn't said fighting land wars in Asia is a bad idea, or trying to dominate the Persian Gulf is unnecessary or that while the American military can do many things it can't turn a post-conflict country into a democratic utopia.  He doesn't say anything about that at all, instead all we get is me: Me Me Me Me Me.

To be sure, I don't blame Sullivan for the Iraq War.  It was going to happen no matter what he wrote about it and in that sense it really doesn't matter.  But it does matter in the sense that so many of our "experts" on foreign affairs seem to have learned nothing from the war.  Sullivan is just a convenient example of this. 

You Are An Evil Hippie

Conor Friedersdorf has a nice piece at The Atlantic looking back at all the vitriolic and base hatred that was heaped on people who opposed the Iraq War 10 years ago.  It's not a very pleasant stroll down memory lane, but it's a good reminder of the actual environment that existed in the lead up to war and goes a long way to helping to explain how lots of "smart people" could support what predictably could easily end in disaster.


What struck me is how so many of the people behind both promoting the war and demonizing anyone who thought it might not be the greatest idea in the world are still very much considered experts in the world of foreign affairs.  They still write important articles, they still get to go on TV to pontificate on foreign affairs and they are still considered by nature to be more "serious" than everyone else.  After Vietnam most of it's architects like Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and William Westmoreland (if you don't know who those people are, that's fine, but you probably should read more) notably left the limelight, even though some of them still had strong opinions about the war.  With the Iraq debacle the "experts" who hawked the war notably haven't.  They are still consulted as if they were ever some Oracle of Delphi, even though we know that they are most certainly not particularly insightful about the Middle East.  Richard Pearle, who posses the profound ability to never admit error to such a degree that he would have made a wonderful General in World War I, was even recently interviewed by none other than National Public Radio about whether or not the war was worth it.  He's the wrong person to ask.

The second thing I realized from a lot of these old quotes, is how much they sound like the quotes about why we should go to war in the first place.  That is they are chiefly concerned with the writer talking about their emotions and making emotional pleas or condemnations.  As Andrew Sullivan wrote:  

FABULOUSLY ANTI-WAR: No, I don't mean Madonna. I mean a group called Glamericans. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form "a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America's potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans." Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups.

The important thing is to look good in Tribeca.

Note that he doesn't even pretend to try and talk about foreign policy, that is the policy our government should have towards other countries.  No he just sort of condemns an obscure protest group for not being "serious" enough, and then makes an emotional plea that Saddam does bad things (note Saddam never had nerve gas so Sully basically just made that one up).  But why does Saddam doing bad things mean that we need to go to war?  This was, and to a large degree still is, the state of our public discussions about foreign policy and war.  Uniformed journalists giving style tips and making emotional pleas that we should go to war because, well because I'm outraged.

Matt Yglesias put what's wrong with our foreign policy discourse quite well back in 2009:

And a lot of what goes wrong in American foreign policy commentary, I came to see, was a refusal to adopt the ethic of responsibility. Instead, people would want to orient themselves in a way that expresses a sense of moralized outrage. So if some country is bad, a proposal to do bad things to that regime must be good, because what’s right is to be on “the right side” in some maximal way. Anything less is “realism” and a betrayal of ideals about human rights and democracy. The problem is that what’s needed, from a humanitarian point of view, is a foreign policy that does in fact make conditions around the world better not a foreign policy that expresses high ideals and a grand sense of purpose.

What I see Sullivan saying is basically, "My feelings are the most important thing in the whole world, so if they demand war, then war we shall have."  I don't know that we've made much progress away from this in the last 10 years.





  

Iraq War Villains

Matt Yglesias has a great post about the Iraq War on his personal blog.  He points out that the "Iraq Question" back in 2002 and 2003 was fundamentally a misguied way of looking at the situtation:

On the actual policy, what holds up reasonably well from the old pre-war case is that the Clinton era “containment” policy on Iraq was crumbling. The endless sanctioning of Iraq was not a viable long-term strategy for the region. That left you with two kinds of options. One—the wrong option—was to get more aggressive. The other—the correct option—was to realize that the goal of military domination of the Persian Gulf is just fundamentally misguided. The project is motivated by fuzzy thinking about oil, and it’s been extremely costly over the decades. Protecting Kuwait from a direct and flagrantly illegal cross-border military attack is a defensible (though arguably not necessary) use of military force, but the whole rest of the undertaking dating back to long before Bush was a mistake.

I think this analysis is right on the money.  At the very least it seems to fall directly into the category of American foreign policy elite applying the lessons (or their constructed story of the "lessons") of the previous conflict to the current one.  Thus the American policy in the Middle East was obsessed with following some sort of absurd (in retrospective) "Cold War Lite" with Iraq being the Soviet Union and everyone else being poor weak Western Europe.  Indeed I've noticed a tendency among certain thought leaders and self style foreign policy experts to try and put Iran in the Soviet role over the past few years with a sort of NATO Alliance of Sunnis lead by Saudi Arabia aligned against Iran.  Obviously this didn't work, and we should have known from the start it wouldn't as the Middle East is a complicated environment with different powers vying against each other for power, a lot more like Europe in the 18th or 17th Centuries than the second half of the 20th.

I recently watched the Kevin Costner vehicle about the Cuban Missile Crisis "Thirteen Days" and one of the things I noticed was how so many people were obsessed in those days with "Remembering the Lesson of Munich" and thus were opposed to any compromises or negotiated solutions to the predicament they found themselves in.  Regardless if that is the real "Lesson of Munich" it certainly wasn't very applicable, because of course any war between the US and USSR would almost certainly destroy both countries.  Thus in the Cold War, war itself could be an enemy as much as the other side.  There's a great scene where JFK asks Dean Acheson to game out his solution to the crisis and Acheson basically says: "Your first step sir will be to demand that the Soviet begin to withdraw the missiles within 12 to 24 hours, they will refuse. When they do you will order the strikes followed by the invasion Cuba, they will resist and be overrun.  They will retaliate against another target somewhere else in the world, most likely Berlin.  We will honor our treaty commitments and resist them there defeating them as per our plans."  Kennedy then points out: "Those plans call for the use of nuclear weapons.  So what is the next step?"  And Acheson doesn't have an answer to him, only saying he hopes cooler heads will prevail at some point.  So basically applying the "Lesson of Munich" here means nuclear armageddon.  Which is a long way to say that the lessons (or the lessons we construct for ourselves in hind sight) of past global conflicts are not necessarily applicable to the present, unfortunately too many of our foreign policy elite haven't learned this lesson.