4:00 pm: I’ve just learned that a New Orleans judge has granted an injunction lifting the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling. If the matter goes to the supreme court, and the supreme court agrees to hear it, will that signal a constitutional crisis?
8:00 pm: Now the administration has served notice that it will issue a second order and is appealing the ruling in regard to the first.
Representative Joe Barton has now apologized for his apology, but his original charge of a shakedown of innocent BP management by a bullying Obama administration still stands as a marker of the hypocrisy of present-day conservatism. I’ve never bought the right’s claim to support limited government. Big government is fine with the right as long as it fights wars, restricts civil liberties, and skews the tax system to benefit entrenched privilege.
Actions, as my grandmother was fond of saying, speak louder than words. From health care legislation to recent supreme court decisions, right wing politicians in both parties have forced continuation of the dysfunctional marriage between the state and established wealth that has characterized US public policy throughout our history. This marriage, exemplified now for us in a series of public disasters wrought by corporate malfeasance, has currently produced greater inequality in this country than obtains anywhere in Europe; and it is this marriage, together with the various political and social inequalities it supports and maintains, that present-day conservatism seeks to preserve against the advance of cultural change exemplified by the election of Barack Obama.
In 2004 the American Political Science Association (APSA) issued a report entitled American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality that concluded in part:
Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.
In this week’s issue of The Nation, a poignant letter to the editor underlines the point. Alice Skirtz, a casework supervisor at the Family Shelter Partnership in Cincinnati points to the growth of populations for whom “homeless shelters are lifesaving.”
If things proceed as they did in the 1980s, when the masses of Ronald Reagan’s “new poor” exploded, we can next expect the “basement dwellers,” followed by people from suburbia with foreclosures of their own. They will compete for precious shelter beds with the post-PRWORA [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996] families stranded for lack of affordable housing.
The Moynihan Report, that influenced PRWORA, “the end of welfare as we know it” during the Clinton era, is now widely regarded as racist, its consequent greater isolation and enslavement of the poor yet another accomplishment of the US marriage between wealth and the state. But right-wing supporters of the document continue to condemn its feminist critics. Here’s the final paragraph of a recent diatribe by Rich Lowry in the National Review:
“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,†Moynihan wrote, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.†It’s a statement just as true and nearly as unwelcome as it was four decades ago.
Voices on the left sometimes reflect a failure to understand the tensions and dilemmas of present-day political animus. Today, Richard Cohen added some words to the growing chorus of demands that President Obama get mad at something. Cohen will give the president his choice among several objects of anger, including China and Russia—Cohen is an old cold warrior and Israel hawk—but he mostly thinks the president’s putative coolness prevents the rest of us from knowing “who he is.” As far as I”m aware, this particular critique of the president was first offered by Shelby Steele back before the 2008 election. Steele’s little book about then candidate Obama was entitled in part, A Bound Man . . . . Though I didn’t accept its conclusion, I thought its title suggestive. It reminded me of a short story by Ilse Aichinger in which the protagonist learns to function within constraint and finds great freedom in his condition. I said of candidate Obama then, that I thought his individuality consisted “in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness.” As my friend Tim Burke put it in a paragraph I quoted:
This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.
And even if there were that much power, as from time to time in modern history there has been, I wouldn’t want it to be exercised. Cohen gratuitously and condescendingly gives the president a pedigree right out of the Moynihan Report and suggests that both the president’s situatedness and his intellect are weaknesses. I profoundly disagree with this claim.
Actions speak louder than words. Richard Cohen and the perhaps liberal savoyards around him in the chorus implore the president to lose his cool and smite the wicked whilst conservatives sound another theme accusing him of shaking down BP. That the conservative accusation didn’t play very well tells me more than the accusation did. While others see a president who needs to “emote,” as Cohen puts it, I see a president battling entrenched privilege with a cool pragmatism that seeks to coopt its concerns and transform them.
There’s a new manifesto from the religious right.
Laurie Goodstein, writing in today’s New York Times, describes it as “an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush.”
Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.
Meanwhile, the terrible murders at Ft. Hood have become a site for posturing on all sides. Joseph Liebermann has described these events as domestic terrorism, setting the stage for Homeland Security Committee hearings that will surely involve little more than political theater. And Jacob Weisberg, writing in this week’s Newsweek, scolds the president for his alleged over moderation with regard to “the threat from America’s Islamist enemies,” describing the Ft. Hood speech as evidence of the same.
Weisberg’s last paragraph is especially telling. Because I both agree and disagree with it, I’ll quote it in full.
Obama is right to continue emphasizing the all-important distinction between religious views that are compatible with democratic pluralism and those that aren’t. As he deals with the fallout of the attack, he must continue to separate Islamic extremism from Islam as a whole. But his words at Fort Hood, while comforting, do not really come to grips with the problem. America does not face a threat from the perversion of faith in general. We face a threat from the perversion of one faith in particular. The president needs to dip into his reservoir of good will to remind mainstream Muslims of their special responsibility. If militant Islamism is a distortion of their moderate beliefs, only their beliefs can defeat it.
Weisberg is right in pointing out that some religious views are compatible with democratic pluralism and some aren’t. This is a point religious rightists were willing to make as well last year when the target was Jeremiah Wright. But I think Weisberg’s claim that “America does not face a threat from the perversion of faith in general” is wrong and also wrong headed. Americans are quite willing to tolerate “perversions” of Christianity and Judaism. Indeed the English speaking world has a long tradition of tolerating “perversions” of Christianity. In 1649, English parliamentarians murdered the British King in the name of religious freedom. But the regime they installed during the interregnum was hardly filled with sweetness and light. In the run-up to our own civil war, Americans were quite willing to tolerate the preaching of slavery from the nation’s pulpits, but the British experience is more telling. The Roundheads failed because they were bigots, and in their sectarianism they couldn’t agree sufficiently to govern or to disarm the violence that plagued their time.
The intransigence of the religious right in this country is displayed remarkably in the manifesto to which Goodstein alludes.
We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.
The headline chosen for Goodstein’s piece is “Christian Leaders Unite on Political Issues.” I guess that’s because the group includes both Catholics and protestants. But the group is a rump Christian group that always gets more favorable media attention than it deserves.
It’s time for that to stop. The Christian right gives cover to the militant militia movement, just recently reviewed by The Southern Poverty Law Center. Anybody who thinks that modern Christian militancy has no potential for violence should remember the Oklahoma City bombing and the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller.
Indeed, in the world at large, the rise of militant Islam troubles me less than the rise of anti-modern religious bigotry generally.
While the spinners parse President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly according to the foreign policy clichés of the moment, it’s at least interesting to wonder if any US president can effect any change in foreign affairs that is more than symbolic, or alter the ideologies of the nation’s military and intelligence agencies or change their behavior. I had planned to write something about this, but Gary Wills has written something more authoritative than anything I could have said, in the New York Review of Books.
“A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets,” Wills writes.
He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.
This perhaps explains why President Obama’s campaign promises to dismantle criminal enterprises within the national defense establishment are likely to remain unfulfilled. Read the entire Wills essay here.
I’m now wondering if the new direction that those of us who ardently supported the President when he ran for office hoped for was ever more than a pipe dream that ended when it was found that AIG and certain banking institutions were “too big to fail.” It now appears that the banking industry with its rightist ideology will be too big for government to reign in, though that really means that there is so much interdependence between the interests and power bases of Wall Street bankers and those of key legislators that serious regulation of capitalist excess is impossible. And it now appears that certain cartels, the medical-industrial complex and the national defense cartel, with their rightist ideologies, have become so powerful that they cannot be successfully opposed.
The Republican party may be in disarray, but the ideological right is not only alive and well but also very much in control.