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White Santa, White Jesus, White Christmas

December 16, 2013 – 8:55 am

Santa’s not alienating, but white supremacy is.

It all started Tuesday, when Slate’s Aisha Harris suggested replacing the fat-old-white-man version of Santa Claus with a penguin.

Why? Well, she found it confusing to grow up with a black Santa at home and a white Santa everywhere else. Her Dad’s ingenious explanation (that Santa magically changes race to match each household he visits) sounded phony.

I didn’t buy it. I remember feeling slightly ashamed that our black Santa wasn’t the “real thing.” … That this genial, jolly man can only be seen as white—and consequently, that a Santa of any other hue is merely a “joke” or a chance to trudge out racist stereotypes—helps perpetuate the whole “white-as-default” notion endemic to American culture

But since Santa is a cultural invention anyway

we can certainly change him however we’d like—and we have, many times over. … Isn’t it time that our image of Santa better serve all the children he delights each Christmas?

You may be charmed by this idea or just find it harmlessly goofy — unless you watch  a lot of Fox News. Then you’d realize that this change-Santa nonsense is a symptom of the political correctness and everything-is-up-for-grabs attitude that’s ruining America. Megyn Kelly laid it out:

For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.

And then she very sympathetically gave black people the bad news.

Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. … He was a historical figure. That was a verifiable fact.

Forensic reconstruction of Saint Nicholas

These things are facts, people. In Fox Nation, they’re not up for discussion.

Historical Saint Nicholas. Monica Crowley, a member of Kelly’s all-white panel, elaborated:

Santa Claus is based on Saint Nicholas, who was an actual person, a Greek bishop, and was a white man. … You can’t take facts and then try to change them to try to fit some sort of a political agenda or a sensitivity agenda.

But on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, Harris pushed back:

Santa now looks nothing like that Santa [i.e. the historical Saint Nicholas]

So how white was Saint Nicholas, anyway? Kathleen Manning blogged for U.S. Catholic:

15th-century Saint Nicholas icon

In 2008, British anthropologists did a facial reconstruction of Saint Nicholas of Myra, based on his remains. The fourth-century Turkish bishop who signed the Nicene Creed looks less like Clement Clarke Moore’s description and more like the cabbie who drove you to the airport to catch your Christmas flight home.

And unlike Coca-Cola ads, religious icons often portray Saint Nicholas as a dark-skinned man whose race is hard to determine. He’s also skinny. And as I study those smaller panels on the pictured icon, I can’t find reindeer anywhere.

So if we want to stick to the historical facts, rather than “change them to try to fit some sort of a political agenda”, that’s what we get: a skinny, racially ambiguous Santa whose Turkish workshop is far from the land of reindeer.

If not reindeer …

Maybe he could drive a wagon instead of a sleigh, and borrow Thor’s flying goats to pull it.

Yeah, but Jesus was white. Wasn’t he? It depends on your definition of white. Jesus was a first-century Middle Eastern Jew. How white were they?

Probably not very. Religion News Service’s Jeffrey Weiss suggests Yasser Arafat or Osama bin Laden as comparable. Atlantic’s Jonathan Merritt says: “If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.”

Maybe. As a brownish, outspoken social activist from the Middle East with a Jerusalem police record of assault against money-lenders, I think he’d go straight to the no-fly list.

Would you sit next to this guy on an airplane?

What is “white” anyway? It’s easy to poke fun at people who believe their cultural happenstance represents eternal truth, the kind who will tell you “Where I come from people don’t have an accent.” But Chris Hayes got to the deeper issue:

Jesus wasn’t white because the category white didn’t exist when Jesus was around in the Roman Empire. That is a construction that was made later on for very intense social reasons.

The Romans had a word for white, albus, but it was a color, not a race. The same was probably true in Aramaic. First-century folks were Jews, Romans, Gauls, Egyptians, and so forth. Gauls tended towards blonde and some Egyptians could be very dark. But I believe first-century rabbis would have been quite perplexed by the idea that they belonged to a “white race”. True, a sub-Saharan African would have seemed like someone from another world, but so would a Pict from north of (what would soon become) Hadrian’s wall, and what the rabbis might have made of the central-Asian ancestors of the Rus is anybody’s guess.

Much later, Shakespeare pictured dark-skinned Othello as an outsider in Venice society, but no more so than the Jewish Shylock.

In Learning to be White, Thandeka traces the beginnings of the white-race concept to the late 1600s, when the founders of Virginia’s plantation system needed to discourage their English and Irish indentured servants from making common cause with their African and Native American slaves, as happened during Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. So they divided the underclass by giving a few small rights and privileges to the European servants.

A new multiclass “white race” would emerge from the Virginia laws as one not biologically engineered but socially constructed. … The laws and the racial contempt they generated would sever ties of previous mutual interest and goodwill between European and African servants and workers, provide the ruling elite with a “buffer” of poor whites between themselves and the slaves to keep blacks down, and prevent either group from separately challenging the class interests of the elite.

In the North in the 1800s, the construction of the “white race” became the key to socializing America’s non-English-speaking European immigrants. They arrived identifying themselves as Polish, Russian, Irish, Italian, or some other ethnicity with its own distinctive language, history, and practices. In America they were homogenized as “whites” and their native xenophobia channeled against Africans and other people of color.

So Hayes is absolutely correct. Jesus would have been puzzled by any Roman who welcomed him as a member of the gens alba. He was a Jew, not a Roman, and being “white” didn’t mean anything at all until many centuries later.

Who’s a racist? In a follow-up segment, Megyn Kelly realized she needed a black on the panel, so she invited frequent Fox News contributor Zerlina Maxwell. Maxwell more-or-less agreed with Harris, which led Kelly to challenge her:

Why is white skin alienating? And why is that not racist?

This is the color-blind, flat-playing-field view of race currently popular among white conservatives: Since white supremacy is built into the cultural infrastructure, I (as a white) can live without thinking about race. If non-whites try to make me think about race, well then, that’s them being racist.

I mean, Santa and Jesus and Batman and all the other cultural icons just are white, so I don’t have to think about their race at all. When I look at pictures of Santa, I don’t see white Santa, I just see Santa. If it bothers you that all the cultural icons are white … whatta you, racist or something? What’s wrong with being white?

It comes down to two very different views of what American culture is. Is it the culture of all the people who live here? Or is it a historically white culture that some non-whites have been allowed to join, on the condition that they accept it the way it is and change themselves rather than seek to change the culture? Post-Martin-Luther-King, the public position of white conservatives (never mind what they say behind closed doors) is to treat people of all races as honorary whites. Isn’t that good enough? Or are you saying there’s something wrong with being white?

So Megyn Kelly is perfectly content to let your black children imagine that her white Santa is bringing presents to your black home. Isn’t that good enough? Or are you hostile to Santa because he’s white? “And why is that not racist?”

Untwisting Kelly’s pretzel takes more time than TV’s sound-bite culture allows, so Maxwell just had to dodge the reverse-racism charge. You can’t have a discussion about the particulars until you challenge several background assumptions.

First, there is no flat playing field. The privilege of ignoring race in America belongs to whites. Non-whites are confronted with race every day, no matter how much they might want to ignore it. The let’s-just-ignore-race notion really means: Let’s ignore the white supremacy built into everything.

Second, focusing on the whiteness of just Santa (or any other individual icon) misses the point. Because there is nothing wrong with Santa being white in isolation. By changing Santa, Harris was addressing her sense of encirclement, of growing up in a culture where all the major icons are white, and blackness seems like an aberration, even when you see it in the mirror.

To make a gender analogy: There’s nothing wrong with Barack Obama being a man. What’s wrong is that the 44 presidents have all been men. If a girl examines that line of portraits and feels alienated from the presidency, she’s not being sexist; she’s recognizing her country’s built-in male supremacy.

Life in the Garden of Sweden

And finally, Santa and Jesus and all the other icons aren’t white because of historical facts. They became white through a long social process. Coca-Cola’s Santa is considerably whiter than Saint Nicholas. The portrait of Jesus on the wall of my Lutheran grade school was much whiter than any first-century Palestinian Jew. In White Like Me, Tim Wise recalls growing up with picture-books — I had them too — that presented a white Adam and Eve, who frolicked in what Wise now calls “the Garden of Sweden”.

To say that this process is now at an end, that whiteness is now baked into our cultural icons and can’t be changed, is to say that white supremacy is baked into American culture and can’t be changed.

That’s what’s alienating, Megyn Kelly. And no, feeling alienated by white supremacy is not racist.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (6)

Rooting for Your Country to Fail is Unpatriotic

December 9, 2013 – 11:13 am

America has decided to implement ObamaCare. Are you with your country or against it?

In America, we argue about everything. Just because the Leader proposes something, we don’t all have to get in line behind it.

We argue about whether to go to war in places like Syria, Libya, or Iraq. We argue about taxes. We argue about how much money our government should spend and what it should be spent on. We argue about which drugs and medical procedures should be legal.

We argue; it’s what we do. If you didn’t argue for your beliefs, if you just knuckled under as soon as the Powers That Be made their will known, you wouldn’t be a real American.

But we also come to decisions. We have a Congress that is empowered to pass laws. We have a president who is obliged to either veto those laws or enforce them. We have courts you can appeal to if you think those laws exceed the powers the Constitution delegates to the federal government.

In short, there are lots and lots of ways you can register your objection to a proposed public policy. Our Constitution creates many pressure points where the flow of an idea into law can be blocked.

But we do eventually make decisions.

Even after a decision is made, you can still argue that it was wrong. You can argue that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. You can argue that we shouldn’t have bailed out General Motors or Bank of America. You can argue that the CIA shouldn’t be launching drone attacks into countries we aren’t at war with or that the NSA shouldn’t be tracking your cell phone.

That’s not just a technicality of freedom of speech. You can make those arguments as a patriotic American, because the country has a process for reversing course. If you can convince enough people agree with you, maybe the power of public opinion will change the minds of our office-holders. And if not, elections can turn those offices over to new office-holders who can make new policies and pass new laws.

That’s not working against America, it’s part of how America works.

But there’s a line between legitimate partisanship and lack of patriotism, and this is where it runs: After a decision is made, after it is upheld as constitutional, after America has decided to do something, you don’t root for your country to fail — and you certainly don’t take action to make your country fail.

That’s unpatriotic.

Democrats respected that line when a Republican administration did something we thought was wrong: invading Iraq. We never stopped arguing against it. We never stopped trying to elect people who would get us out Iraq. And eventually we succeeded. The fighting in Iraq continues, but American troops are out of it.

You know what we didn’t do? We didn’t try to sabotage the war effort. Democratic leaders weren’t out there publicly rooting for failure. We didn’t aid the Iraqi resistance or gloat over defeats. And we certainly didn’t cheer when American troops came home in body bags. If a stray voice on a blog or in a public forum started rooting for defeat or gloating over American corpses, we jumped all over him. No external force had to police us on that; we policed ourselves.

We were Americans. We opposed what our government was doing in Iraq, but we stayed patriotic.

But on ObamaCare, Republicans have crossed that line between patriotic and unpatriotic. Let’s review a few of the ways.

McConnell and the NFL. In June, Republican Senate Leaders Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn sent a letter to the National Football League, warning it not to cooperate in efforts to publicize the law and tell the public how to get the benefits it offers. (They were successful; the NFL did not cooperate.)

This is unprecedented. Private organizations, including sports leagues, frequently take part in public information programs. When Massachusetts passed RomneyCare, the Boston Red Sox helped publicize it. Private companies like CVS, Shaw’s supermarkets, and H&R Block pitched in. This wasn’t controversial, because it wasn’t taking a position on a proposal, it was educating the public about the law.

The Bush administration organized a similar public-information campaign to introduce the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Democrats had opposed the bill in Congress (because it was written to benefit drug companies more than seniors), and we objected to the tactics used to pass the bill. But Democrats did not interfere with educating the public about how to get the new law’s benefits.

McConnell’s logic is revealing. The NFL should refuse to participate because ObamaCare “is one of the most divisive and polarizing political issues of the day.” Actually, no, it had been a political issue, but it was now a law. McConnell admitted as much, but discounted that fact because “this law was enacted … on a strictly partisan basis”. In other words, the constitutional process is insufficient as long as Republicans disapprove.

The Koch Brothers’ creepy Uncle Sam. The Koch brothers have funneled millions of dollars into ads that aim to sabotage ObamaCare by getting young people not to sign up. Not only are these ads misleading — amounting to an anti-public-education campaign against the law — they also turn a symbol of America, Uncle Sam, into something sinister and threatening.

This is well within the Kochs’ legal freedom of speech — just as it would have been within the freedom of speech of anti–Iraq-War billionaires to run creepy and misleading ads telling young Americans not to sign up for the military. (No such ads ran.) But it is similarly unpatriotic.

The fake Cover California web site. Republicans around the country crowed over the problems of the HealthCare.gov web site. Crowing over your country’s failures is unseemly enough, but California Republicans took it one step further: They set up a fake web site to actively confuse Californians looking for health insurance.

California is one of the states that set up its own ObamaCare exchange with its own web site, Covered California. The state web site was working much better than the national one, so naturally something had to be done to monkey-wrench it. Republicans put up their own fake site, Covering Health Care California, where you can’t sign up for health insurance, but you can access anti-ObamaCare propaganda and misinformation. Republican state representatives then distributed a mailer publicizing the bogus web site.

This is not normal. You want to argue that ObamaCare is a mistake and should be repealed? Fine. You want to run on a repeal platform? Fine.

But America has made a decision to do something about its 50 million uninsured. That decision, made through our constitutional process, is to implement ObamaCare. When you take action to screw that implementation up, you are working against your country.

It’s that simple.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (9)

The Procrustean Sainthood of Nelson Mandela

December 9, 2013 – 9:08 am

A strange thing happens when a political leader ascends to secular sainthood, as Nelson Mandela did in his old age and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy did after their assassinations: The popular notion of sainthood starts to overwhelm their personal reputations. Whatever they stood for in their active careers, as saints they represent whatever saints represent. Saints speak divine truth; so whatever you think the divine truth is, that’s what you’ll imagine the saint said.

So, for example, one the most widely recognized Mandela quotes — “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” — is something he didn’t say at all. But it sounds very generically saintlike, doesn’t it? That’s the kind of thing God should be trying to tell us, so it just stands to reason He would have said it through Nelson Mandela.

Except He didn’t.

Partisanship. The archetypal Saint is not divisive or partisan, so anything a particular saint stood for that isn’t universally accepted needs to be swept under the rug. So Martin Luther King is remembered for one sentence:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And not for the more radical statements he made with some regularity, like:

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.

and:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

and especially not something really divisive, like:

All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.

Quotes like that put King on one side and not the other. If we remembered King that way, only liberals could invoke his name, and conservatives would be stuck with the view of King they held when he was alive: that he was a dangerous left-wing radical. What kind of saint is that?

Ditto JFK. Because the memory of his real life has been overwhelmed by his post-assassination sainthood, he can be claimed by conservatives. Forget that the Great Society programs conservatives love to hate were proposals Kennedy couldn’t get Congress to pass (but that LBJ could after Kennedy’s death). He’s a saint, so he has to belong to everybody, no matter what he actually stood for.

Mandela’s real claim to sainthood. Nelson Mandela deserves our admiration for three simple reasons:

  • He was on the right side of history. In retrospect, it is clear to almost everyone that apartheid was wrong, just as it is clear that slavery was wrong and Jim Crow was wrong. (In their day, though, all these points were hotly debated. Those American conservatives who didn’t actively support apartheid usually held that it wasn’t our problem and viewed the South African government as our ally in the Cold War.) Mandela is the historical symbol of the battle against apartheid. No doubt various people did brave and noble things for apartheid at one time or another, but those people were on the wrong side of history so they will never be saints, just as Jefferson Davis is not seen as the equal of Abraham Lincoln.
  • He didn’t give up, no matter what they did to him. He approached his trial with an attitude he later described like this: “I felt we were likely to hang no matter what we said, so we might as well say what we truly believed.” Fearing Mandela’s martyrdom, the South African government did not hang him, but 27 years in prison didn’t break him. When the government gave in to the pressure to release him, he went back to leading the same movement he’d led when they arrested him.
  • When the pendulum swung his way, he used his power to seek peace rather than vengeance. One of the saintlike things Mandela really did say was: “Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.” Post-apartheid South Africa opted for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission focused on finding and documenting the truth about the abuses of the apartheid government, rather than a set of show trials to settle scores.

So my point isn’t that he doesn’t deserve that level of admiration he is receiving. Rather, he deserves to be admired as the person he really was, not as some generic nice guy who was really brave and stuff.

The conservative attempt to claim Mandela. Basically, the logic goes like this: Mandela fought for freedom for his people. We have definitions of the words freedom and people that makes us freedom-fighters too. (We mean the people who own stuff, and their freedom to keep it, no matter how many hungry people have their noses pressed against the window. This definition may not look terribly different from the kind of freedom the apartheid regime recognized, but let’s not sweat the details.) So Mandela is one of us.

The dumbest and most outrageous invocation of Mandela this week came from Rick Santorum:

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that’s the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed…and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

So let’s completely forget Mandela’s real beliefs about health care, as expressed in section 27.1.a of the Bill of Rights in the South African constitution he campaigned for:

Everyone has the right to have access to ­health care services, including reproductive health care

In other words: Mandela’s beliefs about health care were the exact opposite of the position Santorum is invoking Mandela’s name to support.

What Mandela was. Nelson Mandela was a democratic socialist. In other words, he believed in the right of the people, through democratic elections and representative government, to correct the injustices of the existing property system and to regulate the workings of the market to achieve a more equitable outcome. At his trial, he said:

I am an admirer of such a [parliamentary] system. … [I]n my search for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective. I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than that of socialism.

When governments thwart lawful democratic methods for achieving justice, Mandela believed in breaking the law, even violently if necessary. At his trial he said:

We felt that without sabotage there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the Government. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and when the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

He also was against racism, whether it was white-over-black or black-over-white.

[W]e want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on color, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another.

There’s a lot to admire here, but it is a particular point of view. It doesn’t capture all the wisdom and virtue that is contained in any point of view.

Mourning admirable people you disagree with. Death is a time to let by-gones be by-gones. The deceased can’t hurt you any more, so there’s no need to tear him down. His allies and admirers are sad, so it’s gracious not to salt their wounds*

But while there’s no need to dwell on past disagreements or re-fight old battles, it’s also gracious to let the deceased be the person he was, and let his reputation accrue to the side that he actually belonged to.

Nelson Mandela was a real person who lived and has now died. He did some admirable things and (in regard to the main issue of his career, the fight against apartheid) came out on the right side of the history. He had particular opinions and said some wise things.

But there is no need to recast him a generic saint who was all things to all people and a source of all wisdom. We respect him best by letting him be in death what he was in life.

*Ted Cruz, to his credit, took the high road in a Facebook post that praised Mandela without claiming him for the Tea Party. (Cruz’s followers were incensed.)

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

What to Make of Pope Francis?

December 2, 2013 – 10:41 am

Is Pope Francis’ denunciation of “unfettered capitalism” new? or long-standing Catholic doctrine most Americans have ignored and forgotten? Either way, does it matter?

The Catholic Church has always been torn: Is it the church of Jesus, who told a rich man, “Go, sell all that you own and give to the poor”? Or is it the church of the Emperor Constantine, who put the Rome in Roman Catholicism? Is it the church of Saint Francis or of the Borgia popes? Of liberation theology or of Franco’s fascist collaborators?

The church in recent American politics. In recent years the public face of the American church has been turned primarily towards sexual issues: abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. And so the bishops have become allies of the Republican Party; the American politician most publicly identified as Catholic has been Rick Santorum. American cardinals have denied communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians like John Kerry and Kathleen Sebelius, but when a Catholic conservative like Paul Ryan proposes slashing programs that help the poor, a letter of protest is deemed sufficient. (Cardinal Dolan, then president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, subsequently described Ryan as “a great public servant”.)

On ObamaCare, the American bishops have manufactured great outrage against the fairly minor point* of the contraception mandate, while saying relatively little about Medicaid expansion, which will provide health insurance to millions of the working poor.

Liberal Catholic tradition. Unknown to much of the American public, though, the Catholic Church has a long history of liberal economic positions, going back at least to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.

I encountered this tradition myself in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II, when I went back and read his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens. In that encyclical, the Pope re-examined the relationship between capital and labor, and rejected a point of view he called economism (that workers are just another factor of production, like tools or raw materials, rather than divinely created beings with souls), which he saw underlying both capitalism and communism. He also assigned a secondary and functional role to the institution of private property: If a system of private property leads to a better society, fine, but it’s not an end in itself.

So (unlike Rush Limbaugh) I was not shocked this week when I read headlines like Pope Francis attacks ‘tyranny’ of unfettered capitalism, ‘idolatory of money’. Is this actually something new, I wondered, or does it just look new from within the sex-obsessed bubble constructed by the American bishops and their Republican allies?

Symbols and gestures. Pope Francis made a strong first impression on the world when he rejected many of the regal trappings of the papacy and chose the name Francis, which harkens back to the voluntary poverty and simplicity of Saint Francis of Assisi.

He then made a series of conciliatory statements. About gays:

When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.

And atheists:

We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

Where Pope Benedict had enraged Muslims, Francis reached out them, sending a personal message to a leading imam in Cairo, calling for “understanding among Christians and Muslims in the world, to build peace and justice.”

And running through all of his statements was an awareness of the poor, those who have been cut off from the abundant produce of the planet God created to sustain all people.

So far, so good. But would he actually change anything?

Evangelii Gaudium. A week ago yesterday, the Vatican published an “apostolic exhortation” from Pope Francis. Apostolic exhortations are what the name implies: They’re meant to nudge people into action, not announce new doctrine.

Evangelii Gaudium (“the joy of the gospel”) is no different. Its purpose is to “encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality”. Most of the text has nothing to do with politics or economics; it ranges through subjects as diverse as how the faithful should motivate themselves and advice to priests on preparing good homilies.

[In a couple of subjects — abortion and women priests — he announces that there will be no new doctrine, though he does make this interesting and enigmatic statement:

The reservation of the priesthood to males … is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.

Time will tell whether that is a fig leaf for continued patriarchy or an indication that women could come to have more power in the Church, even if they aren’t serving mass.]

But a document encouraging Catholics to make their faith felt in the world has to say something about what, specifically, the world should be made to feel. And here he did not focus on sexual issues, but on economic ones.

Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully a part of society.

Each individual and every community. Not “the poor — that’s somebody else’s gig — I’m fighting against same-sex marriage”.

Catholic economics. Consistently through the years, Catholic economics has revolved around two ideas:

  • God created the world for everybody. Pope Francis is not staking out any new territory when he writes: “we must never forget that the planet belongs to all mankind and is meant for all mankind; the mere fact that some people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.”
  • God did not institute any particular economic system. Economic systems are human constructions, so they are not proper objects of veneration. God is not a capitalist, a communist, or anything else. So economic arrangements have to be justified in practical terms, by their results.

So even something as basic as private property or the freedom to buy and sell has only a functional justification. Protecting property or upholding economic freedom has no value in itself. Rather

The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good. … Sadly, even human rights can be used as a justification for an inordinate defense of individual rights or the rights of the richer peoples.

This position puts the Church fundamentally at odds with Rand-style (or Ryan-style) libertarianism, in which property rights and economic freedom are moral values, not just useful tricks for increasing production. In Randism, the produce of the world rightfully belongs to the people who own the world; if those who own nothing are to survive, they must appeal to the charity of the owners. The owners are the Makers, the poor are the Takers.

Francis observes this position with horror:

We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

He calls on Catholics not just to give alms, but

to eliminate the structural causes of poverty and to promote the integral development of the poor … We are not simply talking about ensuring nourishment or a “dignified sustenance” for all people, but also their “general temporal welfare and prosperity”. This means education, access to health care, and above all employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive labour that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives. A just wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common use. [quotes from Pope John XXIII]

This can’t happen without political action that leads to structural change. The market won’t do it.

We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.

A mind that worships the Market can only see God as dangerous.

[E]thics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement.

And a society that writes off the poor can never know peace or be safe from revolution.

Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. … When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear.

Is this new? No, this is Catholic economics as it has stood for more than a century, with roots going back even further. What’s new is a pope who seems willing to make this the center of his papacy. He has not changed any doctrine — at least not yet — but he has announced a new emphasis away from sex and towards economic justice. As he said in an interview shortly after taking office:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. … The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

But the Pope’s re-prioritization of doctrine is going to be a problem for a lot of American bishops. As Jesuit Priest Thomas Reese wrote:

the bishops as a conference have been embarrassingly silent on economic justice during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. … Many bishops fear that speaking loudly about economic issues would help Democrats and undermine their alliance with the Republican Party on issues like gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty. Some even think that the conference’s earlier letters, “Economic Justice for All” and “The Challenge of Peace,” were mistakes because they hurt their friends.

Conservative Catholic response. I recommend reading a thoughtful article by the conservative Catholic NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat observes that the shoe is now on the other foot: For years liberal Catholics have had a yes-but relationship with the Vatican, remaining faithful by their own lights while refusing to get in line with official pronouncements on sexual issues. Now it’s conservatives who want to pick and choose which doctrines they support:

for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.

He attempts to do so, resting his case primarily on the practical effects of capitalism’s increased production, but then concludes:

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

Let me state that conclusion more boldly: If capitalism is going to be justified by its practical ability to create prosperity even for the underclass, then that’s how it must be judged. You can’t talk about the wonders of increasing GDP in the abstract and then ignore the suffering of real people, or worse, blame them for their own suffering and label them as “takers” for wanting to share in the productivity of the planet God made for everyone.

Are you listening, Paul Ryan?

* They’ve been so successful at voicing their manufactured outrage that I need to explain this: Catholic institutions are not required to buy contraceptives for their employees or promote their use. The institutions in question are just required to provide health insurance (or pay a fine). Employees can use their health insurance for contraception if they decide to, just as they can use their wages to buy all sorts of things the Catholic Church disapproves of. The moral onus of choosing contraception (or not) falls on the employee, as it should.

As I have said at length elsewhere, construing this situation as some kind of moral issue for the employer is just passive aggression. They are hyper-extending the sensitivity of their consciences in order to control other people.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve

November 25, 2013 – 11:22 am

You can’t compromise with people who aren’t working on the problem.

Compromise is great when it works, but it only works in a certain setting.

You can compromise with people who want to solve the same problem through different means. American households do this all the time. You can compromise with your spouse on what car to buy, because ultimately you both want to drive something. Similarly, the kids need a school, we have to live somewhere, we all want to eat something for dinner … so the details will work out somehow.

But without that sense of a common challenge, negotiations have nowhere to start. If I don’t think my drinking is a problem, if one of us wants children and the other is happy without them, if we disagree about whether monogamy is a good idea — those are the kinds of things marriages founder on, because without recognition of a common problem, you can’t both win.

The same thing is true in politics. Mainstream pundits never tire of writing pox-on-both-your-houses columns that praise bipartisanship and compromise, but compromise is impossible when only one side wants to solve the problem, or admits there’s a problem at all.

Historically, slavery was like that. Skillful politicians managed to work around the edges of the conflict and so delay the confrontation for almost a century, but ultimately Northern abolitionists thought slavery was a problem and Southern slaveowners didn’t, so there was nothing to talk about. One side or the other had to lose.

Once you recognize that pattern, the current stalemate in American politics makes sense. Because increasingly, the United States faces problems that Republicans either deny or would rather not solve.

1. Americans without health insurance. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, 47 million Americans had no health insurance, and perhaps has many as 30 million had “junk insurance” that would be useless in the face of a major illness. So if they got seriously ill, maybe as many as 1 out of every 4 Americans would have had to choose between not getting treatment and going bankrupt.

A Medicare-for-everybody system would have been the simplest way to solve that problem, but the conventional wisdom said that was too “socialist” for this country to swallow. So we wound up with ObamaCare, which isn’t a complete solution but will cut the numbers down considerably.

The Republican slogan about ObamaCare is “repeal and replace”. Since they took control of the House in 2011, Republicans have voted dozens times to repeal ObamaCare. But no Republican replacement plan has even come to a vote.

As for the repeal-and-then-we’ll-think-of-something option, remember that the Republicans had an alternative proposal to HillaryCare in the 90s. (That proposal is actually an ancestor of ObamaCare.) But as soon as they had disposed of the Democrats’ plan, they lost interest in any alternative. Expect the same thing this time, if Republicans ever succeed in repeal.

2. Climate change. Republicans don’t all agree on global warming. Some ignore the issue while others ridicule it. Some think it’s a conspiracy to establish global tyranny while others just think that all proposed actions are too expensive. But they all agree on this: Do nothing.

The exception that proves the rule is an NYT op-ed written by former EPA heads from past Republican administrations — back in the days when Republicans did occasionally try to solve problems. As you can see in the comments, they were quickly denounced as RINOs.  So was Jon Huntsman, the only Republican presidential candidate to take climate change seriously.

3. Decaying infrastructure. The occasional bridge collapse makes headlines, but every day Americans face delays and disruptions caused by worn-out or obsolete infrastructure.

We sit in traffic. When it rains, we lose power. Our cars wear out faster. Our internet is slower. And as for new technologies like bullet trains, smart bridges, or smart grids — who do you think we are, China?

The current situation is perfect for dealing with this problem: Real interest rates are negative, people are unemployed, and inflation is low. So borrow money to invest in the upgrades we need to grow our economy, hire people to fix stuff, and pay back (in inflation-adjusted terms) less than you borrowed. What’s not to like?

President Obama has made repeated proposals along these lines. The most recent was full of plums Republicans should like, like lower corporate tax rates. Its price tag was far lower than the $134-$262 billion per year that a bipartisan commission estimated we need. Republicans panned it as “tax-and-spend”; they made no counter-proposal.

Instead, the Ryan budget calls for cuts in all forms of discretionary spending, including infrastructure. When it came time to fill in the details, House Republicans were unable to do it.

4. Undocumented immigrants. Something like 11-12 million undocumented immigrants are currently in the United States. The existence of such a large class of people off the grid creates a wide range of problems, from security to public health. (Someday there will be another major epidemic, and undocumented disease carriers will be afraid to show up at hospitals.) Most of all, undocumented workers can’t avail themselves of the protection of police or the courts, so employers can exploit them at will. That atmosphere of exploitation makes it harder for documented American workers to claim their rights.

Some Senate Republicans, to their credit, took this problem seriously enough to join Democrats in passing an immigration reform bill. That was five months ago. In the meantime, the Tea Party dominated House has done nothing, and has no plans to do anything. Not only won’t Speaker Boehner bring the Senate bill up for a vote, in the unlikely event that the House passes an immigration bill of its own, he says “Frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”

Once again, Boehner is not holding out for some alternate solution, so there is no deal he could be offered.

5. Gun violence. A Reddit subgroup is keeping a list of all incidents in which four or more people are shot. So far in 2013, it’s up to #320. So this year we’re averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of one mass shooting a day.

Sandy Hook was almost a year ago.  At the time, it seemed inevitable that at least some changes would result. Maybe renewing the assault weapon ban that lapsed during the Bush administration. Maybe mandating smaller-capacity magazines, which would have saved lives at Sandy Hook and probably Tucson as well.

Maybe universal background checks for gun buyers, a policy that polls around 90%. (Huffington Post tried to find anything that would poll that high. Only ice cream met that standard. Kittens, apple pie … nothing else was as popular as universal background checks.)

What did we actually get out of Congress? Nothing. Even background checks died in a Republican Senate filibuster.

But maybe there’s a different Republican approach to limiting gun violence, one that ignores the gun-control approach that has worked so well in Australia. Nope. Nothing.

6. The shrinking middle class. The American middle class used to be the envy of the world. It didn’t just happen, it was the result of policies that started with the Homestead Act and really took off with the New Deal: minimum wage laws, protection for workers forming unions, a social safety net, anti-trust laws, and tax policies that limited the accumulation of wealth.

The result was that median family income roughly tracked productivity growth … until the end of the Carter administration, when a new consensus started forming around de-regulation and supply-side economics.

That consensus was cemented by the Reagan administration and Bill Clinton ratified it. So now we have a situation where the median household income is declining (down 6.6% since 2000), monopolies and monopsonies are increasing, and almost all the growth in the economy is being captured by the very rich.

You can’t even get Republicans to talk about this long-term problem, or to acknowledge that income inequality is a problem at all. Their proposed solutions to the economic problems they do recognize are to do more of what got us into this situation: lower taxes on the rich and on corporations, end the estate tax, more union busting, weaken the safety net, and so on.

Post-policy nihilism. Greg Sergeant and a few others have been referring to the current GOP mindset as “post-policy nihilism“. Making policy — having actual ideas and proposals about governing — is so old-fashioned. Just say no, propose nothing, and criticize the other party for refusing to compromise with you.

So the next time you read one of those both-sides-are-at-fault columns, ask yourself whether both sides have actual proposals. If one side does and the other doesn’t, then the two sides are not equally to blame. Before you can expect people to compromise with you, you have to tell them what you want.

That’s how it works in marriage. That’s how it works in government.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

The ObamaCare Panic

November 18, 2013 – 10:13 am

Here’s what I like least about being a Democrat: Way too often, when the conservative media machine either exaggerates or completely invents an issue, our leaders — in the media, in Congress, and even the administration — wilt under the pressure. Rather than rather than defend good policy (or even defend reality sometimes), they start legitimizing the phony issue created by their enemies.

Remember the bogus ACORN pimp video? It was a fraud perpetrated by conservative “journalist” James O’Keefe, for which he and his partner ultimately paid an ACORN employee $150,000 in damages. But the truth came out only after Congress had been stampeded into passing a law  banning ACORN from applying for federal contracts. (Ultimately, a GAO investigation found no evidence that ACORN had mishandled federal funds.) ACORN was forced into bankruptcy and no longer exists. So Democrats in Congress assisted in destroying an organization whose main sins were registering poor people to vote and trying to raise the minimum wage.

Good job, guys.

Over the years panicked Democrats have authorized the Iraq invasion without looking too hard at the “intelligence” the Bush administration supplied, supported torture, abandoned a public option in ObamaCare even though the public wanted it, and given in to the idea that the deficit — and not creating jobs — is the top economic problem.

Remember when the Obama administration fired Shirley Sherrod? On the basis of yet another video doctored by conservative activists? Even Bill O’Reilly apologized for that one.

Just last spring, Democratic Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus proclaimed the IRS scandal an “outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust” while Senator Joe Manchin railed: “The actions of the IRS are unacceptable and un-American. … The president must immediately condemn this attack on our values, find those individuals in his administration who are responsible and fire them.”

Yeah, that one was bogus too.

So now we get to ObamaCare. The HealthCare.gov* web site has been a problem and first month sign-ups were below expectations. That has created an atmosphere of trouble around the program, which the conservative media exploited by drumming up a bunch of ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories. A lot of them have been fabricated from nothing, and most of the rest are exaggerations.

Small business. Sean Hannity devoted a whole show to “victims” of ObamaCare. A tiny amount of follow-up by Salon’s Eric Stern showed that none of Hannity’s guests were actually victimized.

First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C.  He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.

Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.

There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.

Fox’ Megyn Kelly did a similar segment on a car-wash-chain owner who claimed he sold his business because of ObamaCare. Stern again followed up. It turns out Kelly had asked for no information to verify the impact of ObamaCare on the business. Stern’s interview paints a more complete portrait: The guy had been thinking about selling out for several years, he didn’t like Obama anyway, and the prospect of figuring out how ObamaCare would affect his business gave him an aw-fuck-it moment. In short, not exactly a horror story.

Hannity claimed, “These are the stories that the media refuses to cover.” But in fact the stories that aren’t getting covered are the positive ones. TPM’s Josh Marshall is in the perfect position to cover ObamaCare’s effect on small business, because TPM is itself a 20-employee business. He sums up:

[A]t least on year one in New York State, Obamacare seems to basically be a wash for us in terms of premiums versus last year. However, it’s arguably saving us money since this will be the smallest year over year premium increase since we bought our first group policy back in 2005.

I’m sure Megyn Kelly will be featuring Josh on her show any day now.

Canceled policies. The whole point of ObamaCare was to solve two problems: Nearly 50 million Americans had no health insurance at all, and about another 30 million had bad insurance; they might be insured against a broken arm or something similarly minor and fixable, but their policies either

  • didn’t cover the health problems they were most likely to have (i.e., complications from pre-existing conditions)
  • or had benefit caps that made the policy useless in the face of a major health issue,
  • or the insurance company could cancel the policy if they had the audacity to get sick.

Consumer Reports tells this story:

Judith Goss, 48, of Macomb, Mich., believed that the Cigna plan she obtained through her job at the Talbots retail chain was “some type of insurance that would cover something.” When the store she worked at closed in January 2011, she even paid $65 a month to keep the coverage through COBRA.

“I was aware that it wasn’t a great plan, but I wasn’t concerned because I wasn’t sick,” she says. But in July 2011 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at which point the policy’s annual limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization became a huge problem. Facing a $30,000 hospital bill, she delayed treatment. “Finally my surgeon said, ‘Judy, you can’t wait anymore.’ While I was waiting my tumor became larger. It was 3 centimeters when they found it and 9 centimeters when they took it out.”

That’s what you should picture when you hear about canceled policies. Replacing junk insurance with real insurance is part of the good news of ObamaCare.

Of course if you don’t get sick, you don’t notice that your insurance sucks. Such was the case of Dianne Barrette, a Florida woman CBS found whose inexpensive policy is being cancelled. Her story went viral, so Consumer Reports looked into it:

“She’s paying $650 a year to be uninsured,” Karen Pollitz, an insurance expert at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “I have to assume that she never really had to make much of a claim under this policy. She would have lost the house she’s sitting in if something serious had happened. I don’t know if she knows that.”

Yes, President Obama did say “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” in response to the liars who claimed that ObamaCare was a government takeover that would totally disrupt everyone’s health insurance. (Herman Cain, a cancer survivor whose coverage as a millionaire CEO would have been completely unaffected, claimed ObamaCare would have killed him.) Clearly Obama overlooked the possibility that you might like your junk insurance because you’re an effing idiot.

The media is also overlooking the possibility that when insurance companies say they have to cancel your plan and your new plan will cost more because of ObamaCare, they might be lying. TPM reports:

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended.

Real ObamaCare “losers”. The exception are these folks, a couple found by Pro Publica. Because they were in a risk group cherry-picked by the insurance company to be people who never got sick, their premiums were lower than any policy for the general public can be. Since there’s no way to solve the overall health insurance problem while cherry-picking the healthy for special rates, they end up being ObamaCare “losers”.

But a TPM reader who shares their “plight” puts his situation in perspective:

Having insurance, even crappy insurance, in the individual market means we are almost by definition, healthy and relatively young. If we were not, we wouldn’t be able to get coverage of any kind in the non-group market. If our ACA-compliant replacement policy costs us more, it’s likely because we’re too affluent to qualify for subsidies.

It takes a remarkable degree of self-absorption and sense of self-entitlement to be healthy, young(ish) and affluent—and yet consider oneself a “loser.” It’s a label I reject out of shame (no matter how much the lazy, superficial MSM want to fixate on me and my “plight”) NOT because there’s anything shameful about being a loser; the shame is in thinking oneself a loser when one is actually fortunate.

Again, the positive cancelation stories aren’t getting covered. This week, one of my FaceBook friends posted his experience:

I got the notice yesterday from Anthem Blue Cross that my insurance isn’t ACA compatible and will be cancelled. I’m one of the million or so Californians to have their insurance cancelled.

If I do nothing, Anthem will automatically switch me to a comparable (slightly better) plan. The good news – it will cost $265/month LESS than the old plan! Woo-hoo! I think that the difference is because I no longer have to pay the higher HIPAA premium rate because of my pre-existing conditions. Thank you, Obamacare.

Wilting Democrats. If you believe that the major news properties are liberal, you might expect a lot of front-page stories debunking the ObamaCare panic stories. Guess again.

The so-called liberal media has piled on to the anti-ObamaCare memes promoted by Fox News, like a front-page NYT story comparing ObamaCare to Hurricane Katrina. The best response I found was this chart:

But what about Democratic politicians? Surely they are outraged at the unfair coverage and are jumping up and down to defend good policy and debunk BS.

You don’t know many Democratic politicians, do you?

The drumbeat of (largely bogus) negative media is having an effect on public opinion. President Obama’s approval rating is down to 39% in one poll. So of course the Democratic response is to deflect the short-term public ire by undermining the long-term viability of the program.

So when House Republicans put forward a bill that would give insurance companies the option to keep offering junk insurance plans — because it’s all about the rights of big corporations, not people — 39 Democrats voted for it.

Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu’s bill to let individuals decide to keep their non-compliant plans is just slightly better, but Ezra Klein points out the problem

Put simply, the Landrieu bill solves one of Obamacare’s political problems at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem: Adverse selection. Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees. The most determined enrollees are, by and large, sicker and older. So the Web site’s problems are leading to a sicker, older risk pool. Landrieu’s bill will lead to a sicker, older risk pool.

And that means premiums will go up. Similarly, President Obama’s “fix” will let insurers keep offering non-compliant plans for another year. It’s hard to tell how many insurance companies will “uncancel” canceled plans or what this will do to the risk pool. But the general effect is also to address a short-term political problem by making the long-term policy problems worse.

The most annoying thing from my point of view is that this short-term-politics/long-term-policy tradeoff probably won’t even work. It never does. Instead, it will just add to the vague public sense that ObamaCare is a bad law, rather than the huge improvement on the status quo that it is.

I’m with Chris Hayes on this one: The only way out is through. For the Democrats, the best thing to do politically is to do the best thing policy-wise. Going wobbly on ObamaCare is not going to get you any conservative votes in the next election. What’s going to get votes for all Democrats is to make this thing work.

After all, Democrats in Congress, you’ve gone squishy before in the face of short-term bad publicity. Iraq. Torture. ACORN. How has that worked out for you?

* By the way, I finally decided to try out HealthCare.gov Saturday morning, and it worked way better than press reports had led me to believe. The response time was good. Without creating an account, I was quickly able to see sample plans and rates in my area. It was easy to create an account and input information about myself and my wife.

I stopped short of applying for insurance, because we like the insurance we get through my wife’s job. (And like the man said, we can keep it.) So I can’t vouch for the end-to-end process, which apparently was still having problems as of Friday. But if you need or want health insurance and the horror stories have been keeping you from trying to get it, you should definitely make an attempt and see what happens. Probably, you’ll at worst get to a point where you’re one click from success. And then at some point the back end will be fixed and you can go do that click.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (6)

Bullies, Victims, and Masculinity

November 11, 2013 – 10:55 am

The Richie Incognito story is about more than just locker-room culture. It’s about how traditional masculinity sets poor men up for victimization by rich men.

Maybe I should eavesdrop more, but I seldom hear people in bars and restaurants talking about news stories … unless those stories have something to do with sports. A few weeks ago, I heard three guys at a bar talking about how silly it would be to change the name of the Washington Redskins. And Thursday night, a couple in a Thai restaurant were talking about the Richie Incognito bullying story.

We have a lot more speculation than facts about Incognito, but this much seems to be true: Miami Dolphins’ offensive tackle Jonathan Martin left the team October 28 for “emotional” reasons, and briefly checked into a hospital before going to California to stay with his parents. A few days later, fellow Dolphin lineman Richie Incognito was identified as the center of an ongoing harassment of Martin. Apparently it started last year, when Martin joined the team, as ordinary hazing of a rookie. But unlike most NFL rookies, Martin also appears to be a loner and a misfit in jock society. Perhaps his relatively upscale, intellectual childhood (both Martin’s parents are lawyers) was part of why teammates called him “Big Weirdo“. Incognito was suspended indefinitely after ESPN learned about a voicemail in which Incognito called the mixed-race Martin “a half-nigger piece of shit”.

Incognito claims that he had a good relationship with Martin, and that Martin knew the voicemail was a joke. His teammates more-or-less back him up, but The Nation’s Dave Zirin discounts that as “bully solidarity“. ESPN’s Adam Schefter (a former player) commented:

This is not about a football locker room mentality. This is about the right behavior in a workplace environment where people feel safe.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, the story has stirred up a wide-ranging discussion about the N-word (which I’m going to pass over) and about masculinity. To some people (like Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor) it’s obvious that Martin should have punched Incognito in the face, and that would have been the end of it. Martin is 6’5″ and over 300 pounds, so (according to this point of view) he should be able to take care of himself. By instead making this issue public, he has violated the code of the locker room and hurt his team and teammates.

The resemblance to the keep-it-in-the-family view of child abuse or domestic violence (in my opinion) is more than coincidental.

Implicit in the criticism of Martin is the idea that there’s only one acceptable way to be a man, and being shy or non-confrontational is not part of it. Also, that a professional sports team is not just a workplace, it is a culture that only certain kinds of people can join. That seems to be the point of view of a rather disjointed defense of Incognito by former player Nate Jackson.

Richie Incognito lives in the world that our rabid consumption of the game has created. It’s a place for tough guys, where the mentally and physically weak are weeded out quickly. For those who show themselves to be affected by taunting and teasing, the taunting and teasing get louder, until they either break or develop a good defense. If you can’t handle a joke from your teammates, how are you going to handle the fourth quarter when we need you?—that, at least, is the conventional wisdom. Jonathan Martin’s defense was to walk out. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe we need to get more sensitive about this stuff. But let’s also try to understand it. Richie Incognito acted like an animal because he lives in the jungle.

A particularly insightful discussion of the issue was on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show yesterday. Perry connected the issue to larger notions of hazing (talking to documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt whose “Hazing: How badly do you want in?” will be released soon), and to the ways that traditional masculinity opens lower-class men to exploitation by those whose power comes from money rather than brawn.

In particular, Harris-Perry connected the Martin/Incognito story to the NFL’s concussion issue, which got that much hotter this week with the revelation that all-time-great Cowboy running back Tony Dorsett suffers from chronic trauma encephalopathy, a mood-and-memory disorder associated with repeated concussions. Harris-Perry talked to former NFL player Don McPherson, who said:

You hear all these men talking now about this “suck it up, take it like a man”. Well, should we therefore then take our concussions like a man? Should we stop complaining about the fact that we can’t remember our last Super Bowl, like Tony Dorsett was saying this last weekend? Should we take that like a man? Or should we understand that even though he’s a tough guy who plays football, he’s still a human being?

Hazing and bullying is often about group solidarity. And often the ultimate beneficiary of a solid group isn’t a team or teammate, or even the bully himself, it’s a boss or owner.

Ta-Nehisi Coates also made the Incognito/Dorsett connection:

I grew up in a time and place where you really did have to fight if you expected to be able to live. … when I was young our bodies were all we had. Imposing those bodies on other bodies was the height of our power. It was also the limits of it. All the while we knew that were other people with greater power, who imposed with force so great that it seemed mystical to us. To see football players—arguably the most exploited athletes in major sports—bragging about manly power, along the same codes that once ruled my youth, is saddening.

and in a different post, Coates says:

We all believe in the right to defend one’s own body. But the ability to kick someone’s ass is oft-stated and overrated. Jerry Jones doesn’t want to fight DeAngelo Hall. He won’t ever need to, because such is his power that he can erect a Wonderland of a stadium, reduce men to toy soldiers, and toss their battered bodies out onto the street when he’s done. Pimping ain’t easy, but it sure is fun.

If you squint hard enough you might dimly perceive the outlines of some phantasm, some illusion. You might see power back there behind the scrum. You might see how a national valorization of violence attaches itself to profit.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War

November 11, 2013 – 8:21 am

The Tea Party and establishment Republicans differ on style and tactics, not goals.

After his loss in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election, Tea Party Republican Ken Cuccinelli refused to make the traditional phone call to congratulate the winner, Terry McAuliffe.

No big deal, you might say. Cuccinelli has admitted in public that he didn’t win, and McAuliffe becomes governor in any case. The Outside the Beltway blog argues that the congratulating call doesn’t matter, because such gracious gestures are insincere anyway. And Kevin Drum threw the question out to his readers: Does symbolic politeness still matter or not? (Typically, the comment thread quickly devolved into insults that leave no clear consensus answer. And that’s a meta-answer, I suppose.)

But whether the absent phone call has any direct significance on governance, I think it is important. Congratulating the winner, no matter how much your defeat still rankles, recognizes that in the end we are all on the same side. We are all Americans, or (in this case) all Virginians. However bitter the campaign has been, however overheated the rhetoric has become, we all want the collective project we call “government” to succeed, whether our side gets to lead that government  or not.

That is more-or-less precisely what the Tea Party denies: We are not all on the same side. In President Obama’s case, Tea Partiers often don’t even admit that he’s an American. And they see election campaigns not as contests between differing views of how to move our country forward, but as apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil.

The Obama/Romney election, evangelist Franklin (Billy’s son) Graham warned last fall, “could be America’s last call to repentance and faith. … There’s still time to turn from our wicked ways so that He might spare us from His wrath against sin.” And the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer saw the shutdown/debt-ceiling showdown as evidence “the destruction of America” is on President Obama’s “bucket list”.

Like Cuccinelli, Ted Cruz did not even fake politeness when the President visited Cruz’ home state of Texas this week: “President Obama should take his broken promises tour elsewhere.” Where’s that famous Southern hospitality?

Tea Party strategist

Legitimate rivals merit politeness, but if the AntiChrist wins you don’t congratulate him on his victory or give him a chance to implement the vision the voters have endorsed. You continue the struggle wherever and however you can. And if you bring the temple down on your own head like Samson, you take satisfaction in the number of enemies who perish with you.

The Republican establishment. One popular interpretation of Tuesday’s election results was that establishment Republicans had flexed their muscles and proved that they (and not the Tea Party) are the GOP’s best hope for victory.

Christie and AntiChrist

There was some truth to that. Cuccinelli’s campaign suffered from a lack of money, in large part because big bankroll donors like the Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t contribute. The Chamber also figured in the victory of establishment Republican Bradley Byrne over Tea Party Republican (and birther) Dean Young in Alabama’s 1st congressional district.

And the biggest Republican winner of the night was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had praised Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy and accompanied Obama on a photo-op tour of damaged areas late in the 2012 campaign: “It’s been very good working with the President,” Christie said. “He and his Administration have been coordinating with us. It’s been wonderful.”

Frontrunner? After his landslide win in a blue state, some pundits anointed Christie the early frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, while others were more skeptical.

But his potential opponents have treated Christie’s victory like a serious threat, barely even pretending to be happy about a Republican victory. Rand Paul gave Christie a backhanded compliment, saying that the Republican Party needs “moderates like Chris Christie who can win in New Jersey.” (Recall that “moderate” is an insult in GOP circles. It was Mitt Romney’s opponents who called him a “Massachusetts moderate“, which the Boston Globe characterized as “the two dirtiest words in the Republican lexicon”. Romney himself claimed to be “severely conservative“.) Rick Perry likewise questioned whether “a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country”.

Ted Cruz’ comments were even more pointed:

I think it is terrific that he is brash, that he is outspoken, and that he won his race. But I think we need more leaders in Washington with the courage to stand for principle.

So congratulations to the cowardly, unprincipled Governor Christie.

Moderate? For most of American history, moderate sounded reasonable and good, and to much of the electorate it still does. But what evidence is there of Christie’s moderation?

Traditionally, a moderate was someone who shared at least a few positions with the opposing party (like Democrat Joe Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War and waterboarding, or Republican Rudy Giuliani’s support for abortion rights and immigration reform), or shared goals with the other party but tried to achieve them by different means. (That’s what RomneyCare was about, and why Mitt Romney would have deserved the moderate label if he had truly run on his record. Mitt tried to achieve universal health care via private insurance and the free market. Obama’s embrace of that moderate-Republican approach should have earned him moderate status as well.)

I can’t think of any issue where Christie fits the bill. His position on marriage equality seems typical: He believes only in opposite-sex marriage. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New Jersey, and then sued to prevent same-sex marriages after a state judge ruled in their favor. He eventually dropped the suit and allowed same-sex marriages to proceed in New Jersey, but only after it became clear he would lose.

That’s not moderation, it’s pragmatism. He doesn’t waste his effort on losing battles.

He occasionally makes agreeable noises about gun control, but in the only real test he vetoed three popular bills, one being a version of something he had proposed himself just a few months before.

On contraception and abortion, he vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood five times. The anti-abortion Life News says he proved wrong the “media elite [who] claim Republicans can’t win on a pro-life platform.”

He believes in tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the poor. There’s nothing in his record resembling RomneyCare.

ThinkProgress goes into more detail on Christie’s conservative record.

Opposing the Tea Party doesn’t make you a moderate. Likewise, you’ll search Bradley Byrne’s web site in vain for any moderate policy. He just won’t say stuff as gratuitously offensive as his Tea Party opponent Dean Young, who wants anybody who supports marriage equality thrown out of the Republican Party

If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, they need to go to the Democrat Party.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, as well as Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell are all likely to face Tea Party opposition as they run for re-election. They all (eventually) voted to keep the government open and not default on America’s commitments, but they’re no moderates. Just because they won’t set themselves (or the country) on fire to protest ObamaCare doesn’t mean that they secretly support it.

So when they run against Tea Party extremists in the Republican primaries, I’ll be rooting for them. But that offer expires the morning after the primary. I respect their higher level of politeness and their caution about burning down the house we all live in. But they differ from the Cuccinellis and Cruzes and Youngs merely in tactics, not in goals.

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The Filibuster and the War on Women

November 4, 2013 – 11:48 am

The abuse of the filibuster is a hard issue to get people excited about. It’s one of those technical political things that takes too long to explain and is hard to connect to problems voters care about.

This week, making those connections was a little easier. If you care about a woman’s right to decide whether she gets pregnant or has a baby, the connection to the filibuster was all too clear. Here are three of this week’s big stories:

  • Senator John Cornyn threatened to filibuster anyone President Obama nominates to the D. C. federal appeals court. He’s not making objections to the specific judges Obama has picked, he’s arguing that Obama shouldn’t be allowed to make any picks at all. The court’s current 4-4 conservative/liberal balance should be locked in, no matter how many elections Democrats win.
  • That same court issued a temporary injunction to suspend ObamaCare’s contraception mandate for certain firms, in anticipation of a permanent ruling that employers’ religious freedom gives them power over employees’ health decisions. The judge who wrote the majority opinion is a radical conservative that Democrats tried to block when President Bush nominated her, but they had to back down when Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster permanently.
  • Another judge from that same batch of Bush appointees lifted a lower-court injunction against a Texas anti-abortion law that (among other restrictions) instantly closes about 1/3 of Texas abortion clinics, leaving large areas of the state without abortion services, again in anticipation of the law’s ultimate approval.

Let’s take those one at a time.

Filibuster abuse and the D. C. court. Wikipedia describes the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia circuit like this:

While it has the smallest geographic jurisdiction of any of the United States courts of appeals, the D.C. Circuit, with eleven active judgeships, is arguably the most important inferior appellate court. The court is given the responsibility of directly reviewing the decisions and rulemaking of many federal independent agencies of the United States government based in the national capital, often without prior hearing by a district court. Aside from the agencies whose statutes explicitly direct review by the D.C. Circuit, the court typically hears cases from other agencies under the more general jurisdiction granted to the Courts of Appeals under the Administrative Procedure Act. Given the broad areas over which federal agencies have power, this often gives the judges of the D.C. Circuit a central role in affecting national U.S. policy and law.

A judgeship on the D.C. Circuit is often thought of as a stepping-stone for appointment to the Supreme Court.

The court has 11 active judgeSHIPs, but only 8 active judges. (It had only 7 — and a 4-3 conservative majority — until Obama finally got his first pick approved in May. It also has six semi-retired senior judges. If you count them, the court has a 9-5 conservative majority.) That’s because there are three vacancies. The Constitution (Article II, Section 2) specifies how those vacancies should be filled:

The President … shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for

The filibuster is a historical accident. The Founders didn’t envision it, and although an 1806 rule change made filibusters possible, the first one didn’t happen until 1837. They were rare until the 1970s, and truly skyrocketed when the Republicans became the Senate minority after the 2006 election.

Filibusters of presidential nominations were rare until the Clinton administration, and then Democrats retaliated during the Bush years. But even then, the justification for a filibuster was always some alleged problem with the individual nominee. (Bush nominee Janice Rogers Brown, for example, was filibustered for a history of inflammatory decisions, having once written of Social Security: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have the right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”)

What’s new in the Obama years is the use of the filibuster to nullify a federal office by refusing to approve anyone to head it, regardless of character or qualifications. Until Senate Democrats threatened to invoke the so-called nuclear option in July, Republicans were on track to invalidate the entire National Labor Relations Board, essentially nullifying all laws protecting workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain collectively in good faith.

Cornyn proposes an extension of this unprecedented tactic: using the filibuster to nullify the three vacancies on the D. C. court, ostensibly because the court’s case load doesn’t require 11 judges. (He wasn’t bothered by an even lower case load when Bush appointed Rogers.)

If over-staffing of the D.C. court is indeed a problem (and not just a pretext to stave off a liberal majority), the Constitution provides a way to solve it in Article I, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power … To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court

In other words, Congress could pass a law shrinking the D. C. court, if that were really a problem. But legislation requires a majority vote in both houses and the signature of the President, which Cornyn can’t get because his party can’t win national elections.

This is what the filibuster has become: not just a way to block new laws or objectionable appointments, but a way for a minority to repeal legislation already passed or to achieve its goals without passing laws at all.

Who needs to win elections?

The contraception mandate. Thursday, the previously mentioned Janice Rogers Brown (of Social-Security-is-cannibalism fame) was the deciding vote in a 2-1 decision by the D. C. appeals court to grant an injunction blocking enforcement of ObamaCare’s contraception mandate on a business owned by two Catholic brothers. The ruling isn’t a final decision in the case, but it reads like one, because one key consideration in granting such an injunction is a belief that the injunction-seeking side is likely to prevail.

Fortunately, Rogers stopped short of declaring that corporations are protected by the First Amendment’s free-exercise-of-religion clause, which would have produced true chaos. But the 400-employee company is owned by two brothers who claim to operate according to Catholic principles (i.e., having pro-life bumper stickers on their trucks), so the brothers’ religious freedom is violated by the requirement that they provide contraception coverage to their female employees.

I’ve stated my position on this issue at length before: I believe these claims of “religious freedom” are actually passive aggression, stretching claims of one’s own moral purity to ridiculous lengths in order to control the behavior of others. I was pleased to see many of my own favorite arguments show up in the dissenting opinion of  Senior Judge Harry Edwards (the only Democratic appointee among the senior judges) (I’m not claiming Edwards reads the Sift or that the arguments are original to me):

It has been well understood since the founding of our nation that legislative restrictions may trump religious exercise. Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599, 603 (1961). Were it otherwise, “professed doctrines of religious belief [would be] superior to the law of the land, and in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

and illustrates the point with an example Sift readers will recognize:

A Christian Scientist, whose religion has historically opposed conventional medical treatment, might claim that his corporation is entitled to a religious exemption from covering all medical care except healers who treat medical ailments with prayer.

Edwards sees the conflict between the owners’ religious beliefs and the mandate, but does not find that it meets the legal standard of a “substantial burden”, using another analogy I’ve used here.

The Supreme Court has never applied the Free Exercise Clause to find a substantial burden on a plaintiff’s religious exercise where the plaintiff is not himself required to take or forgo action that violates his religious beliefs, but is merely required to take action that might enable other people to do things that are at odds with the plaintiff’s religious beliefs.

… The Gilardis do not contend that their religious exercise is violated when Freshway pays wages that employees might use to purchase contraception, and the Mandate does not require the Gilardis to facilitate the use of contraception any more directly than they already do by authorizing Freshway to pay wages.

Edwards quotes a 1982 Supreme Court decision:

Congress and the courts have been sensitive to the needs flowing from the Free Exercise Clause, but every person cannot be shielded from all the burdens incident to exercising every aspect of the right to practice religious beliefs. When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.

If not for the filibuster, that might be the majority opinion.

Texas abortion law. One of the other Bush judicial appointees who made it through the Senate under threat of the nuclear option was Priscilla Owen, whose appointment the Houston Chronicle opposed with these words:

The problem is not that Owen is “too conservative,” as some of her critics complain, but that she too often contorts rulings to conform to her particular conservative outlook. It’s saying something that Owen is a regular dissenter on a Texas Supreme Court made up mostly of other conservative Republicans.

No less a conservative than Alberto Gonzales once characterized Owen’s opinion in a Texas abortion case as “an unconscionable act of judicial activism”. In other words, even among conservative judges, she stood out as particularly radical.

The stipulation in the recent Texas abortion law (the one Wendy Davis delayed for a session with her famous state-legislature filibuster) that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges in local hospitals is one of a number of regulations designed to close clinics, and is largely devoid of any legitimate purpose. The lower-court judge found that the law was “without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” Similar laws in Wisconsin and other states have been blocked by federal judges.

But thanks to Judge Owen, this one is allowed to take effect. Abortion clinics are already closing, and it is estimated the 1/3 of all abortion clinics in Texas — already not that common — will be unable to meet the requirement.

End the filibuster. Right now, conservatives are benefitting from the fact that Senate Republicans have been more willing to play hardball than Democrats. Democrats under Bush attempted to block only the most outrageous nominees, and for the most part they failed. Those judges are on the bench now, fighting the war on women.

That’s just one front of the struggle, the one whose dots were most easily connected this week. Ultra-conservative judges have brought us Citizens United, came close to constructing an entirely novel interpretation of the Commerce Clause specifically to torpedo ObamaCare, and across-the-board have extended the rights of corporations and the rich over workers, consumers, and the general public.

President Bush did not try to be “reasonable” in his appointments or seek uncontroversial nominees. He nominated the most activist conservative judges he could find, and Senate Republicans refused to let the Democrats filibuster even the worst of them.

Now that the tables have turned, the filibuster has been expanded into a general tool of minority rule. It’s time to end it, once and for all.

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The Method of Madness

October 28, 2013 – 12:33 pm

It isn’t that Obama has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe.

In the shutdown/debt-ceiling fight, the Tea Party Republicans put President Obama in a position where compromise was a practical impossibility: They demanded concessions in exchange for a resolving a crisis that they created, and that they could recreate at will. To give them anything at all would invite an endless series of crises that drop-by-drop would bleed the administration dry. The election of 2012 would effectively have been nullified.

So Obama held firm and the non-Tea-Party Republicans blinked. The deal did not resolve the crisis, but it did buy time. The government is funded until January 15 and the debt ceiling is raised until February 7. Obama didn’t win anything in terms of policy; he just got the metaphorical hostages released for a few months.

Now, presumably, we should be negotiating about the budget and other government policies, so that January and February don’t hit us the way October did. But increasingly we face the question: Negotiate about what?

The essence of negotiation is to figure out what you where you would be willing to compromise with the other side and where they might be willing to compromise with you. It presumes a desire on both sides to reach an agreement.

But increasingly, liberals like me are becoming skeptical. For the Tea Party base, the point of this last fight seems to have been the fight itself. It accomplished nothing, and (by one estimate) cost the economy $24 billion, reducing the growth rate in 4th-quarter GDP from 3% to 2.4%. But that leads Ann Coulter to say, “We should be proud. Tea Partiers should be standing tall after the last few weeks.” And Ted Cruz went home to a victory tour, reportedly getting standing ovations of eight minutes and 14 minutes.

What’s up with that?

So often, when you try to grapple with the issues the fight is supposed to be about, they evaporate. The national debt is supposed to be an apocalyptic threat to America. But the fact that the annual deficit is dropping does not seem to mitigate the urgency. The prospect of going back to the tax rates that produced a surplus in the last years of the Clinton administration is off the table. No tax increase of any kind can be part of the solution, no matter what spending cuts it might be coupled with. Not even egregious tax loopholes can be closed, unless that money is used to lower taxes somewhere else.

So we have a problem that is destroying America, but you can’t consider paying any money to solve it?

Some on the Left have begun talking about “post-policy nihilism” — Republican opposition for the sake of opposition, even when Obama offers their own ideas back to them. Or passing a budget whose cuts they themselves won’t vote for when they’re spelled out.

What are we to make of bizarre irrationalities, like Ted Cruz shutting down the government, and then protesting that the national monuments are shut down? With a confederate flag in the audience and sharing the podium with a guy who called on President Obama to

leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

Ryan Cooper comments:

these tea partiers were absolutely incandescent with rage at Obama that the national parks are shut down. This was the plan, don’t you remember? Guys? The only operating principle at work here seems to be “If X is bad, then X is Obama’s fault.”

The total disregard for even the simplest details or logic here, even according to the Republicans’ own frame of reference, underscores again that this crisis has nothing to do with actual policy differences. This is nothing but the politics of reactionary grievance.

Mike the Mad Biologist elaborated by referring to a piece he had previously written about Sarah Palin:

Her policy ignorance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Palin is conceptually and intellectually poor because her politics are not about policies, but a romantic restoration of the ‘real’ America to its rightful place. The primary purpose of politics is not to govern, not to provide services, and not to solve mundane, although often important, problems. For the Palinist, politics first and foremost exists to enable the social restoration of ‘real’ Americans (think about the phrase “red blooded American”) and the emotional and social advantages that restoration would provide to its followers (obviously, if you’re not a ‘real’ American, you might view this as a bad thing…). Practicalities of governance, such as compromise and worrying about reality-based outcomes, actually get in the way.

And that, I think, gets to the heart of it. The root motivation of the Tea Party isn’t the deficit or ObamaCare or any other policy it’s currently focused on. The root motivation is tribal: a feeling that People-Like-Me used to own America, but it is being taken away by People-Like-Them and needs to be taken back.

That’s why nothing Obama can do is right. It isn’t that he has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe. Who that tribe is, exactly, varies from person to person and situation to situation. Sometimes it’s racial and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s cultural — the whole guns-and-religion thing. Sometimes it’s the Makers vs. the Takers. But what unites them all is a sense of tribal grievance. People-Like-Me used to own American and need to take it back.

I am in debt to Jonathan Korman (a.k.a Miniver Cheevy) for making the connection between the Palinist rhetorical style and the “Duckspeak” of 1984. After rendering an apparent word salad into free verse, Korman finds the structureless structure:

You may have trouble following Palin not only because of the way her arguments jump around, but also because they are almost all incomplete. To decode them, you need to know that they are allusions to right-wing talking points. … I submit that this is not just clumsiness. This is a method, if not necessarily a conscious one.

The point is to remind the initiated of feelings and conclusions and frames without providing any actual facts or ideas that could be thought about or disputed. Orwell noted the usefulness of this technique in “The Principles of Newspeak“.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument.

…. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’.

This is a common speech pattern on the Right. You just quack “Benghazi” or “out-of-control spending” or “religious freedom” or “the Constitution” and whole narratives of misinformation click into place. And because they need not be spelled out, they cannot be challenged.

I’m not sure where we can go from here. A group with policy goals can be negotiated with. A aggrieved tribe with identity issues really can’t be.

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