American Conservatism Lacks Political Imagination

(((Irving Kristol dies; who is left on the American right? cons and neo-cons; who's left on the American left?)))

Hey, it isn't me. I'm just quoting Irving Kristol:

Kristol adds, "American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." He goes on, "If you read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."

As I noted in a comment on FB, it's not like there's a lot of imagination in the American left these days, which I am tempted to say (à la Badiou) is too dominated by party culture and party modes of thinking, when it's not dominated by the false hope of achieving its goals through the Dem party. But I'll admit I'm not prepared to elaborate on that stuff yet. That's coming when I get around to posting on The Meaning of Sarkozy.

Thanks to Doug for remembering this quote from this old but still very interesting essay of Corey Robin's.

Religion is Back! Of Course, It was Never Gone

Surprisingly good piece in the Economist, bringing together several of my own concerns: recognition that religion, as quintessentially human as anything else we do, is not going to go away ever; recognition that religion is a matter of conscience, and that the very idea that religion is a matter of conscience is a hard-won modern idea; that the best way to achieve peace in religionized conflicts is to involve religious leaders rather than to try to make them stop being religious. And so on. And of course a recognition that many "religious" conflicts are not at bottom, or certainly not entirely, "religious."

Many of those struggles, notably the Middle East, began as secular tribal disputes. Now that they have a religious component they are much harder to solve: if God granted you the West Bank, you are less likely to trade it. “Inter-faith dialogue” may sound a wishy-washy concept; but it is a more realistic idea than presenting a secular peace to competing faiths without the backing of religious leaders. Priests and pastors condemned violence from both sides in Northern Ireland; that has not really happened in the Holy Land.

tags technorati : religion, politics, inter-faith dialogue, middle east

Progressives Can Red-Bait with the Best of Them

(((CampusProgress, Che Guevara, Socialism, Progressivism, Red-Baiting, Cultural Heroes and Icons)))

I'm not sure why we should reduce Che to his failures any more than we should reduce him to Guerrilla Warfare, but the thing that really struck me in all this was Ms. Steiger's final paragraph: apparently, she agrees that socialism (which I presume she also equates with the unflattering portait of Che she paints?) has been "discredited," but we can still work "to make life better for the working man [sic]."

It's really disappointing that her assault on what she deems a naive ideological oversimplification of Che takes fuel from and feeds into such a simplistic caricature of socialism and its history, both after the Cold War and before that. And to suggest in such a peremptory way that the dismantling of the Soviet empire somehow "proved" anything at all about socialism or communism is way more tendentious than anyone wants to admit, because the truth is that the US is still deeply anti-communist, so much so that it is necessary to discredit Che Guevara and distance progressives from him and from socialism in general, preferably all at once. Like in this article.

What's so distressing is that this political maneuver is put forth as an exercise in demythologization. Maybe it's time to demythologize "progressivism." I'd try if I knew what it was. Reading this sort of thing makes me think it's like Adam Smith or Peter Drucker's version of capitalism. Which would have been "progressive" in the 18th Century or so.

This sort of "exposé" seems to suggest that we can only admire or respect perfect people. And it always makes me wonder if we really want any heroes at all.

Sketching an Anti-Economist

[via LBO-talk]

The question arose, what progressive or leftist alternatives are there to the Economist? Leaving aside the question whether one is either necessary or desirable (and these are debatable points, but I have a feeling the answer to both is, "yes"), what options might there be? Suggestions in response included the New Internationalist, the Guardian Weekly/Le Monde Diplomatique combo (which I personally favor), or even BusinessWeek (which has its own pretty serious drawbacks, perhaps most especially its US and economic focus, as opposed to the Economist, which is global in focus, both geographically and conceptually). But this all seemed to me to beg a more fundamental question (herewith the content of the list post):

What would an anti-Economist even look like?

Well, it would have to be the E but not, right? That is, it would have to be global in perspective, synthetic in its approach to news, rigorous in analysis, ruthless in application of principles, and critically reflective wrt those principles. As the organ of the anti-Empire, how can it gain wide readership? Does it need wide readership? Probably it does, first because that's part of the fight, and second, because it needs to make that much money in order to keep going.

I think the Economist is having success in the US in large part because it, well, does news. It's not a political magazine, not a "newsweekly" in the US mold of Time or Newsweek or any of now a half-dozen major newspaper weekly magazines, and doesn't succumb to the need to do stories about Britney Spears. Why does no one on this list argue that Time or Newsweek are good alternatives? Partly because they're crap, but I imagine it's also partly because the US newsweeklies do different things. There are no long or investigative pieces in the E. It's essentially a big newspaper published weekly. You can cruise the week's summaries and the TOC in the E every week and have a sense that you know basically wtf is going on around the world. Then you may not read cover to cover, but you can go read a succinct and generally pretty well written piece on page x. If the E were your only source, then this would be a problem, but it shouldn't be and I'm willing to guess it pretty much never is. The same would go, I would think, for the Anti-E.

So all of this makes me think our comparison with the Guardian Weekly and Le Monde Diplomatique makes pretty good sense, if we could just give them bigger budgets. The International Herald-Tribune is another model of newspaper collaboration going international, and it might be useful, here, except that we want a weekly. Maybe we could add the WSJ and, say, Mother Jones to the pool? With some material taken from the AFP wire? Throw in some independent journalists willing to pitch in for modest but reasonable fees (or even for free???), and you've got a pool of stories--if the relevant ownership is willing to share their material for the project--that an independent editorial board could draw on. Surely the best answer would be for such a publication to have its own staff of well-paid writers, but let's suppose for the moment that the scenario I'm working on is meaningfully more plausible than hiring a full staff for a progressive weekly to rival the Economist.

You would need money for space, a full-time editorial staff (maybe half a dozen people?) and a part-time editorial board (maybe a dozen to two dozen people who would have a genuinely meaningful role to play), money to pay reasonable rates to occasional freelance contributors (say 1-2/week?), and then money to cover printing and distribution costs. Am I forgetting anything? That's presuming that (a) publications like the ones noted above agree to pitch in not only with reprinted material but also (at least ideally) with a writer here and there for original material, (b) that the editorial board is able to spend significant time reviewing material for inclusion and occasionally writing original editorial or other pieces that add value to our weekly beyond reprinting material available elsewhere. And we should keep in mind that we want to break into the E's market, but we also want to grab markets not on the E's radar, so it ought to be cheap, or maybe there would be a program for distributing copies at low or no cost in certain areas or through certain channels.

If this is pie in the sky, which at best it probably is (at worst, it is precisely the opposite of what leftists and progressives ought to be worrying about, but that would be a very different post), then any dream of an anti-Economist is pie in the sky, too.

Anyone got the cash?

tags technorati : Economist, Media, Politics, Economics

Update on Iran in Latin America

The Guardian enjoyed the same irony I did regarding the past "relationship" between the Sandinistas and the Islamic Republic, but they note that Iran really got involved in Latin America by way of Chavez.

Venezuela's radical left-wing president, Hugo Chávez, opened Latin America to Iran by signing multiple accords with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including bilateral deals on oil, tractors and bicycles.

"The Chávez-Ahmadinejad relationship is what drives Iran's role in Latin America, which is fundamentally geopolitical rather than economic," said Michael Shifter, of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue thinktank.

Mr Chávez has billed the accords as an "axis of unity" against the US, which he terms the "empire", and has encouraged allies such as Mr Ortega to follow suit.

So, basically, all the America-haters are ganging up on America, despite their ideological differences. And so I go back to Zizek, from April 2003.

What I'm really afraid of is that when we left-wingers ask, "is America aware that in this way they are only creating new tensions?" they miss the point. What if the aim is to introduce instability to the entire region and then to brutally impose some kind of universalized emergency state or new order? But even if the U.S. is consciously counting on the global disorder, it will not be able to control it. My only hope is that American interventions will give rise to some kind of resistance. My big hope - as an atheist, praying night and day for it - is that the resistance in the Middle East will not be simply kidnapped by the so-called fundamentalists. That this resistance will have at least secular socialist wing. And I think there is a fair chance at it. Look at Iran. There is hope.

OK, so much for the hope for Iran. But he's only wrong about Iran because he's right about everything else. Unfortunately, the universalized emergency state starts at home . . .

tags technorati : Politics, Iran, Nicaragua, Zizek, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Ortega

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Love Those Dems

While all the "progressive" bloggers yuk it up in Chicago, both Dem-controlled houses of Congress pass legislation eviscerating the Fourth Amendment.

Let's give W his props. In his second term and facing two opposition-controlled houses, Bush was supposed to be legislatively impotent this year. Instead, he's got the Dems doing his dirty work for him. It would be easy, and perhaps satisfying, to decry the Dems turning their back on the people who voted them into office, but it seems to me more accurate, if somewhat more depressing, to acknowledge the simple fact that Dem success over the last near-twenty years has primarily arisen out of the Clinton-patented strategy of out-GOPping the GOP.

Worse, this latest legislation is just another step down the road Clinton-Gore first trod of extending police power and contracting individual rights. I don't know why we expect anything different from Democrats, now. Clinton was ideologically bankrupt, but tactically brilliant. Today's Dems lack his tactical skill (never mind charisma, or, frankly, intelligence), and have perhaps less ideological integrity than Clinton.

So, if Clinton was in many respects a smarter, prettier Republican, what are we to say of the Dems now running Congress?

tags technorati : Politics, Bloggers, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Clinton, Terrorism, Irony

 

Progressive Taxation is in the Wind

Via the Economist, yesterday:

In Britain several parliamentarians have grumbled after Nicholas Ferguson, a leading figure in British private equity, recently admitted that partners in buy-out firms get away with paying less tax than office cleaners.

The editors discuss the same legislation (introduced Thursday) as that covered in this WSJ article.

The fuse to Thursday's bomb was apparently lit back in February shortly after Democrats took control of Congress. That's when Fortress launched its public offering, stirring heavy press coverage of big payouts -- and drawing more scrutiny from the new leaders on Capitol Hill, who came in hungry to find new revenues to pay for new spending plans.

Senate Finance aides started researching more an issue that had, until then, been largely unfamiliar to them, and stumbled on some scathing accounts in the tax trade press about the advantages of the Fortress deal.

The Economist editors continue:

Sceptics might suggest that the senators [Baucus and Grassley, who introduced the legislation] are merely the agents of the bispartisan politics of envy [or resentment?]. Yet the electorate has much to envy. The public has not warmed to Steve Schwarzman, Blackstone’s co-founder. His 60th birthday bash attracted much press attention for featuring a set by Rod Stewart for which he was reputedly paid $1m. That lapse of taste brought greater scrutiny of his wealth. He is expected to sell stock worth as much as $677m, leaving him a 24% stake valued at almost $8 billion, unless the senators get their way. When Blackstone's shares start trading, perhaps later this month, he should trump Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs on rich lists. Last year alone he earned $398m, almost double the combined pay of the bosses of Wall Street's five largest investment banks.

Well, when you work twice as hard and create twice as much value in the economy as the leaders of Wall Street's five largest investment banks combined, you ought to get a tax break. Sheesh. I mean, how much value are those office cleaners creating? And how hard are they really working? Those offices practically clean themselves.

technorati tags : Blackstone, private equity, progressive taxation, baucus, grassley

George W Bush is Bad for Capitalism

I know it sounds crazy, but check out this Economist blog post by Jason Furman, along the lines of yesterday's piece from the WSJ. Sez Furman:

Summers, Bordoff and I argue that an important part of the solution to rising inequality is a progressive fiscal system. [ . . . ]

Unfortunately, the progressive tax system offset only about 7 percent of the $664 billion income shift since 1979. Absent the tax cuts enacted [by W] starting in 2001, the tax system would have offset 20 percent of the increase in inequality. [emphasis added]

So, thanks to W, progressive taxes offset about 1/3 of the increase in inequality that they would have offset had Clinton's tax system remained in place.

Why does income inequality matter? Let's let noted Marxist economist, comrade Alan Greenspan, explain it to us:

Income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable. You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

So, in short, by contributing substantially to increasing income inequality, George W. Bush has put capitalism itself at risk.

OK. Does this mean I'm for four more years [ahem], or that I am now happy about the last eight? No. Income inequality is A Bad Thing. What's interesting, of course, is that Greenspan doesn't actually say that it's unjust. But recognition of a PR problem with capitalism is fueling a move from odd quarters back toward more progressive taxation. Yes, gross (and growing) income inequality is a symptom of a broken system, and so progressive taxation is sort of a band-aid. But it's still right, given the circumstances, and worth trying to get.

tags technorati : Bush, Capitalism, Economics, Taxes, Inequality

The Atheist Imagination/Imaginary

[Originally extended February 19, 2006 at the old BrainMortgage offices.]

Rereading Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity* for my ethics seminar, I came across a pithy articulation of the nature of cultural change:

What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument for cultural change.(7)

Now, we could take this and apply it to any number of ways liberals and leftists consistently employ vocabularies of disdain and denigration with respect to conservatives, particularly the lower class they so often see themselves as fighting for. But I want to think more specifically about religious belief and its place in the world, theism being one of those things about which many leftists and liberals are particularly disdainful, even vitriolic. They can no more understand religionists' belief in God or rejection of evolution than they can comprehend lower-class conservatives voting for W.

The problem with atheism is not that it's wrong as a religious position, but rather that it suffers from a two-fold failure of imagination. First, there seems to be (and I admit I am generalizing) a tendency among atheists to understand science as "disproving" the existence of a creator God, particularly as that God is represented in the Bible. Unfortunately, this simply reinforces religionist understandings of science by participating in a reading of creation narratives as history or science (which they are not). Evolution only "refutes" the creation account in the Bible if we think they are telling us the same story; of course, that is also the only context in which the Biblical creation account might be understood to "refute" evolution. Better to jettison the literalist/historico-scientific hermeneutic altogether and argue what is much more plausible and more compelling, namely that Biblical creation narratives try to tell us something about how meaning arises in the world, rather than making factual claims (whether we see them as true or false) about the history of the cosmos.

The second failure of imagination within atheism is that atheists haven't found ways of talking about living in the world that are more compelling (more useful to people, more aesthetically pleasing, etc.) than religious ways of talking about living in the world. Should we be surprised, then, that religious people don't adopt an atheist vocabulary? Maybe part of the problem is the naturalist bent of so many atheists: however creative they might be in their scientific or philosophical work (and many of them are . . . although many are surely not), they see atheism precisely as a logical problem instead of as a language game, and religious belief as simply the result of ignorance or misunderstanding, rather than as a failure of atheism to bring anything useful to the table.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when atheists (or theists) are absolutists about the veracity of their language game as opposed to any other, instead of seeing that language game as a means toward the end of a better world. Such people are perhaps more in service of "the Truth" than of justice or equity or even happiness, which seem secondary considerations at best. Maybe that is a good definition of religion?

Of course, this also shows us how the atheist who takes atheism as programmatic actually agrees with the theist/religionist who takes his or her religion programmatically. Both argue that the Truth is out there; they also agree on the kind of truth it is. They disagree only on the means of attaining it. When it comes to a just world, both will say that the (only) foundation for a better, more just, happier world is the Truth, which is only available to us from the perspective of my religious position. Only when we admit that no/my God rules the cosmos will it be possible for humanity to achieve its highest state.

Personally, I don't see the need to impose a vocabulary of atheism before or as part of promoting a vocabulary of justice. To see a discourse of justice as possibly only within a discourse of theism or, conversely, within a discourse of atheism, is to construct a language game that narrows rather than expands the idea of justice, which seems precisely contradictory to the vocabulary of justice itself.

That said, many if not most theists need to adopt more coherent religious vocabularies; specifically, they need to stop talking religion like it's science.



*Love that serial comma.

tags technorati : Rorty, Religion, Philosophy, Atheism, Science

The Strange Career of the Blair Government

Ross McKibbin has written an astute summation of Blair and New Labour for the latest London Review of Books. For both British and American readers the article should provoke somber reflection on the states of their respective countries: Blair's cynical compromises and missed opportunies will remind Americans of nothing so much as the DLC and the failed promise of the Clinton Presidency.

Unfortunately, I doubt Labour or Democratic politicians will learn any of the lessons offered by the results of their party's makeovers.