Hating on New York and San Francisco
To all the Republicans- and even some Democrats- portraying New York and San Francisco negatively in your election campaigns, please keep going. The last thing we need are the yokels from flyover country moving to either city.
Democracy, the “West”, and China
Chris commented below:
And because the West loves them. Westerners still generally believe “Western democracy” (scare quotes, because that should be plural, but everybody seems to assume the entire West -whatever that is- is a monolith) is the best of all possible systems. And so any Chinese (Iranian, Vietnamese, North Korean…) espousing values generally consistent with “Western democratic” ideals gets a lot of airplay.
This is an important distinction and I'm glad Chris brought it up. Many Westerners, particularly Americans, confuse and conflate concepts of 'democracy' and 'pro-West'. What makes many people in the US nervous about China isn't that China's an authoritarian state per se, but rather that China is beginning to challenge American hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the Bush years, democracy promotion became the ostensible theme of American foreign policy, but in reality it masked Washington's real intentions: building pro-American regimes. This hypocrisy was exposed quite blatantly in the 2005 Gaza elections, when the Bush Administration cheered for democratic elections up until the moment that Hamas won them.
How does this apply to China? Being a quasi-optimist, I'd say that over time odds are that the government will embrace some form of democracy. But as Chris points out, this democracy may not be as friendly to perceived Western interests as many Westerners might hope.
Ultimately, a realist would say that notions of democracy and autocracy are quaint compared to the overall dynamic taking place. As China grows, and it will continue to grow, it will begin to challenge US dominance in its region. The historical moment of American unipolarity is beginning to end, and in a few decades we'll see a new world where Washington will be forced to share influence with Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Moscow, and elsewhere.
But democracy is still worth supporting in China, if only so that people like Liu Xiaobo do not languish in prison for voicing aspirations that many of us simply take for granted.
Disappointment in Obama Disappointment
Reading this Guardian piece about how Jon Stewart has turned on the Obama administration has left me disappointed- in Stewart. The Daily Show host is quoted as saying that Obama ran as a visionary but has led as a functionary, with the implication that this is a bad thing.
I realize that Stewart and a lot of other liberals expected more radical progress from this administration, but let's consider the situation that Obama found himself in as he assumed office: an economy in complete ruin. Two bad wars. The international reputation of the US in the toilet. Not exactly a walk in the park!
(Incidentally, my favorite headline from the Obama election victory was from the Onion, natch: 'Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job')
Given his challenges upon assuming office and given the utterly recalcitrant Republican minority in Congress which has had no agenda other than to stymie him, I'd have to say Obama has done very well. On top of his efforts to stave off further economic recession and to wind down the wars, Obama accomplished something that every Democratic president since FDR has sought but not achieved: major health care reform.
The issue here is that a lot of Obama supporters felt that his inspiring rhetoric from the campaign should have guided his performance in office. What they forget is that for all of his charisma and unusual personal history, Obama still has to do battle with the normal checks and balances of the US political system. There are simply limits to what he could possibly accomplish, and while 'hope' is a nice concept it isn't exactly a viable governing philosophy.
So as for Stewart's comment about the president being a functionary rather than a visionary, my response is: well, good! President Bush was certainly a visionary- that no one could deny. But his vision was to remake the entire Middle East via a preventive invasion of Iraq based on a series of cynical, false assumptions that all turned out badly. His vision was that the United States was divinely ordained to spread a wave of democracy and so-called freedom to all the oppressed people in the world. The Bush presidency, people seem to be forgetting, ended in disaster. If Bush was a visionary, then I'd say the United States has had more than enough visionaries for awhile.
I won't go far as to blame wobbly liberals for the upcoming electoral massacre the Democrats face in a month. Unemployment this high simply spells doom for the party in government, and even ultimately popular leaders such as Clinton and Reagan each 'flunked' their first mid-terms.
But I think Obama supporters simply need to readjust their expectations and consider his performance in the proper context. When everyone was dancing in the street two Novembers ago on election night, there was a feeling that with Obama's election all of our problems would soon go away. Nobody- visionary or not- could possibly meet those expectations.
The Tea Party Good or Bad for the Left?
Robert Shrum, the Susan Lucci of American politics, thinks Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot with the Tea Party movement:
The Tea Party will prove to be the best thing that's happened to Barack Obama and the Democrats since, well, Sarah Palin, the media-hyped 2008 vice presidential nominee who turned out to be a bursting bubble, not a lasting bounce, for the McCain campaign. It's fitting that Palin is now the godmother of a movement that has captured the GOP instead of being captured by it. A series of tea-steeped intra-party fratricides has produced unwanted and unabashedly extreme candidates who will kill the Republicans' best hopes for 2010. Democrats will now lose fewer seats; they'll keep the Senate -- and just maybe even the House. The president won't have to struggle with the harshest consequences of a wholesale hostile takeover in Congress.
Shrum's right that in the short term the Tea Party movement will keep Republicans from maximizing their fortunes. But in the long term I'm not convinced this is such good news for the Democrats, or for the country as a whole. Even if the likes of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle lose winnable races this fall, the underlying situation is that the Republican Party as a whole has made a dramatic lurch to the right. A Republican Party without room for Arlen Specter and Mike Castle and Charlie Crist is one that has turned its back on its center.
In the zero-sum logic of politics, this should be good news for the Democrats, right? A Republican shift to the right leaves room for the Democrats to occupy the center, thus expanding its base and winning more elections. In the end, the Democrats become the 'big tent party' and the Republicans keep shrinking.
A nice thought, perhaps, but unlikely. Someday, perhaps sooner than we realize, a Republican will again occupy the White House. Republicans will again likely control both chambers of Congress. Republicans will set the national agenda, write the laws, appoint the judges, and execute American foreign policy. As a liberal Democrat myself, I find this prospect decidedly unappealing. But the pragmatist in me wishes that if Republicans must gain political power again, I'd rather that the party at least be governed by its rational, moderate wing.
Rational and moderate certainly don't describe the lunatic Tea Party, nor would it describe the movement's alarming xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry. Despite his horrific foreign policy, idiotic fealty toward fiscal conservatism and socially backward policies, President Bush at least managed to have a reasonable position on immigration and pay lip service to the virtues of multi-culturalism. The current batch of Tea Party politicians poised to assume power in the Republican Party make Bush look like Paul Wellstone by comparison.
Christine O'Donnell will probably not become Delaware's junior Senator this fall, but her victory in the primary election does not augur well for the country as a whole, including the Democrats.
Exceptionalism Cont.
Damon Linker of the New Republic has an interesting, intelligent response to the National Review article I linked to recently in defense of American exceptionalism. I particularly liked this remark about President Bush:
Lots of conservatives turned on George W. Bush by the end of his presidency. But here we see that if Bush didn't exist, the right would have had to invent him. His proud parochialism, his simple-minded and insecure suspicion of intelligence, his swaggering self-righteousness€”all of it is the natural expression of contemporary conservatism's outlook on the world.
Couldn't agree more.
National Review has responded to Linker's criticism, as well as other reactions, in this piece. I take exception- pun intended- to this comment about left-wing support of mass transit:
Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit's association with Europe.
Emphasis mine. This statement has it exactly wrong. Speaking as a liberal, my enthusiasm for subsidized mass transit comes from the fact that mass transit programs are environmentally sound, reduce dependency on foreign sources of energy, and are typically more efficient in and between urban areas than automobiles. These reasons derive from having empirically observed mass transit systems in action while living in foreign countries, and thus wishing subsidized programs to be implemented in the US.
The NR piece appears to accuse liberals of believing in European exceptionalism, when in fact the opposite is true. The conservative opposition to mass transit exists largely because it is less prevalent in the US than in Europe, and therefore in their twisted ideology must be better.
NR concludes with an absolute whopper of a statement. To wit:
Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.
The shocking part of this sentence? Hanson is actually a professor of history. This remark would embarrass a fifth-grader. But in their effort to keep any contrary evidence from interrupting their precious pet theory of American exceptionalism, NR somehow tries to argue that slavery 'never became part of the national psyche'.
The mind boggles. I realize contemporary conservatives disdain intellectualism, but in publishing this piece shouldn't an even cursory understanding of basic American history be required?
I realize I could probably devote hours of my time to reading mind-numbing right-wing screeds and rebutting them, but I think this question of exceptionalism cuts to the very core of how right-wing and left-wing Americans view our country. And as I've argued earlier, exceptionalism has a central position in contemporary Chinese politics as well.
American Exceptionalism Revisited
In January I wrote that both China and the United States view themselves as exceptional nations, ones that resist comparison to other countries across a broad spectrum of issues. Members of the U.S Republican Party, I wrote, believe in the superiority of the American system regardless of any metric that proves otherwise.
Five weeks later I'm pleased to have come across a very long article in National Review, arguably the most influential conservative magazine in the US, in which the two authors explicitly cite exceptionalism as a chief American value and argue that President Obama is doing his best to undermine it.
I don't have time to provide a thorough critique of the piece, but to give you an idea of the authors' perspective let's consider this statement from the fourth paragraph of the article.
Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth.
Lest you think I am taking this quote out of context, let me state that this statement is made without even the slightest attempt to provide scientific evidence for the claims. Instead, the authors ramble on for a couple thousand words about why American history proves our exceptionalism. As a polemic, their argument has merit. As a work of political and historical analysis it has none.
Let's just take two of the claims under scrutiny. One is that the U.S. is 'freer' than any other country. The other is that it is the most 'democratic'. In economic terms, the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation- hardly bastions of Leftist ideology- listed New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, and Australia as the five 'freest' countries in the world. I wonder how National Review feels about a dreaded European state ranking higher than the US in terms of economic liberty.
NR's claim that the US is the most democratic country in the world is even more laughable. For starters, lets consider the institution of the U.S. Senate. The Senate grants an equal number of seats in the national legislature to all states regardless of population. This means that Wyoming, a state with a population of less than 500,000, has the same number votes as California, a state with roughly 80 times its population. When you factor in abysmal voting turnout statistics, a remarkably small percentage of Americans have a great influence on political outcomes in the US.
This Economist ranking of countries by their degree of democratization does not list the US in the top 15. Countries that do make the list include Sweden, Iceland, Norway, The Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, and Austria. All part of, you guessed it, Europe. And the Economist too has never been accused of promoting a leftist agenda.
That being said, there are many things that the United States does quite well without having to resort to the ridiculous claims made in the NR piece. The US has an excellent university system that still attracts the world's brightest and most ambitious students, many of whom remain in the country. The US also assimilates a large number of immigrants from across the globe with a lesser degree of social acrimony than in many European countries. These are certainly feats to be proud of.
But for contemporary American conservatives, it isn't enough that the US outpaces all other countries in certain fields. We must be the best in all fields. And while I (and President Obama) would agree that this ambition is admirable, it is ludicrous to suggest that at present it resembles the truth in any way. As a result the Right expends tremendous effort writing counter-intuitive missives explaining why, in fact, the American health care system or education system or this or that is actually the world's best despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Power of Textbooks
Who writes the textbooks we use in our schools? Who pays for them? From which point of view do they argue? How do our schools choose these textbooks? Do alternatives exist?
To the last question, I can definitively answer yes. Not long after I arrived in college, a friend lent me a copy of the recently-deceased Howard Zinn's People History of the United States. Zinn's conclusions may not please everybody but his immense contribution to historical scholarship cannot be denied.
But think about it- for the average American, an enormous amount of our historical education is inculcated via textbooks. These books- written near-anonymously, in soothing words devoid of any polemical content. Teachers treat these textbooks as repositories of factual information rather than texts worth critically analyzing. As a result millions of children develop a shared sense of 'what actually happened' without the faculties to criticize it.
If this wasn't frightening enough, check out this fascinating, 10-page article in the New York Times Magazine detailing how evangelical Christian activists have managed to hijack the Texas governing body responsible for approving content to the vast majority of American public schools.
At question is the notion of whether the United States is an explicitly Christian nation. Non-American readers may find this question baffling; why does it matter, after all? Yet to understand this divide is to understand the separate political forces that operate in the country.
Tribalism in US Politics
I've really been enjoying the spectacle of thousands of American conservative cranks descending onto our nation's capital to vent their hatred of Barack Obama. Now, if you take the protestors at their word you may come away convinced that they were a united band of citizens concerned about runaway public spending. But this isn't true. After all, how many of the assembled people voiced these concerns under the last president, under whose guidance US debt skyrocketed? I thought so.
What it boils down to, essentially, is that the people who marched on DC simply don't like the president. Some of them dislike Obama because he supports (some) abortion rights. Some of them don't like him because he wants to extend health insurance to all Americans. Some of them don't like him because they think he's going to take away people's guns. Some of them, and let's be honest here, don't like him because he's dark-skinned.
(I think there's certainly a legitimate criticism to be made about Obama's performance, which as far as I am concerned has been somewhere between lackluster and mediocre. In my opinion, he hasn't gone far enough to repudiate Bush-era policies regarding torture and civil liberties. I also think Afghanistan is a quagmire and that we should probably get the hell out. With health care, he has been too timid in asserting his control over the issue and has instead delegated too much of the policy work to the idiots on Capitol Hill. But I digress.)
If you consider the particular policies that define contemporary conservatism- or liberalism- precious little philosophical consistency exists. In my lifetime conservatives have stood for a reduction in government spending, yet almost universally have supported a belligerent, assertive foreign policy. Conservatives are opposed to abortion yet support capital punishment. They favor de-regulation of business and industry yet want restrictions on cultural products that disagree with their point of view.
I'm sure one could write a similar list about liberals, which drives at my point. These internal contradictions don't matter so much as a shared sense of identity politics brings.
I consider myself to be fairly open-minded, but my first instinct upon learning that one is conservative is to recoil, almost as if a small voice in my head says that he is one of them. Consider some of the public figures, like blog-goddess Arianna Huffington, who undergo a major transformation mid-career. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure she's gone from being an across-the-board conservative to an across-the-board liberal.
Likewise, back in the halcyon days of the Bush administration quite a few liberals voted for Bush due to their support for the Iraq War and neo-conservative foreign policy in general. Despite their protestations, these so-called 'security Democrats' have pretty much just become run-of-the-mill Republicans in the years since. Once one sympathizes with the opposition on one issue, it becomes easier to sympathize on every issue, no matter how unrelated they may be from each other.
All of this goes against what we think of ourselves; we imagine that we rationally develop opinions on each matter of public policy and vote according to how we prioritize these opinions. To a certain extent, this is true.
Then again, in the case of American politics, in which there are only two parties of influence who don't share power in any meaningful way, I think people develop their opinions from an a priori basis. In other words, when you like a politician you'll probably just like what he likes, no matter what.
The Incredible Shrinking Opposition
One by one, President Obama's potential Republican rivals are being dispatched like video game villains.
To wit:
Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, delivered such a feeble rebuttal to Obama's quasi-State of the Union speech that he has since shrunk back into anonymity.
Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, hiked the Appalachian Trail
Jon Huntsman, governor of Utah, was dispatched by Obama to Beijing
And now Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, resigned her position and gave a weird, rambling speech that seemed to indicate we won't have Sarah Barracuda to kick around anymore.
Added to Newt Gingrich, whose aesthetic appeal is only slightly greater than the amphibian he's named after, and Jeb Bush, whose last name is unfortunate, and the list of plausible Republican leaders seems small indeed.
Sure, it's early. There are also others I haven't mentioned: Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and of course former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. These three have certain things going for them.
But there's nobody with even the remote stature of Obama. Or Hillary Clinton. Or Al Gore. The Democratic 'bench' is just much deeper nowadays, which provides no small succor to a Dem like myself who only recently had to endure Rovian delusions of 'generational dominance'.
Tea Parties- Pffftt
I've been tracking this "tea party" movement back in the US with a combination of bafflement and mild amusement. As has The Washington Post, who actually attended the DC party:
Without the spectacle of a 1773-style tea-bag dump in the square, the handmade signs became the focus of the event. Though ostensibly an anti-tax protest, it was more of an anti-Obama festival. Among the messages: "The Audacity of the Dope," "O Crap" and Obama as an acronym for "One Big Awful Mistake America." Some messages were ugly ("Napolitano -- Obama's Gestapo Queen," "Hang 'Em High Traitors," and a sign held by a young girl saying "Victim of Child Tax Abuse"). Others were funny ("Don't Talk to Me! I Forgot My Teleprompter"). Certain ones had sinister overtones ("Tax Slavery Sucks," and "Obama bin Lyin"). Then there was the guy holding a Cabbage Patch doll by its hair with the message: "My kid's growth stunted by your stimulus."
And this, in a nutshell, is why I wouldn't worry about these "spontaneous" gatherings. I imagine that there is a constituency for people uneasy with the present volume of government spending. That these people largely kept their mouth shut when our previous president spent like a drunken sailor, well, seems to be forgotten, but let's just say that a certain segment of the population is unhappy with Obama's economic plan.
But just when these tea parties are beginning to get press, they've already been exposed as a broad, disorganized batch of people whose only unifying feature is their general dislike of Obama. Some, as the Post reports, are still bringing up the "Un-American" angle, for instance. I imagine before long the anti-immigrant, anti-choice, and good old-fashioned racist groups will make an appearance at these rallies.
In some ways, these gatherings remind me of the Bush-era anti-war protests organized by the left earlier in the decade. Like the tea parties, many of these anti-war protests began with a very specific policy goal (preventing and then ending the war) and devolved into a potpourri of left-wing grievances, ranging from freeing Tibet to raising the minimum wage to prison reform. As a result, the anti-war protests never had the effect their organizers wanted.
Then again, let's consider the implications. Anti-war protestors were rallying against the biggest foreign-policy blunder in a generation, a decision by the president that directly led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and countless more Iraqis. These "tea party" people are arguing against the possible restoration of Reagan-era tax rates and fairly standard-issue government spending in a recession by an elected official.
These tea parties, I'd say, are an indication of the right's current weakness, not its growing strength.