The Weekly Sift

The 2016 Stump Speeches: Introducing the Series

One benefit of living in New Hampshire is the opportunity to listen to presidential candidates unfiltered by the national media. It wasn’t until I arrived here in 1996 that I realized just how distorting that filter can be: Early in each cycle, the press corps decides on a narrative for each candidate, and from there on it’s very hard for any other message to get through.

For example, in 2003 Howard Dean was the anti-war candidate. That’s what I expected to hear when I went to see him, and when he instead talked about a wide range of issues, I thought he must be making a real effort to broaden his appeal. But when I read the press coverage the next morning, it only mentioned the anti-war parts of his speech. If I hadn’t been there, I would have thought the anti-war candidate gave another anti-war speech. In fact, I eventually discovered, Dean had given his standard stump speech, which had always been about a wide range of issues. It just never got covered that way.

In the same campaign, I listened to John Kerry and blogged about his talk, not realizing that I had totally ignored what became the mainstream-media story: Kerry calling for “regime change in the United States“. If you were there, it was a throw-away line in an otherwise serious talk about where America was heading and where it needed to go. If you weren’t there, it was the only line you heard.

Ever since, I’ve tried to listen to as many candidates’ stump speeches as I can. Often they contain a lot of slanted statistics and mis-stated facts — which are instructive in their own way — but they also constitute a candidate’s best answer to the fundamental question of any presidential campaign: Where does America need to go and why am I the person to lead us there?

It’s important not to lose sight of that, or to get lost in all the clever remarks and wardrobe choices and inside-baseball strategizing. Where does this candidate think America needs to go and why is s/he the one to lead us there?

Fortunately, in the YouTube era you don’t have to live in New Hampshire or Iowa to hear a stump speech. So in this series I’m going to link to videos and/or transcripts of stump speeches of all the major candidates as they start campaigning, and I’m going to take them seriously. I’ll fact-check, pull out larger themes, compare to other candidate’s speeches, and think about the parts of the picture I think are being left out.

Watch the speeches with me and add your comments. I’m going to start later today with Ted Cruz’s Liberty University speech, and I plan to update this post throughout the year as more candidates announce and more stump speeches become available.

Speeches discussed so far: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders (plus Sanders’ Liberty University speech), Rick Santorum, Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson.

April 6, 2015 – 7:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

Tagged 2016 election |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Last week I finally had to recognize that the 2016 campaign had started. This week I begin covering it. I plan to do a series where I look at the stump speeches of all the major candidates, because I’ve learned in past campaigns that often they’re saying something different from what is being covered in the mainstream press.

So this week I need two featured posts: one to explain what the series is and the other to get it started by examining Ted Cruz announcement speech at Liberty University. They’re both more-or-less done, so they should be out shortly.

In the weekly summary, there’s still the “religious freedom” controversy, which I’ll catch up on and explain how I think the law ought to balance the competing values involved (as it seems to be doing in Colorado). But the more important development of the week was the announcement of the framework of a nuclear deal with Iran. And there was a massacre in Africa. I’ll close with a stand-up routine by Trevor Noah, who has been named as the next host of The Daily Show.

I’m writing from Arizona rather than my usual New Hampshire, so the usual schedule may slip a little. In the Eastern time zone, the weekly summary may not appear until afternoon.

April 6, 2015 – 7:45 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Discriminating Tastes

The [university’s] policy with respect to intermarriage, the record also clearly establishes, was rooted from the beginning in a belief that is derived from scripture: not that races should not associate, but that races should not intermarry.

— William Ball, lawyer for Bob Jones University,
oral argument of Bob Jones University v. the United States (1982)

This week’s featured post is “2016: Understanding the Republican Process“.

This week everybody was talking about Indiana’s new right-to-discriminate law

I’m tempted to go into detail about what’s in it and why it’s wrong, but it’s basically the same thing Governor Brewer vetoed in Arizona last year, so I’d just be repeating what I wrote then. (If you want details, an Indiana lawyer has blogged a better analysis than I could do.)

What I find most discouraging is my own reaction: The bigots are wearing me down. When Arizona was about to do it, I was outraged. Now it’s just “Oh, not this shit again.” And how the heck am I going to boycott Indiana, when I was never planning to go there anyway?

I include the quote at the top to point out that we’ve heard all these points in favor of religiously-mandated discrimination before. Then it was discrimination against blacks rather than discrimination against gays, but the arguments are exactly the same.

And no, Michele Bachmann’s husband was not refused service at an Indianapolis dress shop because the owner thought he was gay. That clever satire went over the heads of many of its readers. They might have figured it out by looking at other articles on the National Report site, like “Obama’s Executive Amnesty Will Grant Illegals Marijuana Seller Permits“.

Georgia has a similar “religious freedom” bill pending. A few days ago, opponents thought they had it blocked by attaching an amendment that takes the bill’s supporters at their word.

As in Indiana, proponents of Georgia’s bill have tried to argue that it has nothing to do with discrimination. Rep. Mike Jacobs, an LGBT-friendly Republican, decided to test this theory by introducing an amendment that would not allow claims of religious liberty to be used to circumvent state and local nondiscrimination protections. Supporters of the bill, like Rep. Barry Fleming (R), countered that the amendment “will gut the bill.”

So it’s not about discrimination, but taking discrimination out of the law “guts” it.

It’s still possible that the unamended version will be restored and passed.

Big Atlanta-based corporations like Delta and Coke have spoken out against similar Georgia laws in the past, but aren’t making a big deal about this one. ThinkProgress speculates:

Some speculate that lawmakers have intimidated these companies into silence with bills that threaten their business — with Delta serving as the example for others. Still pending in the legislature is a bill (HB 175) that would eliminate Georgia’s tax subsidy on jet fuel, which would primarily hurt Delta. Its sponsor, Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R), makes no secret of the fact that the bill is retribution for Delta CEO Richard Anderson’s recent history of weighing in on public affairs, including last year’s version of RFRA.

It’s fascinating to watch the sleight-of-hand involved in defending so-called “religious freedom” laws, particularly when defenders try to make a parallel to liberal freedom issues, either to point out our obliviousness or our hypocrisy. For example:

Shoebat.com decided to call some 13 prominent pro-gay bakers in a row. Each one denied us the right to have “Gay Marriage Is Wrong” on a cake

But this is explicitly not what the bakery court case was about. As the judge wrote:

There is no doubt that decorating a wedding cake involves considerable skill and artistry. However, the finished product does not necessarily qualify as “speech,” as would saluting a flag, marching in a parade, or displaying a motto. … [The baker] was not asked to apply any message or symbol to the cake, or to construct the cake in any fashion that could be reasonably understood as advocating same-sex marriage. [my emphasis]

Or consider this cartoon:

In what sense are Klansmen analogous to gays, or right-wing Christians analogous to blacks? Have gays been lynching right-wing Christians or burning their churches? Does a fundamentalist baker feel physically threatened when lesbians come into his shop?

And finally, Bob the Baker’s reluctance to make a KKK cake is political, not religious. A religious freedom law doesn’t help.

and a plane crash

Once again, CNN has turned into the Air Disaster Network. Every time I checked CNN this week, they were talking about Germanwings Flight 9525. Somehow, they managed to spend 24 hours a day repeating: It crashed, everybody died, and we think one of the pilots might have crashed it intentionally.

Plane crashes are the junk food of news. They seem important — and they are important to the friends and families of the people who die — but otherwise they don’t affect your life and there’s nothing you can do about them. Beyond the simple announcement that a crash has happened, it’s literally News You Can’t Use.

Zak Cheney-Rice points out that CNN could also speculate about terrorism, if the suspect weren’t white. If he were a brown-skinned Muslim, they’d be talking about little else.

This is not an argument for jumping to conclusions. Nor is it meant to accuse Lubitz of terrorism. On the contrary, it is an argument for holding people who commit mass murder to similar standards, regardless of their race or religion. If one gets to be portrayed as a complex human being, they all should be portrayed as such.

and Bowe Bergdahl

But whenever I scanned through Fox News, they were talking about Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier that President Obama got back from the Taliban in a prisoner exchange last May.

The new development this week was that the Army decided to charge Bergdahl with desertion and “misbehavior before the enemy”. For some reason, this makes the prisoner swap a “fiasco” in the conservative mind. I guess they think we should have let the Taliban keep torturing him.

and Yemen

Iran-backed rebels have taken over the capital, and the Saudis have launched air strikes against them. There’s talk of Saudi or Egyptian troops invading. The Christian Science Monitor has a good summary of the situation, which is complicated to say the least.

It’s tempting to frame this as part of the brewing regional Sunni/Shia war — Iran vs. ISIS in Tikrit is another part — but (as in Syria/Iraq) there are more than two sides. The Sunni government was helping us fight the local branch of Al Qaeda, which is also Sunni. The Shia rebels recently overran the air base we had been using for drone strikes against their enemies.

For those of you who can’t find Yemen on a map (don’t be ashamed, just learn), here’s a map.

You actually know more about Yemen than you think. Historically, it might be where the Biblical Queen of Sheba came from. More recently, its Aden harbor is where the U.S.S. Cole was attacked.

Yemen has been an oil producer, but its fields are near exhaustion. (In 2008, the World Bank predicted Yemen’s oil reserves would run out by 2017. How any government will replace that revenue is a mystery.) It’s a poor country that has been badly governed for a long time, and has a scary water problem that climate change is making worse. (Thomas Friedman went there to film Episode 8 of Years of Living Dangerously.)

In short, it’s one of those tragic situations where people are squabbling over crumbs. The victor in the civil war will just win responsibility for solving intractable problems.

and 2016

Presidential candidates are starting to show up in New Hampshire, but it’s surprisingly hard to track them down. (Ted Cruz’ visit this week didn’t show up on WMUR’s candidate tracker.) We’re at a stage in the campaign where candidates want to talk to groups they expect to support them, and don’t want possibly hostile voters showing up to ask embarrassing questions. (Not that I do that.)

Cruz officially announced his candidacy at Liberty University, the school Jerry Falwell founded. WaPo has the transcript of his speech. Next week I plan to start an intermittent series where I look at candidate stump speeches in detail, starting with that one.

and you also might be interested in …

Most of the opposition to the administration’s negotiations with Iran have hidden behind the fig leaf of the “better deal” Obama could get if he took a firmer stand. So it’s kind of refreshing to see a NeoCon honestly admit that he wants war, as former Bush UN Ambassador John Bolton did in Thursday’s NYT.

Bolton thinks bombing “should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.” Because that would totally work, just like Dick Cheney’s plan to have the Iraqis greet us as liberators.

In reality, Iranians would react to an attack the way we reacted to 9-11: 90% of them would rally behind the government, while the other 10% would either shut up or get ostracized as unpatriotic. If you want to completely destroy any chance of democratic change in Iraq, do what Bolton wants.

Happy Birthday, ObamaCare. Steve Benen lists ten false predictions its critics made.

Happy trails, Harry Reid.

Two weeks ago I talked about a racist song sung on a fraternity bus. I remarked at the time that the song couldn’t be new, because the brothers in the video know the words. Now we know where they learned them: at an SAE national leadership school four years ago.

SAE also turned up in “The Hunting Ground” as a particularly dangerous frat for a woman to attend a party at. On some campuses, SAE is said to stand for “Sexual Assault Expected”.

In New York City, a crime is more likely to get on TV if the suspect is black.

As a Michigan State alum, I can’t not mention our most unlikely Final Four run ever. No one can strategize against us, because no one can figure out how we’re winning.

and let’s close with a cautionary tale

If you take your girlfriend to the game, keep your eye on the KissCam.

March 30, 2015 – 10:53 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Tagged gay rights |

2016: Understanding the Republican Process

Four years ago, Jonathan Chait made the kind of prognosticating mistake people don’t let you forget: He picked Tim Pawlenty as the 2012 Republican nominee.

To be fair, Pawlenty wasn’t as ridiculous a choice as hindsight makes him look, and Chait wasn’t the only one forecasting great things for him: Pawlenty was Mitt Romney without the baggage of Mormonism and RomneyCare. He was conservative enough to be acceptable to the Party’s various factions, while sounding moderate enough not to scare off the national electorate.

In other words: If this were still the GOP of 1920, Pawlenty was exactly the kind of Warren-Harding-ish compromise candidate the smoke-filled room above the convention hall would have settled on after ten or twenty ballots. But since Pawlenty was nobody’s first choice in 2012, he never broke out of single digits in the polls and was out of the race before a single vote was cast.

The lesson of Chait/Pawlenty is that the modern Republican presidential process has two distinct phases: First a qualifying phase, where a few candidates break out of the pack to eliminate everyone else, and then a decision phase, where the party picks one of the qualifiers to unify around. Pawlenty is an example of a good decision-phase candidate who never made it out of the qualifying round.

To make it out of the qualifying phase, you need to be the first choice of one of the Party’s factions. But what are those factions?

The Four Factions. I still believe in the model from “The Four Flavors of Republican“, which boils down to this diagram:

The four groups overlap, which is how the GOP stays together. But each speaks a subtly different language and focuses on a different set of issues. In 2012, each faction had a favorite son: Mitt Romney (Corporatist), Newt Gingrich (NeoCon), Rick Santorum (Theocrat), and Ron Paul (Libertarian). Those candidates made it through the qualifying phase, with Romney substantially in the lead. The decision-phase question was then whether Romney could convince the NeoCons, Theocrats, and Libertarians not to divide the party — and so insure Obama’s re-election — by rejecting him.

That model, I believe, will hold again in 2016. To make in through the qualifying phase, a candidate will need to convince one of the four factions that he is their guy. To survive the decision phase and get the nomination, a qualifier has to convince each of the other three factions not to veto him.

So let’s look at the factions one-by-one. Each faction has its favorite sons, and a second category I call “fluent speakers” — candidates who aren’t necessarily identified with the faction, but who can go into a room of activists and speak their language. If a faction comes to believe that its favorite sons can’t be nominated, its members might throw their early support to a fluent speaker. On the flip side, a faction might identify some candidate as an enemy: somebody whose nomination could be a reason to bolt the party. In 2012, for example, many Theocrats had a hard time stomaching the Mormon Romney.

Theocrats. If a candidate denounces gay marriage, compares abortion to the Holocaust, talks about the Constitution as if it were a scripture God revealed to the Founders, and takes seriously the idea that Christians are persecuted in this country, he’s trying to win over the Theocrats.

The favorite sons are Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. (Sarah Palin could be favorite daughter if she actually ran and wasn’t looking increasingly loony. But I don’t think she has any interest in the hard work necessary to run a serious campaign. She floats her name to stay in the headlines, and she’ll tease her supporters as long she can. But she won’t run.) Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal are fluent speakers of the Theocrat language. Scott Walker has the background and record to be a fluent speaker, but after watching his Iowa Freedom Summit speech, I’m still not sure he can really preach in Theocrat. (Questions like that are why we have campaigns.) Chris Christie might be an enemy.

Jeb Bush can speak the language, but fails key litmus tests. Theocrats worry about government-imposed secularism, and so are suspicious of any federal role in education. Bush was an early proponent of the Common Core standard, not realizing it would turn into a “vast network of conspiracy theories“. (To a Corporatist, Common Core is not a liberal conspiracy, it’s a corporate plan to skim more profits off of public education. That kind of conspiracy is OK.) A lot of Theocrats are also Nativists, so Bush’s sympathy for Hispanic immigrants also makes him suspect. One of the key issues of the decision phase will be whether Huckabee/Santorum can paint Bush as an enemy, or whether Bush can use his mastery of the language to convince Theocrats (who liked his brother in spite of No Child Left Behind) that he’s harmless.

In recent years, Iowa has picked the Theocrat qualifier: Santorum in 2012, Huckabee in 2008. Both are interested this year. Ted Cruz’ decision to announce his candidacy at Liberty University says that he’s pitching for the Theocrat vote as well.

NeoCons. This is the John McCain/Dick Cheney wing of the party. A candidate who identifies with Israel, denounces Islam by name, hates Obama’s move to end the Cuba embargo, and views war with Iran as more-or-less inevitable is appealing to the NeoCons.

The purest NeoCon candidates are John Bolton and Lindsay Graham, but it’s not clear that either of them is ever going to be taken seriously. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and a lot of other people are fluent speakers. Rand Paul is an enemy, while Scott Walker’s complete lack of military or foreign-policy experience makes him suspect.

The early primary with the strongest NeoCon flavor is South Carolina, and the kingmaker of the NeoCons is billionaire Sheldon Adelson; when he starts writing big checks, we’ll know who the NeoCon candidate is.

Corporatists. Articles about the “donor class” or the “Republican establishment” focus on the Corporatists. Corporatists value managerial experience, so they favor business executives and governors. They hate unions, want to privatize anything government does, and dislike government interference (but aren’t above taking a special tax break or a bail-out). They want to cut the taxes that affect rich people and corporations, but they also worry about “the 47%” who don’t pay federal income tax. So raising taxes on poor people is a winning issue here, if you come up with some euphemism (“broaden the tax base“) that doesn’t sound like “raising taxes”.

Moral issues are just tactical for the Corporatists; they used gay marriage to boost Republican turn-out in 2004, but are just as happy to drop it now that the wind has changed. However immigration reform works out, they don’t want to lose access to cheap labor.

Corporatists are well-connected in the media, so their candidates usually appear to be stronger than they actually are. (That’s why Romney seemed “inevitable” in the 2012 cycle, but had so much trouble nailing the nomination down.) As candidates from other factions emerge, the media will be shocked and say that they “came from nowhere”.

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker are the Corporatist favorite sons. Corporatists don’t usually have to accept a fluent speaker, but Rick Perry might be acceptable and most candidates speak pretty good Corporatist. Mike Huckabee is an enemy, and many Corporatists find Ted Cruz’ populist side scary.

The Koch Brothers are an interesting case. They present themselves as Libertarians, but much of their money goes to Corporatists. Koch-Corporate may just be a rival branch of the Corporatist faction, one that wants to support its own candidates rather than established ones like Bush. If so, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker might be its favorite son.

Libertarians. Libertarian Republicans are already united behind Rand Paul, just as they were behind Ron Paul in 2012. But they are probably the smallest faction of the party, and the question is whether Paul can pull support from other factions, or whether some fluent speaker might get their support if Paul embarrasses himself in the debates. (I think that’s a real possibility; Rand is just not as sharp as his Dad was.)

The key event to look for is whether Paul can get support from the Kochs. (I don’t think he will.) Paul was invited to the Koch Brothers’ candidate forum (where he clashed with Cruz and Rubio over foreign policy), but Rubio came out ahead in the straw poll.

What the numbers say. 538’s Harry Enten looked at recent nominees and came up with this theory about early polls: At this stage of the campaign, you can be on your way to the nomination if you’re known and liked by your party (as Bush was in 1999), or if you’re not liked because you’re still unknown (like Dukakis in 1987). But it’s death to be known and not liked. No recent nominee has had both high name recognition and low net favorability at this stage of the process.

If you buy that theory, then Christie and Palin are hopeless, while Perry and Bush have work to do, and Jindal is on life support. Huckabee, Paul, Carson, and Walker are about where they ought to be, with Cruz and Rubio doing OK.

Other factors. A lot of unpredictable or hard-to-measure factors will turn out to be important, including:

The Money Primary. Whoever wins the first primary gets a boost, but the first primary isn’t Iowa or New Hampshire: It’s the Money Primary, where the “electorate” are the big donors. A Corporatist almost always wins: Bush in 2000, Romney in 2012.

In a few days we’ll start hearing fund-raising totals from the first quarter, and they will make it clear that Jeb Bush is decisively winning the Money Primary. That will shape the race in three ways:

It anoints Bush as the Corporatist qualifier, unless and until he screws up. It all but sinks Chris Christie, and tells Scott Walker he needs a more Theocratic image.
It will ignite the Jeb-is-inevitable talk, which will continue until a Theocrat “comes from nowhere” and wins Iowa. (If Jeb wins Iowa, then he probably is inevitable.) That will open up the possibility of a Libertarian or NeoCon winning New Hampshire and a NeoCon winning South Carolina.
Money gives a candidate resilience. If you have a lot of it banked, you can absorb a loss and regroup in the next state. In 2012, Romney lost South Carolina to Gingrich, then outspent him 4-to-1 to win Florida.

Identity politics. There’s a strong I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I aspect to Republican politics. In the Obama years, that helped non-white candidates like Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal, who let Republicans say, “See, we’re not racists; you’re the racists.” But as the Democratic mantle shifts from Obama to (presumably) Hillary, I expect Republicans to lose interest in non-whites. If there were a viable woman in the race — Palin isn’t, and Carly Fiorina has yet to emerge from obscurity — she might get a similar boost. Another female VP candidate is a real possibility.

Performance. The hardest factor to predict is how well candidates will perform on the campaign trail. In 2007, who knew Obama would be that good a campaigner or a strategist? And you can never guess when somebody is going to self-destruct in a debate, like Rick Perry did in 2011. (His excuse is that he was recovering from back pain and was over-medicated then, but he’s better now. I thought his Iowa Freedom Summit performance was impressive, but we won’t know until the debates start. Certainly any little flub he makes will get a lot of coverage.)

I expect Cruz and Christie to perform well, and Jindal and Paul to perform badly. (Watch Paul’s interview with Rachel Maddow.) The big wild card is Bush, who has never campaigned for national office, or for anything at all since 2002.

I don’t think we give Mitt Romney enough credit for how good a primary campaign he ran in 2012. He was the target in every debate, and nobody wounded him. Can Bush walk that gauntlet? It’s harder than Romney made it look.

Luck. If 2008’s October surprise had been an Iranian nuclear test rather than a financial crisis, John McCain might be president. You never know when Fate will serve up some issue that lets a candidate say, “I’ve been right about this all along.” Conversely, you have to wonder if the story Rick Perry wants to tell about the Texas economy will fall apart now that oil is under $50 a barrel. All the governors are tied to the events in their states. More bond downgrades for New Jersey could sink Christie, and the sluggish economy of Wisconsin could be trouble for Walker. The outbreak of an unpopular war could turn Rand Paul into the peace candidate.

What I Expect. Paul is the only Libertarian running; unless he self-destructs, he’s a qualifier. Similarly, unless some gaffe makes him a laughing stock, Bush will be the Corporatist qualifier. Iowa will anoint the Theocrat qualfier (or eliminate Theocrats if none of them can win it). Ditto for South Carolina and the NeoCons. Then the two qualifiers who are polling best against the Democrat — Hillary unless somebody else emerges soon — will have a shot at putting a coalition together.

March 30, 2015 – 9:16 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

Tagged 2016 election, Republicans |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve been wondering when to start talking about 2016. Lots of pundits started before all the 2014 votes were counted, which seemed a little early to me. But Ted Cruz has officially announced his candidacy, and other unannounced candidates are finding reasons to meet with voters here in New Hampshire, so I guess it’s on.

With Elizabeth Warren still insisting she won’t run, I’m still not seeing any Democratic threat to Hillary. But I’m not buying the Jeb-is-inevitable talk on the Republican side, so I expect some fireworks there. I can’t predict who will prevail — maybe Jeb, maybe not — but I can describe a little about how the decision process will play out, building on the model of the GOP I constructed for the 2012 campaign in “The Four Flavors of Republican“. I’ll lay that out in this week’s featured post “2016: Understanding the Republican Process”, which should be out around nine or so.

The weekly summary discusses (what else?) Indiana’s new right-to-discriminate law, which as far as I can see has nothing to do with religious freedom. I make fun of CNN’s ghoulish 24/7 coverage of yet another air disaster and Fox’s nearly-as-total focus on Bowe Bergdahl. Meanwhile, Yemen has a civil war nobody can win; ObamaCare turns five; Harry Reid announces his retirement; and an inattentive Celtics fan loses his girlfriend to the Bulls mascot.

March 30, 2015 – 8:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Survival and Democracy

I have not yet heard … a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario.

— President Barack Obama

This week everybody was talking about Netanyahu’s re-election

What that means is the subject of this week’s featured post “What Just Happened?“. My main take-away from the election is that the problem in Israel isn’t Netanyahu, it’s the electorate.

One of the things I don’t discuss in that article is the early exit polls, which predicted a much closer election. Whenever that happens, suspicious people start charging fraud. In this case, though, it looks like late-and-early voters just voted differently than mid-day voters.

Now, a surge just before polls close is sometimes evidence of a different kind of fraud, but I haven’t seen any supporting evidence for that. In the U.S., you’d be talking about the difference between people who have day jobs and the rest of us. But in Israel, Election Day is a national holiday, so that’s not it.

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions here. If something is actually wrong, Israelis will probably figure it out for themselves.

and debates about the budget

It will be interesting to see whether Republicans in Congress can agree with themselves on next year’s budget; then we can worry about whether Democrats will filibuster or Obama will veto.

The basic political problem of the budget is that Americans grossly overestimate how much the government spends on things they don’t like. So cutting government spending sounds good in the abstract, but the vast majority of federal spending goes for stuff that is widely popular, like defense, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, and highway construction. A lot of the rest is spent on stuff that is useful and necessary: air traffic control, disaster relief, disease control, food safety, and so on. You may not think about it very often, but as soon as somebody dies of Ebola or a batch of tainted food hits the market, everybody wonders why the government doesn’t have this under control already.

What’s left is mostly spent on poor kids and poor sick people. When it’s made clear what a spending cut will do, in terms of kids going hungry and sick people dying, cutting there isn’t all that popular either.

So if you want to make major cuts, the best way to do it is to hide what you’re cutting. The two main tricks for doing this are the block grant and the magic asterisk. The proposed Republican budget (which achieves balance by 2025) has both.

The magic asterisk is an unspecified $1.1 trillion cut over ten years in “Other Mandatory” spending. The WaPo’s Wonkblog explains:

Other than health care and Social Security, mandatory spending includes a range of programs such as food stamps, disability payments for veterans, the earned income tax credit, and Pell grants for college students. The budget document did not specify which would be cut.

So if you’re a disabled veteran wondering if this means you’re going to be cut off — or anybody else who might be affected — your Republican congressman can assure you: “No, we meant other Other Mandatory spending.” He can say that to everybody.

The problem with magic-asterisk budgeting is that when it comes time to pass an appropriations bill, the Republicans will discover they can’t: They never really agreed on specific spending cuts, they just agreed on the abstract idea of spending cuts.

Block grants just push the sleight-of-hand down to the states. Ezra Klein explains:

A block grant takes money the federal government is already spending on a program and gives it to the states to administer — usually with fewer rules and conditions. That’s it. The hope is that states will use the money more efficiently. But block grants can cost more, cost the same, or cost less than the funding mechanisms they replace. Block grants change how money is spent, not necessarily how much money is spent.

… There’s nothing magic about block grants that makes Medicaid cost $700 billion less; it just sounds better to say you’re going to save money by block-granting Medicaid and food stamps then by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and food stamps.

The reason these kinds of tricks are necessary is that the federal budget is generally money well spent. If there were trillions budgeted for bridges to nowhere, Republicans wouldn’t have to hide what they’re cutting.

and I finally got around to paying attention to Hillary’s emails

I’ve had trouble getting interested in this story, because I know lots of people in Clinton’s generation who think email is magic. They use their mail app and something happens; they can’t be bothered with what it is. Colin Powell also used a private email account to do business as Secretary of State, because, well, who knows why? He didn’t think his email was broken when he became Secretary, so he didn’t fix it.

Nobody really cares about government email archives unless some other story makes them care. If you’re a Benghazi conspiracy theorist, for example, the fact that there might be a hidden trove of conspiratorial Clinton emails somewhere is a big deal; it keeps your fantasies alive. But none of those people were going to vote for Clinton anyway.

Another reason people might care is if Hillary were running as some squeaky-clean good-government reformer. Then the idea that she might have cut a corner somewhere would spoil the image she’s trying to project. But that image was never going to work anyway, and Clinton surely knew that already.

So there’s the possibility that the email story might feed into some other story later, and that people might care about it then. But until then, it’s no big deal.

What the story does point out, though, is the risk of Democrats putting all their eggs in the Clinton basket so early in the process. If tomorrow Jeb Bush were caught in a tryst with an underage boy, Republicans would shake their heads sadly and move on to the next candidate. But if some scandal or unexpected medical problem put Hillary out of the race, Democrats would be scrambling.

and you also might be interested in …

Alternet points out one thing that’s wrong with our national discussion of education policy: Often nobody in the room is an actual educator. No teachers, no principals, no education researchers, no professors of education — just “individuals from influential right-wing think tanks, with little to no scholarly work or graduate-level degree work in education.”

That’s not just on TV, it’s in fairly highbrow publications like The Economist. So that’s something to keep in mind the next time you watch or read a piece about how our education system needs to be completely re-organized: Is there any reason to believe that these people know what they’re talking about? Are the people presented as “experts” any more knowledgeable than someone you might meet at a bar?

While we’re on the subject, ThinkProgress observes that “Every Claim In This Ted Cruz Statement Is Completely False“. The statement is about the Common Core education standards, which Cruz says he will “repeal every word” of.

When someone asked his office what that could possibly mean, since Common Core is not a law and so can’t be “repealed”, a Cruz spokesperson said:

Common Core is a federally created curriculum that the state’s ‘Race to the Top’ grants are tied to,” offered Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz. “So if the state does not adopt the standards, it gives up the grant money. But since the federal government created this mess, there should be a way to undo it.

And that’s the statement that is completely false. CC is not federally created, it’s not a curriculum, Race to the Top didn’t tie grants to it, and since the grants are almost all spent already anyway, there can’t be any penalty for a state to un-adopt the standards if it wants to.

But if none of the claims are true, they’re all “truthy” to Cruz’s right-wing target audience. So I’m sure he’ll keep repeating them.

Still on education: Remember Dave Brat, the Tea Party insurgent who upset Eric Cantor in a primary? He’s in Congress now, and he says education funding isn’t necessary, because “Socrates trained Plato on a rock.”

Aside from just being false — Plato was a aristocrat, and had a lot of expensive teachers before Socrates — Brat’s remark is evidence of a serious problem in his thinking: Are we just trying to train a handful of aristocratic geniuses, or do we want to have an educated society? Or does he think we could hire a Socrates for every child in America? If we could, maybe we could teach them on rocks.

Proof the NFL concussion problem is considered serious: 24-year-old Chris Borland, who was a well-regarded rookie linebacker for the 49ers last season, announced his retirement. He’s had only one concussion, described as “minor”, but: “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

He’s worked most of his young life to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL, and now he’s in a position to make millions. But it’s not worth the risk.

and let’s close with a moment of Zen

March 23, 2015 – 12:13 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

What Just Happened?

Prime Minister Netanyahu trashed President Obama, the peace process, and Israeli Arabs — and made a startling political comeback. Maybe it’s time Americans recognized that Israel has changed.

During George W. Bush’s first term, a lot of thoughtful foreign observers felt sorry for America and its good-hearted citizens. A fluke in our electoral system had allowed Bush to take office even though Al Gore had gotten more votes. Once in power, Bush turned out to be a radical conservative rather than the like-father-like-son moderate many voters had expected.

And now America wasn’t acting like itself at all: It was trumping up bogus reasons to start wars, creating a “law-free zone” in Guantanamo, torturing prisoners caught on the battlefield, and even imprisoning American citizens indefinitely without trials. How sad it must be for the peace-and-freedom-loving people of America, sympathetic foreigners thought, to see what was happening to their country.

Then we re-elected him.

Around the world, the shock of 2004 was the realization that the problem wasn’t him, it was us. Americans, or at least a majority of the Americans willing and able to get out and vote, liked this kind of government. Who could predict what we might do next? [see endnote 1]

That’s what came to my mind Tuesday when Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister of Israel.

The spirit of 67. Like a lot of Americans (and in spite of my criticisms of Israeli policy on this blog) I have a deep and irrational affection for Israel. In June of 1967, I was an impressionable ten-year-old stuck inside with a cold and nothing to watch on TV but the Six Day War that was pre-empting all other programming. I was completely sucked in by the David-and-Goliath narrative all three networks presented as tiny Israel thrashed its much larger neighbors. What better fantasies could a housebound Midwestern Lutheran boy ask for than to be an Israeli tank commander kicking up sand in the Sinai, or a pilot screaming over the horizon and striking terror into Egyptian or Jordanian troops? [2]

In the decades that followed, Israelis were easy to identify with: They looked like us and dressed like us and talked like us. All the Israeli leaders who showed up on TV spoke marvelous English. They seemed so polished compared to Yassar Arafat, who always looked dusky and unshaven and foreign. Israel’s armed forces fought like ours, with tech and air power and a high value on each soldiers’ life. Their parliamentary system was more like the British, but that was OK too; it still had campaigns and elections and courts that enforced basic rights.

In high school, I had friends who had been to Israel, and others who wanted to go. They made it sound like such a magical place. Of the Arab countries, only Egypt piqued my interest, and then only the remnants of its dead civilization. Present-day Cairo or Baghdad or Damascus held no similar allure.

Through the 1980s, I paid little attention to the Palestinians. Sinai had gone back to Egypt in the prototype land-for-peace swap, and no doubt the West Bank would eventually be part of some similar deal. It was taking longer than I’d expected, and I wasn’t sure what to make of the new and expanding Jewish settlements [3], but peace seemed to be in everyone’s long-term interest, so I had little doubt it would eventually happen.

Since the 1990s, though, I’ve been increasingly bothered by the situation in the West Bank and Gaza. Even appreciating the complexities involved in resolving the problem, it’s hard for me to get past a basic sense of wrongness: This can’t go on. Something has to be done.

Israeli conscience. My main solace these last few decades has been that a lot of Israelis feel that same wrongness. For example, one chapter of Ari Shavit’s recent book My Promised Land discusses his military service as a guard at the Gaza Beach detention camp in 1991, and how he and his fellow soldiers struggled to cope. They know there is no real comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany — for starters, Israel isn’t out to annihilate the Palestinians — but they can’t help but feel the resonances.

And even N., who harbors strong right-wing views, grumbles to anyone who will listen that the place resembles a concentration camp. M. explains with a thin smile that he has accumulated so many days of reserve duty during the intifada that soon they will promote him to a senior Gestapo official.

I, too, who have always abhorred the analogy, who have always argued bitterly with anyone who so much as hinted at it, can no longer stop myself. The associations are too strong. They well up when I see a man from Pen Number 1 call through the fence to a man from Pen Number 2 to show him a picture of his daughter. They well up when a youngster who has just been arrested awaits my orders with a mixture of submission and panic and quiet pride. They well up when I glance at myself in the mirror, shocked to see myself here, a jailer in this ghastly prison. And when I see the thousand or so humans around me, locked up in pens, in cages. …

What makes this camp tick is the division of labor. The division makes it possible for evil to take place apparently without evil people. This is how it works: The people who vote for Israel’s right-wing parties are not evil; they do not round up youngsters in the middle of the night. And the ministers who represent the right-wing voters in the government are not evil; they don’t hit boys in the stomach with their own fists. And the army’s chief of staff is not evil; he carries out what a legitimate, elected government obliges him to carry out. And the commander of the internment facility is not evil — he is doing the best he can under impossible circumstances. And the interrogators — well, after all, they are doing their job. And it is, they are told, impossible to govern the occupied territories unless they do all this. As for the jailers, most of them are not evil, either. They only want to leave all this behind and get back home.

Yet in some mysterious way, all these nonevil people manage together to produce a result that is evil indeed.

Shavit is the great-grandson of one of the original British Zionists, and in his own way remains a Zionist, loyal to his great-grandfather’s Jewish humanism. (In an earlier chapter, he retraces his ancestor’s tour and tries to imagine what he saw and what he was thinking. [4]) He believes the Occupation is a cancer on the original Zionist vision, and it needs to end — not just for the sake of the Arabs, but also for the sake of the Jews.

But he is optimistic. The Zionist story, as Shavit tells it, has always balanced the need for the Jews to survive as a people with their need to survive as a moral people. The current moral challenge is nothing fundamentally new, and Zionists will figure it out as they always have.

The tension Shavit feels between morality and survival reminds me of a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson, who late in his life hoped for the eventual end of slavery but (fearing a race war if the slaves were freed) saw no practical way to bring it about:

We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

I really want to believe Shavit, and to believe in the ability of Israelis like him to meet their moral challenge and shape a just future. But the politics of the Netanyahu era are hard to reconcile with his hopeful vision. And Jefferson’s Virginians never did figure out how to end slavery, did they?

Against democracy. Israelis deal with the contradiction between the Occupation and Israel’s traditional democratic values in two opposite ways: Some, like Shavit, come back from military duty with a determination that the Occupation must end. Others return with a weakened commitment to democracy, an attitude that is sometimes called “bringing the Occupation home”. It is psychologically difficult to serve in the territories, treating Palestinian Arabs as a subject population full of terrorists, and then in civilian life to see Israeli Arabs as fellow citizens with rights. Even Israeli Jews who oppose the Occupation can come to seem like a dangerous fifth column.

To appreciate the full anti-democratic ugliness of the Netanyahu era, read Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Blumenthal is a secular American Jew, the son of the former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Like Shavit, Blumenthal mostly tells stories rather than argues. But the stories he tells come from the kind of Israelis you don’t usually see on CNN: Arabs and left-wing Jews, as well as members of the openly racist parties to Netanyahu’s right. [5]

Americans typically only notice Israel’s foreign policy, but Blumenthal calls attention to disturbing domestic laws that get little coverage in the American media. For example, the government has tried in a variety of ways to make it difficult for Israeli Arabs and their Jewish sympathizers to commemorate the Nakba, a day of mourning for the Palestinians driven from their homes in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. [6]

On the Israeli left, there is an effort to boycott products made in the West Bank settlements they consider illegal. But a 2011 law makes promoting such a boycott a civil offense. Simply saying “I think people shouldn’t buy West Bank settlement products” in public could land you in court. Wikipedia summarizes:

The law states that individuals or organizations who publicize a call for an economic, cultural or academic boycott against a person or entity merely because of its affiliation to the State of Israel and/or to an Israeli institute and/or to a specific region under Israeli control, [my italics] may be sued civilly, in tort, by a party claiming that it might be damaged by such a boycott. The law also allows Israeli authorities to deny benefits from individuals or organizations – such as tax exemptions or participation in government contracts – if they have publicized a call to boycott and/or if they have obligated to participate in a boycott.

Some Israelis are ignoring the law and daring the government to enforce it, including the Hebrew-language Facebook page “Sue me, I’m boycotting settlement products.”

Most disturbing of all is a Netanyahu-supported and cabinet-approved bill that is still awaiting a final vote in the Knesset: the Nation-State Law, which would end the principle — often ignored by the government, but still occasionally invoked by the Supreme Court — that all Israeli citizens are equal under the law. Haaretz summarizes:

The legislation, which was originally drafted by right-wing MK Ze’ev Elkin (Likud), is an attempt to resolve the tension between the country’s dual Jewish and democratic character, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

It does that by defining Jewishness as the default nature of the state in any instance, legal or legislative, in which the state’s Jewishness and its democratic aspirations clash.

In December, Bernard Avishai put the issues bluntly in The New Yorker:

[T]his bill is about writing into the law old Zionist provisions that have morphed into racist and theocratic practices. It will make judicial correctives nearly impossible. … If it comes to an election, it will be best for democratic forces to unify, not only around what Israel does, but what Israel is. Israelis not in the thrall of settler fanaticism need to decide whether they want to be part of the democratic Western world or not. The Jewish nation-state law puts the choice starkly: a globalist Hebrew republic or a little Jewish Pakistan.

Conflict over this bill is part of what led Netanyahu to call for the recent elections. But contrary to his hopes for a clearer mandate, late polls indicated his party might control only 20 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and that a more liberal coalition might get first crack at forming a new government by controlling 24 seats. [7]

Americans are used to political campaigns ending on a Mom-and-apple-pie note. No matter how radical his positions might be, a candidate closes with an appeal to the center, and attempts to prove to late-deciding voters that he’s not as scary has he’s been made out to be.

Facing defeat, Netanyahu did the exact opposite; he embraced more firmly the ugly side of right-wing politics. He came to America to rally Republicans in Congress against President Obama; he reversed his support for a two-state peace settlement with the Palestinians (and then flipped back after the election), leaving the world to wonder whether he has any plan for peace at all [8]; he warned the public of the “danger” posed by Arab voters “streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations“, i.e., using their legal rights as Israeli citizens; and he charged that a left-wing government might “follow orders” from the international community rather than defend Israel.

And it worked. In a stunning comeback, his party took 30 seats in the Knesset, which (combined with the vote for other right-wing parties) grants him another term as prime minister. During that term, he will know he owes his office to anti-Arab, anti-peace, anti-international-community, anti-democratic rhetoric.

What this means for Americans. There is still a large bloc of reasonable, humanistic, democracy-valuing, peace-loving Israelis. They are the ones that Americans are more likely to know: more likely to visit this country, more likely to write books published in English, more likely to appear on American TV, and so on. Similarly, Americans who visit Israel will probably spend most of their time inside a bubble of humanistic and democratic sensibility; their academic or business contacts will be largely drawn from educated, well-traveled classes where people yearn for “a globalist Hebrew republic” rather than “a little Jewish Pakistan”. [9]

But what this election should teach us is that those people are not the majority. The problem in Israel isn’t Netanyahu, it’s the electorate. That problem is not going away; it’s getting worse. Israel is drifting away from peace and democracy, with no turnaround in sight. [10]

Americans need to face that reality, and re-evaluate our policies in response to it. We can no longer blindly support the Israeli government, hoping that someday it will produce an Anwar Sadat, or even another Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres. Those days are over in Israel.

President Obama may be starting to figure that out. If he takes any action based on that new understanding, he will come under a blistering attack from our own right wing. The rest of us will need to have his back.

[1] That’s my explanation for those huge and adoring crowds Barack Obama drew across Europe during his candidacy in 2008. It wasn’t his personal charisma or even the inspiring symbolism of a black president. Europeans looked at Obama’s popularity and hoped: “Maybe the most powerful nation on Earth isn’t crazy.”

[2] I remember a joke from that war: An Egyptian commander sees an Israeli soldier stick his head out from behind a dune, and sends five men after him. None come back. Then he sends twenty men, and none of them come back either. Finally he sends a hundred men. An hour later, one badly wounded soldier crawls back to report. “It was ambush,” he says. “There were two of them.”

[3] I am careful not to use Jewish and Israeli interchangeably, and in this case Jewish is the more appropriate term. Arab citizens of Israel typically are not welcome in the West Bank settlements, even ones their taxes helped build. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Few, if any Arabs live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and a surge of violence in recent months has persuaded some to leave those in east Jerusalem.”

The right of Israeli Arabs to live in certain parts of Israel is also controversial.

[4] If I met Shavit, I’m sure we’d find a lot to argue about. But he has written a really good book. It is not an argument, but a series of historical vignettes of the Zionist movement. (HBO is about to make it into a movie.) As Palestinian author Sami al Jundi recognized in The Hour of Sunlight, the way to bridge a divide is not to convince opponents with your arguments, but to engage them with your stories.

[5] In his closing chapter, Blumenthal spends time with young leftist Israeli Jews who can no longer live in Israel freely or in good conscience. He finds an active community of Israeli expatriates in — of all places — Berlin.

A more nuanced but equally disturbing account of Israeli society is a review of Goliath by anthropologist (and self-described “nice Jewish girl”) Callie Madhof.

Even though for ten months, I hadn’t expressed a single political opinion, I had also not hidden the fact that I’m not afraid of Palestinians or Palestinian towns and cities. Even in my role as a researcher, by simply being open to visiting and speaking to Palestinians, I had marked myself as leftist. In Israel, a lack of racist paranoia is in itself a political position.

These are the parts of Israel that most American Jews don’t see, and most Israeli Jews don’t see anything wrong with. As a book about Israelis, Goliath runs up against the problem that the reality it depicts is beyond a large portion of its potential readership’s imagination. Whereas Israel’s liberal critics ask what went wrong, or how we can salvage the Zionist dream, Blumenthal’s critique cuts deeper, settling in the rifts of contemporary Israeli society and following the politics of apartheid to their terrible conclusion. His is not a picture of a polarized society, but one that is frighteningly cohesive, as it moves ever closer to fascism.

[6] The closest American parallel would be the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in place of Columbus Day. In the U.S. this can be controversial, but is considered a clear expression of free speech. I can’t imagine Congress passing a law to harass such celebrations.

[7] Forming a 61-vote majority is even harder than it looks, because no Arab party has ever been included in a governing coalition, forcing would-be prime ministers to cobble together super-majorities of the primarily Jewish parties. (That’s what has given those tiny religious parties their clout through the years.) The Joint Arab List captured 14 seats Tuesday.

[8] Marc Schulman commented in the Times of Israel:

[W]e have always claimed that the Palestinians were the ones who were guilty of saying one thing in Arabic to their home audience, and something different on the international stage. Now … our Prime Minister has been caught brazenly doing the same thing.

My reading of Netanyahu’s support for a two-state peace plan is similar to my reading of his support for a “better deal” with Iran: He is always available to accept his enemies’ surrender, but has no interest in finding a mutually acceptable compromise.

[9] Imagine coming to America and visiting only Berkeley or Wall Street. You might go home thinking of the Tea Party as a noisy rabble that wiser heads will easily handle.

[10] Optimists will point out that the United States rejected Bushism in 2008. But that reversal did not come from any new understanding, it resulted from external shocks: the Iraq War turning into a disaster and the economy collapsing. To hope for a similar Israeli turnaround means hoping for similar external shocks.

March 23, 2015 – 9:51 am Categories: Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (14)

Tagged Israel-Palestine |

The Monday Morning Teaser

For the last six months or so, my background reading project has been about the disturbing below-American-radar changes that have been happening in Israel during the last few decades. In my files I have a long shapeless “Israel’s Identity Crisis” article that is far from ready for public consumption. But I was able to pull together some of those thoughts this week to discuss the significance for myself and for Americans in general of how Prime Minister Netanyahu’s turn-to-the-dark-side saved his political career. He trashed Obama, the peace process, and Israel’s Arab citizens — and the voters loved it.

I’m still debating on the title, which currently is “What Just Happened?”. This is the kind of article where every sentence has to be phrased just right, so even though it seems complete I probably won’t get it out until 9 or 10.

The weekly summary will probably be later than usual, maybe noon or one.

March 23, 2015 – 7:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Dangerous Things

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

— Terry Pratchett

This week’s featured post is “The Other Half of American History“, in which I review Edward Baptist’s amazing recent book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

This week everybody was talking about a letter to Iran

Forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter to the leaders of Iran, advising them on American governance, so that they won’t be fooled into making a peace agreement with our wily President Obama. Exactly why they felt it necessary to advise Iran is not clear. Maybe they’re angling for contracts with the Iranians after they retire from the Senate and achieve their dream of becoming high-rolling lobbyists.

OK, that was snarky of me. It was obvious why they wrote: They want the Iranians to walk away from the proposed deal — the end of negotiations would be “a feature, not a bug” according to the letter’s author — so that we can have another Middle Eastern war, this time with a country three times the size of Iraq and much more spirited. It’ll be great: The Iranian people will greet us as liberators, just like the Iraqis did.

Still too snarky. Conservative WaPo columnist Michael Gerson, while recognizing that the letter had “all the gravity and deliberation of a blog posting” and “raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern”, tried to put the best face on the 47’s motives and goals: Yes, they want the current negotiations to fail. But

The alternative to a bad nuclear deal is not war; it is strong sanctions and covert actions to limit Iranian capacities until the regime falls (as it came close to doing in 2009) or demonstrates behavior change in a variety of areas.

A more realistic assessment — illustrated by the history of our failure to keep North Korea from getting the bomb — comes from Foreign Policy’s Jeffrey Lewis: The “better deal” in which all of Iran’s centrifuge’s go silent

is a fantasy, a unicorn, the futile pursuit of which ends with a half-assed airstrike against Iran, a region in flames, and eventually an Iranian nuclear weapon. … A Republican administration, if given a chance, would negotiate exactly the same agreement that this administration is negotiating, with all its flaws and shortcomings. … The outlines of any deal with Iran are largely determined by the relative power of the parties — how advanced Iran’s nuclear programs are, what U.S. military options look like, the vitality of the sanctions regime, etc. — not the personal qualities of the presidents we elect. You can believe that George W. Bush’s flinty gaze would have stared down Hassan Rouhani or that Ali Khamenei will understand that Barack Obama is a transformational figure of historic importance. You can believe those things, but you’d be an idiot.

The idea that the Iranian government might fall soon, or that it came close to falling in 2009, is highly speculative — especially when you put it together with American or Israeli attacks, covert or otherwise. Given the Iranian history of British colonialism and American interference, any direct foreign intervention will cause the Iranian people to rally around their government, the same way Americans rallied around President George W. I-Lost-the-Popular-Vote Bush after 9-11.

The Nation’s William Greider asks the obvious question you seldom hear: What about Israel’s nukes? Israel has never admitted having the bomb, but it is widely believed to have hundreds of nuclear warheads. Nobody knows for sure, because Israel submits to no international inspections.

I asked another friend (a well-informed journalist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause) why reporters don’t talk about the Israeli bomb. “Groupthink,” he said. “It’s almost as though Israel gets a bye from the media.”

The Iranians, he added, have raised the issue of the Israeli bomb many times in the past, but their complaints were generally ignored in the Western press.

The Iranian people may not like the sanctions Iran’s nuclear program has led to, but the premise of the sanctions — that Iran achieving parity with Israel is unthinkable — has to rub them the wrong way. If the Iranian government is seen standing up for the principle that Iran is a nation equal to any other nation, that’s got to raise its popularity, not invite a revolution.

There’s been much online discussion about whether the senators’ letter violates the Logan Act of 1799, which bans Americans from undermining government policy through “correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof”.

As satisfying as it may be to yell “Treason!” or imagine Mitch McConnell doing a perp walk, HuffPost’s Monica Bauer describes Logan Act talk as “click bait for liberals” rather than a serious matter, and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell rejects the Act as “unenforceable because it is obviously unconstitutional and absurd on its face”.

I have to agree. The Adams administration had a penchant for restrictions on its citizens’ freedom of speech. The Logan Act is of a piece with the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts. Obama is right not to try to enforce it.

But even if it’s not treason or otherwise illegal, the letter is unpatriotic. The signers hate Obama more than they love America.

There is an underlying separation-of-powers issue about whether this agreement ought to be a treaty and require ratification by the Senate, rather than an executive agreement that does not. But it isn’t the constitutional crisis Republicans like to claim. Presidents of both parties sign executive agreements. They aren’t enforceable by the courts, as a treaty would be under Article VI of the Constitution. But presidents are highly motivated to keep their predecessors’ agreements to maintain the credibility of their own agreements.

By impugning executive agreements in general, Republicans continue down the path towards making the United States ungovernable that I talked about two weeks ago.

The Yalta agreement on the re-organization of Europe after World War II is an example of a far-reaching commitment that was made without Senate ratification. Watching FDR balance the constitutional issues in his post-Yalta message to Congress is instructive: He affirms that the U.N. charter, whose general outlines the Yalta agreement affects, will have to be ratified by the Senate. But other aspects of Yalta are not submitted for ratification.

and reactions in Ferguson

It’s been fascinating to watch Ferguson react to the Justice Department’s scathing assessment of its police and courts (which I described last week). Both the city manager and the police chief have resigned, but the mayor is determined to hang on. He isn’t even convinced the city has a serious problem:

The report stated there was probable cause to believe the police and court routinely violate people’s civil rights. But, Knowles said, “that’s not proof.” He added that “there is probably another side to all of these stories.”

But we don’t know that side yet because it’s so hard for white mayors and policemen to get their stories out in our black-dominated culture, I suppose.

Similarly, National Review assures us that the problem in Ferguson is “predatory government”, not racism. It’s just kind of a coincidence that predatory government happens to show up and be tolerated in a majority-black community with a white power structure.

They charged a guy with shooting two policemen during a protest in Ferguson Thursday. He has a great defense: He claims he was shooting at somebody else.

Notice one key difference between shootings like this and the shootings police do: No major figure is stepping up to say that the victims had it coming.

and a racist frat incident in Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat got in deep trouble after a video surfaced of the brothers singing on a bus:

There will never be a nigger SAE.
There will never be a nigger SAE.
You can hang them from a tree,
but they’ll never sign with me.
There will never be a nigger SAE.

The guys on the bus seem to know the words, so you’ve got to figure this wasn’t the song’s world premiere. After the video went viral, University President David Boren closed the house and expelled the two students identified as leading the singing.

National SAE back-pedaled as fast as it could, saying it has “zero-tolerance for any kind of discrimination” and claiming that 20% of its national membership is non-Caucasian. It’s also been editing its history page to play down its origin as a Confederate frat. According to an earlier version of the page:

The fraternity had fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began. Of those, 369 went to war for the Confederate States and seven for the Union Army. Seventy-four members of the fraternity lost their lives in the war.

Think Progress lists previous race-related incidents involving SAE, including

In 2009, Valdosta State University in Georgia hosted a community forum on “Heritage, Hate or Fear?” that was inspired by the university’s SAE chapter’s practice of flying a Confederate Flag on its front lawn.

The Oklahoma State University SAE chapter is taking flack for a Confederate flag posted on a member’s wall in such a way as to be visible from the street.

So it sounds to me like this isn’t just two guys. SAE’s Confederate heritage is more than a historical footnote. It’s part of the frat’s “charm” and attracts a certain element.

There’s a side issue here about the media, which gives me an opening to discuss my policy on The Weekly Sift. This CBS/AP article refers to SAE members “engaging in a racist chant” but doesn’t say what the chant was, a practice I’ve noticed on several news outlets. Others refuse to print or say nigger, replacing it with references to “the N-word” or “n****r”.

I first had to decide whether to use nigger in my writing in 2007, when I was still posting as Pericles on Daily Kos. My policy — which applies not just to nigger, but to bitch, faggot, or any other epithet — is to ask myself this question: If I replace the word with a euphemism, who am I protecting?

My 2007 post described the racial atmosphere of my 1960s working-class childhood. Saying something like “We used the N-word” would have protected myself more than the fragile sensibilities of my readers. I mean, Jackie Chan used the N-word in Rush Hour; it was hilarious. But my truth was much starker: We told nigger jokes. Saying anything less would just give my readers room to imagine that what I did really wasn’t that bad.

Same thing here. Describing the video in some oblique way just protects the frat boys. A “racist chant” could be eeny-meeny or some other childish thing where the racism isn’t the point. Describing the incident that way opens the possibility that “racist” might be nothing more than some journalist’s debatable interpretation. So I think you have to print it the way they sang it.

and you also might be interested in …

Rest in peace, Terry Pratchett. Most obituaries highlight his Discworld series, which is tremendously amusing. But my personal favorite Pratchett novel isn’t set on Discworld, it’s Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman about the coming of the Antichrist. (Well, there is one Discworld connection: Discworld’s Death character shows up as one of the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse.) Imagine if Left Behind was short, clever, and had a sense of humor.

Israel holds elections tomorrow, and it’s anybody’s guess who will win. It’s a parliamentary system, so we might not know right away. Even if Netanyahu’s party isn’t the top vote-getter, he still might wind up as the leader of a majority coalition.

Paul Krugman points out that internal economics may play a bigger role than the Palestinian or Iranian issues Americans are focused on. He references an amazing statistic:

According to the Bank of Israel, roughly 20 families control companies that account for half the total value of Israel’s stock market.

and let’s close with a moment I’m sorry I missed

As spring approaches, let’s remember that winter hasn’t been all bad. Like this massive snowball fight in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

March 16, 2015 – 11:49 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

The Other Half of American History

Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told

In the U.S. history I learned in school, slavery is a MacGuffin. Two powerful groups of white men spend a century struggling over it, but what the slaves actually do never seems all that important.

That’s why people who don’t like to talk about slavery can claim that the struggle was about something else entirely: Tariffs or states rights or simple regional rivalry make great substitute MacGuffins, because the conflict is all that matters. From three-fifths and the Missouri Compromise and bleeding Kansas all the way to Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, and Appomattox, African slavery is just a plot device that gives white men something to fight over. So if you want to swap in some other plot device, feel free.

The postmodern focus on diversity and multiculturalism has added sidebars to that story: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or a day in the life of a slave. And who was this Dred Scott that so many white lawyers argued about? Such human-interest features add emotional depth, if you’re into that kind of thing. But the real history of American history is still driven by white men: Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, John Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth.

Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism turns that approach upside-down. In his telling, slavery is the story of America. The Pilgrims’ search for religious freedom or the injustice of taxation without representation — those might make good human-interest sidebars. But the spread of English-speaking people across North America is fundamentally about profit, and the profit comes from two primary sources: land stolen from Indians and labor stolen from Africans. Bringing those two together opened a spigot of wealth that white men struggled to control. In that story, the experience of the African slaves — how they lived, the work they did, the culture they built, and how they eventually got their story out — is key. It is a story of progress but not of triumph, and the story continues to this day.

Slave Capitalism. In addition to shifting the focus to slaves [see endnote 1], Baptist fixes another mistake: We tell the triumph of the industrial North and the end of institutionalized slavery as if it were the inevitable result of the inexorable forces of progress. In that version, Southern slave society represents the last gasp of dying feudalism, while the rising tide of capitalism and freedom propels the North.

But in Baptist’s telling, the South is every bit as capitalistic as the North. To Baptist, capitalism is just a way of managing property, and property can be whatever society wants it to be. Today, property can be a copyright, a trademark, or a slice of radio spectrum. Then, property could be people. [2] Capitalism doesn’t care.

Southern slaves were managed capitalistically, not feudally. Feudalism stratifies society, but each stratum is a community that has its rights and duties. Serfs live in serf families, who intermarry with other serf families on land that has been their home for generations. Serf communities may not have much military power compared to their lords, but by appealing to tradition and communal judgment, they can exercise considerable moral force. Serfs might be bound to the land, but neither they nor the land are property in the capitalistic sense; both are entangled by moral obligations that capitalism doesn’t recognize. [3]

In the old slave country of the Chesapeake, slavery could occasionally resemble feudalism, as master families and slave families lived side-by-side for generations. But Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina — the tobacco country — saturated with slaves early. From the Revolution onward, slaves were an increasingly important cash export, whose price fluctuated with the price of cotton. They might be raised in families and communities, but they were sold as individuals — ripped away from their wives, their husbands, their children, their parents — to wherever the frontier of the cotton country happened to be: first Georgia, then Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and finally Texas.

On the cotton frontier, slaves were simply chattel. They had no families or communities — at least not until later — and could be worked without regard to any moral judgments or human rights. Depending on market conditions, they might be expensive to replace. But they were all replaceable for a price.

Slave efficiency. One of the inevitable-triumph-of-the-North myths is that slavery was inefficient. The idea that free labor is vigorous and creative while slave labor is lazy and stupid was originally British propaganda. Britain banned slavery in 1833, as the rising political power of the working class made the dignity of labor a key talking point. Northern abolitionists picked up the British line, which was then adopted by Union propagandists and eventually by post-Civil-War historians.

It’s not true, and Baptist has the numbers to prove it.

In terms of cotton-bales-per-worker, no system of free labor (prior to the invention of the mechanical cotton-picker in the 1930s) ever matched the slave-labor system of the 1850s. What’s more, cotton productivity was rising at the beginning of the Civil War. It had been rising for decades at a rate of around 2% per year. That’s comparable to the rate of increase in the textile industry of Britain and the North, where machine power was replacing human power.

How did the Southern slavers achieve that astounding managerial feat? Did they have cotton-picking research institutes and extension services that trained slaves in the latest methods? No. They set individualized measurable daily production goals for each slave, and whipped slaves who didn’t meet them. Then they ratcheted up those goals year by year.

The slavers themselves had no idea how the slaves managed to meet the goals as often as they did; most slavers couldn’t have picked cotton efficiently if their lives depended on it. But the threat of daily whipping inspired the slaves’ ingenuity, and compassion led them to teach each other their best techniques. [4]

So no: purely economic considerations wouldn’t have ended slavery at least until the 1930s. And even then, the produce-or-be-whipped motivation system might have performed well in factories, mines, and the kind of crop-picking-by-hand that undocumented immigrant workers still do. Even today, any workplace where produce-or-be-fired is the motivating principle might work more efficiently under produce-or-be-whipped slavery. [5]

The Hidden Connections. Making slavery a MacGuffin and the slave experience a sidebar leads to a one-damn-thing-after-another telling of even the white half of American history. But Baptist’s approach restores the hidden connections between events, and creates a more unified tapestry. I’ll just give just two out of many possible examples: Haiti and Texas.

Haiti. In the usual telling, the Haitian Slave Revolt is only significant because it stokes Southern planters’ fears of a slave revolt in the United States. It’s not directly connected to any other important event, so unless you look it up, it’s hard to remember exactly when it happened.

But Baptiste situates it like this: Before its revolution, sugar-producing Haiti was France’s most profitable New World colony, with exports outstripping all of Britain’s American colonies put together.

The French Revolution created an opening for the Haitian slaves to revolt, and after Napoleon came to power, recapturing Haiti was key to his North American plans. The wealth of Haiti together with the strategic domination of New Orleans over the trade of the Mississippi watershed would be the basis for the expansion of French power throughout the vast-but-untapped Louisiana Territory. Perhaps France might even push the fledgling United States back from the eastern side of the Mississippi.

So Napoleon dispatched two armies: one to recapture Haiti and the other to base itself in New Orleans and prepare for expansion. But when the Haitians defeated the first army, the second was diverted to reinforce it. It was also lost. That massive failure convinced Napoleon to abandon the New World and sell Louisiana to President Jefferson.

So the next time you hear about Americans helping Haiti in some way, don’t think of it as charity. Think of it as repaying a significant debt.

Texas. In the Alamo Myth, the Texas Revolution is a battle for freedom against the imperial domination of Mexico. But actually, the 1824 constitution established after the Mexican revolution from Spain did away with slavery. The Southern slavers who had emigrated to Texas came up with a variety of dodges to keep their slaves, and figured Mexico City was far away. But when Mexico eventually began moving to enforce the ban, slave-holding Texans organized resistance, eventually declaring independence in 1836. So the Alamo really was a battle for freedom, but Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett were on the anti-freedom side.

Around the same time, President Jackson was fulfilling two of his major goals: Getting rid of the Second Bank of the United States and ejecting Indian tribes to the far side of the Mississippi. Removing the Indians opened up large regions for new cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi, while getting rid of the central bank initiated a free-wheeling period of American finance.

The result was a slave bubble, much like the recent real-estate bubble. Newly chartered Southern banks sold bonds in Europe collateralized by the mortgages they held — slave mortgages rather than home mortgages — and lent money to virtually any white man with a plan to buy slaves, clear former Indian land purchased cheaply from the government, and plant cotton. When the price of slaves sky-rocketed, that just made them more valuable collateral for bigger mortgages and more mortgage-backed bonds — just like houses in 2007.

Predictably, the world economy couldn’t absorb the sudden increase in cotton production, and falling cotton prices started the Panic of 1837 (conveniently after Jackson had left office). Suddenly, everybody wanted to sell assets for cash, banks were going under, mortgage-backed bonds were in default (leaving state governments on the hook), and lots of would-be cotton magnates had negative net worth. But unlike the houses of 2008, the slaves of 1837 were mobile. And there was Texas, an independent pro-slavery republic where the bankers couldn’t chase you down. All across the south, re-possessing bankers often found nothing but empty buildings and a sign saying “Gone to Texas”.

So the new Texas settlers had stolen black labor twice: once from the blacks themselves, and a second time from the banks and European investors who held mortgages on them.

Continuing illusions. The way we tell our national story affects the way we think about ourselves and our future. It remains far too easy to romanticize the antebellum South, and to replace the brutal abuse of an entire people with a few air-brushed memories of white slavers’ affection for their nannies or valets. (I would tear down every Civil War monument in the South. No one who fought for the slave empire is a hero.)

It is too easy to give the North credit for black freedom, ignoring the slave-trade profits, the Northern land speculators who helped slavery expand, the cheap cotton that made the fortunes of the New England mills, and the markets that Southern wealth created for fledgling Northern industries. Ignoring the African role in the origins of all American wealth makes today’s impoverished blacks seem ungrateful for their food stamps and welfare checks.

And it is too easy to see capitalism simply as a modernizing, beneficent force, rather than an amoral machine that will process whatever assumptions are fed into it. Without the balancing force of democratic government, and without an electorate guided by compassion, justice, and other humane yearnings, capitalism will monetize all values and turn everything into property — including human beings.

Once people are property, they will be used like property — until some political process makes the abuse stop.

[1] In talking about slaves, I’m doing Baptist an injustice, because his terminology reverses the usual objectifications. Instead of slaves, he says enslaved people. It is their masters he de-personalizes as enslavers. He also rarely refers to the slaves’ workplaces as plantations, a word that evokes images of fair Southern belles or genteel men in white suits having drinks on the veranda. Instead, he talks about forced labor camps, presaging Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags.

[2] One of the creepiest things in the surviving letters of Jefferson Davis is the way he used the phrase my people. Today, my people are my community, the humans I identify with. But Davis used my people in sentences with my horses or my cattle.

[3] A big chunk of Marx’ Capital describes how the English lower classes suffered as feudal land gradually evolved into capitalistic property.

[4] It’s no coincidence that set-high-goals-and-punish-failure is still a favored policy of the American Right, and that the Right’s center of power is the white population of the old cotton country. See, for example, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education policy.

[5] In Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmon described how phony vagrancy laws created slave-like prison labor that was used in mines and factories throughout the South until World War II. I reviewed his book in “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor“.

March 16, 2015 – 9:48 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (26)

Tagged capitalism, race |

The Weekly Sift

The 2016 Stump Speeches: Introducing the Series

The Monday Morning Teaser

Discriminating Tastes

This week everybody was talking about Indiana’s new right-to-discriminate law

and a plane crash

and Bowe Bergdahl

and Yemen

and 2016

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with a cautionary tale

2016: Understanding the Republican Process

The Monday Morning Teaser

Survival and Democracy

This week everybody was talking about Netanyahu’s re-election

and debates about the budget

and I finally got around to paying attention to Hillary’s emails

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with a moment of Zen

What Just Happened?

The Monday Morning Teaser

Dangerous Things

This week everybody was talking about a letter to Iran

and reactions in Ferguson

and a racist frat incident in Oklahoma

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with a moment I’m sorry I missed

The Other Half of American History

What is the Weekly Sift?

Recent weeks

Subscribe by email

RSS Subscription

Links of the Day

Past months