Shawn Gude

At the risk of abusing the rule of thumb that we Leaguers don’t have to abide by the strictures of journalistic timeliness, I’m going to riff off of a Freddie deBoer post from last summer. You’ve been warned.

Here’s Freddie face-palming at the obloquy over Obama’s decision to send his kids to private schools:

This is what Obama is doing: he’s a) paying for his children to attend an expensive private school and b) opposing public subsidies of other people doing the same. In other words, he is defending the right to pay for something with private funds while opposing using public funds to pay for the same. You can agree or disagree with that on the merits, but that is hypocrisy? Huh:?

As far as voucher hypocrisy goes, I think Freddie is right. It’s eminently reasonable to oppose vouchers, then turn around and enroll your daughters in private schools. But does it also say something about Obama’s commitment to public education if his children attend private schools? I think so.

Continue reading this post…

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If you were hoping for Ron Paul’s swift exit from the spotlight, you’re out of luck.

With strong showings in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, the libertarian-leaning congressman will linger for the time being. More importantly for anti-interventionist, anti-drug war, pro-civil liberties lefties, his views will continue to circulate in the mainstream media.

I have mixed feelings about Ron Paul. He dabbles in conspiracy theories, and his ties to racists are, of course, repellent. His calls for severe government retrenchment are unpalatable, as are his positions on immigration, abortion rights, and monetary policy. A Paul presidency, combined with the political class’s ravenous appetite for “entitlement reform,” could mean the evisceration of vital programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That’s difficult stuff to reverse. But there’s also a strong argument to be made that the things Paul is good on—the war on terror, the war on drugs, civil liberties—are, felicitously enough, the areas in which the president has considerable power.

To be sure, though, this is all kind of intellectually gratuitous. Paul won’t be elected president, nor will he be the GOP’s nominee. If liberals and leftists are sympathetic to his candidacy, it’s because his presence leavens the debate, not because they expect Paul to directly reverse the odious policies he lampoons. Realistically, he won’t get the chance to do so. Yet it still matters if his electoral success continues.

First, it would demonstrate that candidates who hold heterodox views on the national security state are electorally viable. More important in the short term, though, it would mean Paul’s positions would continue to receive otherwise-unlikely exposure. The horse-race-happy mainstream media covers the “top tier” of candidates almost exclusively, and last week’s choice of the week is quickly interred. Consequently, a nosedive in the polls or a string of disappointing primary finishes would likely mean voters wouldn’t hear about the evils of the drug war for the remainder of the election cycle. We certainly haven’t reached that saturation point.

None of this is to say Paul’s prominence will occasion a quick paradigm shift. Indeed, several weeks back Elias questioned whether the electorate’s affinity for interventionism would attenuate with more exposure to anti-interventionist views:

What’s more, the US’s self-mythology as humanity’s redeemer, Freedom’s guardian, God’s favorite — this is all the kind of stuff that makes it especially difficult to convince Americans that a humble, mature foreign policy is best. A foreign policy that values life above glory, and doesn’t try to smother its existential fear (consciously or not) by constructing meaning through bloody struggle; despite what Americans may say now, after nearly 10 years of anti-climax and failure, it leaves many voters rather cold.

He is filling a void in the conversation, however. The bowdlerized political discussions in the mainstream media give little indication, for instance, that a huge chunk of the country supports legalizing marijuana, or that the drug war is calamitous, particularly for poor communities of color. Actualizing a humbler, less militaristic foreign policy may be a tougher sell than altering drug policy, as Elias argues. But it certainly won’t change with a constricted conversation. (There is one big caveat to all of this: The implicit assumption of Paul’s left-wing sympathizers is that his beneficent message won’t be encumbered by his odious past–i.e., profiting off racist newsletters–that opposition to neo-imperialism won’t henceforth be associated with anachronistic monetary policy prescriptions or bigotry. I tend to think any exposure is good exposure, but who knows?)

There’s no shortage of left-wing blogosphere voices decrying the expansion of the national security state or the immorality of Obama’s foreign policy, of course. But the Democratic Party is bereft of prominent, unapologetic defenders of civil liberties and non-intervention.

That’s part of what’s the matter, Corey Robin writes:

Our problem—and again by “our” I mean a left that’s social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it) and anti-imperial—is that we don’t really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating.  The source of Paul’s positions on these issues are not the same as ours (again more reason not to give him our support).  But he is talking about these issues, often in surprisingly blunt and challenging terms.

As far as I can tell this dearth of voices is nothing new.

Even after the exodus of Southern racists, the Democratic Party’s politicians have, when push came to shove, embraced Scoop Jackson liberalism over George McGovern liberalism. They’re inveterate interventionists, once Cold War hawks and now War on Terror hawks. The most visible Democratic politician in the 10-year interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11? Bill Clinton, a consummate centrist. The prominent aberrant figures—Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Jesse Jackson—have been just that, fleeting anomalies. More often than not, the party’s been populated by supine politicos rather than principled true-tellers.

Yet many liberals, perpetually cowed by McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, still resist efforts to shift the party to the left. Look at Ralph Nader’s run for president in 2000. The country’s coffers were relatively flush. There was no threat of rollbacks in vital government programs. The specter of austerity couldn’t be plausibly raised. In short, an electoral challenge from the left was most opportune. And still Democratic apparatchiks unleashed vitriolic attacks on Nader, faulting him for Bush’s victory instead of Gore’s insipid campaign.

This is the state of American liberalism, at least as manifested in electoral politics. It’s really no wonder scores of liberals have latched onto an anti-militarist alternative, goldbug paleocon or not.

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I’m tired of liberals getting duped.

Most conservative politicians don’t unswervingly support the free market, even if they profess as much. They’re pro-business capitalists more than free-market champions. The typical Republican will back bailing out large financial institutions then resist attempts to end “too big to fail,” that anti-competitive monstrosity. (The same is true, of course, of center-left Democrats like Obama.)

As Dean Baker contends in his latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism, rhetorical paeans don’t equal political records:

“[Progressives] accept the notions that the right is devoted to the unfettered workings of the market and, by contrast, that liberals and progressives are the ones who want the government to intervene to protect the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. But this view is utterly wrong as a description of the economy and competing policy approaches… In reality, the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward. Progressives have been useful to the right in helping it to conceal this agenda. Progressives help to ratify the actions of conservatives by accusing them of allegiance to a free-market ideology instead of attacking them for pushing the agenda of the rich.”

We see a similarly aggravating framing in progressives’ telling of the so-called Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Here’s the standard narrative: Laissez-faire economic policies, buttressed by pervasive Social Darwinism, precipitated a vast economic expansion—but at the expense of workers. Robber barons bought statehouses, and magnates bought garish mansions. Sans state intervention, the average American was out of luck. The Progressive Era changed all of that, with increased regulation on businesses, workplace safety laws, and the implementation of a progressive income tax. (For his part, historian Gabriel Kolko argues much of the intervention was still done at powerful interests’ behest.)

In short, progressives decry the Gilded Age as an ignominious epoch of unfettered markets and the Progressive Era as the humane, regulatory response to unbridled capitalism. But this is overly simplistic. There was considerable state intervention during the Gilded Age. The problem was, it almost always increased the power of capital relative to labor. The government gave away huge expanses of land to railroad companies, for instance, then violently repressed labor uprisings. Continue reading this post…

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Manichean rhetoric is employed, nuance is jettisoned, and catchy sloganeering reigns supreme.

To believers in the primacy of intellectual honesty, the cacophony of protest can be disconcerting, the participants obstreperous. Will Wilkinson and Julian Sanchez certainly seem to think so. In recent posts, the two libertarians urge occupiers to stop occupying and start engaging with the political system.

Sanchez had the opening salvo:

“A small group of people self-selected for their commitment to some set of shared goals and values may be able to pick a set of slogans to chant in unison, or resolve their limited disagreements by consensus process.  But real democracy in a pluralist society involves deep and often ineradicable disagreement—and not just on the optimal uses of public parks and other commons. It’s true, of course, that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good. But a frame that sets up an opposition between “the 99%” and “the 1%” —or, if you prefer, between “Washington/media elites” and “Real America”—suggests a vain hope that profound political differences are, at least in some spheres, an illusion manufactured by some small minority.”

Wilkinson, similarly rankled by protesters’ antipathy toward pluralism, also decried their ideological presumptuousness: Why can’t the protesters accept that a huge chunk of “the 99%” doesn’t agree with them without questioning the naysayers’ lucidity? (It’s a funny gripe for a guy whose brand of liberal-libertarian fusionism has been implicitly based on the idea that liberals just need to adopt libertarian policies to achieve their desired ends.) At bottom, Wilkinson and Sanchez have two principal beefs with the occupiers: their rhetorical reductionism and puerile conception of democracy.

The two correctly characterize the 99-1 dichotomy as simplistic. But Wilkinson and Sanchez are missing the point of a catchy slogan—or any protest chant, for that matter: They’re succinct, and thus, require some explication if one is seeking nuance. (The “1″ arrayed against the “99″ simply means that the wealthy and powerful have a criminally large influence in our political economy, and they use that influence to perpetuate an unjust system). Parliamentary bargaining and cerebral discussions have their place—indeed, I wouldn’t blog at the League if I thought otherwise. But agitation outside the ballot box or the walls of Congress is a necessary antecedent to social change. As Howard Zinn felicitously phrased it, it’s “that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.” That might upset Wilkinson, Sanchez, and other populist critics, but dispassionate policy papers don’t catalyze social change. Visceral exhortations must supplement cerebral appeals.

On the question of expunging pluralism from the American polity, Wilkinson is right: Too often people blame ideological differences on obfuscation or ignorance. But the pluralistic give-and-take that Sanchez and Wilkinson invoke is, at present, illusory. Even Sanchez acknowledges “that concentrated and wealthy interests routinely capture the apparatus of government, and use it to serve ends inimical to the general good.” The 1 percent isn’t monolithic, nor is it a moustache-twirling, scheming phalanx of elites arrayed against a homogeneous 99 percent. The truth is less conspiratorial, less coordinated, and comparably banal. But pernicious it remains. In addition, there’s a good case to be made that institutional factors impede the passage of more egalitarian policies.

Look, I share the two libertarians’ (abstract) devotion to pluralism. But what about the pluralism of democratic expression?

When Sanchez writes things like, “To imagine protest not as prologue to politics, but as a substitute for it, suggests a denial of the reality of pluralism, and an unwillingness to find out what democracy actually looks like [italics mine],” he’s offering up an overly constricted vision of democracy. Wilkinson is also a defeatist. To him, our debauched democracy “does about as well as democracy can be realistically be expected to do, given the size and diversity of this country.” (I suspect Wilkinson’s cynicism about our process’s prospects is also tied to his affinity for public choice theory.)

To democratic minimalists like Sanchez and Wilkinson, democracy is electoral politics. Citizen participation means voting, if one is so inclined. Enhancing citizen power is gratuitous. But this is exactly the kind of narrow, elite-enhancing conception of democracy that the Occupy movement so clearly eschews. What many occupiers do seek is a more vibrant democracy in which corrupt influences don’t dictate policy and average citizens can meaningfully influence the forces and decisions that shape their lives.

This desire for democratization is comparable to the radical agrarian movement of the late 1800s, as Lawrence Goodwyn describes in his masterful work Democratic Promise: “To the extent that the reformers were able to develop new modes of political expression, they were engaging in an attempt at cultural redefinition of what constituted genuine democracy. The extent to which they succeeded in enlarging prevailing frames of reference measured the meaning of Populism.” The Occupy movement is similarly concerned with reshaping popular conceptions of democracy and citizen participation.

That includes some good old rabble-rousing. Zinn again:

“Democracy is not just a counting up of votes; it is a counting up of actions. Without those on the bottom acting out their desires for justice, as the government acts out its needs, and those with power and privilege act out theirs, the scales of democracy will be off. That is why civil disobedience is not just to be tolerated; if we are to have a truly democratic society, it is a necessity. By its nature, it reflects the intensity of feeling about important issues, as well as the extent of feeling. This fills a vital need in a political system accustomed to counting heads, but needing also to measure passions.”

After facilitating at a general assembly several weeks back, one of my best friends received a message from a participant thanking him for the empowering experience. Even in the “world’s greatest democracy,” she had never felt as engaged in the democratic process. At a recent Occupy DSM statement of principles working group meeting, one member said he never dreamed of trying to solve the world’s problems. He said it partly in jest, but these anecdotes get to the heart of what I think the Occupy movement is all about: augmenting agency and correcting deep societal power imbalances.

In the face of this reality, the most democratic, discourse-shifting left-wing protest movement in years is now being implored to funnel all its aspirations into a moribund, perverted political process.

Uh, I think we’ll pass.

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