A Small Group of Thoughtful, Committed Republican Anarchists…

The New Yorker ran a piece yesterday chronicling the “Anarchists of the House,” a profile of the hardcore conservative House Republicans who drop bombs into the wheels of government.  The article is (not surprisingly) very unfavorable, arguing that the congressional Right’s ideological extremism has created “an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage… twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.”  The latest right-wing innovations include withholding support from any Obama initiative, including those based on Republican principles (like Obamacare); procedural sabotage, like refusing to appoint NRLB commissioners or “block[ing] the appointment of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for three years”; and hostage-taking around the once routine vote to pay the country’s creditors, where Republicans “extract[ed] over a trillion dollars in spending cuts” from Obama.  The results have been fiscal austerity, the emasculation of many regulatory agencies, an historic slowdown in the passage of legislation, defeat of new gun control measures, the downing of a bipartisan immigration bill and lags in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Is Anarchy the new Birchism?

Has this strategy been successful?  The New Yorker argues that “the rational way to view these events is that Republicans have marginalized themselves.”  But is this really true?  I would argue that on issue after issue, Republicans have punched well above their weight in the face of a sometimes overwhelming Democratic majority.  Ever since the brief period of pseudo-bipartisan accord ended in mid-2009, the Right has been able to limit or cut discretionary spending (debt ceiling concessions, sequester), incapacitate or slow key regulatory agencies (CFPB, NLRB, DOL), kill any public option and delay Obamacare and generally cripple the Federal government’s ability to create new programs and laws.  All of these achievements are central objectives of the anti-government Right, and all have been accomplished while Democrats control the presidency and one or both houses of Congress.  This is in addition to the Republican wave at the state level passing all kinds of crazy socially conservative and anti-worker shit now that they control 27 legislatures and 30 governorships.  And the machinations of the most pro-elite Supreme Court since the 1930’s.  Obstructionist Republicans have suffered few setbacks at the polls, and are actually predicted by many to take back the Senate while retaining the House in 2014.

How did the Right pull it off?

How the fuck have these kooks been able to accomplish so much from a minority national position?  How is the Right even relevant after the Bush debacle and incredible economic collapse brought on by greedy capitalists on Wall Street?   I would argue that the Right propagates a clear ideological worldview that, although basically incoherent and lacking any real factual basis, they’ve stuck to and been able to clearly convey (that, that and boatloads of money…. like ruptured Titantic hulls filled with gold bars type money).  Slow job growth?  Government spending/Unions.  Economic sluggishness?  Government spending.  Poor education?  Unions.  Municipal decay?  Government spending/unions.  Basically everything boils down to government spending and unions destroy freedom and kill jobs.  The Right is also well organized at the state and local level, utilizing one of the last organized groups in America as foot soldiers (churchgoers).  And, conservative politicians, as anti-government legislation government legislators, are in the weirdly unique position of being able to enact their favored agenda just by showing up and not doing shit – kind of like anti-death penalty executioners or pacifist soldiers.

A tepid progressive response

The mainstream progressive response has been to assume the mantle of technocratic centrism and rail against these extremists and ideologues.  This is a tremendous mistake.  There is a bubbling anger in America, caused by 40 years of stagnating incomes, vanishing opportunities to climb the ladder and widespread industrial decay, which deserves a full-throated response.  Proposing “sensible,” centrist policies which fail to solve the problem even in their purest form, before they’re fed through the congressional sausage works (see: stimulus, healthcare, financial regulation), makes you look like you don’t have answers (which, in the case of national Democrats, you don’t).  At some point, voters will assess your record and realize that none of your proposals will help them much, the opposition won’t even allow these weak proposals through anyway, and you are therefore unable to govern.  At that point, voters will hand power to your ideologically driven foes who, although they may be headed into uncharted waters, are at least going somewhere.  The only answer for the Left is crafting a potent ideology of it own based on freedom, equal opportunity and democratic revival that can tap into the legitimate anger of Americans and become the alternative that people look to as they become increasingly disaffected with Washington politics.

Snowden’s Treatment by “Journalists” and “Progressives”

A lot has been said about the hostility shown by “journalists” and “progressives” toward whistleblower Ed Snowden, so I won’t rehash old battles here.  I did want to touch on a couple revealing incidents, though, that mostly flew under the radar.

I only see ideology when it undermines my ideology

On June 30th, New York Times pop culture and media writer David Carr published a piece titled “Journalism, Even When It’s Tilted” where he uses Glenn Greenwald as a muse to discuss the role of advocacy in journalism.  Although Carr tries to stand on (his self-defined) middle ground – saying Greenwald “is an activist who is deeply suspicious of government and the national security apparatus” but “also a journalist” – he ultimately reinforces the standard narrative that only pro-government, militarist, pro-corporate journalists can operate without ideologies. To Carr, Greenwald’s defense of whistle-blowing in the face of attacks by pro-government journalists “seems more like a campaign than a discussion of the story he covered” where his “primary objective remains winning the argument.” Meanwhile, “an economic incentive for information absent a political agenda,” (i.e. the corporate tv, newspapers etc..) allows an “independent press” which is now eroding as the decline of traditional media gives way to the proliferation of “digital enterprises” with “partisan agendas.”

The issue with this line of reasoning is obvious – where the fuck have Carr and all the other MSM journalists now screaming “advocacy” and “bias” been while their newspapers pushed us into wars, totally missed the looming housing crisis, vilified worker organizing, gave platforms to anti-teacher zealots et cetera, et cetera.  The only reason he’s writing this article is because Greenwald happened to challenge, rather than enforce, Carr’s own ideology.  The thousands of stories every day which fly across his laptop screen praising corporate America or parroting leaks from administration officials give him no pause because he’s so immersed in mainstream ideology he doesn’t even notice.

Stay down, sit down. Don’t stand up for your rights

In addition to the ridiculous awakening of mainstream journalists to the dangers of ideological biases (that challenge their own), the other point I wanted to touch on is how many “progressive” supporters of president Obama have revealed their tiny, tiny balls.  A great example is the Campaign for America’s Future’s Bill Scher, who displayed hummingbird sized lluevos in a Bloggingheads.tv conversation with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis when he said of Ed Snowden

“I feel sad about what’s going to happen to him. Because he has basically traded his personal freedom, he will probably be incarcerated eventually because of a political opinion he has… This poor guy [throws] away his entire adult life” by saying “I can’t abide by this it’s not worth living in this world if it’s like this therefore jail and speaking my mind is a better option, which I just find painfully sad and misguided.”

Wow, so this is what “progressives” have come to – a complete refutation of idealism in any form.  This type of technocratic pussiness is pervasive among Democrats (and mainstream Republicans), but it’s rare that someone will just come out with it.  I understand being too scared to stand up for your own beliefs, but your fear of shame should at least illicit a fucking head nod and muttered “right on” or something when you hear about someone else doing it.  Scher’s complete discounting of principled political actions is just another sign of the American Left’s drift away from any coherent ideology worth defending.

The pro-establishment bias of most journalists and many prominent liberals comes as no surprise, but it is being cast into stark relief by the NSA revelations.  There are about a thousand other NSA-related topics I’d also love to get into, but I’ll save that discussion until the next big Greenwald story drops.

Stop and Frisk is about Values not Numbers

A federal district court this week began hearing testimony in a class action lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” (S&F from now on cause I’m lazy) tactic.  NYPD officers conducted 533,000 stops in 2012.  Eighty-seven percent of New Yorkers stopped were black or Latino, and eighty-nine percent of those stopped were innocent of any crime.  Critics and defenders of the tactic have often faced off over its effectiveness and legality, but the real focus should be on whether stop-and-frisk violates the fundamental values of freedom and equality.

The framing of the stop and frisk debate assumes that effectiveness equals legitimacy

The New York Times provides a great example of how framing of the S&F discussion actually masks the fundamental issues involved.  The Times recruited six experts in July 2012 to answer the question “Does Stop and Frisk Reduce Crime.”  Implicit in this question is the assumption that the right or wrongness of S&F depends on how useful it is at stopping crime, not whether, regardless of impact, it has a place in a free and equal society.  Supporters argue that it has dramatically reduced crime, while opponents disagree and offer better ways to fight crime.  However, as soon as people accept this framing, the question of whether S&F is legitimate if it proves to be effective has already been answered in the affirmative.

America’s about being free, not risk-free

Policies like this, which rely on distorted utilitarian calculations about harm reduction to trample all over fundamental freedoms, have no place in America.  I’m sure if we locked everyone in a 6×6 dog cage (or fluid-filled Matrix dreampod), and played 2 ½ Men re-runs all day long, crime would be drastically reduced.  But that’s not the fucking goal of the American experiment.  Even if the state employed Orwellian monitoring systems or Minority Report-esque crime prediction models that allowed citizens to walk about “freely” unless they decided to commit a crime, this would STILL be completely unacceptable.  Freedom’s important because its freedom, not because of some marginal benefit/marginal cost calculus.  Forcing people to spread eagle in front of their parent’s house while they humiliatingly have their pockets checked for the 2% chance they might have a weapon is fucking anti-freedom and un-American.

Stop and frisk violates equal treatment before the law

The other major (and oft-cited) problem with S&F is that it’s racist as shit.  These aren’t upper Westside society ladies getting patted down for pills; these are black and brown kids being systematically stopped and harassed by the police.  The question of whether more crime is committed by/against black and Latino youth is totally irrelevant.  By the time you’ve started debating whether the percentage of X-type people stopped is higher or lower than the percentage of crimes committed by X-type people, you’ve already conceded that utilitarian notions of safety trump equal rights.  In America, everyone is equal before the law.  Everyone should be treated as an individual, and no one should be immediately judged, intimidated and manhandled by a heavily armed group of badge-wearing street enforcers, based solely on their race.

We’re becoming a society that tosses aside freedom and equality to obsess over utilitarian measures of security

America, especially in the post-9/11 era, has been sliding steadily away from a focus on freedom and equality towards a coldly-calculating techno-rationalism myopically focused on absolute safety (typically for the powerful or the majority).  This can be seen in the opinions of people like jury foreman Joseph Cote, who argued during an Islamic radicals’ trial in 2006 that “it was ‘absolutely’ better to run the risk of convicting an innocent man than to let a guilty one go.”  It can be seen in the plurality of public support for domestic drone surveillance, which sacrifices freedom for all-seeing security.  And it can be seen in the dramatic jump in “preventative” stops by the NYPD in the years after 9/11.  We must completely reject this thinking and the false utilitarian calculus that underlies it, or America will risk overturning decades of progress on freedom and equality.

Public Opinion, Power and Ideology in Pushing the Iraq War

George W. Bush launched his attack on Iraq ten years ago Tuesday.  Since then, there has been an endless stream of commentary and critique surrounding the loss of American life, hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars, failure of the U.S. to achieve some of its geopolitical goals, and occasionally even a discussion of the more than 100,000 dead Iraqi men, women and children.  I’d like to reflect for a second on what the war says about public rationality, the relationship between power and credibility, and the ability of powerful ideologies to obfuscate a straight-forward understanding of institutional incentives.

Americans supported the war because they were relentlessly lied to

Public opinion favored the war because American people were duped into our attack on Iraq.  Despite extensive documentation of the parade of lies trotted out by the Bush Administration and servilely repeated and amplified by major media institutions, pessimists continue to argue that the American public is bloodthirsty by nature.  If the president, vice president, secretaries of everything, senior members of both political parties, leading think-tank bullshiterati, national newspaper editorial boards, cable news programs and almost every other elite all say that Iraq is a WMD-wielding threat with ties to the guys who just blew up 3,000 Americans a year earlier, how can you possibly expect the American public to see through it or be properly informed?  Is Chad Whitesworth supposed to just stroll down to his Topeka-area Revolutionary Books and grab a copy of Chomsky’s (who he’s never even heard of) latest anti-imperialist tome?

You can see the manipulability of public opinion by considering Iran and conducting a thought experiment on Iraq.  Warmongers have been pushing lies about Iran’s nuclear program for years, but without (until?) a sustained war push by political elites and the press, the American public continues to oppose a unilateral or multilateral strike (unlike Iraq).  Presented with a slightly less skewed set of facts, Americans choose peace.  Now imagine if in 2002, President Bush said Iraq wasn’t a threat, major editorial boards called a war unnecessary and Brookings scholars said it would be a tremendous strategic blunder (all true).  Could you possibly argue that, presented with these facts, Americans would have supported an attack on Iraq?  Of course not.

Media organizations and opinion makers favored powerful interests over truth

The relationship between power and credibility has also been made starkly clear in the years after the American attack.  Simply put, the more powerful an institution or its defenders are, the more credibility they gain in popular discourse.  Neo-cons promoted American military power, the military-industrial complex and big oil interests by banging the war drum, and they lost almost zero credibility despite the fact that Iraq cost orders of magnitude more lives than 9-11 and more than a trillion dollars in wasted funds.  Bill Kristol was rewarded with a regular column in the New York Times, Ken “Threatening Storm” Pollack is still an “expert on Middle Eastern political-military affairs” at Brookings, and Richard Perle is looking even creepier at the American Enterprise Institute.  Imagine what their media reception would’ve been like if they’d advocated an $800 billion dollar airdrop of U.S. food and medical supplies into Iraq that ended up killing 100,000+ civilians and 5,000 U.S. aid workers, instead of opening up Iraqi oil fields for U.S. investment and providing a great global reminder of why you don’t fuck with the U.S. government.

Elites buy into ideological justifications over clear-headed rational analysis of institutional incentives

The run-up to our attack on Iraq also demonstrated how challenging it is for elites to apply incentive-based, marginal benefit/cost analysis to powerful institutions.  American control of oil was clearly central to the Bush Administration’s decision to overthrow the Iraqi regime (why not attack Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo etc…), but political and media elites attacked this idea as a lie or conspiracy theory.  A similar willful blindness prohibits frank discussion of the possibility that Wall Street firms regularly commit fraud or insider trading as a part of business (to earn above market returns), or that politicians make policy decisions based on campaign contributions or future job opportunities.  CEOs and politicians are instead taken at their word or dismissed as bad apples if any corruption is uncovered.

Using an incentive based framework, all of this unethical behavior make sense.  The world’s leading consumer of oil needs to secure future reserves, Wall Street executives gain multi-million dollar bonuses by boosting stock prices, and politicians without wealthy backers are dead in the water, facing a future in academia rather than a lucrative lobbying gig or million dollar pay day on Wall Street.

American elites helped pave the path to war by favoring ideology over incentive-based thinking, bowing to powerful interests over truth and actively participating in the manipulation of public opinion.  Anti-war advocates should endlessly point to Iraq’s boy-who-cried-wolf examples as military attention is turned to Iran.  Progressives should also refuse to engage with thinkers and policymakers who advocated for the Iraq War.  Finally, anyone who wants to challenge powerful institutions should stick to marginal benefit/marginal cost thinking and advocate for policies grounded in providing strong material and social incentives for military generals, politicians and corporate executives to act in the interests of the American people.