Heartache With Hard Work

So Bernie Sanders is talking about not voting for the newest compromise. A few thoughts.

1. As far as I can tell, he’s saying he’s on the face about VOTING for the bill, but has not said anything about his willingness to vote for cloture. If he plans on being in the 60, but voting against the bill itself, I think that’s more than reasonable.

2. However, if he means he’s not willing to vote for cloture, that changes things. To some extent, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt – that this is a negotiating tactic and that in private conversations he’s making it clear to people that when the rubber meets the road, he’s not going to blow this whole thing up.

3. But IF that’s not the case, then as much as I agree with him on the merits, he’s delving into the same kind of irresponsibility that has made the Nelson, Bayh, Lieberman, Snowe, et al party crew such a barrel of fun this year. Regardless of what he thinks ought to happen in an ideal world, he has to know that if health care goes down in the next few months, we’re not getting another shot at it for a decade at least. And he also has to know (contra a disturbingly large percentage of the bloggerati) that this health care bill is still a MASSIVE improvement over the status quo.

It’s a delicate balance – and Sanders is a genuine guy, so I think he understands that. He certainly isn’t pulling any of the stuff we’ve been getting from Lieberman. That said, the dynamic that folks on the left need to keep in mind is that the person who wins a game of chicken is usually the person with less to lose.

Let’s say health care reform has 50-55 guaranteed votes. The battle is convincing the far left (Sanders, Burris apparently) that it’s worth supporting whle also getting some of the people on the right. Sanders’ statement is a shot off the bow, a reminder that he can bolt just as much as Nelson or Lieberman can.

The difference is that Nelson and Lieberman don’t appear to care particularly about a bill passing. They know that they can’t up and say it – because even the most conservative Democrats are going to get raked over the coals if they come out swinging against health care – but if they can plausibly spin it as the fault of the ‘crazy left’ they’ll be happy.

That doesn’t mean there’s no space for Sanders to express his displeasure – and to keep trying to nudge things in positive directions. I just hope that IS what he’s trying to do.

With more time, I’ve only grown to appreciate the punk masterpiece Oh! Calcutta! from Chicago’s Lawrence Arms more and more. Which means I’ve been seriously anticipating their follow-up.

Unfortunately, their latest release is only an EP – the unfortunately named Buttsweat and Tears. Fortunately, it picks up where the last album left off – raucous guitars, vocals that balance right on the edge between harsh and beautiful, and enough energy to power a minor city. It’s also a bit more introspective, demonstrating their continual progress as not just a great band but also as fairly sophisticated storytellers and painters of portraits.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Calcutta. There’s certainly nothing that comes remotely close to “Are You There Margaret? It’s Me God” or “Great Lakes/Great Escapes” and they’re guitars sometimes touch a little bit too closely on the ‘classic rock’ sound – which distracts from what they do well. Less specifically, it all also sounds just a little bit less dynamic; this is still music to put you back on your heels but it doesn’t quite hit as hard as their best work.

Still, it’s a welcome release from one of my favorite bands these days. Each one of the five tracks has a lot to offer. As usual, they sound their best when they sing together: Brendan Kelly sounds like the gravel road cutting through Chris McCaughan’s dusty plains. Neither one of them has a particularly big vocal range, but together they cover a pretty wide space – and the result is something marvelous.

Them Angels Been Talkin’ – The Lawrence Arms

I dug some of the tracks from the short-lived band Street Smart Cyclist so I was excited to hear that some of the members of that band have formed Snowing, and put out a debut EP Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit, available for free here.

This is lo-fi, 90s-style emo-punk at its best: all shouts, frenetic drumming, and that guitar that makes you feel like you’re getting punched repeatedly underwater. But in the very best of ways.

Sam Rudich – Snowing

All five songs on the EP are great, but I really just cannot stop listening to “Sam Rudich.” It’s just a little bit more tuneful than their other songs, but manages to tread slightly closer to the world of melodies and vocal harmonies without losing any of its ragged luster.

Eric Kleefeld notes this awesome allusion from Michelle Bachmann (crazy-MN) at a Tea Party rally against health care reform, referring to their efforts as “the charge of the light brigade!”

Kleefeld notes something important:

The fun part here is that the Light Brigade lost that famous battle of the Crimean War — they lost it badly, sustaining heavy numbers of deaths and injuries. They are celebrated not for victory, but for their bravery in taking on truly insurmountable odds in a military disaster. It’s hardly the sort of positive example that could truly rally the political faithful to success, is it?

I would go even further. Tennyson celebrated the Light Brigade, seeing the futility of the charge but interpreting it through the lens of a kind of noble bravery.

But the more historically accurate reading is that their bull-headed ‘heroism’ was precisely their problem. They saw glory as its own reward, and were therefore utterly blinded to the absolute pointlessness and stupidity of their charge. It wasn’t bravery in the sense of sacrificing life for a noble purpose. It was a poorly designed and completely meaningless sacrifice. In short, it was a stupid mistake, not some piece of noble bravery.

And to top off the irony, the villain in the story is the leadership – who ordered their troops into the bloodbath based on their own incompetence, the acceptance of faulty premises, and personal vendettas. And who acquired their leadership role not through any merit, but simply through buying their way into the spot.

To stand in front of a crowd and call them the Charge of the Light Brigade, then, is basically to declare that they are the playthings of your own ridiculous dreams. I’m not sure that’s precisely what Bachmann was going for…

Matt Taibbi wrote a polemical piece a few days ago – describing the Obama administration as being in the pocket of big financial interests. The substance of his criticism is reasonably accurate. 2009 has been a pretty good year for those folks, and the proposed measures to go after them have been relatively toothless.

But…being on the right side of an argument doesn’t make you right. And Taibbi risks treading into the territory of ending up at the right conclusion but doing so in all the wrong ways.

To illustrate, critics have pointed out that, well, he’s asking rather a lot of the administration and doing so in a way that doesn’t seem to admit any chance that they might have a legitimate reason for their decisions. Tim Fernholz has a pretty solid takedown, which documents a ton of facts Taibbi marshals that turn out to be massaged at best, or clearly wrong in a lot of cases. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias point out that the true villain in all this, which Taibbi virtually ignores, is our institutiona structure that makes legislative change hostage to the 60th vote in the Senate.

Robert Farley points out, rightly I think, that a lot of this is beside the point. Taibbi’s piece is deliberately written in a style that is designed to hurl bombs in the area of facts – not necessarily to marshall a set of strong arguments in favor of a reasoned position. That he ends up being more or less right in his broad sketches is really all that is expected.

So the real question is: where do we go after reading this debate? And that’s where Taibbi’s black-or-white approach really starts generating problems. Against these sort of criticisms, like clockwork, comes this response from Taibbi, accusing those who disagree with him of suffering from “Obamania.”

It’s an incredibly frustrating and silly response, and really serves to clarify the actual disagreement here.

Taibbi thinks that the sole purpose of a citizen in a democracy is to advocate for the position you want. If a politician does something else, you rage against the dying of the light. That’s fine as far as it goes. It’s great even. We need to have people who feel that way. They push the boundaries. They help to keep people honest and accountable. Great. So in that sense there’s nothing wrong with Taibbi’s original post. It serves a purpose.

But, there is a different way of thinking about a person’s role. Some folks feel that sense of personal motivation, but are also inclined to ponder the larger question of not just what I want, but what someone who wants what I want should actually be able to GET. That’s where I’m at. It’s not that I don’t hold a lot of desire for things to be radically different – I just have a different sense about how worthwhile it is for me to value the process by which those things are attempted. I know society doesn’t share my opinions on a lot of things and I think it’s mostly my burden to figure out what I can actually get.

To clarify in broad strokes. Take a person who wants single-payer health care, absolute nuclear disarmament, a massive carbon tax, a huge tax increase on the wealthiest, reproductive freedom for every person in the world, US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, stronger environmental regulations, prison reform, a Supreme Court full of liberal justices, etc.

The extreme version of Taibbi is going to write scathing pieces every day of the week and twice on Sunday about how this administration promised to be something different, but turns out to be more of the same. In short, he’s a Nader voter. The extreme version of me is going to end up unemotionally assessing everything, and will probably end up with nothing because I observe and analyze a lot, but never get around to simply picking one thing to go after and fighting for it.

Neither of those extreme versions is particularly useful. But a world filled with people that trend to both sides–and who end up supporting each other–is a world that might actually get things done.

Anyways, back to the “Obamania” thing. The point here is that things like the ‘cult of personality’ arguments Taibbi tosses around completely eviscerate the delicate balance. His post demands that everyone in the world must behave like him in order to have the credibility to speak on these issues. It implies there is only one Correct kind of criticism–the form that he engages in. One that accepts no admission of practical difficulties, which insists until the very end a purity of will. Which says that the only proper relationship between citizen and leader is the issuance of demands.

It’s petty and it’s stupid, and it’s a destructive meta-theorization about the motives of people who provide an important backbone for any actual change. It’s not enough to just WANT something; you need to be able to understand that the world is full of people who don’t want it to happen with whom you have to deal. You can demand a purity of criticism and get nothing, or you can recognize that your perfect idea is going to get put through the wringer of political compromise and the result is fair more likely to turn out better for you if you can play ball.

When you alienate those who agree with you about the broad strokes, you’re going to stand very, very little chance of getting what you want in the details.

I know it’s frustrating that the debates over things like health care and financial reform involve the most conservative elements of the party getting tons of concessions and the left having to abandon things left and right. But you can’t lose track of the fact that the bill that will eventually pass is a major loss of the other side. The fact that it’s even up for debate is a MASSIVE concession to our side. The reason we have to hold our nose and vote for the bill that comes out of this process is that we CARE about getting the major elements – while the people who are demanding concessions all over the place would be perfectly willing to let it die.

We have a lot to lose and they don’t. If all you can do is hurl invective, you’re just not going to get very far in the face of that. In particular, accusing people of falling victim to “Obamania” isn’t going to help your case.

Disappearing – Super Deluxe

Ezra Klein has a post today calling a spade a spade:

At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

This, of course, raised a firestorm. Charles Lane, editor at the Washington Post, called it “venomous,” “disgusting,” and an “outrageous smear.”

The response from a lot of folks on the left can be exemplified by Matt Yglesias here:

Ezra Klein made this observation early today, earning him a baffling response from Washington Post editor Charles Lane. Lane is basically pissing his pants at the prospect of pointing out that Lieberman’s actions have consequences, deploying hugely inappropriate and massively uncollegial language. He accuses Ezra of perpetrating a “vile smear” and of having lost his mind. But one thing Lane doesn’t do over the course of his 500 word post is point out any errors in Ezra’s item.
This coming from a guy who, as best I can tell, has never raised a peep of objection to George Will and Charles Krauthammer regularly using the pages of The Washington Post to mislead the audience about crucial matters of public policy.
As I said in my Daily Beast column on Alan Grayson, the stark moralistic language Rep Grayson uses makes people very uncomfortable. Lieberman’s people are squirming at the accusation that he bought his Medicare concessions by threatening to kill people. Lame Washington Post editors are squealing. There’s a reason: Stark moralistic language works.

I find this “but Krauthammer is a jackass” retort to be worse than pointless. Who cares? It’s a non-sequiter and only makes the rest of the argument look petty.

I’m also pretty sympathetic to Lane’s general argument, which is that we tend to look for ulterior motives far too often – and refuse to acknowledge that there can be such a thing as differences of opinion. I’ve said repeatedly that one of things I like about Obama is his apparent belief that it’s important to debate with people in the assumption that they are actually arguing in good faith.

I’ve also said that I don’t really like the Grayson approach, not because I’m against “stark, moralistic language” as such, but because I think that lapsing into that sort of approach far too easily translates into imputing bad motives on those with whom you disagree. When you’re basic method of communciation is accusations that your opponents want to hurt people, it gets very difficult to come back out into the world where people may be wrong, but still reasonable.

That said, Lane’s criticism is misguided because there is incredibly strong evidence that Lieberman isn’t bargaining in good faith. That’s the point of all this criticism.

When you have a difference of opinion based on the details of a complicated situation, or a different set of value priorities, you’re going to end up with different judgments about the importance of policies. That’s fine. Democrats can and should emphasize the moral case for health care reform, but it wouldn’t be fair game to say that the Republicans are trying to filibuster because they hate sick people.

The thing with Lieberman is that we have about as stark evidence as we’re ever going to get of someone who clealry has NO interest whatsoever in the actual value that this policy can provide. In short, we can be as clear as we’re ever going to be that he is NOT bargaining in good faith.

He has supported precisely this Medicare buy-in previously, and voted for something very similar to it in the 2003 Medicare bill. And not just then, but Greg Sargent gets us the video of Lieberman proposing precisely this deal as a compromise just THREE MONTHS AGO. He makes nonsense arguments against things and when those are pointed out, he simply moves on to different nonsense. He’s invited into meetings to figure out a compromise and refuses to go. Then he signals to Reid and co. that he will consider the compromise they put together, waits for it to get resolved, and then comes out against it before the CBO even issues its judgment.

That’s what makes him so despicable. He has no policy objectives to this – and tons of his prior behavior made it clear that he sees the extraordinary value in getting health care reform done – but is willing to block it out of spite. That’s horrendous, irresponsible, and the sort of behavior that should get you impeached.

Anyways, it’s always important to get to the bright side. And here, the bright side is that in spite of all the Lieberman shenanigans there ARE actually some people in Congress who have been working on this in good faith: the Republican Senators from Maine. No matter how much Lieberman wants to keep jerking people around on this, there’s always a fallback available in the Finance Committee bill which Snowe (and possibly Collins) will get on board with. In which case, we won’t need Joe and he can go sit on the the other side of the aisle with his BFFs there.

All of which means that we’re going to get a very good health care bill – even though it’s going to be a lot worse than it COULD have been. It’s probably going to pass in the Senate within a couple weeks, and there’s a small chance we could have legislation ready for the president’s signature by the first couple weeks of next year. And for all the twists and turns and frustrations and everything else…that’s a big deal.

Me, December 8:

I don’t want to assign good motivations to a jerk like Lieberman if they’re not warranted, but is there even the smallest chance that his machinations are designed to allow him to have his cake and eat it too? He gets to infuriate the left – who have somewhat strangely decided that the public option is the only thing that matters in the health care bill – but potentially support a ‘compromise’ that does as much for the actual goals of health care reform as anything else that’s on the table.

The news today:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) formally notified Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that he would filibuster the health care reform bill if it includes a Medicare “buy-in” provision, Roll Call reports.
“Lieberman’s position came as a surprise to Reid, considering the self-described Independent Democrat was among the first people Reid spoke to about the Medicare provision when it was discussed by a Democratic group of centrists and liberals attempting to craft a compromise that could secure the votes of all 60 Members of the Democratic Conference. At the time, Lieberman ‘voiced support’ for the plan, according to a Senate Democratic leadership aide.”

Jesus H. Christ in a Nissan Altima.

I give up trying to find a silver lining in this guy. He’s the worst.

God – John Lennon

For someone with politics that I share, Amanda Marcotte manages to write a lot of things that infuriate me. One example:

But the debate between religious people and atheists exists on a plane beyond whether or not one should be allowed to believe what you want (which most people agree, outside of religious fundamentalists). Whether or not there is a god is not a matter of personal preference or inherent tendencies. It’s a truth claim. It’s less like being gay or straight, and more like claiming that you believe that gravity works or that E=MC2. If there is a god, there is one and atheists are wrong. If there’s not, atheists are right. And the anger about how ungentle atheists are comes from this inescapable conclusion, or at least the unwillingness of some atheists to say, “Well, even if there isn’t a god, your wishing makes it true for you.” And that appears to be Prothero’s argument—the best atheists are the ones who pretend that the truth claims of religion are something they aren’t.

As someone who doesn’t believe in God, and who is working pretty hard to think about how it’s possible to secularize politics, this sort of comment just drives me nuts.

It embodies all the things that atheists purport to hate about religion: the insistence on simple responses to questions that are important precisely because they can’t be answered. It’s the sort of statement that’s true in a sense – but the way in which it’s true renders it completely pointless.

Of course no one is going to be able to offer empirical proof for the existence of God. The wide-eyed breathlessness with which this point is made by a lot of the more evangelist atheists–as if theological scholars over thousands of years hadn’t ever considered it–makes you start to wonder if they have any interest in seeking to understand the subject on which they consider themselves to be experts.

The basic concern of theology is how we it can be that we possess the capacity for making judgments when our empirical existence suggests that we are simply subjective beings. After all, judgment implies a position from which two issues might be considered. If existence is only material–and is found through the realm of experience–then there can be no vantage point capable of issuing authoritative judgments among the various perspectives. There are only individual perspectives.

In order to make a normative statement with objective validity, you need to be able to identify the perspective that exists outside of perspectives. The one perspective which isn’t a subjective opinion but is valid fact. Theology is the field of human thought trying to grapple with this idea.

The argument you hear from the religious side in these sort of debates (“how can there be morality without God?”) is a base representation of a very real problem. The thing is that they’re right–but only in the sense that Marcotte is right in her argument (i.e. – in a question-begging fashion that makes it pointless to try and argue on the terms they set out). It is impossible to have morality without God, if by God we mean that fundamentally super-empirical idea that gives us a means for organizing and relating to an otherwise chaotic universe.

The move made in the 16th-18th centuries was to try and sever the thread between God and value-production. This was in some sense a move forced by history. The religious wars of the Reformation meant that a general acceptance of one particular interpretation of God was not going to function as the universally accepted standard of validation. But it’s also an intellectual problem. A problem of epistemology. How, exactly, can you declare that something has been established? That’s why you get Descartes and his cogito, ergo sum. It’s why you get Kant trying to find a way to establish a priori concepts able to stand where God once did. It’s why you get Hegel thinking about geist.

For all of them, science and and philosophy were inter-connected. After all, even something as simple and clearly ‘provable’ as the statement “X caused Y” depends on a prior determination of what counts as an agent capable of making that judgment. The eventual splitting of philosophy and science shouldn’t obscure that they both come from the same place. And, of course, the problem with both of them is their assumption that once you took God out of your equations, you had left the terrain of theology.

All philosophies are theologies. They all require some sort of foundational premise–one which takes place outside of the empirical realm but which is itself the means by which material facts can be translated into meaningful concepts.

The key point made by atheists is that all theologies are also political. They serve individual interests, and derive their legitimacy from them. One perspective on God wins not because it’s more correct, but because it is capable of declaring itself victorious. Indeed, the question of more or less ‘correct’ is a totally meaningless one when it comes to meta-theology. The whole premise of theological thinking is that it deals with questions that can’t simply be reduced to empirical study.

That’s why I think, more and more, that the rejoinder to “atheism is just a new religion” should be “why do you think that’s a criticism?”

The problem isn’t with theology as such, it’s the narrowly constructed terrain of acceptable concepts of value-production that we’ve allowed within theology.

The failure to understand this produces people like Christopher Hitchens calling religion the cause of horrific violence. Once again, that’s true, but only to the extent that it’s a useless contribution. Of course, religion is the basis for horrific violence. Religion is a concept, a way of recognizing the fundamental tension built into a being capable of thinking of itself as being: how is it that there is an ‘I’ and that there are also ‘not-Is’? When you decide that someone deserves to have war waged on them, you are establishing a religious community (those on your side – a particular concept of ‘I’) and therefore justifying the destruction of those on the other side.

Religion is the means by which that destruction is enabled, but it’s simplistic and silly to say in a declarative sense that religion CAUSED the conflict. Instead, religion is the terrain on which a particular type of violence–they type made possible by the existence of beings who believe themselves to have a Will (as opposed to pure instinct)–takes place.

The practical/political variation on this is: how is it that I am made to suffer, rather than simply feel pain? Pain is inevitable, eternal. It could not be other than it is. Suffering is pain that which we are capable of understanding could have been different. The question ‘why do I feel pain’ is meaningless. You feel it because it’s there. Pain could theoretically be quantified–“I experienced three pain-units when I hit my finger with the hammer.” Suffering can’t. It’s a theological matter, not one subject to empirical answers. Pain is the experience of nerves; suffering is the experience of a self.

So the question is: ‘why do I suffer?’ One answer is simply “because God wills it.” Another one is “because the political order which permits that suffering is just.” Both are theological answers the difference is in where they locate the ineffable, external justification for suffering. A secular approach might say that pain is inevitable, but we may call unjust the suffering that could be prevented.

As usual, John Lennon saw this more clearly than just about anyone: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

The message atheists need to be thinking about is how to convince people that the type of measurement that are in favor of is better than the God-as-Man-in-the-sky versions. But they need to recognize that ‘better’ is (again) a theological question.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that atheism is going to do a lot better when it back off the rigid scientism, stops framing itself as an attack on the whole concept of theology, and focuses on practical statements about how morality and justice and meaningfulness can be achieved in more productive and life-affirming ways. Certainly one part of that is pointing out the empirical problems with literal theology, but only because that forces the debate BACK to theology. It is necessary to make the scientific/empirical case, obviously, but part of that is being able to convince people that there’s something behind the curtain, too.

Which is why I love the Atheist Bus Campaign. And also why I enjoy the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They’re political in a playful–rather than vindictive–way. They reference these sort of debates about the existence of God, but don’t treat it as the whole kit and kaboodle.

Lots of discussion today about Woodrow Wilson and how he got so overrated.

I think it’s pretty simple, actually. Every other president associated with a Major War that was Won By The Right Side is a widely believed to be a great president (Washington, Lincoln, FDR). So people assume that Wilson must also therefore be a great president.

He’s the guy who’s major argument for being in the Hall of Fame is “well, everyone else who reached X milestone is in, so I guess we need to induct him, too.” Even more, the achievements that do distinguish him are precisely the kind of things that are going to get overrated. They look flashy (ooooh, internationalism) but made very little material impact. Finally, his major problems (virulent racism, bad Supreme Court picks) are precisely the sort of thing that popular opinion is likely to ignore.

In short, he’s Lou Brock.

As compared to Andrew Jackson, who’s place among the greats is a lot more similar to Catfish Hunter in the “a goofy nickname and a big personality somehow convinced people that this guy was something special” sense. Although to the best of my knowledge, Catfish Hunter never committed genocide against any indigenous people. So the analogy isn’t perfect.

No time for anything original from me. But here’s some funny lines written by other people about the Conrad-Gregg deficit reduction commission being proposed:

Jonathan Chait:
“Conrad and Gregg seem to think that instituting major reforms in the public interest is rare because the threshold for passing legislation is too low. Thus they’ve designed a process that creates new and higher supermajority requirements, on an issue where getting even 51% to sign on is probably impossible. And if that fails, maybe they’ll conclude the process was too easy. Next time they could also require the commission members to create a cold fusion reactor or retrieve a magical ring from inside a volcano.”

Ezra Klein:
“There needs to be a Conrad-Gregg entitlement commission because bipartisanship has broken down. In response, Conrad and Gregg are setting a higher bar for bipartisanship? It’s like trying to cure the flu by competing in a triathlon.”

Pretty much.

Also, on the subject of felon disenfranchisement, what djw said:
“I’d recommend that anyone who finds this line of thinking persuasive read this old Matt Welch piece. Central to his argument is that, when we take a closer look at the laws, most of us are probably unprosecuted felons. It’s much more helpful to think of the disenfranchisement of felons as the disenfranchisement of a subset of felons–those who live in populations where felonies are agressively policed, and who commit felonies we choose to actually enforce.”

With the added stipulation that is clearly implicit in his post, but really needs to be shouted loudly: the populations which suffer from this policy are overwhelmingly and disproportionately racial minorities. And it’s not exactly a coincidence.