A new perennial question in American politics is: How much of the rabid opposition to Obama is due to race, and how much is due to other factors? This question was taken up The Economist, in its Lexington column, concluding that race has little to do with it (http://www.economist.com/node/17308059). I think Lexington is mostly right, but underestimates the effects of synergy.
Obama combines a set of defects, from the point of view of his ideological opponents: He is an elitist member of the intelligentsia; he has a foreign (Muslim) sounding name and a cosmopolitan history; he seems to lean toward European-style social democracy (“Socialism!”); he represents a commitment to conscious and intentional progress over political idolatry. In short, he is “the threatening other” that populates the manufactured hysteria of right wing zealots. It is not that he is black, in and of itself, which motivates most of the antagonism toward him, but rather the reality and mythology of who is, which is only more dramatically underscored by the sound of his name and the color of his skin.
It’s completely true that Obama would have problems with the Right even if he were a white guy named Jack, but that doesn’t mean that the marginal symbolic accelerants he’s saddled with are irrelevant. By analogy, a fire that started in the kitchen and is raging through the house would have happened with or without the overly combustable material in the walls, but how hot it would have been, and how much damage it would have done, is hard to estimate. It’s hard to look at the widespread “birther” nonsense and insistence that Obama is a Muslim (both involving myths adhered to by a significant percentage of the American people) without recognizing that it isn’t just his liberalness, but also his “otherness,” that is in play.
The right-wing torch-bearing mob forming the mass of the opposition, ready to shoot “commies” and “wetbacks” at the drop of a hat, defining the world in terms of a pretty narrow “us” and an otherwise all encompassing “them,” is not unaffected by Obama’s “otherness.” It’s true, as the argument goes, that he was black in 2008, but one by a tidy margin even so, receiving a significant number of votes from those same white working-class folks who are lined up against him now. His color is not the only variable, or one which creates such an impenetrable racist barrier that he could never have been a viable candidate (obviously, he was). But it is one ingredient in a mix that, when triggered by other ingredients, contributes to a combustion that would have happened with or without his color, and with or without his Muslim sounding name, but which is made hotter by those accelerants.
Obama’s burden is that he combines being a smart, erudite, academic, rational Progressive with being Black and named Barack Hussein Obama, in a country populated by many very tentatively and precariously tolerant of the latter facts, but completely allergic to the former ones. But once that allergy is triggered, the resistence to the latter facts breaks down as well, and all of the ingredients combine to feed the fever and contribute to the reaction.
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The question of when a person becomes a person, raised again by Amendment 62 on this year’s Colorado ballot (defining personhood as beginning at conception), provides a good example of basing one’s notion of truth on one’s political preferences rather than vice versa.
What raises the issue today is Susan Greene’s column in yesterday’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16392181), in which, despite Greene taking the position that Amendment 62 would be disastrous public policy, she was booed by a pro-choice audience for even admitting to any complexities or subtleties to the issue. The audience’s approach is the wrong one; Greene’s is the right one. Explore the issue thoroughly, with the courage to confront the complexities and subtleties, and then arrive at conclusions which are the result of that process.
Before I delve deeper into this issue, a couple of disclaimers: 1) I fervently believe that doing it “the right way” (reasoning applied prior to and informing conclusions, rather than mobilized afterward as rationalizations for them) leads to, in this case, the conclusion that, for legal purposes, personhood should be defined as vesting at birth rather than at conception (or at any intermediate point), despite the fact that I’m about to point out the legitimate ontological counterpoints to that conclusion; and 2) As a matter of political strategy, it is undeniably true that once you form a position on a controversial issue, admitting to some logical validity on the other side does more to shore up the opposition than to increase your own credibility and the strength, through a demonstration of moderation and subtlety, of your own position (as should be the case, in a world that applied reason more scrupulously to political issues). This latter fact is a direct result of the privileging of political strategizing in all-out political warfare: Admissions and concessions provide ammunition for opposing zealots to a greater extent than they generate goodwill among them, and that ammunition is then used in sophisticated propaganda techniques to play on the cognitive dissonance and other psychological vulnerabilities of those in the middle to convince them of the opposing view.
Even so, as tempting as it is to get sucked into this logic, and to “do what it takes” to ensure that we arrive at “the right” political conclusions, I think that, all things considered, it vastly diminishes our ability to progress toward governing ourselves ever-more intelligently. By reducing politics to a battle of more-or-less arbitrary ideological certainties, rather than trying to raise it to a process of collectively searching for those policies that are best informed and most conducive to the public interest, we obstruct rather than facilitate the deep structural political development that will serve us best in the long run.
On so many levels, in so many ways, politics imposes a constant pressure to continually disregard long-term goals in favor of short-term ones. This is a pressure we have to resist and transcend.
Ontologically, two things regarding the definition of when human life begins seem abundantly clear: 1) A zygote isn’t a “human being” in any legally relevant sense, and 2) The only significant difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn baby is location.
A zygote can be defined as a human being by means of either a religious/mystical assumption or a rigidly typological approach, but both are irrelevant to the legal and moral issues involved. It’s true that, even in a political system which separates church and state, those moral convictions that are nearly universally held by all members of all faiths, rooted perhaps in those faiths, can inform our legal structure (e.g., “thou shalt not kill”). Even if a separate utilitarian argument can’t be made (as it can in the case of a prohibition against murder), if it is something that is a non-contested interfaith moral conviction, then certainly it can be incorporated into law. But once there is significant disagreement, a fundamentally religious belief cannot be incorporated into the law that governs us all, without both violating the First Amendment and undermining the public interest that it protects.
But there is a non-religious justification for defining human life to begin at conception: Conception is the one and only truly bright-line change of state that demarcates the boundary between non-existence and existence. Prior to conception, there is the sperm, which belongs entirely to the father, and the egg, which belongs entirely to the mother; it is only after the former fertilizes the latter that you have a new and distinct full complement of DNA in a single entity that defines the new human being.
But that bright-line change of state, while very convenient, has no relevance to the purposes of the laws regulating the social relationships and interactions among human beings, since that single-celled entity bears no resemblance whatsoever to a socially incorporated human being. It has no consciousness, no independent existence, no attributes of a human being as a member of a society. Conception may be the most logical scientific threshold for defining the beginning of the development of a human being, but it is not the most logical legal or moral threshold.
At the other end of pregnancy, birth is not a significant change of state for the fetus (though it is for the mother!). The fetus in the womb when contractions begin is really pretty much the same being as the newborn baby held in the nurse’s arms at the end of the process (here’s a link to a description of the changes that a fetus does undergo at birth: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002395.htm). This poses a real dilemma: We as a people, probably fortuitously, are not willing to reexamine our nearly universal moral conviction that infanticide is wrong, but are then left with the reality that there is no functional difference, except for the form of the mother’s connection, between a late-term abortion and infanticide.
I believe that this dilemma is a function of human conceptualization, rather than the result of an actual moral imperative. In reality, our moral and legal universe is laden with arbitrary lines in the sand, and really must be. For instance, at what point does expressing anger and hostility toward another person become unacceptable? (Or, where is the line between just being a jerk, or a person acting on their own insecurities and hurt feelings, and being a bully?) It depends both on the relationship to the person, and the form and strength of the expression of anger. There is no bright-line change-of-state boundary involved: Calmly saying “that makes me angry” is acceptable in most contexts, while red-faced rants are unacceptable in most contexts. Somewhere between those two is a not very clearly demarcated line which one can cross, one which is defined by a sense of what best serves the pragmatic purpose of the normative prohibition.
Since there is no legally or morally useful clear line when a fetus becomes a baby, we need to draw the line according to other, similarly pragmatic, considerations. Certainly, there’s a moral argument that can be made for drawing that line somewhere between conception and birth, according to some notion of when the fetus is less like a mere cluster of cells or mass of organic material with a full DNA complement, and more like the baby that eventually emerges. It’s an argument by logical extension: If it’s wrong to kill babies, then it must be wrong to kill them wherever they are located.
Personally, I’m not such a moral absolutist: We’ve drawn the line at defining post-birth infanticide as morally unacceptable, and that’s good. We aren’t therefore under some moral obligation to define anything and everything that logically follows from that moral precept as also morally unacceptable. The moral and legal prohibition of infanticide is a moral line in the sand, no more, and no less. Some hypothetical historical figure might have argued, when moral and legal prohibitions against infanticide were taking root, “Ah, but that’s a slippery slope! If you outlaw infanticide, someday people will insist that we outlaw abortion as well, and think of what havok that would wreak on society!” I say, let’s not slide down any slopes. We can pick where to draw the line, and not be obligated to follow indefinitely the path that we imagine it carves for us.
There are overwhelming practical reasons to define life as beginning at birth for legal purposes. Doing otherwise reduces pregnant women to the legal status of incubators, denying adult human beings the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. It denies those who do not want to give birth -many of whom are teenagers, poor, facing challenges and constrained opportunities of their own- that choice, and leads to all of the problems frequently associated with children born into such conditions, particularly if truly not wanted. (Many readers are probably familiar with the theory from the book Freakonomics that, despite almost universal predictions to the contrary, U.S. crime rates began dropping in the early 1990’s because of the legalization of abortion in the early 1970’s). And it drives women seeking abortions into back alleys, creating what has been in the past a public health nightmare.
Even if one rejects my argument about drawing moral lines in the sand, and takes instead the stand that it is a moral bad to abort late-term fetuses, one can still weigh that against all of these considerations and say, “some bads are worse than others.” If the balancing test has any degree of practicality to it, then the complete protection of a woman’s right to choose is the inevitable outcome.
I am an advocate for moving political discourse in the direction of what I just exemplified above, and away from the no-holds-barred cage matches between precipitous oversimplified absolute certainties. We need to invest in the process by which we arrive at our individual and collective cognitive conclusions, as well as the process by which we select from among them what to implement as public policy. Just as in science and in courts of law we adhere to methodologies and procedures to our great benefit, we need to improve our political procedure as well.
We have developed a pretty good procedure for resolving our differences of opinion in the political arena, but apply almost no procedural discipline to how those competing opinions are formed, or how they compete for adherents. Extending the progress we’ve made in the fields of science, law, and electoral politics to the realm of cognitive politics would be an enormous step forward, and one each of us can choose to advance, both by advocating it, and by modeling it as our own individual approach to political discourse.
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The Republicans in Nevada, knowing that they have the weaker hand to attract Latino voters, decided on a different strategy: Find a Latino front man, name his group “Latinos for Reform,” and create an ad which encourages Latinos to send a message to the Democrats who haven’t done enough for them by not voting (and thus, incidentally, helping to secure the victories of rapid xenophobic Republicans and Tea Partiers who are absolutely antagonistic to the interests of Latinos). Unfortunately, my video-embedding widget doesn’t seem to be working, so here’s the URL of the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKFAiMbm1Fc&feature=player_embedded.
Similar to the campaign to trick some inattentive Democrats into voting for an anti-reproductive-rights ballot initiative in Colorado (Zealots Trying To Undermine Democracy), this is an attempt to trick Latino voters into acting against their own interests, by posing as an interest group aligned with Latino interests (though in reality aligned with the xenophobic right-wing agenda) advocating that Latinos withhold their votes in protest from the party far more aligned with and dedicated to their interests.
Ironically, the rank-and-file right-wingers who believe they are voting for Liberty are really voting for Machiavellian power-grabbing trickery, power which is then utilized in the interests of the corporate elites who want to preserve and advance the obscene (and economically dysfunctional) economic inequality in the United States.
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Yahoo’s Echo-Chamber of Yahoos: The AP article on Obama’s campaigning on behalf of the Democratic agenda and Cognressional Democratic candidates doesn’t offer much that’s new; a reminder of the arguments, and of the reactions to it. But the comments that follow from readers are what’s really striking (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101021/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama). If you scroll through them, there is an overwhelming majority that are rabidly right-wing, the thumbs up and thumbs down votes are overwhelmingly in favor of a rabid right-wing ideology, and most of the few counterarguments are hidden due to “low ratings” (they can be opened up, but they are not immediately visible like the rest). My own first two attempts at posting comments, which used language much like I use on this blog, were not published. (The third attempt, pasting excerpts from “A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”, finally made the cut). Intentionally or unintentionally, Yahoo has created a nearly perfect echo-chamber, one which reinforces a popular but information-deprived public mania. Disinformation abounds, references to actual data and analyses which debunk it are at best buried in the noise (and at worst essentially censored or muted). What public discourse really needs, and really benefits from, is a robust exchange of information, and attention to how reliable or unreliable that information is. Yahoo’s forum is precisely the opposite: A robust reinforcement of arbitrary assumptions and passionately held but not highly informed political positions. It is the social and cultural equivalent of, upon witnessing an epidemic, working to spread it rather than contain or cure it. (Trivia: The word “Yahoo” was coined by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), one of the most brilliant satirical novels ever written.)
Some hope in the crisis of bee colony losses: For the past four years, a phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder” has decimated the bee populations in America and Europe, threatening to wreak havok on agricultural production, which depends on bees for crop pollinization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder). This was one of those many potentially devastating crises looming on the margins of public awareness; potentially devastating because without bees pollinating crops, agricultural production could virtually collapse. The October 25 issue of Time Magazine reports that the cause for this phenomenon may have been found: A combination of viral and fungal infections, providing a one-two punch that is either the cause or a side-effect of colony collapse disorder. If the former, there is some hope for a solution. As Time reports: “The virus can be eradicated only by culling infected hives, but the fungus can be controlled with commercially available antibiotics.”
Colorado too easily hijacked by fanatical extremists: The Denver Post argued in an editorial today that the case of Doug Bruce secretly funding draconian (and insanely fiscally self-destructive) ballot measures 60, 61, and 101 is an object lesson in the need for tightening enforcement of current election laws, which require procedures for reporting and tracking information about who is supporting and financing ballot initiatives. But we really need to go farther: We need to make it harder to amend the constitution via ballot initiative. The fact that it is as easy, through popular initiative, to pass a state constitutional amendment (which the state legislature can’t then amend in order to make it workable) as mere legislation means that the preference is for constitutional amendments, a fact which has already turned Colorado’s state constitution into a mess of poorly drafted, poorly conceived, and often contradictory provisions.
Democracy is at its best when a reasonably well-informed public makes responsible choices based on individual judgments about what best serves their own or the public interest. Democracy is at its worst when well-funded disinformation campaigns pump amplified falsehoods into the reverberating echo-chambers of segregated and insulated ideological camps. By that measure, we are currently enjoying one of the low-points in American democracy.
I’ve watched political ad after political ad refer to “the failed stimulus” and the “most fiscally irresponsible Congress in American history,” accusing those Democrats who supported it of an incomparable villainr. And I cringed each time, knowing that, as John Stewart once described the infamous emails exchanged by climate change researchers expressing some sloppiness in the research, “it’s like catnip” to those who are already predisposed to believe a demonstrable falsehood. The combination of the nature of human cognition and perception (filtering out that which challenges our current beliefs, and amplifying that which reinforces them), with the balkanization of the dissemination of information (with conservative ideologues happily hooked on the ideological opiate provided by Fox News), and the highly financed and completely amoral pumping of outright misinformation into and through media outlets, create a perfect storm of cultivated ignorance, just in time to channel into completely dysfunctional electoral decisions.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some objective sources of information to which to turn, in order to sift through all of this noise and deception? Oh, wait, there is. The Associated Press reported today, for instance, that stimulus spending was far more successful than popular opinion (and false campaign advertising) would have it, reporting that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people are employed because of stimulus spending (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101020/ap_on_bi_ge/us_elections_stimulus). The AP article reports that many state and local governments were kept fiscally viable by the stimulus spending, and that the suffering construction industry experienced a boon due to new road and bridge building, while tax cuts and benefits have assisted millions suffering during the economic crisis.
But the problem isn’t just that those disinclined to believe, or factor in, these facts are too lazy to include them in their diet of information; it’s also that they have conveniently defined all such facts out of existence, even if they are served to them on a silver platter. The mantra about “the liberal media” permits all information contrary to their preferred myths and falsehoods to be dismissed en masse as part of a vast conspiracy by socialists to deprive them of their liberties. It doesn’t matter if the non-partisan CBO said it, or thousands of scientists working over decades all over the world have concluded it; all that matters is that it must be false, because it isn’t what they already believe, and all else is by definition false.
I refer to this social force, eating away at our ability to govern ourselves rationally and sensibly, as “Organized Ignorance,” a movement both organically and intentionally cultivated to enshrine demonstrable falsehoods, create false idols of misinformation, stoke up blazing emotions with the combustible kindling of “patriotic” and religious fervor, and unleashing it all as a man-made (and made-of-man) disaster flowing like molten lava over the institutional edifices of our republic.
The irony, and perhaps the saving grace, is that many of the people caught up in this fervor are really descent people, sincere, honest people of goodwill who have been swept along by forces designed to do so, like addictive drugs sold as health-enhancing tonics. Many can be weaned from these corrosive cognitive substances they have become hooked on, can be returned to sanity, can become a part of our shared effort to govern ourselves as reasonable people of goodwill.
The trick now is for the rest of us to figure out how to design and implement an effective detox program, and return this country to some semblance of sanity. Because the situation right now really is pretty dire.
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No sooner did I write two posts on the hypocrisy of the far right, which both claims that it’s “Constitutional Idolatry” demonstrates a superior respect for the historical document they are inadverantly mocking, and simultaneously prosecutes a theocratic agenda in direct opposition to the First Amendment (inspiring my post just this morning: Why the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses Are So Vital), then our non-witch friend was accommodating enough to explicitly, publicly deny that the First Amendment embodies any such principle as “separation of church and state” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101019/ap_on_el_se/us_delaware_senate). (My other very recent post on the subject, yesterday afternoon, was about how the proponents of Amendment 62 in Colorado, defining life as beginning at conception, used an outright deception trying to trick voters very probably opposed to it to vote for it, thinking that it is something else entirely, in a blatant expression of contempt for the concept of democracy and constitutionalism: Zealots Trying To Undermine Democracy).
Ms. O’Donnell is wrong on the law. Though the First Amendment doesn’t use the phrase “Separation of Church and State,” the combined effect of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause is very clearly to create just such a separation, at least in every sense that anyone might be politically or religiously motivated to object to: The state can neither favor nor disfavor any religion. Since it can neither favor nor disfavor, it is separated from those religions by the imposition of neutrality. That is precisely what the phrase “separation of church and state” refers to, and precisely what right-wing antagonists to constitutional democracy like O’Donnell want to undermine.
The state is, in fact, not separated from religion within the context of neutrality to all religions. It can, and does, partner with religious institutions to achieve secular ends. It can, and does, accommodate religious institutions, equitably and without favoritism, in a variety of ways (tax breaks, for instance, and access to public buildings for religious purposes, such as religious clubs in school). But the Christine O’Donnells of the world are not concerned with the lack of separation as long as no religion is favored or disfavored; rather, they are eager to find a way to dismantle precisely the kind of separation that the First Amendment imposes, the kind that acts as a bulwark against the theocratic impulses of the modern conservative movement in America, the most anti-constitutional, and to some extent anti-democratic, movement we’ve seen in a long time in this country.
Democracy is a system which works best when people, informed of the issues, vote their conscience. Without a doubt, it has become polluted with money and marketing strategies, a battle of psychological manipulation and the amassing of the funds to propagate it. But if we fail to draw the line at outright intentional deception, at blatant misrepresentation designed to deceive voters into voting for something that they have been led to believe is something else entirely, then we should at least invoke the moral condemnation that should be triggered by such acts, followed by the punishment of it at the ballot box.
Amendment 62, of course, is a ballot measure which defines life as beginning at conception, in a probably unconstitutional assault on Roe v. Wade and women’s reproductive rights, and is a little gremlin of legal mischief, tying in knots a legal system almost entirely predicated on legal rights that vest at birth. Even that minority of Democrats who lean in the pro-life direction would (or should) tend not to support this measure, because it’s poorly drafted and poorly conceived, and far more draconian in its implications than simply the repeal of Roe v. Wade would be. The majority of Democrats, who, in the final analysis, simply can’t conceive of reducing women to legal incubators, would oppose this ballot initiative both for its anti-reproductive-rights implications, and for its general costly dysfunctionality (if it became law, it would wreak havok through a plethora of unintended consequences, while simultaneously tying up the courts by the need to rule it unconstitutional, the inevitable ultimate outcome).
Which is why its advocates decided to try to trick Democrats into voting for it, by means of a robocall by “a fellow democrat” which makes no reference to “abortion” or “fetuses” or “unborn children” or any other word or phrase which would indicate what the amendment is actually about, but instead refers only to thousands of Coloradans being killed due to a lack of civil rights protections (as reported by Colorado Pols: http://coloradopols.com/diary/14149/now-thats-one-misleading-robocall).
Yes, you can argue that from the perspective of whoever paid for the call (but who also violated Colorado election law by not stating who they were), the description in the robocall is entirely accurate (if also intentionally selective). But there is no doubt that it was designed to invoke false images in the mind of the listener, to deceive them into believing that Amendment 62 is a measure to protect some group of fellow Coloradans (as currently legally and conventionally defined) whose lives have been put in jeopardy by a failure to provide adequate civil rights protections.
It is left to the imagination of the listener who the members of this group may be. Illegal immigrants being denied life-saving services? Residents exposed to toxic substances in their drinking water? Inmates being subjected to dangerous involuntary drug testing? There is no doubt that the ambiguity was exploited in order to trick some population of not terribly well informed or dilligent Democratic voters into voting against their conscience, by misleading them about the meaning of the measure on which they would be voting.
This is a case of a fanatical minority, knowing that they are in the minority, but wanting both to impose their moral tyranny on the majority that disagrees with them, and to circumvent the Constitution which protects the rights of some from the tyranny of others, trying to undermine both popular will and constitutional protections by means of outright deception.
Since they are so transparent in their contempt of both democracy and constitutionalism, I recommend that we take pains to ensure that democracy and constitutionalism return the favor.
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Natural disasters and economic crises are not what plagues humanity; humanity is what plagues humanity. Humanity plagues humanity in the obvious ways, in acts of terrorism, in rogue-state escalations of tension and threats of military violence, in genocides and riots and acts of mayhem large and small. Humanity plagues humanity in contested but fairly apparent ways, by clinging to platitudes and engaging in the politics of ignorance and belligerence, of xenophobia and homophobia and a general fear of the “other”. But humanity also plagues humanity by indifference, by a lack of will, a lack of perseverance, a lack of commitment to confront the enemy within and defeat it each and every day, each and every week, each and every month, year, decade, century, and millennium. Humanity plagues humanity by failing to step up and contribute to the solution, even if never having contributed directly to the problem. Humanity plagues humanity by sitting on the sidelines and surrendering the field to the most ruthless, or the most enraged, or the best mobilized by the best funded but least altruistic.
Not only is the Tea Party the incarnation of our own worst enemy, but so too are the vast numbers of reasonable people of goodwill who can’t be bothered to stand up to them. The Denver Post reported today on “the enthusiasm gap,” assuring us that it is real, and tht it may be decisive (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16367341). And when the Republicans take the House, and maybe the Senate; when they undermine through an assault of defunding and riders and amendments which chip away at the modest Health Care Act we fought tooth and nail to pass, and complained bitterly about it not being enough; when they turn the clock back a few years to the days when W made most of us ashamed; all of us who weren’t excited enough to keep it from happening will be to blame.
It’s not just those who do violence to the public interest that are responsible for the damage done, but also those who sit by and let them do it. We’ve got somewhere between zero seconds and 15 days to avert a political disaster. I suggest that each and every one of us spend just about every waking moment for the next two weeks doing every last thing we can to avert it. Don’t wait for the clarity of hindsight to recognize how urgent it is. Don’t forsake hope just because it didn’t serve you breakfast in bed the day after the honeymoon; you’ll miss it desparately when it’s gone.
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The title quote, uttered by President Obama to describe the choice we have in the 2010 elections, captures the essence of the on-going struggle between humanity’s inner-angels and inner-demons, a struggle which produces the realization of both our dreams and our nightmares, depending on which prevails in any given moment of history.
The refrain “we want our country back” is the refrain of those who fear progress, who cling to a mythologically sanitized past rather than forge a path into the inevitable future. It attracts, along with those who are making some vaguer, narrower reference, those who want to take the country back from, among others, women, African Americans, Hispanics, non-Christians, and Gays, groups which have succeeded in diminishing the opportunity gap between themselves and the white, male, Christian minority that has historically maintained that gap to their own advantage and in accord with their own bigotries. And while we have progressed in diminishing the gap, the legacy of history remains with us today, and demands our forward-looking rather than backward-looking attention.
Those who have the courage to hope, to aspire to do better, don’t ever want their country “back.” We always want it “forward.” Our history has been the story of a people moving forward, conceived in a Declaration of Independence which continued and contributed to a transformation of the world already underway, accelerating our reach for future possibilities, and our removal of the shackles of past institutional deficiencies. It was a nation of Progressives, of people who knew that you don’t just accept the institutions handed down, but always seek to refine and improve them. It was a nation that drafted a document by which to govern itself, one which proved insufficient (The Articles of Confederation, drafted and adopted in 1777, though not actually ratified until 1781), and then got its representatives together to try again, ten years later, and get it right (producing the U.S. Constitution, which was a document drafted to strengthen, not weaken, the federal government).
The drafting and ratification of our brilliant Constitution marked a beginning, not an end, a point of departure through which to express and fully realize our collective genius, not an impediment to the use of our reason and will to address the challenges yet to come. It was drafted by people wise enough and humble enough not to imbue it with the quasi-religious hold it (or an insulting caricature of it) now has over some contracted imaginations. It was meant to be a source of guidance rather than a source of idolatry. It provided the nation with a robust legal framework through which to address future challenges, some of which were already visible at the time, and some of which were not, but which the framers knew would ceaselessly present themselves (and which many thought would promptly make the Constitution itself obsolete. The fact that that hasn’t come to pass is a tribute to our ability to make from the document they created in a given historical context one which adapts itself to changing historical circumstances).
Ahead of the country remained the abolition of slavery, the protection of individual civil rights from state as well as federal power, a far-too-late end to the slaughter and displacement of the indigenous population (too late because they had already been nearly exterminated, and removed to tiny, infertile plots of land), the institution of free universal public education, the extension of suffrage to unpropertied males and women, the passage of anti-trust laws to preserve a competitive market, the establishment and necessary growth of an administrative infrastructure which immediately preceded and facilitated the most robust acceleration of economic growth in the history of the world, the desegregation of our schools, the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the beginnings of absolutely crucial efforts to address the long-term detrimental health and economic consequences of environmental contamination.
There never was a moment in the course of this story when there weren’t challenges yet to be identified and addressed, many of which could only be successfully addressed by means of government, and, often, only by means of the federal government (e.g., the abolition of slavery, which ended up requiring the federal government to prosecute a civil war; the enforcement of Civil Rights protections; and environmental protections covering interstate pollutants). Our Founding Fathers understood that. Thomas Jefferson himself said that every generation needed to refine its institutions to adapt to changing circumstances and meet the challenges of their own day. Such people never wanted their country “back.” They always wanted it “forward.” And they dreamed of establishing a country that would renew rather than renounce that commitment with every new generation.
Though there are many today who don’t get this, most don’t get it by means of blurry vision and historical inconsistency, rather than a retroactive commitment to what they claim currently to be an immutable truth. It is a tiny minority today, utterly detached from reality, who want to completely abolish Social Security or Medicare, though there are many who vehemently oppose health care reform and improved financial sector regulation. The difference between those past acts of our federal government that we have come to take for granted and whose value we almost universally recognize, and those present acts of our federal government that so many (so absurdly) call a “socialist” threat to our “liberty,” isn’t in the nature of the policies themselves (they are actually very similar in nature), but rather in the difference of perspective granted by elapsed time and an improved quality of life.
The impassioned, angry, vehement opposition to today’s progressive reforms, almost down to the precise words and phrases (including cries of “socialism”), is virtually identical to that which confronted the passage of Social Security and Medicare in their day. It is the perennial resurgence of the same faction, the same force at work today as in those previous generations: The voice of fear, the clinging to past failures and deficiencies for lack of courage, the perception of progress as a threat rather than a promise, though those same cowering souls could hardly imagine living without the promises of progress fulfilled before their birth and in their youth. They take gladly from those progressives who came before and fought to establish the world they now take for granted, but fight passionately against those progressives of today striving to provide similar gifts of social improvement to future generations.
In Colorado, these two sides, these two opposing forces of Hope and Fear, are embodied in our U.S. Senate and Gubernatorial races. In both races, it is the urbane, highly informed, business savvy, pragmatic Progressive pitted against the retrograde, chauvinistic, insular and regressionary Conservative. Michael Bennet, as I have written before at some length (Why Michael Bennet Truly Impresses Me), is a model of reason, civility, humility, and subtle systemic understanding, all focused on how to leave our children with more rather than less opportunity than we ourselves have enjoyed. Ken Buck, his opponent, is a sexist troglodyte who accused a rape victim of “buyer’s remorse” (though the accused rapist admitted in a taped phone call from the police station that he had in fact raped her!), a candidate who opposes access to abortions even by victims of rape and incest (condemning some pre-teen girls to a premature motherhood that will, in some cases, utterly destroy them). With the same indifference to reality, Buck is committed to the pseudo-economic certainties of his ideological camp, certainties which defy the lessons of history and the prevailing economic models of those who actually study the subject.
In our gubernatorial race, we have a very similar match-up, with Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper (currently the very popular mayor of Denver) as a model of the rational, urbane entrepreneur (who, after being laid off as a geologist in his youth, opened a very successful brewpub in a downtown Denver area –LoDo– which, through his enterprise and hard work, he helped to turn into a very robust restaurant and bar district), opposed by Tom Tancredo, the U.S. Congressman (from my district, CD 6) who became nationally and internationally infamous for his outspoken xenophobia and belligerent anti-immigrant demagoguery. Again, it is a race of hope against fear, a repeat of similar struggles we have seen around the world throughout human history, with prosperity and human welfare flourishing where hope has prevailed, and a contraction of wealth and opportunity taking hold where fear prevails (sometimes accompanied by nightmares of violence directed against the scapegoats who have been identified as personified targets of that fear).
Economically, Hope counsels that we employ the best economic models to forge the best fiscal and economic policies possible to ensure the robustness, sustainability, and equity of our economic system, while Fear counsels that we base our economic policies on information-stripped platitudes, contracting rather than expanding, insulating rather than competing, cowering rather than aspiring. A hopeful people invests in its future; a fearful people stuffs its money in a mattress. A hopeful people works to create a higher quality of life, while a fearful people works toward enshrining past achievements and, by doing so, obstructing future ones. A hopeful people seeks to expand opportunity; a fearful people seeks to protect what’s theirs from incursions by others. A hopeful people reaches out, looks past the horizon, and works toward positive goals. A fearful people builds walls, huddles together, and obstructs the dreams and aspirations of others.
But this year, in this election, it is not just any other incarnation of the struggle between Hope and Fear. It is the most dangerous form of that struggle, the form it takes when we are on the brink of inflicting on ourselves enormous suffering. Because the struggle this year is characterized by a terrifying discrepancy in passion: The angry, fearful mob is ascendant, while cooler heads are too cool, too uninspired, to face that mob down and disperse it.
It is under just such circumstances when, historically, Fear prevails over Hope. It is under these circumstances, circumstances that the hopeful among us are allowing to take hold, when countries get sucked into the nightmare that fear produces. This is what responsible, reasonable people of goodwill cannot, must not, allow to happen.
Vote. Make sure everyone you know votes. Confront the angry, frightened and frightening mob and insist that we are better than that. Don’t let them put this state, this country, and this world back into Reverse again, as it was from 2001-2009, when America became a nation defined by fear, with a government defined by the belligerent ignorance which is Fear’s most loyal servant. Let’s keep this nation in Drive, and move hopefully into the future. In 2008, many of us were excited by that prospect, and in 2010, we should remain warriors of reason and goodwill in the face of the Grendel of small-mindendness awoken by the small, fledgling steps forward we have taken as a people. We need to defend, preserve, and advance what we accomplished in 2008. We need to move forward, not backward.
Don’t sit this one out. Don’t let the brutal tyranny of Fear and Ignorance rule us.
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Everyone who advocates any political or social position, and who claims to do so because it serves interests other than merely their own, acknowledges, either implicitly or explicitly, that we are in a shared enterprise. Some think the public interest is best served by an absolutist commitment to “less government,” and some by doing the analysis and making the determination, in each instance, in the light of the specific relevant facts. But regardless of what we value, what we believe, what we insist upon, if we are valuing it, believing it, and insisting upon it in a public forum in an attempt to persuade others that it is the right thing to value, believe, or insist upon, then we believe that we have some shared fate, and some common interest in governing and organizing ourselves wisely. That is the human enterprise.
First, let’s dispense with the artificial distinction above between “governing” and “organizing” ourselves. Those who believe that churches and community organizations and voluntary associations of various kinds are useful, but that government is an impediment to our individual and/or collective welfare (the latter simply being an aggregation of our individual welfare, according to some set of values held by the individual advocating a particular position), are in effect saying that they favor one form of government over another. If government were eliminated or reduced, but voluntary organizations were left to fill the void, then the latter would become governments, and would be subject to many of the same issues, debates, and concerns that current governments are subject to. So, the debate is always over what form and function of government we advocate.
I assume that we can all agree, that in any conflict of ideologies, generally speaking, we are acting on the assumption that some are more useful than others. The logically possible alternatives are that conflicting ideologies are not actually incompatible, or, if they are incompatible, that the public interest is unaffected by the choice between them, in both of which cases there should be no conflict. The existence of conflict demonstrates the belief that some ideologies, some positions, better serve the public interest than others.
I further assume that we can all agree that the purpose of our political process, of our public debate over which ideas to implement, is based on conflicting beliefs over which ideas best serve the public interest. We should all acknowledge that we are engaged in a process the purpose of which is to select those ideas which best serve the public interest, however it is defined.
There are really, implicitly, two interrelated debates taking place under that one rubric: What is “the public interest,” and how is it best served? In other words, there is a debate over how to define the goal, and over the means for achieving it. We routinely conflate these two debates, arguing over means to differently conceived goals without debating the relative merits of the goals themselves, because we are in conflict over policies which, by their nature, are based on particular resolutions of both aspects of this contested terrain.
The first thing we need to do, in service to the human enterprise that we all implicitly acknowledge we are in, is to engage explicitly in the debate over what defines “the public interest,” without leaping to the debate about how it’s best served. This pre-empts the error of various idolatries, including “Constitutional Idolatry” (the treatment of adherence to a particular reductionist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as the necessary and sufficient justification for all policy positions), by requiring attention to the end that is being served, rather than merely advocacy of a particular means for serving it. It requires, in other words, that the argument be made, rather than merely the dogma invoked.
Having to “make the case” is an essential procedural cornerstone of engaging in the human enterprise most effectively. We resolve legal disputes by “making the case” in court, which looks for adherence to a particular set of procedures and rules to best ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented. We resolve scientific and academic disputes by “making the case” in peer-reviewed journals, which look for adherence to a particular methodology which maximizes the reliability of data and of the analysis applied to it. We need to learn how to submit political disputes to the same discipline, to a methodology which maximizes reliability of information and of the analysis applied. The starting point for developing such a discipline is the requirement that political positions prevail to the extent that the case for them prevails in a court-like or academy-like procedural crucible, rather than to the extent that they manage to exploit unexamined emotional responses and predispositions (the same predecessor to modern legal and scientific procedures which gave us throwing witches into lakes to determine guilt or innocence, and basing knowledge of nature’s subtleties almost exclusively on popular superstitions).
When we subject the fundamental political conflict over how to define “the public interest” to this constraint, we discover that one set of positions is based on a refusal to make the case, rather than on how well the case was made. The Tea Party and its fellow travelers, invoking the “Constitutional Idolatry” mentioned above, claim that we have an authoritative document that tells us exactly how to pursue the public interest, without requiring any consideration of what the public interest being pursued is. It jumps to advocacy of a methodology for pursuing the public interest (i.e., adherence to a particular interpretation of the Constitution), assuming that the public interest is thus served. It may be, but the case needs to be made, explicitly, to determine if the argument should prevail under a sound methodology applied to political disputes.
Currently, there isn’t really any debate over what the public interest is. There is, rather, a conflict between those who think we should pursue it, and those who think we shouldn’t, the latter, essentially, arguing that the public interest is best served by being disregarded. This latter group is rooted, for instance, in a belief in the justice of inequity, that what each has is what each deserves, and that any attempt to “redistribute” wealth, or to refine property rights in ways which result in the redistribution of wealth, is an injustice against those from whom it is redistributed.
But this position is detached from reality. It doesn’t recognize that current property rights are a legal and political artifact, no more inherent to nature than alternative sets of property rights, and are a particular kind of distribution, not the absence of one. Modifications in these laws are less “redistributions” than “alternative distributions.” All that distinguishes them from the current system of distribution of wealth is that they are more or less efficient (contributing more or less robustly to the production of wealth), more or less fair (distributing wealth and opportunity with less regard for the chances of birth), and more or less sustainable (establishing a stable pattern of rights and responsibilities).
This position that defends strictly defined and inviolate private property rights is detached from history, in which the distribution of wealth extant today is rooted in violence and exploitation, and that the distribution of opportunity today is affected by that historical legacy. It is detached from empathy, in which the injustice of being born into poverty and suffering its effects is a social problem to be addressed rather than someone else’s problem to be disregarded. It us detached from pragmatism and economics, in which our current extreme economic inequality diminishes economic robustness and social mobility, decreasing both aggregate wealth and increasing persistent, long-term social costs imposed on all of us. But most of all, it is detached from consideration of what “the public interest” means, because the economically, socially, and morally dysfunctional commitment to current inequities can only be defended in blindness, for only as long one refuses to face the question of what “the public interest” means. It crumbles under scrutiny as soon as that question is addressed.
The Human Enterprise requires that we address both the question of what defines “the public interest,” and what means (i.e., public policies) best serve it. And it requires that we do so according to a methodology that maximizes the reliabilitiy of information and analyses employed, and minimizes the role of prejudice (i.e., emotional predispositions). It’s time for all of us to engage in that enterprise together.
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