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A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog writes in to him, saying:

“I just had a revelation that may seem obvious, but I think I now really understand the difference between liberals and conservatives. The former perpetually live in the 1960s… while the latter live perpetually in the 1970s…

How can we move both groups into the 1980s and 1990s, when both sides accepted a lot of what was right about what the other side had to say?… Why is it that the history of 40-50 years ago seems to impact on people’s thinking so much more than the history of 20-30 years ago that ought to be fresher in their minds?”

It’s a good point, but here’s my answer: both sides didn’t “accept” what the other side said, they merely made necessary compromises. The 1970s and especially the ’60s are when the conservative and liberal parties we know today first emerged, and hence it is there that we may see them in their purest forms.

As for why they don’t compromise–well, nobody likes to see the pure form diluted, do they? And this makes sense, because it’s standard negotiating practice to ask for more than what you actually expect to get.

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Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, astutely notes:

“[I]t’s not that the working class has abandoned Democrats. It’s just the opposite: The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class.” 

 It’s an excellent article, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

He goes on to describe the animosity that existed between the “New Left”, as he calls it, and organized labor. Specifically, to paraphrase him a bit, there was something of a culture clash, and so the  “New Leftists” were disliked by the old-school working class.

It’s this clash, of course, which has caused such a problem for the Democratic party, and the article does a good job of explaining how it still impacts them even today. And (forgive me a bit of self-promotion) it’s sort of related to the issue I wrote about here.

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Exile: “Kreia, what are you–are you a Jedi? A Sith?”

Kreia: “Does it matter? Of course it does. Such titles allow you to break the galaxy into light and dark. Categorize it. Perhaps I am neither, and I hold both as what they are: pieces of a whole.”–dialogue from Obsidian Entertainment‘s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, The Sith Lords. 2004.

“I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
                                Or else a little Conservative!” —Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Act II. 1882.

I think everybody knows that the two-party system has its flaws. It is obvious that a system in which two sides work in opposition to one another virtually all the time is bound to have flaws. And then of course, everybody knows that lots of people end up voting a party-line ticket without bothering to consider the specifics of a candidate or policy. No one wants to be guilty of voting without thinking.
Because of this, many people really want to find some sort of “common ground”, or at least a way outside the two party system. This takes two forms: either a centrist “let’s compromise” attitude or else a “a pox on both your houses” approach.
The current holy war between Republicans and Democrats is an irritating thing, to be sure.* But Centrism, in my opinion, does not actually break free of this divide; it merely mixes and matches elements of both in some sort of hope that somehow this will make the two sides dislike each other less. 
(Meanwhile, the “pox on both houses” idea manifests itself primarily as libertarianism, a somewhat noble idea which amounts essentially to leaving everyone alone to do whatever as long as it harms no one else, but which falls apart quite completely when faced with the complexities of actually governing.)
The end result is that the Centrists say “We want both of you.” Libertarians say “We want neither of you.” In this way, as I sort of touched on here, both of these ideas still define themselves in terms of Republicans and Democrats. By that I mean that they are not actual political philosophies, they are just philosophies for dealing with the existing political philosophies.
I suppose I’m writing this like I have some kind of answer or solution. I don’t. All I can say is that while I can understand and sympathize with the impulse of people like the “No Labels” group to break out of the traditional two-party mold and be really independent of “Partisanship”, it’s actually much harder than it seems.   
*One could also, by the way, make a very good argument that the Republicans bear much more responsibility than the Democrats for the current level of vitriolic polarization. This is the sort of detail that centrists are often willing to overlook in their quest for bipartisanship.

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There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, that’s often told about Adlai Stevenson. Supposedly, at one of Stevenson’s campaign stops, a woman yelled to him “You have the vote of every thinking person!” To which, the story goes, Stevenson replied “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!“

It’s the sort of story that resonates with any one who has any interest whatsoever in politics, at least now that Stevenson is so far back in history that he has ceased to have any power to divide people politically. Everyone always feels like their side–right though it undoubtedly is–is also an oppressed minority, overwhelmed by hordes of uninformed imbeciles motivated only by the propaganda of shadowy elites.

This is the view that is held both by the members of the Tea Party and by most of the people who oppose them. And I suppose this is so because it is partially correct–and necessarily so, given the way politics works in this country.

The Tea-Party is, as I have said before, a re-branding of the Republican party to make it seem more fresh and exciting, but most of all to dissociate it from the unpopular George W. Bush and his administration.

Now, this does not mean the Tea Party is quite the same thing as the Republican Party; obviously, from day one they have sought to purge anyone who shows any signs of compromising with the Democrats from the party’s ranks. They appear to be insistent on ideological purity.

Many Democrats have tried to label the Tea Party as an “astroturf” (fake grass-roots) operation, citing Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks organization and the work of the Koch Brothers. And they are to some extent correct, though I suspect every large movement and every mass demonstration has some wealthy backers, if anyone cares to check.

But what does the Tea Party, as an organization, want? Most people who are sympathetic to them have said they are a sort of Libertarian movement, which claims to want smaller government. Those who oppose them say that they are racists. The Tea Partiers deny this, saying they only oppose “Big Government”.

Data about what the members of the Tea Party think about certain issues are at odds with the slogans they yell. As I noted earlier, a majority of Tea Partiers think free trade is bad for the country. This is not exactly a Libertarian position. Yet they continue to argue for capitalism, and despise governmental attempts at economic intervention.

So from all this we are to gather that they are clamoring for a free market, nothing more. Yet so often they are found not talking about this stuff at all, but about “restoring honor to the country” and “American exceptionalism” and “taking their country back”. They are always dressed in super-patriotic garb, always waving the flag and talking of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. This is all complemented by a dose of fundamentalist Christianity–often with the implication that the Christian God blessed America specifically as the “greatest nation”.

This is, as I’ve said many times, nationalism. Not necessarily ethnic nationalism, as so many will infer. It may well be a completely non-racist, non-ethnically prejudiced nationalism, but nationalism it is nevertheless. The “Restoring Honor” rally held by the Tea Party’s much-beloved Glenn Beck was a cry for a return to National Greatness. The American exceptionalism talk means just what it says.

And the hatred of Obama? I think that much of it is not racially motivated. If you listen to the Tea Partiers, a chief complaint of theirs about Obama is that he supposedly “apologizes for America”. They want a President who will speak only of the greatness of America, a view which focuses solely on the positive things it has done. (At this point, they usually make some reference to the phrase “Shining City upon a Hill“.)

I believe Obama damned himself completely in the eyes of these Nationalists when he said, in response to being asked if he believed in American exceptionalism: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” This type of subjective thinking is wholly, dare I say it, foreign to the religious nationalist’s worldview.

In his otherwise excellent article on the Tea Party, Matt Taibbi wrote:

“It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.” 

The second sentence is accurate to an extent–though some would couch it differently–but the first part seems blind to the fact that virtually everything the Tea Party movement does is filled with symbols of Americanism and references to American history–not necessarily accurate history, of course, but some romanticized version of it. The underlying theme of it all is a longing for National Pride and National Greatness.

So, the rank-and-file Tea Partiers are nationalists. They want to protect American jobs through protectionist measures, punish illegal immigrants, deny any mistakes made by America through history, and above all restore “National Greatness”. This is the will of the majority of Tea Party participants.

But, it must be remembered, these are only the foot soldiers, not the generals. “Theirs not to reason why“, they simply are carrying out the strategy laid out by the other aspect of the Tea Party: the businessmen who finance the whole thing.

This is where the Libertarian strain comes from. The people who fund the Tea Party have no interest in “National Greatness” either for the United States or for any other nation. They just want to be able to make deals to do business with China, or to keep costs down by not having too many environmental standards to comply with at their factories.

This is not the sort of thing most people would get on board with–largely because, as often as not, capitalism works in opposition to nationalism. (For example: sending American jobs over to China? No American nationalist could ever sign off on that, even if an economist justified it with Ricardian comparative advantage.) 

Hence, the need to on the one hand spread the Capitalist system while on the other giving the Nationalistic streak in the party something to distract it from the details of how the system works. Much better that the Nationalists should be told the government that is regulating the capitalists is “anti-American” than to try to defend the decidedly non-nationalistic behaviors of capitalism itself.

The late Conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote of the “Davos Man“. Named for the site of the World Economic Forum, Huntington said such people “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite’s global operations”.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that Glenn Beck and his followers are always talking about, hinting at dark conspiracies to destroy the American way of life by international socialism. And, I suppose there is a kind of truth to it; though it isn’t really a secret conspiracy. (If it were, we wouldn’t hear about it.) The point, though, is that there are also international capitalists who have just as little interest in national loyalty, but who are willing to exploit it for their own sake.

This conclusion is somewhat unsatisfying, mostly because, as I said at the beginning of this post, it is precisely the kind of thing that everyone concludes about the opposing side, no matter who they are. And furthermore, it is because this is the sort of thing that naturally arises in our system of politics. The same sort of dynamic exists in the Democratic Party; and I’m sure if one looked one could find contradictions between the intellectuals at the top and the working-class rank-and-file.

If one is sympathetic to the overall goals of a party, one calls it a “compromise”, and hails the miraculous union of these viewpoints. But if one is unsympathetic, it is a “contradiction”, and a bizarre cabal with one side pulling the others’ strings.

In any case, however, this is my conclusion as to the structure and philosophy of the Tea Party. Feel free to critique it.

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“Pilate saith unto him, ‘What is truth?’…”–John 18:38 

Most people probably believe that of the two major political parties in the United States, it is the Democrats who are more prone to relativism. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that there are more intellectuals, who are always given over to questioning traditions, in the Democratic party. The second is that many years of conservative propaganda has told everyone so.

Most of this is the work of the religious Right, though the Atheist philosophy of Ayn Rand also rejects the idea of anything other than absolute Truth, and it is certainly more widely heard in “conservative”,or–if we must use the term–“right-wing” circles. And there is some truth to all this; after all, does not the word “Conservative” itself suggest a certain intellectual and philosophical rigidity?

But, of late, there have been signs of a creeping relativism among conservatives. For example, this column from paleo-conservative writer Patrick J. Buchanan. An excerpt:

““Naked reason,” pure rationalism… ignores that vast realm of sentiments, such as patriotism and love, that reside in the terrain between thought and feeling.” 

Buchanan, admittedly, is far from one of the major players in the Republican party, having been effectively ostracized years ago. But there is altogether something very “post-modern”, as Andrew Sullivan often says, about the behavior of the conservatives of late. Recall the odd incident early this year when Rudy Giuliani and other prominent conservatives appeared to have forgotten about the 9/11 attacks.

(As Henry Leland says to Mike Thorton in Alpha Protocol: “There are only so many coincidences that can happen before they stop being coincidences.”)

Of course, one could easily explain away such things by pointing out that it is merely the inevitable result of competing–nearly warring–political parties. A strategy, nothing more. Indeed, I suspect a credible case could be made that changes in the media and the education system have produced a general increase in the relativistic outlook, and we only notice it with conservatives because they are, historically, less susceptible to it.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that strategically speaking, the Republicans are moving more and more towards a relativistic approach to reporting and analyzing every issue. Much of their criticism of Obama is based on how he makes them feel, or the image he projects.

Perhaps Lee Atwater had some part in it. (On some sites, I have seen the phrase “Perception is reality” attributed to Atwater. I doubt he originated it, but it does encapsulate his worldview.) Still, from at least Edward Bernays onward, propagandists, strategists and ad men, or whatever name, must have at least a touch of relativism to carry out their duty.

Now, I cannot stress enough that it is mostly the conservative intellectuals and strategists who seem to think this way. All the examples I gave, with the partial exception of Giuliani, were very much the behind-the-scenes tactician sort, not the leaders, and not the rank and file. I don’t think we will ever see Sarah Palin, for example, engaging in anything other than black-and-white moral reasoning. (“We win, they lose…”)

That’s part of what’s so odd about it, in fact. On the one hand we have the traditional non-relativist view of the world characterized by most of the Republican politicians, but pull away the curtain and we find men like Karl Rove–heir to Atwater–and other such strategists. Buchanan, let us not forget, was a strategist for Richard M. Nixon. (Nixon, by the way, was interested in the works of Nietzsche.) Even Dick Cheney, in his role as an adviser to Gerald Ford, famously said: “Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose.”

It is pointless to counter by saying that the same is true of Democrats. Of course it is. Carville, Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and the rest are all doubtless cut from the same cloth. But the Democrats as a whole are already supposed to be the party of relativists, to hear the Republicans tell it, and they’re kind of correct. Nothing reveals this more than the fact that Democrats in general will tend to attack Republicans for being too absolutist. Whereas, the Republicans pride themselves on seeing through the moral haziness in which the liberal intellectuals lose themselves by understanding the absolute, God-given differences between True and False, Right and Wrong.

Let me, as Obama would say, be clear:  the majority of the Republican party believes in a rigid, absolutist, traditional Christian morality–or wants to, anyway.  But many of their strategists are willing to do almost anything to achieve victory, and are more than happy to bend the truth in order to get what they want. And they are fairly open about it.

In short, their strategists appear to be using moral and factual relativism in order to justify the rank-and-file and their leaders behaving like moral and factual absolutists.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged. 

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It is the opinion of this humble blogger that you are entirely too concerned with recent redecorating of the Oval Office.

Now, no doubt decoration is a fine thing, and a worthy endeavor deserving of thoughtful criticism. But I don’t think it is worth expending the journalistic and rhetorical resources needed to write entire columns and blog posts on.

This is all the more important to understand because, like everything else politicians do, this redecoration will undoubtedly become the subject of what passes for debate between the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans, I’d wager, are even now trying to find something unpatriotic about the color of the new coffee table. Democrats, on the other hand, will leap to the defense of it, probably even if they privately hate it.

Now, I admit, this state of polarization is not itself the fault of either the blogosphere or even the mainstream media, even though everyone says it is. For decades, the political system in the United States has been relentlessly, and perhaps inevitably, moving towards a point at which agreement on anything between the two parties is inconceivable. This is the result of forces beyond the control of any one individual or entity.

Here’s the thing, though:  if the two parties can at least battle each other over actual issues concerning the state of the real world, the military, the economy, the culture etc., there is a chance–admittedly a slim one–that the disagreements between the two parties may actually be susceptible of resolution based on actual material evidence.

The decoration of rooms, however, is not such an issue. Neither are countless other arguments over what boils down, at then end of the day, to questions of taste and symbolism. The fact people allow themselves to continually argue over such irresolvable and subjective issues is a serious obstacle to anything like actual competition on matters of policy.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged. 

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Conservatives and Libertarians are fond of saying that Liberals put too much faith in the power of “Big Government.” Some of them have even gone so far as to say that Liberals have a religious devotion to the Government, treating it, the claim goes, as a sort of omnipotent deity. (This rather libertarian-minded charge, incidentally, dovetails nicely with the Religious branch of the Conservatives’ deeply-held belief that Liberals are godless, hedonistic decadents.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I myself was once a libertarian, and I will confess that perhaps there is some truth to the claim that liberals believe overmuch in the power of government, though surely the idea that they see Government as God is rather hyperbolic. But that’s an issue for a different post.

For now, I wish to examine rather the conservatives’ view of government. For, if liberals overestimate the government’s power to good, I think the conservatives overestimate its power to do ill, or at least have a misguided view of what a government behaving badly might look like.

Conservatives spend entirely too much time nowadays harping on the theme of alleged tyranny by the U.S. government. It’s a dramatic thing to say, of course, and is surely likely to arouse people’s interest in small-government philosophy. And furthermore, it is certainly a good idea to be constantly vigilant for signs of tyranny. Did not all the tyrannical dictators of history arise because not enough people were wise enough to be on the lookout for the first hints of their plans?

It is my opinion that tyranny, dictatorship, Stalin-esque police states, etc., are the more terrible but (fortunately) far less common type of government failure. The problems the average, law-abiding U.S. citizen is likely to run across when dealing with the government stem not from dictatorial brutality, but instead from the dull inefficiency of a massive bureaucracy.

Now, I do understand why, say, the Tea Party crowd feels a need to talk more about tyranny and less about bureaucracy. Tyrannies are fun to rebel against, bureaucracies are boring. More importantly, the monstrous atrocities committed by tyrants litter the pages of World History, whereas the comparatively banal problems of bureaucracies are the stuff of dull Economics textbooks.

So, perhaps it is inevitable that Tea Party propaganda (to use the word in its neutral, Bernaysian sense) will always rely on the rather dramatic idea of the current Government engaging in Tyrannical and Authoritarian behavior. For propaganda, like humor, relies on exaggeration to make its point.

Nevertheless, I feel it is dangerous–indeed, potentially ruinous to the libertarian streak in the Tea Party–to continually argue against governmental brutality that, while no doubt a thing to be avoided and guarded against, is far less often a problem for the average citizen than is the near omnipresence of inefficient and incapable governmental red-tape.

Bureaucracy is a far less interesting thing to oppose; and is far harder to solve, but I believe that it is the true problem with “Big Government”.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged.

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“Modern liberal intellectuals have had a notoriously difficult time coming up with a decent account of patriotism even when they have felt it…. they have proclaimed their allegiance to a hypothetical, pure country that is coming into being rather than to the one they inhabit.”–Richard Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru, “An Exceptional Debate”.

Comes the obvious response: “Conservatives proclaim their allegiance to a mythical, pure country they claim formerly existed rather than to the one they inhabit.” This response, both to Conservatives in general and to Lowry and Ponnuru in particular, has been said many times.

Both of these ideas, of course, may correctly be called “Utopianism”; a dangerous mindset. I suspect this is what people mean when they espouse the idea that Republicans and Democrats are really the same, and both are equally dangerous to the average person.

This isn’t quite true. The Democrats (Liberals) are more susceptible to the latest political fads and fashions; the Republicans (Conservatives) are much more likely to be unwilling to change from tradition, even if the traditions are meaningless and unhelpful. Still, one can be forgiven for thinking that the two sides are too preoccupied with creating their perfect Dream-Nations that they neglect to carefully consider what the best policies actually are.

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Many Conservatives are understandably upset over the possibility.

It seems to me that it does make perfect tactical sense: the NRA knows they have the Republicans on their side; it’s the Democrats that they need to make indebted to them.

If Reid makes a deal to do what they want as far as gun legislation is concerned in exchange for an endorsement, then they’re happy. And if he loses, at least he’ll only lose to a pro-gun Republican.