At this point, picking a fight with Bill Kristol is a little like wrestling a dead tuna. He may be bigger than me, but he's easy to pin.
In his most recent column, and one of his last, Kristol argues that the future of "Liberalism" rests on the "shoulders" of Barack Obama. It's a vivid expression of the type of denialist dementia that much of the conservative camp has churned out since Obama's win. In their view, Obama's failure will clear the way for a reappraisal of conservative policies, and open the door for what Kristol calls "new conservative alternatives." He doesn't name these, or even hint at them, and we can be pretty certain these "new" alternatives will look a lot like the old ideas that, after all, in his opinion, "have on the whole worked." His sweeping claim is that conservative principles were tested and surpassed mamby-pamby liberal policies on the "most important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family." So why have American voters rudely closed the book on the conservative era? Kristol can't seem to offer a guess. Keep in mind, this is the guy that bet everything he had on Sarah Palin because she charmed him during a port call in the middle of a Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise. So he doesn't always think things through thoroughly.
His argument about the failure of liberal thought is really more an attack on our manhood. It's not that our ideas are wrong, or our compassion for the poor misplaced, or our sense that government should work naive, it's that we are "limp" and "feckless" and "trembling."
Shortly after the election, I made the argument that Americans had rejected conservative thought sweepingly, with gains for Democrats across the map. What I said then was that Americans had risen up to overturn the idea "that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money." I believe this is true. Americans have realized that an ideology (and a party devoted to that ideology) that promises them nothing when they are struggling, that assumes poverty and misery are merely byproducts of the business cycle and must be endured so a few folks at the top can party is morally indefensible. If you can come up with a body of conservative thought that discards this tendency to dismiss suffering and reject the role of government in its alleviation, then maybe you're on to something. But I don't think it can be done.
I don't want to take time to pick off the ways Kristol is mistaken one by one. Well, okay, I do. But it really shouldn't be neccesary. It's a little like pointing out what was wrong with medieval medicine. Physicians in the Middle Ages used treacle the way conservatives use tax cuts. Neither cures anything.
Pause to reflect on the things Kristol believes conservatives got "right more often than not." Communism? Jeez, talk about an oldy but goody. OK, I'll admit it: no one got that one right, so he can at least claim Republicans were no worse than Democrats. To maintain the global balance of power against our communist adversaries, we supported despots, fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada, armed proxies in El Salvador and Afghanistan, and built a nuclear arsenal that was at once more powerful than any force ever imagined by man, and utterly useless. Jihadism? I won't fold on that one. It is the utter refusal of conservatives to allow government to map out a fossil-fuel-free future that, among all other causes, most clearly makes us targets of muslim extremists. Our addiction to oil - and the profits it brings to many segments of the economy- requires us to opt for "stability" in the part of the world that spews out our sweet, black narcotic. That means supporting regimes that can keep the oil flowing, even if these regimes oppress their people, or bankroll extremists as part of a dysfunctional bargain to stay in power. No, Bill, you don't have the right answers there.
And why does he link "crime and welfare" when he is assembling the list of conservative successes? And how in the world does he imagine conservatives have either of those things figured out? Heckabagosh. We imprison more of our adults than any other nation in the world. One in every one hundred American adults is in prison. I guess if your friends are in the business of building prisons, or operating them for profit, then, hell, that's a great thing. But in any other universe, or by any other measure, that is a failure. And what about welfare? 13 million children in the U.S. live in poverty - that's nearly 20% of all children. By what measure is that a win for the conservative side? His last claim - that conservatives are right on issues related to "education and family" - is equally laughable. Children in poverty consistently perform less well in school, so if you push kids into poverty you also undermine their ability to succeed in the classroom. Bush policies have undermined creativity and innovation in the classroom, and conservatives continue to campaign to drive science from schools, in their efforts to replace biology with the Bible. And the party of family values has repeatedly tried to prevent loving non-traditional couples from sharing the enjoyment of family life. Americans are working more and spending less time at home. We can't afford medical insurance to protect the health of our kids and loved ones. How is that family friendly?
As Kristol rides off into the sunset, I can only hope his New York Times colleagues resist throwing him a good-bye party. Let the guy slip away without fanfare, then change the locks on the doors so he can never, ever come back.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Repudiating Bush, celebrating the historical meaning of Obama's inauguration
Like everyone else, I imagine, I have a story about how I watched Barack Obama's swearing in. I don't share this because I feel like my story has more meaning than yours, or even any great significance beyond the emotional resonance the experience carried for me. I share it in the hope that we will find, at some point, through an accumulation of these accounts, a kind of oral history of the moment and its significance across the wide landscape of the nation.
I watched Obama's swearing in sitting on the floor of the gym of my son's school. He goes to a Jewish dayschool on the southside of Chicago. And his teachers - the entire administrative and instructional staff of this school - made the decision that he, and his classroom full of 3-year-olds and all the other kids in the school, should watch the inaugural ceremony. And the remarkable thing was how clearly he and his 3-year-old classmates understood that this was important. They all seemed to know who Barack Obama was. This election has been going on so long, and our household has been supportive of Obama throughout, so my son has been surrounded by cheerleading for Obama for most of his life. Shortly after he learned to talk, he learned to say Barack Obama. He could recognize his picture on TV, or on a book's dust jacket, early on. I imagine this was true for many of the other kids in his class. My son's school is a remarkable place. The preschool and kindergarten programs are recognized for their excellence - the teachers are creative and compassionate and engaged - and my son's class is diverse: African-American kids, Japanese and Korean kids, Latino kids, and, in many, many cases, kids from mixed families, where mommy is from one race or ethnicity or religion, and daddy is from another. In some cases, the kids in the school have two mommies, in a few cases they may have two daddies.
I got there to pick up my son, at the normal time I would, shortly before Obama took the oath of office, and I sat down cross-legged on the floor behind my son, and he scooted back and sat on my lap. Sitting there, among kids and parents from all backgrounds, in a school my wife went to, where my son now goes, in the neighborhood where Obama lived and taught, a neighborhood that sits surrounded by poverty, but gathers together people from all over the world, I wept. Not openly. I was embarrassed to weep too openly. Which was stupid, because others in the room were weeping.
Obama's speech acknowledged the need to celebrate the milestone we were witnessing and served as a repudiation of eight years of Bush folly and failure. Obama promised that we would restore our commitment to science, and end the Bush administration's efforts to discredit science, and ignore scientific consensuses that were at odds with the interests of their allies in industry and the beliefs of those in the evangelical community. He promised to end governmental, tax, and regulatory policies that favored "only the prosperous" and served to protect and supplement the wealth of the wealthiest. He promised openness where the Bush administration favored secrecy. He rejected the idea that our liberties and our privacy and our constitution could be pushed aside in the interest of security. He embraced diplomacy and negotiation and multilateralism and rejected Bush's preference for unilateralism and preemption and saber-rattling. He celebrated America's diversity, markedly different from the Republican party's efforts to portray immigrants as unwelcome guests, Muslims as untrustworthy, gays as sinners. It was a tough speech, beginning with a polite acknowledgement of Bush's "service" to the nation, but then going about the business of identifying the variety of ways Bush failed America.
There's a line in Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he says: "Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." I've always marvelled at the ambition and the sweep of that statement. If you accept it, it means that everyone - even those we haven't yet fully embraced, like illegal immigrants, gays, felons - should expect to be protected fully by all of our laws. No one should be jailed without due process, everyone should be allowed to marry, each of us should be able to vote. Obama's inauguration, a day after the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, and unfolding on the same mall that hosted King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech, inevitably draws our attention back to the work of the generation that fought for and achieved civil rights for African Americans. Sitting there in my son's school, I felt like we had gone a long way toward the day when all of America's children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, could sit down together. King's words didn't map out the full diversity of today's America, but every journey begins with initial steps. One of the other great achievements of my lifetime was the conquest of the moon. Perhaps the famous words spoken then make sense here too. This is a giant leap.
I watched Obama's swearing in sitting on the floor of the gym of my son's school. He goes to a Jewish dayschool on the southside of Chicago. And his teachers - the entire administrative and instructional staff of this school - made the decision that he, and his classroom full of 3-year-olds and all the other kids in the school, should watch the inaugural ceremony. And the remarkable thing was how clearly he and his 3-year-old classmates understood that this was important. They all seemed to know who Barack Obama was. This election has been going on so long, and our household has been supportive of Obama throughout, so my son has been surrounded by cheerleading for Obama for most of his life. Shortly after he learned to talk, he learned to say Barack Obama. He could recognize his picture on TV, or on a book's dust jacket, early on. I imagine this was true for many of the other kids in his class. My son's school is a remarkable place. The preschool and kindergarten programs are recognized for their excellence - the teachers are creative and compassionate and engaged - and my son's class is diverse: African-American kids, Japanese and Korean kids, Latino kids, and, in many, many cases, kids from mixed families, where mommy is from one race or ethnicity or religion, and daddy is from another. In some cases, the kids in the school have two mommies, in a few cases they may have two daddies.
I got there to pick up my son, at the normal time I would, shortly before Obama took the oath of office, and I sat down cross-legged on the floor behind my son, and he scooted back and sat on my lap. Sitting there, among kids and parents from all backgrounds, in a school my wife went to, where my son now goes, in the neighborhood where Obama lived and taught, a neighborhood that sits surrounded by poverty, but gathers together people from all over the world, I wept. Not openly. I was embarrassed to weep too openly. Which was stupid, because others in the room were weeping.
Obama's speech acknowledged the need to celebrate the milestone we were witnessing and served as a repudiation of eight years of Bush folly and failure. Obama promised that we would restore our commitment to science, and end the Bush administration's efforts to discredit science, and ignore scientific consensuses that were at odds with the interests of their allies in industry and the beliefs of those in the evangelical community. He promised to end governmental, tax, and regulatory policies that favored "only the prosperous" and served to protect and supplement the wealth of the wealthiest. He promised openness where the Bush administration favored secrecy. He rejected the idea that our liberties and our privacy and our constitution could be pushed aside in the interest of security. He embraced diplomacy and negotiation and multilateralism and rejected Bush's preference for unilateralism and preemption and saber-rattling. He celebrated America's diversity, markedly different from the Republican party's efforts to portray immigrants as unwelcome guests, Muslims as untrustworthy, gays as sinners. It was a tough speech, beginning with a polite acknowledgement of Bush's "service" to the nation, but then going about the business of identifying the variety of ways Bush failed America.
There's a line in Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he says: "Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." I've always marvelled at the ambition and the sweep of that statement. If you accept it, it means that everyone - even those we haven't yet fully embraced, like illegal immigrants, gays, felons - should expect to be protected fully by all of our laws. No one should be jailed without due process, everyone should be allowed to marry, each of us should be able to vote. Obama's inauguration, a day after the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, and unfolding on the same mall that hosted King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech, inevitably draws our attention back to the work of the generation that fought for and achieved civil rights for African Americans. Sitting there in my son's school, I felt like we had gone a long way toward the day when all of America's children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, could sit down together. King's words didn't map out the full diversity of today's America, but every journey begins with initial steps. One of the other great achievements of my lifetime was the conquest of the moon. Perhaps the famous words spoken then make sense here too. This is a giant leap.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Lord Feinstein
I've been bothered by the reaction of a whole generation of supposedly progressive (or at least big "D" Democratic) politicians to Obama's presidency. As he picks his team, and rolls out some hints about policy directions, all sorts of old-timers are voicing "hurumps." The worst might be Dianne Feinstein. We have her public complaints about Leon Panetta, as well as her sweeping aside efforts by Harry Reid and Obama to keep Roland Burris at arm's length. What's going on here? I think it is a case of advanced Senatoritis. Members of the U.S. Senate seem to acquire increasingly inflated egos the longer they serve and grow to expect deference and kowtowing from everyone they encounter. They are America's House of Lords. And like the House of Lords, they do almost nothing that threatens to shake up the establishment. One should never expect the Senate to lead us anywhere. The best we can hope for is that the Senate doesn't get in the way when, as might happen now and then, a president shows up and elects to map out a new direction. Such was our luck when FDR constructed the New Deal legislation, although at times Alben Barkley, Senate Majority Leader, would rise up to assert the Senate's independence.
Steve Conn over at Rustbelt Intellectual has some perhaps parallel observations about Arlen Specter. Specter's recent threats to block or complicate the confirmation of Attorney General nominee Eric Holder can be seen, like Feinstein's hurumphing, as an expression of Specter's exaggerated view of his importance. As a member of the Senate, it seems he believes, he is owed the courtesy of being heard.
The reality is, I think, that we can expect years of foot-dragging by the Senate. Their rules, which reward committee assignments through senority, mean that any new members, elected to carry forward change, won't get their feet in the stirrups for years. When they get into positions of influence, years from now, I hope Al Franken, Kay Hagan, and Jeff Merkley don't come down with the same condition afflicting Feinstein. Maybe there is a way to inoculate them.
Steve Conn over at Rustbelt Intellectual has some perhaps parallel observations about Arlen Specter. Specter's recent threats to block or complicate the confirmation of Attorney General nominee Eric Holder can be seen, like Feinstein's hurumphing, as an expression of Specter's exaggerated view of his importance. As a member of the Senate, it seems he believes, he is owed the courtesy of being heard.
The reality is, I think, that we can expect years of foot-dragging by the Senate. Their rules, which reward committee assignments through senority, mean that any new members, elected to carry forward change, won't get their feet in the stirrups for years. When they get into positions of influence, years from now, I hope Al Franken, Kay Hagan, and Jeff Merkley don't come down with the same condition afflicting Feinstein. Maybe there is a way to inoculate them.
Friday, January 2, 2009
New Year
In my last post, in fact in many essays on this blog, I focus on my philosophy of governance. I never describe my comments as such - I never wave my hands around and say: here's my philosophy. But if you piece it all together, you should get the picture. Government should be an instrument for advancing the needs of the wider population, and, in particular, for constructing solutions for our most vulnerable.
What is wrong with the Bush administration is their complete contempt for the idea that government serves any public end. Depending on who you sat down with, you might find that Bushies believe government is primarily a waste of money, or a detestable instrument to overturn the justifiable accumulation of wealth controlled by the captains of industry, or, as Dick Chaney seems to believe, a set of institutions that can be repurposed to deliver benefits to friends and political allies. It's like a candy machine, and the trick is to move the machine into a secure room, and only allow your narrow circle of friends to have the access code. The thing that ties Bush to Blagojevich is that Blagojevich also scoffs at the idea that government serves the wider community. He sees it as his own personal ATM.
In a column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman takes on the same topic. Here is the key passage:
Then cretins like Blagojevich come along and make the Republicans' work easier. Corruption and ineffectiveness by Democratic politicians like Blagojevich and William Jefferson and a generation of leaders in Ohio only serve to convince voters that Reagan was right - you can't trust government.
The stakes are high for the Obama administration. Not just because he is our first African American president. Not just because we find ourselves at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. But also because we need to rebuild trust in government. We need to remind Americans that government can solve problems, and assure our safety and security from narrow-visioned manufacturers who poison us and spoil our environment, and map out possible futures by providing start-up capital to new technologies, and help lift-up the poor and educate our children. The Obama administration needs to be bold and skillful and successful. And it needs to begin right away, and demonstrate results in the first 100 days.
What is wrong with the Bush administration is their complete contempt for the idea that government serves any public end. Depending on who you sat down with, you might find that Bushies believe government is primarily a waste of money, or a detestable instrument to overturn the justifiable accumulation of wealth controlled by the captains of industry, or, as Dick Chaney seems to believe, a set of institutions that can be repurposed to deliver benefits to friends and political allies. It's like a candy machine, and the trick is to move the machine into a secure room, and only allow your narrow circle of friends to have the access code. The thing that ties Bush to Blagojevich is that Blagojevich also scoffs at the idea that government serves the wider community. He sees it as his own personal ATM.
In a column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman takes on the same topic. Here is the key passage:
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
This is a view I have held for years. This is why I steamed while the press was constructing hagiographies for Reagan when he passed away. Reagan justified our widespread distrust of government - which arguably is part of our political DNA - and set the stage for George Bush, and the abandonment of any expectation that government should be people-focused and competent and solution-oriented. The failure of the Bush administration to appoint qualified people - the idea that Michael Brown could run FEMA or Harriet Miers could be a Supreme Court justice - flows from this contempt for government. If you are looking for a reason for why we are so screwed right now, you should start your search with Reagan. Not just because he created a mind-set that has guided the Republican party ever since, but because he so effectively sold his idea to the American people.
Then cretins like Blagojevich come along and make the Republicans' work easier. Corruption and ineffectiveness by Democratic politicians like Blagojevich and William Jefferson and a generation of leaders in Ohio only serve to convince voters that Reagan was right - you can't trust government.
The stakes are high for the Obama administration. Not just because he is our first African American president. Not just because we find ourselves at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. But also because we need to rebuild trust in government. We need to remind Americans that government can solve problems, and assure our safety and security from narrow-visioned manufacturers who poison us and spoil our environment, and map out possible futures by providing start-up capital to new technologies, and help lift-up the poor and educate our children. The Obama administration needs to be bold and skillful and successful. And it needs to begin right away, and demonstrate results in the first 100 days.
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