Sorry for taking so long, I've been busy and trying to work out how to keep the comment short-ish.
Terry,
It lets you shrug off the bad as, "business" as usual. It lets you say thigs which are terrible are just an issue of scale, as if scale doesn't move the bad to the horrible to the indefensible.
And those who disagree with you are deluded, or blind, or fools, or worse.
I'd be more inclined to take this well if I had much in the idea of what I'm trying to be persuaded of by people expressing disagreement. Should I lose my hubris or whatever and have a Damascene conversion to progressivism, what would you expect to change? Would the history of the human race become substantially rosier in my book, or would I just be blessed with a perspective that insisted our future history was due to become rosy any second now? Would the oft-noted propensity of the human race to fuck itself up be revealed as fiction, or would it simply be addressed with more hopeful eyes? These are serious questions. Do you question what I would call the closest things to historical facts I have at my fingertips, or do you question what I make of them?
I'm accused of looking down my nose at every nurse, volunteer worker and single mother in the world, and I don't know whether that's because the concept that a group of people exists and behaves in a manner that can be differentiated from the mere sum of its parts is a lot newer and less well-accepted than I had believed, or that there's some kind of attachment to the notion that human goodness transcends human failing, or what. Good people exist, and the totality of human society is pretty dumb and brutal and the strong pretty much invariably exert control over the weak. To the extent that systems and trends within society work to ameliorate the Hobbesean state of nature, it is obvious that there is much further to go than we have already come (buying into the general progressive narrative that things will always get "better"). I am not sure why this is something that requires me to be in despair if I notice it, or that people should find offensive enough to defend themselves against it. If you believe in progress, do you believe it will happen next week? Do you believe it will happen always and invariably upwards? Because without those there really isn't a problem, that I can see, noting the times when it happens slowly or in reverse. If things were right now, why would "progress" be necessary?
The argument for the significance of scale seems to suggest that a trend doesn't matter as long as the current state is much worse than the last. But that makes no real sense to me either. Buying that Bush is worse than Nixon, although not necessarily worse than Taft or Jackson, does that then mean that the roots of Bush cannot be found in Nixon and beyond? And if these roots can last thirty years, and if the presidential cycle includes Jackson and Taft and Reagan, and the political history of the nation includes McCarthyism and Japanese Internment, then is it unreasonable to look at whether the roots of the evils embodied by Bush might be found deeper than the man, or even the movement of which he is a poisoned spearhead? Why is it valid and meaningful to express hope in the ability of a democratic electorate to guide itself towards progress but not to examine why it so often does not?
You say that it has become intolerable over the last eight years, I ask, what was not intolerable about extraordinary rendition when Clinton was doing it, other than the fact that we did not know about it in order to be outraged? What was not intolerable about Iran-Contra or McCarthyism?
Why is it not elitist to say "educate the people" like we're their paternalistic guardians, but horrible to say "educate ourselves about the people, including the weaknesses we all share," as if we're the same kind of people trying to struggle our way through this just like everyone else. More to the point, if something seems to be a limit of capability, why is it morally suspect to point that out?
As I said, I'd be more open to denigrations of my capacity to be convinced if anyone would specify what it is I should be materially convinced of, rather than my personal despair and situation as a generally bad person (writing bad elitist poetry about my bitter beliefs of superiority over the good natured common people who've done nothing personally to offend me) for not being convinced of whatever it is.
CHip
Perhaps "in favour" was unfair, but Obama's statements on the subject during the spats with Clinton over who could wave "national security" the most, and during his addresses regarding Israel and Iran ("no options are off the table" to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons) mean that he either cannot or will not shift the Overton Window himself from its current bounds of "lunacy" and "lunacy in a diplomatic tone of voice." There's undoubtedly a measure of both political inability and personal unwillingness, although exactly what the proportions are I don't know. Nonetheless, especially with a candidate of the Credit Card Party at his side emphasising his commitment to The System, foreign policy is such a reactive and deterministic area of political policy that I'm struggling to see any evidence that Obama will bring about seismic change to the DC culture of militarisation and exceptionalism. Still, if a return to the Clinton era is all anybody wants then why should I begrudge people their expanded middle class and subsidised health insurance? Baby steps, right?
Sadly anything less than complete agreement with such people is seen as proof of the rightness of their position (like a parakeet who learns to make the "click" noise, it's a self-reinforcing behavior), so any attention at all, positive or negative merely makes the conviction stronger.
Ouch. That's a harsh judgement from someone I hold in quite high esteem. But then, whenever anyone is bundled in with a "such people" it can never be a good thing.
TomB, Geekosaur,
It's funny that a "depressive swing" is mentioned, it's entirely possible I'm incapable of getting past my natural sonorousness to fully express the nuances of my opinions. I don't dislike us, as a rule, as a species. Rather, I view us - myself included - like my own labradors. Adorable, cute, wonderful creatures to be around, yet I wouldn't trust them to drive a truck. I adore human beings both as individuals and en crazy masse, but I don't harbour any illusions about us, no matter how adorable we are. The mob is not an irredeemable and hopeless case, but it makes no sense to consider it limitless. If you understand - or at least believe you understand - the limits of capability, you can formulate plans and understandings that leave less room for abject disappointment.
Terry, I am a democrat, I am just not a democracy fetishist. I believe that democracy is truly appalling, but that all the other ways are worse.
Nonetheless, filing the rough edges off a broken system, no matter how appealing, is not going to fix that broken system. Both candidates have endorsed nuclear bombing of Iran - what, then, should those of us without suffrage in your elections but who nonetheless feel we might be impinged upon by such action do about such a devil's choice? Dismiss me as a reflexive, clicking parakeet if you will, but do not believe the luxury of considering the grievances of disgruntled foreigners thoughtless is something to which you should have natural title.
The USA is a threat, and the more militaristic, fundamentalist and imperial it gets the greater that threat is - that is not a moral judgement, nor an anti-American one, but a factual statement given the terrifying anarchy of the international world. All those of us on the outside ask is that you not consider Mr Bush to be the sole cause and drive of what makes you a threat to the rest of us, and that you do not seek to make your foreign policy merely something that placates us, but which might actually have a slim chance of respecting us as part and parcel of "the people" too.
Well, Scott, I don't describe myself as a progressive so I shall be sure to distance myself from tarring others in the same brush.
Nonetheless, what else would you use to describe the seething mass of opposing psyches that makes up an electorate? 300 million people with their own biases, concerns, experiences (and lack therof)? Do we honestly believe that such an organism could be anything more than a rudimentary sludge of purpose? Do we give the impression of being a shining crystalline structure of emergent hyperintelligent self-awareness? Even assuming that there is such a thing as the self interest of 300 million people who all want different things, I don't know what that interest would be and I doubt you do either, beyond certain basic lizard brain concepts like not wanting to die until we're old enough for our bodies to give up. It's not out of order to suggest that nobody knows something the evidence suggests nobody could possibly know.
With what factual element do you take issue? Do you believe that people, in general, know what is good for them? I certainly don't know, and believe me I've thought about it, but such is the complexity of the matter at hand. I, being some peculiar hallucination produced by the warring biases and instincts in my haphazardly evolved brain, simply lack the capacity to weigh up the complexities of the global financial markets beyond an idea that moral hazard should be considered to apply to rich people as well as poor. People who spend their lives looking at this stuff are running around panicking because they have no clue what's going on, are we to honestly believe it is sensible to suggest that the salt of the earth plumbers, photographers, milliners, personal assistants, carpet fitters and unemployed beer-pong champions can come to a sensible conclusion as long as there are over a hundred million of them all talking at once? Seriously?
To say that people in general muddle through, that they are mostly victims of circumstance and that they find interesting ways to ignorantly screw themselves up may well be shattering some illusions that we plains apes have about ourselves, but I do not know that anyone can say it isn't *true*. Disheartening, rude, insulting, probably the kind of thing that would make people off-handedly discount a progressive political platform, indeed all these things are very possibly true also. But to say that a bunch of people who don't know what they are doing as individuals will, as an aggregate, also not know what it is doing hardly seems like rocket engineering.
Perhaps your ire was caused by my believing that I am elitely looking down on the rest of the masses and declaring that I and I alone know what's best. That would piss me off too. Unfortunately for everybody, I don't know any more than anybody else (and it's unlikely that even if I did people would have any inclination to listen, or that my random stumbling on The Right Answer would appear materially different to any other blowhard, so why should they?). I just know that whatever we're doing now seems to suck really, really hard and we don't have a stellar track record of knowing how to deal with that.
Or do the people in the middle of an economic crisis exacerbated by the actions of their twice-elected representatives have a substantive problem with that?
@85 Paula Lieberman
Given that Jackson was president approximately a half-century prior to the 1880s, I take it those periodicals were not concerned overmuch with current affairs. Looking around you at the state of the various Indian nations today, with how much of their retained wealth and salvation can we credit this upset and angry editorialising in the 1880s?
It is, indeed, appropriate that you would point out the Indian genocides as a perfect example of when the pen is manifestly not mightier than the sword. The lumpen clay of the public has no real inkling of what is best for it, such is the complexity of the matter at hand, and will rarely get ired up over what becomes of a group of heathen savages, or "terrorists" as we know them now. The difference between politicians knowing that journalists are shouting at them and knowing that such shouting will rob them of power at the ballot (or via some cruder mechanism) is wide and deep indeed.
Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Jackson was an evil, racist, small little troll of a president, "the idol of the worshippers of military glory, but from incapacity, military habits, and habitual disregard of laws and constitutional provisions, altogether unfit for the office." Remind you of anyone?
Again, to reiterate, the assertion that Bush is an inevitability and a continuance-if-amplification of business as usual, no matter his seeming to be far larger and worse than such presidential motherfuckers as Taft and Nixon when we live under his ever-present and media-cacophonated shadow, is not a call to apathy. It is simply a desire that people recognise the difference between a symptom and a cause. If people think that Bush and his like, or even the sinister Right* are somehow corrupting and polluting the pure azure sea of American democracy, the risk of complacency and of setting too much faith in too little is omnipresent. Do not fetishise your nation or your democracy. America has always been a swamp of villainy. Nevertheless, it is possible to navigate a swamp as long as you set out with good waterproof boots and, most importantly, a lack of illusions about the water's clarity and potability. Navigate a swamp as if it were an alpine stream and alligators will simply eat you.
Bush is a criminal for whom a slow death from gutshot at the side of the freeway is probably fair justice, but if the fundamental causes of Bush cannot be addressed after his exorcism from the White House such justice isn't going to help you, me, or anybody else in the long term.
*as opposed to the dextrous Left.
I never said scale was unimportant. I'm saying that if you're looking to change it there's simply no point in just scaling it back, especially not now pandora's box has been opened and the rich kids know they can get away with it.
Besides, I'm not entirely convinced that the scale is so drastically different. Wasn't McCarthyism widescale? Was the genocide of the Indians constrained to a few pockets of insiders in the government? Was Japanese-American internment a tiny fringe program?
Do you think Bush emerged ex nihilo? If not, if he is the result of a trend, will moving back eight years to the point when the strategies he's involved on a wider scale were just used sparingly and in secret solve the problem, or just defer it and hide it so that people can get surprised again in another eight years?
The fundamental question is whether Bush, Cheney et al are causes or symptoms of the problems facing the US at the moment. If they are the causes, they can be excised like cancers and the body made whole and healthy again. But if the way the USA is governed and constituted, and the way it expands and relies on increasing militarisation and economic colonisation like all empires before it, is the cause, then people like Bush and Cheney are inevitable results of a much bigger problem and simply voting them out of office will not cure the malignancy.
You really think that this is not the regular business of the US government? Even assuming Clinton as being a paragon of virtue, the last 40 years has seen the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush I. It's seen the expansion of the military industrial complex to an extent that the biggest elephant in the room is the multi-trillion dollar war/welfare industry and the reliance of a good 20%+ of the population on the manufacture and sale of instruments of war, and the usage of such instruments in actual war. It's seen Iran-Contra, the original FISA court, McCarthyism, the first Gulf War, the Southern Strategy, the invasion of Kosovo, the overthrow of the Shah, the crackdown on civil-rights, and much, much more.
And before that you have the internment of Japanese-Americans, the know-nothings, the administrations of Coolidge and Truman, and back further the expansionist and white-dominionist imperial policies of the original "founding father" presidencies, which continued stealing from and abusing the natives of the country under the ethno-religious nationalism that called itself "manifest destiny".
Bush and his crew may have taken all these trends further than before, but the difference is merely one of scale, and of inevitable scale too. The underlying trend has been there longer than any of us have been alive. Unless we've got people here who predate the Trail of Tears and the Louisiana Purchase, that is...
My point, lest be misunderstood and someone sic Elizabeth Bear on me, is not that it's always been this way and that therefore we should throw our hands up in the air and recluse ourselves into bitterness. The point is that if you want to fix it there's no point being nostalgic for the point on the upwards curve before you personally started to notice, which it seems for many people has become the mid-90s and the Clinton administration. Clinton was a competent manager of the interests of the empire - he was not the kind of person to tackle the fundamentals of empire head on. Further, while Bush is the apotheosis of a trend, Clinton was the part that immediately preceded it, the period of luxury and decadence that helped this generation of Americans crystallise the idea that the world owes them its luxuries.
It's easy to see the upcoming election of Obama as a repudiation of the evils perpetrated on and in the name of Americans by the Conservative regime, but unless there is a fundamental rejection, by Americans, of the notions that make them look longingly back on the Clinton era, two terms of competent management and a bloating, entitled middle class under Clinton 2.0 will once again give way to a bloated, entitled government, Bush 3.0.
Either way, for those of us on the margins of the empire, the transiton between incompetent and competent management isn't as dramatic as it is for those in Rome.
I wasn't one of those who thought things had to get worse before they got better, but I was one of those who thought they would get worse before they got better, and thought about how we could focus on making them get better even as they were getting worse.
I suspect I am right about the former, although I also hope I'm right in thinking that Bush's second term will not be as prolific as his first. It's entirely possible that the burning of Social Security will not appeal to Congress. It's also worth looking at the "curse of the second term" syndrome, and then looking at all the different scandals that Bush has brewing. Valerie Plame, Abu Ghraib, Al QaQaa, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Perle, OH MY!
Despite the fact that I allowed myself to be convinced of a Kerry win in the weeks running up to the election, I know now that I was reflecting my own preferences more than relying on the gut instincts which turned out to be correct in the first place. I guessed that it would be close, but go eventually to Bush because of the moral issues and because of the irrational "Bush makes me feel safe" syndrome, which I have personally come across and which never, ever makes sense, even to those who walk away without changing their minds. If there is a greater example of sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALA" than those who believed Bush made them safer, I haven't met it.
So yes, we're going to have some trouble brewing. But 2006 is only two years away, and Bush will spend at least 60% of that time on holiday, not actually doing anything. From here on in, his policies will be of the kind that "Middle America" cannot help but notice. The economy is not looking pretty, the collapse of the dollar is looking to happen sooner rather than later, and when that happens I think we're rather more likely to see awakenings and shifts to a "reality based" worldview. It will, of course, be rather too late by then, but the silver lining will be the discrediting of the NeoCons and the Republican party for a long time.
Nobody wants another Great Depression, but if you must live in the country that votes for one, we all must work to make the best of it, and safeguard ourselves for the future following it.
I've always been a fan of the variant: "He couldn't find his own arse with both hands and an atlas."
Honourable mention, of course, must go to the ubiquitous British phrase "He couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery" (Translation for those Americans who don't know: The piss-up is a longstanding British traditional ceremony of two parts. The first consists of manipulating a group of people into the proximity of various alcoholic beverages, and the second of manipulating the beverages into the people.) This, of course, has reached the level of cultural saturation that one now needs only to allude to it, i.e. "The words 'piss-up' and 'brewery' spring to mind when reading this chap's article."
MD,
What you're driving at? There will always be people on the left of the spectrum, and they'll never be happy, so we should just ignore them and concentrate on "the other 97%"? Well, far be it from me to point out the fantastically obvious, but there are plenty of people on the right, it appears, who will likewise never be happy no matter how much they are pandered to.
I don't see why the whackjob Religious Right should have such an easy ride of it, with everyone bending over backwards to show how God-Fearin' they'd be while in office, if we're then going to ignore the loopy left. Both extremes are stuffed full of nutters, why give preferential treatment to the conservatives over the progressives?
Hell, I think any progressive voter who has a choice of Centre-Right Candidate A or Centre-Right Candidate B has a right to complain that there's nobody on the ticket who adequately represents their views. Nobody likes voting for the lesser of two evils, no matter how much they may suck it up because the evil of the two lessers is particularly unwanted.
Chip:
Can I lay out a convincing path by which increasingly radical presidents pave the way for electoral reform? No, I can't. However, I also doubt that you can lay out a convincing path by which electoral reform can ever be achieved as long as the two major parties in the USA both benefit so strongly from the mutual backscratching agreement that locks everybody else out of the game. The only "electoral reform" which has been carries out with any degree of enthusiasm over the years by either party is the bipartisan activity of Gerrymandering. As far as outright revolution goes, I don't want to take up too much room in the comments section, so let's leave this at "you must be kidding me."
However, we should take a look at what has happened and try and work out what has gone wrong. Of course we should not allow the front lines to be breached as a warning to convince the troops to fire back, but the front lines are already breached, and have been for some time, and the electorate are still unconvinced that they should pick up those guns and start shooting.
Let me put it another way. Election 2000, the lies over Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, CAAPS II, Guantanamo, Ashcroft. All these things should have been a wakeup call to the American electorate. Yet despite all these things, if Kerry wins it will not be decisive, it will be hard fought and close up to the edge, right to the end. My belief that it will get worse before people are truly woken up is not an ideological belief, it is an observation of what is actually happening. I've spent the last three years trying to work out why on God's Green Earth it should possibly be the case. It's not something I believe should happen, it's not something I want to happen, it's not something I think has to happen. It's just what I think WILL happen. Kerry or no Kerry, we're not out of the woods anytime soon.
By all means, vote for Kerry. Bush, contrary to your assumptions, is not "my" Mr Steel-Tariffs, and I am as keen to see the scary Triumvirate of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft removed from power as anyone here. However, I do not believe that a vote for Kerry is a vote for anything other than damage limitation. I've got nothing against damage limitation. Damage limitation is good! It doesn't make things "get better". If he is voted in, it will be by the narrowest of margins and he will likely be handed two houses tilted against him and an electorate still in thrall to nationalist sentiment, always sculling below the surface of American Patriotism, that has been inflamed and brought to the surface by Bush's rhetoric. You say the left was not idle when Clinton was in office. We got Bush anyway. Excuse me for not dancing the Victory Jig.
In short, although I think Kerry will be better, I do not think he will be better enough to matter in the long term and prevent the remission into nationalism. I think he will provide breathing room, with which the electorate will get bored before adopting a new nationalist darling who whispers sweet nothings into their ear and tells them that they're special.
As far as Trade goes, I think that Kerry and Edwards are definitely pandering. "I'm for jobs!" Well shove rhubarb up my arse, I'm so suprised that someone's running for office on that ticket! Seriously, though, I've checked out both candidates websites and the list is depressing. Strengthen international IP, "break down trade barriers" in SE Asia, gang up on the Chinese/Japanese... it sounds like the 19th Century all over again. It's like Chang and Stiglitz never happened.
I'd prefer it if people were actually serious enough about international trade organisations to strengthen them in such a way that enabled them to genuinely develop emerging markets, rather than "one rule for the rich, one rule for the poor" systems as they currently function. The long term benefits of ensuring that developing economies can successfully transition to developed, rather than being stuck in the "developing forever, never quite making it" loop, would be immense for the global economy of which we are a part. However, I'd also like a naked lady to give me a million dollars. I've got a feeling monkeys are going to fly out of my butt before either happens this decade.
Hmm...
I'm utterly of two minds about this whole issue. On the one hand, I agree with Theresa that the whole reason I say "perhaps things have to get worse before they can get better" is that, yes, I think people should do what I want them to do, dammit! I appreciate that my opinion is only my opinion, but on the other hand I think I'm right. I wouldn't hold an opinion I disagreed with, would I? That's everyone else's job.
However, as Ken MacLeod pointed out in his blog on March 1, Clinton Knew. The sanctions were kept up based on false evidence; the same false evidence that Bush used to justify his little jaunt in Mesopotamia. Bush may have waged an unjust war for political reasons, but Clinton pushed for policies which starved the population of food and medicine.
I am not saying that Bush and Clinton are not different at all -- for a start, a vote against Bush is a vote against Ashcroft, and if that's not enough I don't know what is -- but I have my doubts that Clinton, or Kerry, are different enough.
At the end of the day, the fundamental structural problems with the world, the US government, the UN, the WTO, the EU etc. will all still be in place regardless of who wins. The US needs electoral reform to break the two party system, which fails to adequately reflect the majority of the country and which is pushing both parties towards a nationalist/conservative centre (it pains me that there was not a single Democratic nominee who was progressive on trade - everything was and remains protectionism in fancy baubles, no matter how much they label such things "fair trade," and as much as I prefer such things to destructive Market Fundamentalism and NeoLiberalism, I can't see where they differ from George "Steel Tarriff" Bush in any great respect).
Internationally, God knows what needs doing. International organisations need strengthening so that they can withstand lone brutes like the USA and EU forcing their doctrines on the rest of the world. That's something which I feel will have to be caused by crisis and the reaching breaking point, a global "Let Them Eat Cake" moment. God only knows the havoc and destruction that could erupt on the way to positive change of the world, but we see now and observe with our own eyes the havoc and destruction that holds sway before such reforms take place.
In short, Kerry would be a short term gain over the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney/Ashcroft nightmare, but my concern is that the difference will cause the American Left to relax, to believe that they have "woken up" the Democratic Party and made it into a genuine cause for liberalism and reform. Things can get incrementally better only if people acknowledge that once the Democrats are in power they must continue to travel the path. The danger is, as always, that without a viable party on the Progressive Left of the Democrats, they will be able to skate by on "at least we're not John Ashcroft." That will not do.
So, yes, until America has a crisis that inspires reform of the Federal election process (and if 2000 didn't do that, then yes, it will have to get worse), I do not hold much hope for long-lasting and effective change.
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| 2008 | 7 |
| 2004 | 5 |
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