Creatures of Society

[T]he accumulation therefore of Property … and its Security to Individuals in every Society, must be an Effect of the Protection afforded to it by the joint Strength of the Society, in the Execution of its Laws. Private Property therefore is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing; its Contributions therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered as conferring a Benefit on the Publick, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honour and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or the Payment of a just Debt.

— Benjamin Franklin,
“Queries and Remarks respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania” (1789)

In this week’s sift:

  • Where are we on Citizens United? Financing campaigns with unlimited corporate money has never been popular, and the battle for the Republican nomination shows why. Legislation, constitutional amendments, new court cases — is anything going to fix this?
  • Answering the rhetoric of the rich and other short notes. Cracked magazine is a surprising source of common sense. Limbaugh follow-up. Abused workers pack the products you order online. Are women really people? A judge blocks Wisconsin’s voter-ID law. An orbital view of the Nile at night. Turning greenhouse gases to stone. Why I like Cenk Uygur. And lots, lots more.
  • Book recommendation of the week. I got the Ben Franklin quote above from Common as Air by Lewis Hyde. The history and philosophy of intellectual property in America is more complicated than the entertainment industry would have you believe. The subject launches Hyde into a re-examination of property in general, an issue that’s been on my mind for a while.
  • Last week’s most popular post. The Sift had a slow week. Rush’s Apology and other short notes got 167 views, the first time a short notes post has been the most popular. (Something like 200-300 people get the Sift in ways that don’t show up in those stats.) I know I’m prejudiced, but I think The Republic of Babel deserved more attention than it got.
  • This week’s challenge. I’ve been trying to think of a way for feminism to go on offense, rather than just try to mitigate all the horrible proposals that are out there and respond to clowns like Rush Limbaugh. If women’s-rights issues that seemed settled are debatable again, doesn’t that demonstrate the need to have an Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution? The 27th Amendment got ratified 203 years after it passed Congress. So why not try to get those last three states the ERA needs? Check out what the National Organization for Women is trying to do.
March 12, 2012 – 12:32 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Where Are We on Citizens United?

So far, the 2012 election cycle has been everything the critics of the Citizens United decision expected. Mitt Romney is leading the race for the Republican nomination not because voters like him or his vision for the country, but because limitless quantities of money are available to tear down any serious rival. Newt Gingrich is able to stay in the race because one tycoon has decided that’s a good idea, and Rick Santorum has a super-rich sugar daddy as well. (Even so, a Romney-supporting hedge fund billionaire thinks the ultra-wealthy have “insufficient influence” on politics. I have a hard time picturing what would please him.)

Meanwhile, it’s been reported that the Koch brothers have pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama in the fall, and other plutocrats allied to them have offered $40 million more. Karl Rove’s Crossroads SuperPACs are planning to raise and spend $240 million, and there are many, many other such groups. That’s all in addition to whatever the Republican Party and its candidate spend.

So despite being opposed to SuperPACs in theory, President Obama has come to the conclusion that going into an election without one would be like playing in the American League without a designated hitter or refusing to take 3-point shots in the NBA; whether you think a rule is good for the game or not, you don’t have the option of moving to a fantasy world where the rule doesn’t exist.

There’s an argument about whether this is hypocrisy on Obama’s part. I agree with Kevin Drum that it isn’t. One of Drum’s examples applies to me: I claim income-tax deductions that I would do away with if I had the power. Playing by the rules and wanting to change the rules are two different things.

More money, more mud. Money equals speech, says the Supreme Court, and more speech means better democracy. But in practice, more money means more negative misleading speech.

With a little bit of money a candidate can get a positive message out and present an attractive image. But before long everyone has seen the beautiful family and its adorable dog. Everyone has heard that you want to turn Washington around and make America great again. Repeating those ads 24/7 doesn’t help you.

But carpet-bombing a state with charges that your opponent wants to strangle grandmothers, sell little girls to the Chinese, and raise taxes to subsidize terrorist training camps — that works. (It works even better if the charges come not from Candidate Smith, but from some untraceable Coalition to Save America From Everyone But Smith.) The more repetition the better. So the more SuperPAC money, the more negative the campaign.

What to do? This is the world wrought by Citizens United. Even Republicans don’t like it.

According to a new poll by pollposition.com … 68% of registered Republicans want money out of the Super PACs and only 21% said they were fine with it.

Democrats and Independents oppose this new unlimited-money politics by even larger margins. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the kind of political system where large majorities could change things?

Imagine that we do. What then? We could pass legislation to mitigate the worst effects of Citizens United. Or we could pass a constitutional amendment that undoes it completely. Or we could elect people who would appoint justices who would reverse the decision. Failing at that, we could craft legal cases carefully and hope to get the Court to change its mind.

People are trying to do all those things.

Legislation. Judge Kennedy’s decision in Citizens United imagined transparency rules that would allow intelligent voters to know where campaign money was coming from. The DISCLOSE Act would have implemented some minimal transparency rules, but Republicans filibustered it in the Senate. Democrats plan to reintroduce it in 2012.

I’ve googled “Republican alternative to DISCLOSE Act” and so far found nothing. GOP.gov says:

The proposed legislation is a punitive measure for associations of persons who choose to exercise their right to free political speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, and affirmed in the Citizens United v. FEC case.

which isn’t the kind of position that leads to compromise.

The Sunlight Foundation keeps track of this stuff. They’re also pushing the SUPERPAC (Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability in Campaigns) Act.

Constitutional Amendments. Senator Sanders of Vermont introduced the Saving American Democracy Amendment. It targets corporate personhood in general:

SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

It prohibits corporate campaign contributions also allows Congress to pass laws limiting campaign spending in general.

Move to Amend has a similar proposal, which goes on to say:

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Such amendments are drawing grass-root support. Several dozen Vermont town meetings passed resolutions of support earlier this month.

Vermonters are not the first Americans to urge that the Constitution be amended to renew the century-old principle that citizens have a right to prevent corporations from buying elections. Referendums have already passed in Boulder, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin. Cities across the country, including Los Angeles, have urged Congress to begin the amendment process. State legislatures in Hawaii and New Mexico have done the same.

Lawrence Lessig points out the Citizens United is not literally a corporate-personhood decision, but instead interprets the First Amendment to protect (in Justice Scalia’s words) “speech, not speakers”. So it’s not that Exxon has a right to speak, but that Congress has no power to limit the spread of Exxon’s message. Lessig’s proposed amendment is simpler:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.

Non-citizens in this case means both corporations and foreign individuals.

Lessig finds it hard to imagine that any such amendment will get the 2/3 majority it needs in Congress, given that infinite corporate money will rally to defeat representatives who support it. (Several elections would go by before the amendment could be ratified.) That’s why he favors a constitutional convention.

Congress hasn’t voted on any of these yet. Any amendment faces a long, slow road. But both Left (Equal Rights Amendment) and Right (Human Life Amendment) have shown that an amendment is a good long-term goal to build a movement around, even if it doesn’t get adopted.

Judicial remedies. Russ Feingold thinks Citizens United was just a mistake, and the Court needs to undo it. “The best thing to do is to get new justices, different justices, who will do the right thing.”

But the traditions of the Court itself work against such a plan. The doctrine of stare decisis requires the Court to respect the decisions of past courts unless and until they prove unworkable. “I wouldn’t have done that” is not a good enough reason to reverse a decision. That’s why major reversals (like Brown v Board of Education) are rare, and usually come after a long process of trying and failing to make the original decision work (as David Strauss explained in The Living Constitution).

The Montana Supreme Court has attempted an interesting end run around Citizens United. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United said:

We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

Five Montana justices said, more-or-less, “Given Montana’s unique history of corruption, things are different here.” That case has been appealed to the Supremes, and it will be interesting to see what they say. Probably they’ll overturn Montana’s decision and reaffirm Citizens United, but Justice Ginsburg might use the occasion to put the Court’s conservative majority on the spot and hold its ridiculous and unpopular reasoning up to ridicule.

Summary. At the moment, we have no immediate prospect of reversing Citizens United. But when you don’t have a bill, you have an issue. Democrats need to pound on this in 2012, because Republicans in Congress are taking positions that are out of step even with rank-and-file Republicans.

A good test case will be Scott Brown. He comes up for re-election this year, and claims to be an “Independent Voice for Massachusetts” rather than a right-wing extremist. He cited a number of reasons for voting against the DISCLOSE Act, including wanting to make it apply to unions as well as corporations, but he never put forward an alternative that he would support. (Republican moderates did the same thing on health care. Snowe, Collins, etc. — they seemed to be considering the ACA and came up with many minor objections to it, but they never said “Add this amendment and I will vote for it.”)

In the old days, the role of the moderates in each party was to craft pragmatic solutions and provide the swing votes to pass them. If they’re not doing that any more — if, instead, they’re just wringing their hands and making excuses for supporting the partisan agenda of their extremist colleagues — then there’s no reason to elect moderates.

The ball’s in your court, Scott. Do you want to do something specific about Citizens United, or are you OK with the system the way it is?

March 12, 2012 – 12:26 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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“Common As Air” by Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air isn’t just another book about copyright and intellectual property. It’s the kind of return-to-first-principles that should happen a lot more often.

This subject is usually a battle of slogans, from “information wants to be free” on one side to “theft is theft” on the other.

Hyde doesn’t go there. Instead he roots back through American and English history to examine two questions: What is property anyway? And what did the Founders think they were doing when they gave Congress the power to establish patents and copyrights?

The usual answer to the first question is that property means private property; the paradigm is a person owning a house. This is often presented as if it were natural and prior to society or culture. But Hyde goes back into English history to revive the alternate property model of the Commons.

The Commons turns out to be a lot more complex and nuanced than “The Tragedy of the Commons” would have you believe. A common was never a lawless wasteland that anyone could exploit at will. Instead, a common was land owned collectively by a community of “commoners”, who had variously defined rights subject to various restrictions. That’s why the model endured for centuries, without tragedy.

Second, the Founders were not thinking in terms of “intellectual property” at all. Instead, they saw patents and copyrights in terms of government-granted monopolies. In general, they disapproved of such monopolies, which were the crony capitalism of the 18th century. (A 20th century example: Gandhi’s Salt March protested a licensed salt monopoly in India.)

Patents and copyrights, then, were not viewed as government recognizing some natural property right. Instead, they were useful evils, in which the government granted artists and inventors temporary monopolies in exchange for communicating ideas that would eventually enter the public domain. Hence the phrasing of Article I Section 8 of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have the power … to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Patents and copyrights were devices for managing the public domain as an informational commons. A vibrant public domain was the goal; the current system, in which copyright is essentially eternal for anything created after Mickey Mouse, would have horrified the Founders.

Hyde fleshes out this picture by examining how individual Founders viewed their writings and inventions. Franklin, for example, never tried to patent his inventions — not the Franklin stove and not the lightning rod. When Jefferson invented a new process for processing hemp, he wrote to a friend

I shall probably describe it anonymously in the public papers, in order to forestall the prevention of its use by some interloping patentee.

The most interesting part of the book is the hardest to explain, and I think I’ll have to recommend that you go read it: Hyde relates a society’s large-scale structure to its view of what a person is and should be. The current system, with individually owned property as the paradign, promotes the ideal of the autonomous individual, who is connected to and responsible for no one unless s/he chooses to form such connections.

The Founders lived with a different ideal, a public citizen, whose identity intertwined with the community s/he lived in, and who took payment in honor as much as money. Franklin, for example, did not disdain money in any way. But he also gloried in his reputation as a public benefactor, who saved the community from lightning.

March 12, 2012 – 12:24 pm Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

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Answering the Rhetoric of the Rich and other short notes

This is how upside-down things have gotten: Cracked.com is now a leading source of common sense. Last week Cracked editor David Wong concentrated a giant dose of sense into 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.

I particularly liked the take-down of “I never got a job from a poor person.”

If you are working at a Toyota factory, your paycheck doesn’t come from under the mattress of the owner of the company. That money came from lots and lots of regular Joes who bought Toyota cars. The guys in suits are just middlemen between the supply and the demand. … It’s the same for somebody working at Walmart, or a grocery store, or a liquor store. You didn’t get your job from a poor person, but collectively their money made it happen.

As for “Stop asking for handouts! I never got help from anybody!”, Wong gives a foul-mouthed defense of the same point Ben Franklin made more politely in this week’s Sift quote.

The entire concept of owning anything, be it a hunk of land or a house or a fucking sandwich, exists purely because other people pay other armed men to protect it. Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won’t buy you a bucket of farts.

So when I say “We’re all in this together,” I’m not stating a philosophy. I’m stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn’t have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this — all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access — was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people.

So what actually happens if college students’ birth control pills aren’t covered by insurance? A study that looked at the results of a temporary price increase in 2007 showed a variety of effects that don’t completely validate anybody’s position: Women had less sex, but when they did have sex, they resorted to cheaper, less effective forms of birth control, like the morning-after contraceptives that the Catholic Church considers “abortion pills”. The rate of accidental (post-abortion-pill) pregnancy stayed about the same.

Follow-up on the Rush Limbaugh mess that I covered last week:

  • The pressure on advertisers has really worked. During Limbaugh’s Thursday show, WABC in New York broadcast 77 public service announcements, 7 ads from companies that were in the process of withdrawing their advertising, two ads from continuing advertisers, and five minutes of dead air.
  • Nobody liked Limbaugh’s apology. Slate’s “Dear Prudence” column used it as an example of how not to apologize. Even Don Imus dissed it.
  • Rush hasn’t changed his behavior. Thursday he responded to a female writer’s satirical WaPo column about him by complaining about her “b-i-itchy opinion“. Over the last half century, white people have had to learn how to disagree with black people without calling them “niggers”. (It’s not that hard, once you catch on.) Limbaugh still hasn’t learned the comparable lesson about women. You don’t have to trot out bitch, slut, and whore just because one of them said something you don’t like.
  • Conservative-in-exile David Frum explained why the liberals-are-just-as-bad excuses don’t cut it.
  • The rest of the right wing is still hounding Sandra Fluke. Laura Ingraham calls her “a willing pawn in the process to subvert the truth” and (based on nothing) Bill O’Reilly conspiratorially claims she is being “run out of the White House” and Eric Bolling calls her “a plant”. As far as I can tell, no one on the Right is addressing the substance of Fluke’s testimony, which is that limiting access to contraception at Georgetown has harmed women’s health, sometimes because of conditions (like ovarian cysts) not caused by sex or pregnancy.

This musical response to Limbaugh comes from Reformed Whores:

A longer article on this topic has gotten crowded out of the Sift two weeks in a row now, so I’ll just post the link and hope to comment on it later: Worker abuse isn’t just a problem in Shenzhen, as I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave makes clear.

Jessica Winters’ column in Time addressed the question “Are Women People?“. The answer seems doubtful.

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway.

One way to avoid appeal to the Supreme Court is to base your case on your state constitution. A Wisconsin state judge issued an injunction blocking Governor Walker’s vote-suppressing photo-ID law. He notes that the right to vote is guaranteed by the Wisconsin constitution.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Indiana’s voter-ID law did not violate the U.S. constitution.

Here’s the Nile at night, as seen from the international space station somewhere over (I think) Sudan. Enjoy.

TPM’s Josh Marshall calls attention to Rick Santorum’s increasing unpopularity. His downturn began right about the time he dissed JFK and called President Obama “a snob” for wanting people to go to college.

One possible long-term solution to the energy problem is to burn a plentiful-but-dirty fossil fuel like coal, but avoid global warming by injecting the CO-2 into the ground. An experiment in Iceland makes that seem a little less like a fairy tale. Here’s now it works:

Waste carbon dioxide is first separated from steam and then dissolved in water, forming carbonic acid. The solution is then pumped 550 yards underground into a basalt formation, where the acidity leaches elements like calcium and magnesium from the surrounding rocks. Over time, the solution flows through the basalt formation and these elements recombine to form minerals like limestone.

But while we’re talking about ejecting fluids deep into the ground, we need to remember that sometimes it doesn’t work out. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources is now claiming that brine injected into the ground by frackers accidentally caused 12 earthquakes.

Jonathan Chait’s “2012 or Never” explains the desperation of the Republican electorate and its unwillingness to accept half a loaf and fight for the rest later. When your party is based on the white majority and your social message falls flat among young voters, it’s now or never.

In polling, if you control the question, you control the answer.

Hullabaloo’s David Atkins is a liberal who thinks President Obama has compromised with Republicans too much and cut programs he should have protected. A Bloomberg poll asked whether he approved or disapproved of Obama’s negotiations with Republicans on the budget and his handling of the deficit.

Of course, my first instinct was to answer a resounding no to both questions. But I hesitated and reconsidered. … I knew that any disapproval answers for the President’s approach to the deficit and negotiating with Republicans would be interpreted by lazy researchers and a lazy press to mean that I had felt that the President was too partisan in his approach, and not concerned enough with closing the deficit. So I swallowed hard and said that I approved.

This clip displays a lot of what I like about Cenk Uygur’s show “The Young Turks” on Current TV. Cenk denounces what Cameron says, defends Cameron’s right to say it, and then makes the excellent point that the Bible says a lot of things, and people choose which parts to emphasize:

So it’s not just an argument between religious people and non-religious people. It’s an argument about people who have CHOSEN to find hate in the Bible.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, I link to an article explaining why the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts diverged politically.

March 12, 2012 – 6:47 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

Reason’s Tribunal

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

In this week’s sift:

  • The Republic of Babel. Tyranny can manage with a simple vocabulary of commands, but democracy can’t do its business without a rich discussion-language of shared concepts and frames and taken-for-granted assumptions. That’s what the culture wars are really about: Will American democracy conduct its business in a secular language or in terms defined by Evangelical Christianity?
  • Rush’s Apology and other short notes. Conservatives admit that “slut” is unacceptable language, but they ignore the underlying content, which consists of vicious lies. If JFK nauseates Rick Santorum, it’s because Rick can’t tell the difference between institutions and people. Parents homeschool for a lot of reasons. What everybody should know about the price of gas. An economist denounces the global-warming deniers who quoted him. Young people aren’t buying houses. Where the deficit doesn’t come from. And Eliza Doolittle’s Dad was wrong about morals.
  • Book recommendation of the week: Speaking of JFK, Stephen King’s new 11/22/63 is a great read. It doesn’t fit into any standard category. It’s sort of SciFi, sort of romantic, sort of historical, not at all creepy, and very character-driven. The past really is a foreign country, especially Dallas.
  • Last [two] weeks’ most popular post. Republicans Have Gone Crazy Before got 372 views. The most-clicked link was the Wallace Shawn interview on Chris Hayes’ Up. It seemed strangely meaningful to me that Shawn (who played the hyper-capitalist Ferengi Grand Nagus on Deep Space Nine) calls himself a socialist.
  • This week’s challenge.  Usually, I think the best way to deal with Rush Limbaugh is to ignore him, because he feeds off outrage. But I’m thinking this might be his Don Imus moment. (Check this out.) Sign the petition urging his advertisers to drop him.
March 5, 2012 – 1:46 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

The Republic of Babel

I owe a debt to this year’s crop of presidential candidates. Time and again, one of them says something so outrageous that it brings my thoughts into focus.

First it was Herman Cain saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Until that moment, I had vaguely wondered about the role of shame in keeping the 99% down, but it took Herman to crystalize it for me.

More recently, Rick Santorum has been my teacher:

When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left? The French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Yep. Secular government inevitably leads to the Reign of Terror. (If you don’t believe it, go visit some secular hellhole like … just about anyplace in Europe, where mobs roam the streets beheading people at will.) Blue Texan has already exposed Santorum’s ignorance of the actual French Revolution, but I want to go somewhere else with the quote: What the heck is Santorum talking about? What could be burning so brightly in his mind that he needs this mangled French Revolution analogy to express it?

I think Santorum has mushed two ideas together: One is an important insight that I wish everyone would think about, and the other is totally wrong. Here’s how I pull it apart:

  • Important insight: American democracy is losing its language of discourse.
  • Wrong: Until recently, conservative Christianity provided that language.

Put them together and you get Santorum’s point: Unless we get back to God, our democracy is going to fall apart.

But let’s not put them together. Let’s discuss the insightful part first, and then step around the Evangelical rabbit hole Santorum has fallen down.

Language in the broad sense. By “losing our language” I don’t mean English. I’m thinking about all the social and intellectual infrastructure that allows us to talk through our differences: taken-for-granted assumptions, shared frames, common concepts, a portfolio of shared heroes to emulate, and so on.

Sharing a language of discourse with somebody doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree. But it does mean that you can explain your problems to each other and empathize with each other’s difficulties. It means that you have some basis on which you can construct a compromise.

Dictatorships can get along without that kind of language. A master-slave relationship functions just fine with grunts and gestures and maybe a few words of pidgin-speak. Common understanding? Just show the slave what to do and beat him until he does it.

But democracies need to be able to talk. I have to know more than just what you want to do or want me to do. I need to understand why you want what you want, and I need to be able to explain why I want something different. We have to be able to discuss the nuances of our hopes and fears and plans — what’s absolutely essential and what isn’t — so that we can cobble together a solution that we can all live with.

A democracy that can’t do that devolves into mob rule or military coup or Potemkin elections that rubber-stamp decisions already made by a governing elite. That’s when the French Revolution analogy starts to make sense: Without a language of discourse, you can have Robespierre or you can have Napoleon, but you can’t really achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Consensus and compromise. The Bible doesn’t tell us what kind of government developed in post-Tower Babel. But we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a democracy.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, democracy only works when the issues worth killing and dying for — genocide, slavery, the legitimacy of the property system, and a few others — have already been decided by consensus. Otherwise you’ll have civil war, because the 49% will not march meekly to their fate.

In that essay, though, I treated consensus as a static thing — as it is in the short term. But any lasting democracy has to be able to evolve consensus on new issues as they come up. That can happen if you have a language of discourse. You can make temporary compromises and tinker with them over time until they acquire the prestige of tradition.

Think about pacifism, which is as stark a moral issue as any: To one side, war is humankind’s greatest evil. To the other, it’s essential to defending our way of life. What room is there for compromise?

And yet, we have compromised: The nation continues to defend itself, but pacifists who don’t interfere with the military aren’t jailed or considered traitors. They’re allowed to claim conscientious objector status in a draft, but their taxes support the military just like everyone else’s.

No simple principle would lay down that boundary, but each part of it has become time-honored.

Now think about abortion, where the argument has not really changed since Roe vs. Wade. Either you want to kill babies or you want to subjugate women. It’s been that way for 40 years.

What the Culture War is about. When you grasp the Babel problem, you see the Culture War in a whole new light. What we’re fighting about isn’t abortion or homosexuality or traditional values or even religion. We’re fighting about what the language of American democracy is going to be. What worldview is going to frame the issues that we will then debate and vote on?

One candidate is a secular worldview of reason and science. Another is the worldview of conservative Christianity.

Either one could work, up to a point, if we could reach consensus on it. And neither would require that everyone convert to that worldview completely, only that everyone learn to speak that language in the public square.

Other religious worldviews could work as well as Christianity. There’s no inherent reason we couldn’t have an Islamic Republic or a Jewish Republic or a Hindu Republic, if that’s what we decided we wanted.

But what we can’t have is a Republic of Babel. Not for long.

The Language of the Founders. You know whose language of discourse really worked? The Founders.

The Constitution is a masterwork of compromise. Effective government vs. individual rights; state power vs. federal power; the mob vs. the propertied elite — they worked out a series of good-enough solutions that let the country move forward. Only slavery was too much for them, and even then their band-aids held things together for most of a century, giving their children and grandchildren a chance to avert disaster.

You think abortion or same-sex marriage would have stumped the Founders? No way.

That’s why there’s so much Founder-nostalgia today. At the Constitutional Convention, problems didn’t just sit there, and factions didn’t move further and further apart forever. Whatever came up, they figured out how to keep the process moving.

One frustrating part of Founder-nostalgia is the unending clash of examples “proving” that they were either for or against religion: Franklin calling for prayer at the Constitutional Convention (and invoking the threat of Babel), or Adams signing the Treaty of Tripoli declaring that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”.

It goes round and round. If you’re selective, you can quote Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin on either side. Washington was a lifelong Anglican, but he didn’t take communion. No one knows why.

The reason we keep arguing about this is that we’re asking the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter what theology the Founders believed in their private hearts. What matters is how religion influenced their public language of discourse.

God in the Declaration. The most quoted phrase of the Declaration of Independence is

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

This mention of “the Creator” is supposed to back up the claim that the Founders’ worldview was fundamentally religious, and to counter the observation that God was completely left out of the Constitution.

God is mentioned exactly two other times in the Declaration: “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the first paragraph and “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” in the last.

Interestingly, these phrases were altered from Jefferson’s original draft. The edits cut both ways. “Self-evident” (an Enlightenment philosophical term) was originally “sacred and undeniable” (a religious term). Rights originally came “from that equal creation” with no personification of the Creator. And “Divine Providence” did not appear at all.

Notice what you don’t find in any version of the Declaration: Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, or any other sectarian name of God. God is given purely functional names that any monotheistic religion would recognize. (Even a polytheistic Hindu would understand: “Creator” means Brahma, and “Divine Providence” refers to Vishnu the Preserver.) The Declaration finds God in the Laws of Nature, but it makes no no reference to any sect’s scripture.

Now think about the era: 18th-century science provided no well-founded theories of origin — no big bang, no primordial soup in which proteins could randomly develop, no evolution by natural selection. If you talked about origins and foundations at all, you ended up talking in religious terms, because there was nothing else. (David Hume was as close to an atheist as the 18th century allowed. The participants in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” eventually converge on a theory of intelligent design.)

So here’s what you (and Rick Santorum) should notice about the Founders’ most important products: The Declaration and the Constitution were written in the most secular language that existed in that era.

But weren’t the Founders religious? Individually, yes. But they didn’t all have the same religion, and they knew it. Patrick Henry would fit right in at a fundamentalist megachurch in Virginia today. If he brought Franklin along, old Ben would probably keep his objections to himself and leave everyone charmed. But Jefferson and Madison would get themselves ejected in short order, and an outspoken New England Universalist like Ethan Allen would be completely beyond the pale.

What’s more, the Founders could see the bad example of England, where Anglicans, Catholics, and Puritans had been hanging each other since Henry VIII. That, they knew, is where sectarian government leads.

But unlike the worst excesses of the later French Revolution, the Founders didn’t attempt to eliminate religion or create a new one. Instead, their public gatherings worked in secular language, because that was a language that everyone could understand. If you needed sectarian language to justify what you wanted to do, they figured, the government probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The Secular Tribe. Something important has changed between the 18th century and today: Secularism has developed into a more complete worldview. It has a theory of origins, a psychology, and humanistic ethics. 18th-century secularism did not threaten sectarian worldviews any more than medieval Latin threatened vernacular French or Spanish. One was a rich, earthly language of everyday life and the other a more philosophically subtle language for widespread professional communities.

In the 18th century, essentially no one spoke Secular at home, so it was not involved in the tribal rivalries of the individual sects. But today, many people do speak Secular at home. And so, while I think it’s a mistake to talk about Secularism as if it were a rival religion, it is a rival tribe. Today, secularism is part of many people’s individual identity. And so, demanding that other people express themselves in secular terms in public can mean that I want them to adopt my tribal identity and abandon their own.

More and more, then, the sects are digging in their heels against this threat to their identity. They are building their own parallel institutions and becoming separatist. As they do this, they are developing their own set of acceptable “facts” and establishing defenses against any non-sectarian evidence or logic. (The idea that the Founders established a Christian Republic is one those false “facts” they are rallying around.)

If that trend continues, it will kill democracy. Elections will give one side or the other a temporary advantage, but will solve nothing for the long term. When the options on the ballot are Kill Babies and Subjugate Women, the losing side just reloads and tries again.

How do we save democracy? First, we have to realize what we’re doing. Whether you speak Secular or Evangelical or something else entirely at home, you need to stop trying to use the public square to validate your identity. That’s not what the public square is for.

Second, all sides need to examine themselves for tribalism — secularists most of all, perhaps, because many of us are unaware of the possibility of secular tribalism. We may need to construct a meta-secular language that purges the tribalism out of secularism. Religious people need to keep asking what is really essential to their religion and what is simply a tradition that has become a comfortable habit and a source of tribal identity.

Third, we all need to understand that a compromise that allows us to live together is an achievement and not a corruption.

Finally, we all need to stretch our understanding and strain to hear each other’s deepest meanings rather than react reflexively against whatever we can perceive as an insult. The Republic of Babel cannot last, but it can move in either direction: towards the war of all against all, or towards the struggle of all to understand all.

March 5, 2012 – 1:36 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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Rush’s Apology and other short notes

You already know the basic story: Republicans didn’t let Georgetown student Sandra Fluke testify at their committee hearing on religious liberty vs. reproductive rights, resulting in that famous all-men-at-the-table photo.

So Democrats held their own hearing where Fluke did testify. Rush Limbaugh responded by attacking her for several days as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and suggesting that she post sex videos on the Internet.

She’s having sex so frequently that she can’t afford all the birth-control pills that she needs. That’s what she’s saying.

Other members of the conservative media defended Rush against the backlash. Mona Charen, for example wrote:

When the producer asked: “What do you make of Rush Limbaugh’s comments?” I said that his choice of words was crude but that I certainly understood and sympathized with the point he was making.

Mitt Romney missed his chance to have a Sister Souljah moment. “It’s not the language I would have used,” he said. To which Maureen Dowd replied: “Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?”

Eventually, Rush started losing advertisers. Money talks, so Rush issued an apology of sorts:

I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

So Rush and everybody else on the Right agrees that “slut” is an over-reaction to Fluke’s testimony, but they stand by “the point he was making”.

You’ve probably heard all that. But this point isn’t getting nearly enough attention: Rush’s attack on Fluke was fundamentally false from end to end. She was not talking about her sex life. She was not asking for a government subsidy. (Georgetown’s health plan is paid for by the students.) She was exposing the negative impact of Georgetown’s policy on the health of its female students.

This controversy isn’t about using bad words, it’s about telling vicious lies to silence an opponent’s legitimate point. Rush has not apologized for that or even admitted doing it. That’s what the conservative media is defending and Republican politicians won’t denounce.

Watch Fluke’s opening statement and see if you can find any connection between what she said and what Limbaugh said about her.

Rick Santorum’s recent attack on JFK was not only inaccurate and politically odd (how does dissing the first Catholic president rally the Catholic votes Santorum needs?), it was yet another example of the fuzzy thinking that surrounds the corporate personhood issue. Santorum seems unable to distinguish religious institutions from religious people.

Here’s what Kennedy said in his famous 1960 campaign speech to a conference of Baptist ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote

In other words, the Church and the State are separate institutions. Having authority in one does not give you authority in the other.

But this is how Santorum explained why reading Kennedy’s speech makes him “want to throw up”:

To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes you throw up.  What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?

In other words, he interprets Kennedy’s words to mean that the Church and the State must consist of different people; if you’re active in the Church you must be passive in the State, and vice versa.

But the conflict that nauseates Santorum goes away once you understand that institutions are not people. Individuals can be active in both religion and in politics, and we can still maintain Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between the institution of the Church and the institution of the State.

The Santorums reinforce all the worst stereotypes about homeschooling parents. But they aren’t all like that, as this first-person account by Stumblegoat makes clear.

Things everybody should understand about the price of gas:

  • America may have plenty of untapped natural gas and coal, but that’s not going to do you any good if your car runs on gasoline.
  • The price of gasoline depends on the price of oil.
  • Oil is a world market.
  • Gas prices were low when Obama became president because a worldwide recession had depressed demand.
  • New oil production in America will change the world price of oil exactly as much (or as little) as new production in Nigeria or Kuwait or anyplace else.
  • American oil production has gone up since Obama took office, reversing a long-term downward trend.
  • No conceivable increase in American oil production will make a sizable dent in the world market.
  • Anything that took Iran’s oil off the market (like a war) would make oil prices skyrocket.

Therefore: “Drill, baby, drill” is not an answer to the high price of gas, but reaching some kind of peaceful settlement with Iran would help.

The global-warming deniers who published a letter in the WSJ made their argument look serious by quoting the research of Yale economist William Nordhaus. Now Nordhaus explains why they’re wrong.

Last week the NYT talked about why young mothers aren’t married. This week the Atlantic examines why young adults aren’t buying houses.

Derek Thompson reviews a lot of reasons, but finally comes around to the one that makes sense to me: We don’t live in a long-term-planning world any more. The whole idea of a 30-year mortgage sounds absurd in an era where nobody has the faintest idea what their life will be like in ten years.

Kevin Drum has an interesting graph. If you break the federal budget up into Medicare, Social Security, and Everything Else, then graph it as a percentage of GDP, Everything Else is lower than it was 50 years ago and is still decreasing. Remember that the next time somebody starts talking about “out-of-control government spending”.

We don’t have a generalized spending problem. We’ve got an aging population and healthcare costs that are increasing too fast. Solve that and everything else falls into place.

The traditional theory said that the poor were less ethical than the rich. In “My Fair Lady“, Pickering asks Eliza’s father “Have you no morals, man?” and Mr. Doolittle replies: “No, no, I can’t afford ’em, gov’ner. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

But a new study indicates the exact opposite:

“Occupying privileged positions in society has this natural psychological effect of insulating you from others,” said psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re less likely to perceive the impact your behavior has on others. As a result, at least in this paper, you’re more likely to break the rules.”

March 5, 2012 – 1:03 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (10)

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The Long View

No Sift next week. Back on March 5.

Much of the current conservative movement is characterized by this sort of historical amnesia and symbolic parricide, which seeks to undo key aspects of the Republican legacy such as Reagan’s elimination of corporate tax loopholes, Nixon’s environmental and labor safety programs, and a variety of GOP achievements in civil rights, civil liberties, and good-government reforms. In the long view of history, it is really today’s conservatives who are “Republicans in name only.”

— Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin (2012)

In this week’s sift:

February 20, 2012 – 10:48 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Republicans Have Gone Crazy Before

The most comforting thing about reading history is that you know the story comes out at least sort of OK. After all, if the world had really ended back then, you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this book.

This week I’ve been reading Rule and Ruin: the downfall of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. You might imagine that story would be depressing, but I’m finding it strangely hopeful, for this reason: Republicans have gone crazy before, and they more-or-less recovered from it.

So they might recover again.

Regular readers of the Weekly Sift know that I think the current Republican Party is insane. I agree with David Frum that conservatives have created an alternate reality “with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. As a result, the main Republican “accomplishments” of recent years have been to prevent the country from dealing with real-world problems like global warming or growing inequality, and they’re fighting a last-ditch effort to stop Democrats from doing anything to help the 50 million Americans who lack health insurance.

Delusional thinking is understandable when the fantasy is at least pleasant. But in the conservative Bizarro World, our country is ruled by foreign-born usurper who is trying to destroy the Christian religion and replace the Constitution with either Communist dictatorship or Sharia or (somehow) both. We are beset by all manner of bizarre conspiracies, mapped out from beyond the grave by Saul Alinsky and orchestrated by Marxist multi-billionaire George Soros.

The real world has many problems, but at least it’s not that bad. If somehow we could shake our Republican countrymen awake from their nightmare, we’d be doing them a favor.

So anyway, I’m down on Republicans these days. But what you might not realize — because I have assumed it goes without saying — is that I fully support the idea of a Republican Party. I agree with a recent Thomas Friedman column: America doesn’t need a third party,

What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

On all sorts of issues — education, pollution, housing, poverty — we need a vigorous two-party debate on national standards vs. local control. Neither side should win that debate once and for all, because both represent American values that go all the way back to Hamilton vs. Jefferson.

Similarly, all the way back to the construction of postal roads and the Erie Canal, American economic development has balanced the public and private sectors. We need one reality-based party championing public-sector development and another championing private-sector development.

Isolationism vs. internationalism, workers’ rights vs. owners’ rights, preserving traditional mores vs. correcting past injustices — what’s called for in each case is not a final victory of one side over the other, but a continuing tension between conflicting values. That’s why we need two parties.

Two sane parties, that is.

Consider the budget. Just about everybody understands that it’s a bad idea to borrow another trillion dollars every year from now on. So there’s room for reasonable people to debate whether to close that deficit primarily with spending cuts or with tax increases; how that pain should be spread among the rich, the poor, and the middle class; whether to start tightening the screws immediately or wait until the economy is stronger; how to split the spending cuts among safety-net programs, investments in education or infrastructure, and defense; and many other questions.

Instead, last summer we debated whether or not the United States should pay its bills. That was not a sane discussion. And in a Republican presidential debate in August, none of the candidates would accept a hypothetical deal in which spending cuts outweighed tax increases 10-to-1. Instead, all Republican candidates have proposed tax reforms that would substantially decrease revenue. They focus tax cuts on the rich, while sometimes actually increasing the taxes of the working poor. Vague or completely unspecified spending cuts make up the difference.

On social issues, Republican presidential candidates (eventually including Romney and Paul) have endorsed an anti-abortion “personhood” position so radical that it was decisively voted down in Mississippi. Got that? Mississippi is too liberal for the current crop of Republican presidential candidates.

It’s crazy over there.

So here’s the comforting lesson from Rule and Ruin: Republicans were at least this crazy in 1964, and they got over it.

Those of us old enough to remember Barry Goldwater at all have had our memories sepia-tinted by the mellower Goldwater of the 80s, and 90s, who warned against the dangers of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. But the Goldwater of 1964 was every bit the full-blown loon that Michelle Bachmann is today.

Just like present-day crazies, the 1964 extremists imagined a previously invisible conservative majority that Richard Nixon had failed to inspire in 1960, but which would turn out in droves if Republicans nominated a “real” conservative this time. In the defining pro-Goldwater tract A Choice Not an Echo Phyllis Schlafly explained:

it looks as though there is no way Republicans can possibly lose so long as we have a presidential candidate who campaigns on the issues. But … how did it happen that, in four major presidential campaigns*, Republicans were maneuvered into nominating candidates who did not campaign on the major issues?

It wasn’t any accident. It was planned that way. In each of their losing presidential years, a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues.

Top that, Sarah Palin.

[*the four treacherous candidates were Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, and Richard Nixon in 1960]

The Tea Party of 1964 was the John Birch Society, whose founder believed Dwight Eisenhower had been a communist sympathizer. “It is difficult,” he wrote of the five-star general and two-term Republican president, “to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.”

But within a few years all that had been swept away. Just as Goldwater’s elderly mellowness brightens our memories of him, Kent State and Watergate have darkened our picture of Nixon, who presided over a very moderate administration overall. From the Nixon years we get the Clean Air Act, OSHA, the EPA, and the first SALT treaty with the USSR. Nixon opened relations with China, appointed more blacks than Johnson had, and increased the minority role in federal contracts both on the small-business level and in labor unions.

Nixon’s Republican Party is what I wish we had back: a party of diverse views, leaning conservative and sometimes pandering (as any party does) to the electorate’s baser instincts, but by-and-large facing the nation’s real problems and trying to solve them. Even the party’s right wing was purging itself, as Bill Buckley succeeded in marginalizing the Birchers.

So how does an insane party get its mind back? First, it has to nominate a true extremist like Goldwater. (Rick Santorum would fill the bill nicely.) Until it does, the delusional system will explain every defeat as it did McCain’s in 2008 or Nixon’s in 1960: He wasn’t extreme enough.

Second, the extremist has to go down to a historic defeat (like Goldwater’s 61-39 shellacking by LBJ) that proves for a generation that the invisible majority does not exist. Again, I’m confident Santorum could handle this part of the script.

And finally, the sane-but-cynical conservatives who thought they could harness the crazies have to become targets of insanity themselves. This is already happening. Fox News and the Drudge Report, for example, are already under fire for having “turned left”. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have been assailed as “liberal” and even “socialist“. Newt Gingrich is “not a real conservative” either.

This will keep getting worse, because when reality becomes optional, no one is safe. At some point, even conservatives with impeccable credentials will realize that the beast is eating its own and has to be put down.

And then they will put it down. It happened before. It can happen again.

February 20, 2012 – 10:30 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (13)

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When the Priests’ Scandal Becomes Relevant

In previous posts about the Catholic hierarchy’s War on Obama, I have restrained myself from bringing up the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal. A lot of people do, and most of the time I wince, because it’s a cheap shot.

But there is one situation in which it’s not a cheap shot, and that’s when the clergy is striking poses of great moral courage in face of this “War on Religion” that they’ve made up. (Is the War on Christmas over yet? Who won?) As a Catholic priest said during Sean Hannity’s “Faith in America” segment:

If I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscience, I’d better be willing to die for that.

Brave words. I’m hearing a lot of brave words from priests these days. But it’s easy to be brave during a completely fabricated metaphorical “war”.

Think it through: When in course of the current healthcare proposals will a Catholic priest have to take some specific action that will go against his conscience? Or look at it from the other side: What can he refuse to do that will get him arrested — or punished in any way — for his a Gandhi-style resistance?

Nothing.

Churches were always exempt from the rule that they must provide contraception in their healthcare plans. And under the administration’s new compromise proposal, Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities don’t have to cover contraception either; their insurance carriers have to provide a separate policy for free — which they can do without any subsidy from the premiums paid by the institutions, because contraception saves them money. Matt Yglesias explains:

The point here is simple. While birth control costs more than nothing, it costs less than an abortion and much less than having a baby. From a social point of view, unless we’re not going to subsidize consumption of health care services at all (which would be a really drastic change from the status quo) then it makes a ton of sense to heavily subsidize contraceptives.

The absence of any place to take a stand becomes obvious if you read the lawsuit Belmont Abbey College has filed against the contraception mandate. It is full of vague assertions that the College is being coerced to “violate its deeply-held religious beliefs”, but does not specify any particular belief-violating act that it or its employees will be forced to perform. As the suit progresses towards trial, the College will have a hard time proving that it has standing to sue.

In short, unlike Gandhi or Martin Luther King, priests and bishops can strike heroic poses anywhere they want, and police will never feel obligated to haul them away. The system is already set up to walk around them.

That raises this question: How believable are those poses of great moral courage? And then this one: Didn’t the Catholic clergy just face a moral crisis? How much courage did they display then?

OK, most priests didn’t sexually abuse children or anybody else. But how many knew about some particular sexual abuse and did nothing? How many knew their diocese was just shuffling abusive priests around and letting them rape children somewhere else — and did nothing? How many suspected something and decided they didn’t want to know?

A priest with moral courage would have investigated his suspicions, then gone to his superiors and said, “I’m not going to let you do this. Do the right thing or I’m blowing the whistle.”

That would have been courageous.

How many priests did anything remotely similar? Anybody? That situation wasn’t metaphoric. It was a real moral crisis that required real moral courage.

If you didn’t have it then, don’t posture to me now about how brave you are.

Like the congressional hearing on this issue, Sean Hannity’s panel was all men. Jon Stewart had something to say about about “the world’s holiest sausage-fest”.

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February 20, 2012 – 10:06 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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