As I define it, it is the culmination of many years of unfortunate decisions regarding child rearing -- ill-conceived self-image programs, rewarding mere participation, the alienization of punishment, and the emergence of political correctness.
It is the failure of the education system; the dumbing down of America.
It's the self-righteousness and vitriol of religious factions.
The loss of civility due, in-part, to an erosion of communication skills.
It's the lies of politicians and corporate executives. The slow decay of integrity and honesty.
it's unreality television.
And, it's an uninformed and ignorant electorate; partially the result of a deficient media.
To which I will add: It's the predictable consequence of voters and pundits choosing to support a politician primarily because of how much they appear to irritate the "other side".
Comments stalwart Dave passes along a piece that matches well with my (limited) personal experience with one Mr. Gingrich of Georgia:
And while he may understand the kinds of hot-button issues that get to people, what he does not understand is how he, Newt Gingrich, comes across to people. The answer: not well...Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He'll never be president.
Back in 2007, it fell to me to entertain a colleague visiting from New Hampshire. In an effort to talk about something other than science for a few minutes, I (jokingly) asked him how many presidential candidates he had met. He paused for a moment, then said, "Pretty much all of them."
It took me a second to realize that he was serious.
Whatever you think of the disproportionate influence Iowa and New Hampshire have on the nominating process, one feature of this particular quirk in our system is that candidates have to actually meet a substantial portion of the electorate in those states, and make a meaningful impression on them to win. Clearly, this isn't a foolproof way to weed out the sleazy or the possibly unstable, but considering the stakes involved, it's probably better than allowing candidates to campaign solely via the media and at a great remove from real people. Or at least people who care enough to vote in primaries and caucuses.
I met Newt Gingrich twice: once as a middle school student, when his district still encompassed the south side of Atlanta (he decamped for Cobb County along with most of the other white people in the 90's), and a second time when I was a student at Georgia Tech. I don't think my impression of him either time was unduly influenced by politics, since in the first instance I was 12 or 13 years old, and the second time would have been right around the time I voted for Bob Dole for president.
Long story short: Newt is an asshole. One of the most off-putting, arrogant, condescending personalities I've ever encountered. To meet him is to dislike him.
His run will be mercifully short once the good people of Iowa and New Hampshire get the chance to realize this.
The greatest disparity between the religious makeup of Congress and the people it represents is in the percentage of the unaffiliated — those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” Only six members of the 112th Congress (about 1%) do not specify a religious affiliation and none say they are unaffiliated. By contrast, about one-sixth (16%) of U.S. adults are not affiliated with any particular faith.
and notes:
This group has also been growing very strongly - but the public political culture closets it.
I'm not sure that this is really an example of "closeting" unless one assumes that there are members of Congress who are "unaffiliated" (I really dislike that term, BTW) in their hearts but profess otherwise for any variety of reasons (family, social pressure, or their political careers). I would guess that this is the case for a handful, but probably not many.
But if we take the members' responses at face value, this seems to me a simple function of majoritarian politics. Religious minority groups that are represented at all among the members tend to be somewhat geographically concentrated, meaning that while they are minorities nationally, they may be less so locally. This is clearly true for Mormons (Utah), and probably to some extent for Orthodox and Jewish people as well (urban districts.)
Atheists are pretty well-distributed geographically. I don't think most of the other 83.9% of the American public are consciously against atheists holding office...but the minority of them that do care, care about it a LOT. And with numbers that disparate, that's really all it takes to keep professing atheists out of the halls of congress, for now.
--Obama becomes the third consecutive president to lose at least one house in a midterm. Declarations of historicity are overblown; the difference is one of degree, not type. I don't think this signifies much more than the American electorate (at least the ~20% or so that is perennially up for grabs) would prefer a more parliamentary system, even though they probably don't realize it.
--The one bright spot: the "Palin Model" of vague right-wing populism and a refusal to engage any non-Fox press failed miserably in Delaware, Nevada, and Alaska. I am cautiously optimistic that she has peaked.
--California remains a stolidly Democratic state that doesn't give a rat's ass about actual personal liberty. Disappointing, but not surprising.
--Washington State, despite being a high-tech hub, is really bad at math.
You know what? You were right about Citizens' United.
The campaign ads right now aren't just making me rethink my reflexive libertarianism...at this point I'm actually wondering if we didn't give that whole monarchy thing a fair shake.
Here's the thing...being a "former Satanist" or having "dabbled in witchcraft" was practically a cottage industry among professional Christians during the late 80's and early 90's. Satanism was what suburbanites were panicked about before black people started moving in. So having come out of that was the ultimate conversion street cred.
Sort of like Vanilla Ice claiming to be from the streets of Miami instead of the cul-de-sacs of Dallas.
All of which is to say that I'd bet a substantial sum that Ms. O'Donnell's claims of witchcraft are an exageration at a minimum, if not outright bullshit. And since she is running as the uber-conservative candidate, I for one look forward to her deciding whether she'd rather be a witch or a liar.
Yes, [the Tea Party] are, for the most part, emphasizing economic and fiscal issues, which is wonderful, even though they have no actual realistic plans to cut spending by the amount they would have to if taxes are not to rise. But that does not mean they have in any way forsaken the social issues substantively. Name a tea-party candidate who is pro-choice. Name one who backs marriage equality. Name one who wants to withdraw from Afghanistan beginning next year. Name one who has opposed torture. Name one who has the slightest qualms about police powers. Name one who would end the military ban on gays serving openly, and take even the slightest political risk on any of these subjects.
I welcome the belated right-wing opposition to out-of-control government spending. But the one thing you have to note about tea-party fervor is that none of it existed when they had real leverage over a Republican president, who spent us into bankruptcy. That tells you something. And if you think a party led by Palin will not embrace every neocon crusade or Christianist social policy, you're dreaming.
So this is where I admit that despite my best efforts, I am completely and utterly fascinated by Christine O'Donnell. More precisely, I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Christine O'Donnell.
Much has been made of this:
(If you don't want to watch, this is basically a clip of an excruciatingly earnest twentysomething O'Donnell on an MTV show talking about why she thinks masturbation is a sin.)
Now...it has been pointed out that her anti-onanist stance is not exactly the centerpiece of her platform, and that this was from 15 years ago. (She has declined to refutiate it, recently, though.) More to the point, it isn't as though she developed this particular set of beliefs out of thin air, but rather that she was/is simply subscribing to the actual doctrine of the Catholic Church to which she belongs.
Fine, fine and fine. But I still think it matters.
I would not knowingly support for office someone who professes such a belief, for the same reasons I would not knowingly support someone who really believes that the world is 6000 years old, that man was created on the 6th day of the universe's existence, that a global flood wiped out all life on earth except what was on a big boat, or that 70 virgins await you in paradise if you die killing infidels.
This isn't to say I would rule out all religious people--in this country, that's nearly everyone--because lots of people belong to faith communities and don't take all of this nonsense literally. Or even if they do, they have the good sense to keep it to themselves.
No, my problem is not with the profession of silly beliefs per se, but that it indicates a level of credulity that is just too dangerous to put in power. If you believe we don't have dinosaurs because they couldn't fit on the ark (say), then I think the odds are greater that you might believe equally absurd propositions such as "that ex-KGB guy who runs Russia seems like a good fellow", or "we will be greeted as liberators and democracy will bloom in the desert."
Gene Healy says Republicans think that their voters are stupid:
By 2012, our national debt will be larger than the entire U.S. economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. So what's on the front burner in Washington these days? Zoning issues in lower Manhattan!
...
The establishment Right wants to play the Tea Party movement for suckers. It remains to be seen whether they'll play along.
I don’t find this believable. This idiotic foofaraw could be a distraction only if the GOP rank-and-file actually cared more about the size of government than the cultural politics of American identity. But they don’t. It’s not even close. American conservatism is a movement consumed by protecting and asserting a certain fabricated conception of the traditional American way of life against imaginary enemies.
Needless to say, I think Will has a point here. You can argue that the party, the people that tend to vote for it, and the media that cater to those people all feed off of each other. But in any case, the modern kulturkampf-obsessed GOP didn't arise in a vaccuum.
Imagine a successful two-term Republican governor with a credible small government record, a demonstrated commitment to civil liberties, skepticism about foreign wars, a longstanding determination to right America's fiscal ship, evidence of competent management skills in the public and private sectors, and an utter lack of ugly populist rhetoric during the whole of his substantial time in public life. You'd think he'd be a God send for tea partiers and civil libertarians, a possibility to win the GOP nomination in 2012, and an appealing alternative for those of us who think that given a sane alternative Barack Obama doesn't deserve another term.
That attractive, reality-based Republican exists! His name is Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico.
He goes on to say that Johnson has an uphill battle with regard to name recognition and fund raising. But the elephant in the room (if you'll pardon the expression) that Friedersdorf neglects to mention is that Johnson is an outspoken drug war skeptic. And I think that puts him out of the running as firmly as Mitt Romney's Mormonism and Rudy Giuliani's cross-dressing.
The American right today is not a political movement, it is a cultural one, and one that is still fighting the culture war of the 1960's. It isn't that most Republicans actually believe marijuana is harmful (too many of them have smoked it themselves, and know better) or that they actually think the war on drugs is good policy (because no reasonably intelligent person still believes this, and I don't think most Republicans are actually stupid). It's the counter-culture that drugs (and marijuana in particular) are emblematic of.
For the establishment right, it isn't about good policy, it's about sticking it to "the elites", "the intellectuals" and yes, to "the hippies". Understand that, and you understand why the the GOP looks so completely, utterly bonkers these days.
So for the record: Bill O'Reilly is now to the left of President Obama on DADT. And President Obama is to the right of Dan Choi and Bill O'Reilly and John Aravosis and me.
Just typing that made my head explode. I'm going to go get a restorative cupcake now.
I have a theory I've been toying around with, which probably bears more explanation than I can afford to give here and now, but it goes something like this: If you want to look at where the general attitude of a society about something is heading, you look at the arts and commerce (in reality, the former is a subset of the latter.) If you want to look at where it is, you just talk to (a large and hopefully representative sample of) people. If you want to know what has already changed, you look at politics.
I am sure that counterexamples exist (the federal government was almost certainly ahead of attitudes about civil rights for black people, at least in the south), but I think this is true about several of the issues where I see American society undergoing a pretty big shift in my lifetime, and homosexuality in particular.
The fact that anyone takes William Kristol seriously anymore is as terrifying as it is depressing.
And one routinely hears how very, very dangerous any use of military force against Iran would be.
Would it be so dangerous? That is a debate the country needs to have, publicly and frankly, before it’s too late.
Critics of military action against Iran argue that it would open up a third front for American forces in the Middle East. Our troops would be at risk from Iranian missiles. Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz (causing oil prices to skyrocket) and use its terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to carry out attacks well beyond the Middle East, including perhaps on the U.S. homeland.
Yet if we carried out a targeted campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, against sites used to train and equip militants killing American soldiers, and against certain targeted terror-supporting and nuclear-enabling regime elements, the effects are just as likely to be limited.
It’s unclear, for example, that Iran would want to risk broadening the conflict and creating the prospect of regime decapitation. Iran’s rulers have shown that their preeminent concern is maintaining their grip on power. If U.S. military action is narrowly targeted, and declared to be such, why would Iran’s leaders, already under pressure at home, want to escalate the conflict, as even one missile attack on a U.S. facility or ally or a blockade of the Strait would obviously do?
Why, indeed? After all, acquiescence to American power has a been a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy since it's founding.
If the Iranian regime's first priority is maintaining its grip on power--to the extent that they will not retaliate against targeted strikes against nuclear facilities by the US--doesn't that also suggest that they can be contained even if they did possess nuclear weapons?
Either the Iranian leadership are rational, or they aren't. Either they are willing to risk immolation in some sort of apocalyptic showdown with the Great Satan, or they aren't. But you cannot argue that they are both too irrationally belligerent to be contained AND rational enough not to fight back when directly attacked.
Note that I'm not saying there is no plausible scenario in which military action against Iran should ever happen. However, Kristol's formulation that we really have nothing to lose by erring on the side of preemption is as crazy as it is familiar.
One is tempted to wonder how dangerous it really would be to have the entire editorial board of the Weekly Standard shot. After all, it is unlikely that particular flock of chickenhawks are especially well-armed themselves, and even if they were, surely the instinct for self-preservation would lead them to attempt to talk their way out of it, rather than engaging in a firefight that would almost certainly end in their destruction. Surely that would make the world a safer place, too, to have the leading voice for war in the most powerful country on earth neutralized. And I'd like to think that given the Marxist roots of neoconservatism they could at least appreciate the irony.
Washington's ballot initiative I-1068, which would abolish state criminal and civil penalties for marijuana (for adults 18 and over), hit a snag this week, when the Service Employees International Union and "other players in progressive causes" declined to financially support the drive to get the necessary signatures to put I-1068 on the ballot. Phillip Dowdy of the group Sensible Washington writes:
Over the last month, the SEIU and others in state politics have talked with Sensible Washington about steps they could take to ensure that the initiative turned in enough signatures to qualify for this November’s ballot because marijuana legalization being on the ballot would drive extra voter turnout in ways that would benefit progressive causes and candidates in November in what’s shaping up to be a tough year for Democrats and progressive issues. Now after stringing the I-1068 campaign along for four weeks, they’ve walked.
Anyone who is truly serious about reforming drug laws should have given up on the mainstream left as a reliable ally a long time ago. If you can't get a former litigator for the ACLU to vote the right way in Gonzales v. Raich, you're pretty much screwed.
I keep telling people that a lot of the lefties in this state, and particularly in this city, are not liberal. They aren't interested in individual rights [em. added]--at least, not rights to do very many things outside a bedroom. Progressive activists are believers in government. They want to save the Earth by controlling people more, including by banning the use of tobacco outdoors in the public parks. I think the broad group of people who vote leftward are far more tolerant than the activists, and would vote for I-1068 if they could. Maybe now they won't get the chance.
--The new coalition government in the UK is actually talking about rolling back its own police power. File this under "I'll believe it when I see it", but Greenwald is depressingly correct: it is inconceivable that we would hear what Nick Clegg is saying from Barack Obama.
--Matt Yglesias on the fuzzy line between public and private. This is an argument libertarians should take seriously. This too.
--On a related note, Thoreau has an excellent suggestion for libertarian-ish pols who cannot seem to address issues of race and civil rights without stepping in it up to their eyeballs.
What's most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale...
It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights. Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack. The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we'll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism. For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we'll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit.
Sadly, this is old news. I can't really say I find the Obama administration to be a disappointment in this regard, but only because my expectations were so low to begin with:
And herein lies the real problem. The political center in this country, if the actions of the political class are any indicator (and is there any reason to think that they aren't?) is still so irrationally afraid of terrorism that there is broad support for shredding the Bill of Rights in the name of the appearance of security.
And no politician is going to fix that. This is a cultural problem. The politics merely reflect that.
I think it is very unlikely I will vote for any Republicans in this century. Two reasons:
1) Sarah Palin is widely considered a legitimate contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is considered to have "less than zero" chance of the same. (Briefer and funnier Gary Johnson here.)
The First Amendment is not and never has been outcome-dependent; the Government is barred from restricting speech -- especially political speech -- no matter the good results that would result from the restrictions. That's the price we pay for having the liberty of free speech. And even on a utilitarian level, the long-term dangers of allowing the Government to restrict political speech invariably outweigh whatever benefits accrue from such restrictions.
(And yes, I realize that Greenwald would probably be the last person to characterize himself as being of "the left", but he is clearly no Republican apologist.)
I'm broadly pro-yelling at politicians, so it's hard for me to get worked up over the Joe Wilson thing. Actually, I think politicians should probably be yelled at and yell at each other more, not less. I would prefer some genuine passion over principle to the microscopic oscillations between the Democratic and Republican wings of the American Party.
I also find it telling that the Republicans (or at least an awful lot of them) are worked up into apoplectic rage over what really amounts to some rather mundane domestic policy questions, while the Democrats (except Dennis Kucinich and a few other people no one takes seriously) just a few short years ago could not muster a fraction of that outrage over starting a god damn war on false pretenses.
I've sat on this a couple of weeks, but it seems appropriate in context: the only thing that puzzled me more than the general lovefest over Ted Kennedy was the visceral hatred he seemed to have inspired in so many of his political opponents. (It should be said that I find lovefests over politicians just icky generally.) By all means: disrespect the memory of a the late senator from Massachusetts, if you are so inclined, but don't do it because you think he represented some particularly virulent form of crypto-socialist-whatever, or because of your utterly manufactured outrage over the senseless death of a woman whose name you would not remember if she had been riding in the car with a less prominent politician.
Do it because disrespecting our rulers is our sacred right and (occasionally solemn duty) as Americans.
We are mostly ruled by liars and thieves. This is the normal human condition. There's nothing wrong with behaving accordingly.
I think it's pretty funny that people who (daily and for years!) turn their children over to the State for their education are freaking out about the possibility of their little darlings watching a speech by the President.
In terms of indoctrination, this is a fart in a hurricane.
