Month: April 2005

Goldilocks Logic

By the logic of modern journalism, in which they are considered to be “getting it right” if both sides of an issue criticize them, we now know that James Dobson is a moderate on gay rights:

Gay rights supporters from around the country, angry at James Dobson’s stance against homosexuality, are expected to converge Sunday and Monday on his Focus on the Family headquarters.

A second demonstration is also set for Sunday by a handful of extreme anti-gay activists from the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan.

Ironically, both groups will be protesting the stand taken by Dobson and his ministry on homosexuality. The gay rights advocacy group Soulforce accuses Dobson of “spreading lies about same-gender families.”

Phelps’ group says Focus officials are headed to hell because the ministry is soft on homosexuality.

One’s too hot, one’s too cold and this one’s juuust right.

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“They’re talking about my burrito”

A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

[…]

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

[…]

Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.

“The kid was sitting there as I’m describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he’s thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re talking about my burrito.'”

Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.

“He said, ‘I think I’m the person they saw,'” Russell said.

The burrito was part of Morrissey’s extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.

“We had to make up a product and it could have been anything. I made up a restaurant that specialized in oddly large burritos,” Morrissey said.

The terrorists have won.

Hat tip to senior blog research assistant, Gloria

Hello-oh? Pope Is Dead

I know that most of you probably read The Howler and don’t need any reminding, but this one is a particularly good observation and I haven’t heard anyone mentioning it. Tim Russert has turned his show into a religious seminar for the last month and a half. Last week really was the final straw. Here’s Sommerby:

THROUGH THE TUBE DARKLY: Refresh us—when exactly did Meet the Press become an openly Catholic program? Last Sunday, for the third time in the last five weeks, Tim Russert devoted his entire show to a religious discussion. Early on, Russert popped this question to Father Thomas Bohlin, U.S. vicar of the conservative Catholic group, Opus Dei:

RUSSERT (4/24/05): Father John McCloskey, who was also an Opus Dei with you, was on this program. He has a Web site where he predicted basically in 2030 that the number of Catholics would go from 60 million to 40 million; almost a smaller and purer church. Is that, do you think, the vision of our pope? [Russert’s emphasis]

No, Russert’s emphasis didn’t make sense, but it was quite pronounced. Moments later, we heard from Joseph Bottum, one of two other guests whose bull-dog conservatism made Bohlin seem like a poodle. Bottum responded to the claim that the Catholic hierarchy needs to consult with Joe Sixpack more often:

BOTTUM: I’m not sure that there’s any solution in all of that… I’m not sure it’s any solution to the problem the church faces addressing the concerns that arise in a democratic experiment like the United States. We have characteristic abuses, as I said, that are going to happen in these places. And the church needs to be to some degree countercultural, to stand against that and to speak out and say, “We can’t kill our babies.”

Did we say conservative? Yes, when Bottum discussed the “characteristic abuses” that occur “in these places,” he was referring to democracies—to “places” like the U.S.!

Question: Were we the only ones who gazed with surprise at Sunday’s Meet the Press discussion? Who wondered what this odd debate had to do with the American news agenda? Who wondered why we were hearing this on NBC’s one weekly news hour?

SISTER MARY AQUIN O’NEILL: I’m grateful for an opportunity to return to the question of truth. Truth is another name for God and so it cannot be something that we possess. It’s something that we hope to dwell within. The truth is always larger than we are, greater than we are. And it is not something that we can attain by ourselves.

Say what? O’Neill seemed like a very nice person, but were we the only ones wondering why this rumination was occurring on Meet the Press, which was once a well-known news show? In fact, we found ourselves puzzling again and again as the conversation veered into the weeds. For example, why was Father Joseph Fessio, siting in Rome, saying this on a one-time news program?

FESSIO: The point is if Jesus Christ is the bridegroom of the church, if God has sent his son to us as a man to unite himself in a marital act, a nuptial act to his whole people, to make us one flesh and one body with him, there’s something very deep and mysterious about that. It’s what the church has always taught is that, not that men are better than women, not that men should be given more honor than woman, but that men image forth the bridegroom because Christ is essentially someone who’s married to us, and therefore you can’t have a woman who gives that iconic image of Christ who’s the bridegroom of the church.

But why exactly is that “the point” on a weekly news program? And why exactly was this a topic for such a weekly show:

O’NEILL: Frederic Herzog wrote many years ago that the two things that distinguish Catholicism are the sacraments and the Blessed Mother, Mary. They are both under siege right now. And the sacraments are in trouble because we don’t have ministers. That’s the question for me. We must find a way to solve that. The people are hungry for the sacraments, and without the sacraments, we don’t have the church.

That’s a perfectly fine conversation—but what was NBC News presenting it? O’Neill continued, but what was the connection between her rumination and the traditional Meet the Press?

O’NEILL: I believe that one of the most important things for this church now is to really act on Christici Fidelis Laici, where we were told there’s a complementarity between the laity and the ordained. Complementarity means one cannot trump the other. And so, in all the questions that the church faces, the lay-people and their experience and their insights have to have an equal place at the table with those who are ordained.

Of course, you know how these news shows can be. Once one guest opines about Christici Fidelis Laici, everyone has to spout off:

BOHLIN: I think there’s another way of looking at this whole issue, which is the way that John Paul II has looked at it, coming out of Christici Fidelis Laici, the great document on the lay-people in the church, which is that, really, talking about priests, bishops, Catholic professionals, is talking about an infinitesimal portion of what the church is, and really, the forefront of the battle of the church is waged by every baptized person. And that’s what’s has to be—that’s the battle. That’s where the battle is, where those people are.

For ourselves, we don’t have a view on this great document. Meanwhile, why would the Meet the Press audience have a dog in the following hunt?

RUSSERT: But if you’re a sacramental church, you need priests to administer the sacraments. And if there’s a shortage of priests, what do you do?

Why can’t “our pope” just figure it out, then tell us what we should do in “these places?” In the meantime, why couldn’t Russert spend a few minutes on the actual news, which might affect the actual American people, the people who live in such lands?

But enough of the negative! In the good news department, the very ’umble Parson Meacham was there, preaching the gospel according to Newsweek:

MEACHAM: If you are a person of faith, particularly in the United States, you live in hope. You live in the hope that one day there will be a God who will wipe away all tears from your eyes and there’ll be no more pain, an image from Revelation that’s drawn from Isaiah. And if people of faith are to play a role in the public square, they must, I believe—a humble layman’s opinion—they must practice humility and be—understand that the peace of God does passeth all understanding and that no one has, I believe, a monopoly on truth.

Of course, this ’umble layman is always inspiring. Just consider this earlier bite, where he ’umbly impressed with his detailed knowledge of every known item of scripture:

MEACHAM: You know, in the words of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, we are all seeking the means of grace and the hope of glory, and the road by which we—the road we take to attempt to do that can be different and obviously have been throughout history. I would draw a distinction between the teachings of the church and ultimately the broader force of Christianity. There is a sense, I think, of—as God said to Job in the Old Testament in the longest sustained monologue from the Lord in the Bible, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” So he should not be presuming to act as though we know everything and that we understand all truth.

In fact, St. Paul said, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. Now, I am known in part, soon I will be known in full.” So we are all on a journey. St. Augustine defined this as the soul’s journey back to God. And my sense is, the more that Benedict XVI can speak in the spirit of the past week as opposed to the past generation, he will become a force for at least an ecumenical spirit if not reconciliation.

Let’s face it—Meacham really isn’t the man to be talking about “longest sustained monologues.” Or, as we normally paraphrase Meacham, Blah blah blah blah harrumph zzzzzzz.

Meachum is, of course, the dunce who wrote:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

Hookay.

I was rather stunned by Russert’s show this past week-end. It was, after all, Justice Sunday, a “religious” event that was actually newsworthy. Russert spent the hour talking Catholic theology instead. And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t just spent five long weeks with wall to wall religion on all the networks covering every possible issue that could be of interest to anyone who hadn’t actually taken vows — which I’m expecting to see Little Russ do any day now. That priest shortage is a big problem. His pope needs him.

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Storytelling

Matt Yglesias over on TAPPED makes a good point about the new parental notification law. It pretty much clears up any remaining notion that repealing Roe vs Wade will solve the abortion issue once and for all so we can put all that unpleasantness aside as various progressive states will do as their constituents require and everybody will live happily ever after.

Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They’re not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they’re happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws.

That is correct. I don’t know how long it’s going to take Democrats to understand that those who vote one way or the other on that issue alone cannot be finessed. We can try to sound sympathetic to the “ick” factor and whittle away at the rights of women over time until there is only the most bare right to abortion if the woman’s life is threatened and it won’t make a difference to those who believe it is a fundamental issue of morality. We have to fight this one on the merits.

This reminds me of an interesting article by Paul Rogat Loeb in USA Today from a while back in which he writes that one of our problems with abortion is that we have not told personal stories:

Even if you’ve heard enough about Terri Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why President Bush’s political grandstanding in her case backfired. More than 70% of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration’s disregard for local control, the rule of law and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.

Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For 20 years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace. You’d think this belief — that the most difficult decisions must be our own — would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn’t. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.

The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell, and those we keep hidden. Many families have wrestled with end-of-life choices. But they’re brought on by the illness and aging of loved ones, not by our own actions. No one judges us for having a sick parent as they might for our sexuality. So we’re likely to talk in public about such choices.

But most women don’t publicly discuss their abortions. Although a third of all U.S. women have abortions by age 45, they’re more likely to view the dilemma as a product of their own failures — to use adequate birth control or to have the financial or emotional resources to afford another child. They’re more likely to feel shame.

When the movement to legalize abortion began, advocates talked about the human costs of prohibition. They told the complex stories of why women would choose to value their own lives, choices and possibilities over the potential life of the fetus. They framed abortion as an act of compassion. We see this in the recent film, Vera Drake. Its working-class protagonist in postwar England views her actions “helping young girls in trouble” as part of the same ethic of caring as looking after her aged mother. Pro-choice activists eventually told their stories powerfully enough to convince America that its abortion policies had to change.

Since Roe, these voices have been neutralized by those speaking for the humanity of the fetus. Some oppose abortion from compassion and conviction. The motive of others, who also campaign against sex education, access to birth control and financial support for poor families, seems more like punitive vindictiveness. As the stories of the women involved faded, the reasons why women have always made this difficult choice, and will keep doing so, got told far less often.

Schiavo was a soap opera that everyone could understand in narrative terms. And most people underestood that it was a complicated story in which all of the characters were drawn in various shades of heroism, love, selfishness and grief. The discussions around the Easter table in many homes, I suspect, were characterized with sighs and stories of “remember your Aunt Millie’s first husband Bill back in Baltimore? She had to pull the plug and her son wasn’t happy about it at all” kind of dialog. “Morality” was probably not the way in which this topic was overtly discussed because the morality of the issue was so complicated.

Abortion, I think, has always been difficult to talk about because it had to do with sex — and therefore, in some people’s minds, sin. But I do remember back in the day that one of the things that made abortion finally come out of the closet was the willingness of people to talk about the issue. The stories were of the horrors of the back alley abortions they endured and the complexity of circumstances that led them there. For instance, here’s just one example from Gloria Feldt’s book “Behind Every Choice is A Story” of a complicated situation and the horrible way the women was forced to deal with it:

In 1970 I had a back-street abortion. I had a young daughter of 18 months at home and was separated from an abusive husband. When I found out I was pregnant with another child right after finally having the courage to leave an abusive man, I cried and cried. This was before abortion was legal. I told a close friend who said she knew of a doctor who performed these abortions.

I went to his clinic, which was dirty and sleazy underneath an underpass in Metairie, Louisiana. I was treated as a criminal and so were all the other women in the room. You had to give $150 in cash before they would even speak to you. I was led to a back room where there was no caring or anesthetic to be found. It was very painful and I threw up immediately and kept throwing up for over an hour after the procedure. My girlfriend who went with me was worried as I did not come out right away as others had. She inquired about me and was led to the back room where she saw that I was in pain and throwing up. She held my hand and got a washcloth to wash my face and help me. She asked the nurse if there wasn’t something wrong and she replied “this is how some of them get.” My girlfriend was horrified at the coldness and uncaring atmosphere of the place. We left sometime after and she drove me home and called a friend who was an intern at the time. He came to the house and prescribed some antibiotics and pain medication. He was very kind.

This ABC News poll says that 81% of the public believe that abortion should be available to rape and incest victims. That is not an absolutist “culture of life” position. However, 57% of the public believe that abortion should be illegal if the reason is to end an unwanted pregnancy. The question, of course, is what does “unwanted” mean and who decides? If you were to tell that personal story, a woman with a toddler already and an abusive husband she is trying desperately to leave, would 57% agree that this particular unwanted pregnancy should be dealt with in that horrible back alley situation? Should she have been forced to have this child under those circumstances? I doubt it.

Certainly, a fair number would say “tough” — that women should have to carry the preganacy to term and give it up for adoption. But suppose that meant that the abusive father would have the right to take full custody? And, after all, how easy is it to give the sister or brother of your two year old up for adoption? And what about money or health care or legal fees? People don’t want to think about the practical, financial aspects of having a child under stressful stituation, but it is likely to be a primary concern of the person who is going to have to pay the price. I know that in the discussions I had about the Schiavo case, the issue of cost was somthing that came up in every single conversation. Who pays and where will the money come from are things that real people talk about when they deal with these issues.

I understand the impulse of those who say “I’m not sorry” as a way of expressing their right to dominion over their own bodies. As a knee jerk civil libertarian, I am very sympathetic to a straight forward expression of individual rights. But from a political point of view, it makes far more sense to present this issue as one of complicated morality which individuals see differently in different circumstances and which politicians are much too craven and self-interested to intervene.

There are probably cases in which large numbers of people would see abortion as repugnant on some level. But there are many, many cases that would evoke the dinner table conversations that happened around the Schivo case if people knew the stories. 16 year old girls who made mistakes and 34 year old struggling mothers of two whose birth control failed and women who have no money and low paying jobs and medical students with a mountain of debt and a year to go. These stories may or may not meet every single person’s criteria of what constitutes a “good reason” for having an abortion. But every single one of those women might very well decide that the circumstances are so dire for them that they will take their chances with a back alley abortion if a legal one is unavailable. That is the stark, dramatic choice that this country faces in this debate. And as Matt says, don’t count on being able to just drive to California or Canada (even if you can come up with the money) because repealing Roe vs Wade will not be the end of it. They will not stop until it is outlawed nationally.

It is important to introduce back into the dialog the fact that this is not an abstract moral issue, but a multi-dimensional, intensely human dilemma. When people understand things in those terms they are far more likely to want the government to step back than step in. It seems they know instinctively that the blunt instrument of government in the hands of moral absolutists is a bad idea.

Update: And yes, it would have been very helpful if people knew the horrible situations in which some of these young girls affected by the new parental notification laws find themselves. Parental notification laws do not hurt the healthy familites that just want to help their girls make a good decision. Those kinds of families can deal with complexity and have probably built up a lot of trust over the years. These laws hurt the girls whose families are cruel, violent and authoritarian. Many adult women have had their lives ruined because they were forced to bear the burden of their parents’ obsessive religious or political zealotry.

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Duped

Ezra notices this Andrew Sullivan post and argues with Sully’s complaint that Democrats just love raising taxes for its own sake. He makes the observation that Democrats don’t really care how we raise the money, we are interested in how it’s spent. He contrasts that with the Republicans for whom cutting taxes is a virtue, no matter how much is being spent — leading to George W. Bush. (I’m pretty sure that Democrats prefer to raise money from filthy rich plutocrats who should be patriotic enough not to begrudge the country that gave them everything a little piece of the action, but maybe I’m wrong on that.) In any case, it’s true that Democrats see taxation as a tool that must be used to ensure a stable and prosperous society, while Republicans see it as evil in itself — or more precisely, they like to market it as evil in itself while they spend like Paris Hilton.

I have noticed this new singular reliance on the tax and spend canard among Republicans who are appalled at the current warm embrace of bigoted theocrats and/or inchoate, messianic global adventuring. It seems to be the last GOP identifier these people have and they are rather desperately clinging to it.

Sullivan says in this unusually (for him) confused article in TNR:

Retreating to the Democrats is not an option. Small government conservatives are even less powerful within the opposition’s base than in the GOP’s. Bill Clinton’s small-c conservatism was made possible only by what now looks like a blessed interaction with a Republican Congress. The only pragmatic option is to persuade those who run the Republican Party that religious zeal is a highly unstable base for conservative politics: It is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of the very mechanisms that keep freedom alive.

Good luck with that.

All that remains of Sullivan’s Republicanism is a knee jerk conviction that Democrats love taxes and big government for its own sake. But the truth is that most of the time Democrats are forced to raise taxes to fix the messes that Republicans have left us in. For decades we’ve been bailing out these reckless bastards. And when we have the opportunity, we like to put some brakes on their future rash and irresponsible economic performance by creating some social insurance so that average Americans don’t get ruined every time these assholes take power. Ezra is right; we don’t believe in “government” and “taxes” as some sort of values in themselves. They are the necessary tools to mitigate the excesses of the market — and most often these excesses were exacerbated and enabled by Republican governments in the name of individual economic freedom. We just don’t think that freedom from taxes trumps the gritty reality of being well and truly economicaly fucked by Republican policies. I guess that’s just the difference between us.

Yes, we would like to roll back tax-cuts on the rich because somebody has to pay for all this and they are the ones with all the money. To ask that they pay a higher percentage of their already huge incomes is simply not an outrageous request — particularly since they are mostly GOP cronies who financed and benefitted from raping the treasury in the first place. We do not believe that rich people are morally superior because the “market” rewards “productivity” with wealth, so they must be more productive and, therefore, more important to a successful economy. (Paris Hilton creates jobs, but I don’t think the kind of “jobs” she creates are what we have in mind here.) We believe that the backbone of the economy is a thriving middle class and we believe that the government has to offer some support to make that happen.

Sadly, Democrats are undoubtedly going to have to spend a generation cleaning up the horrible mess the Republicans are creating right now. This is why it’s so important that we preserve the social safety net and enhace it in the areas of health and job retraining. People are going to need it. They always need it after the Republicans come along and wreak havoc on the economy.

“Small government” whatever that really means, is a chimera. Nobody actually does it. The way you tell the difference is that the Democrats pay their way honestly and then clean up after the Republicans once they’ve spent the country into oblivion. Who are the grown-ups again?

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Editor, Jeff Gannon

This sounds pretty funny, to be sure. But I wouldn’t laugh too hard. Where’s the money for this little venture coming from?

Link fixed

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Check It Out Now

I’d just like to make a plug for the advertiser over to your left — BagNewsNotes. I happen to love the ever-changing news photos when I see them on other blogs and I really like them here. But you should click on them and take a look at the site itself. It’s an unusual look at the way our politics and culture are seen by people in this country — or, at least, should be.

(And, hey, if anybody feels like complaining that I’m endorsing one of my own advertisers, take it to Paul Harvey.)

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Born To Rule

Billmon has written a wonderful review of Shadia Drury’s book, Leo Strauss and the American Right which I urge everyone to read. I was reminded of a conversation I had with my older brother (the smart one in the family) about fifteen years ago. We were listening to Newt Gingrich smarmily intone about God and family values on CSPAN and my brother turned to me and said, “They want to repeal the enlightenment.” I thought, as I have often thought in my life, that my brother was full of shit. And as has often been the case, I was wrong. When the neos really started to flex their muscles back in the late 90’s it was clear that they were, shockingly, hostile to the enlightenment. I had many an argument with libertarians(which I have since abandoned for lack of hours in the day and cells in the brain) trying to tell them that the modern Republicans think John Stuart Mill was a dangerous radical and that the American constitution is a piece of toilet paper.

I would only add a couple of thoughts to Billmon’s extremely interesting post. The first is that I think one of the untold stories with the neocons is how they have put post-modern techniques in service of pre-modern ideology — and how that may undo them. That is to say that while they fully believe in their own inate superiority, they have quite masterfully used modern marketing and business techniques to sell the exact opposite concept to the public — that everyone is master of their own destiny. As Billmon puts it in his piece, they believe “the people just need their opium” and they decided that the opium of the modern era was an illusion of freedom. At the same time they introduced the idea that we need more traditional values and that we should have no taxes but high spending, culture of life and culture of war, and a myriad of impossible to reconcile ideas. (It’s possible that they originally thought to supplant opium with confusion.)

The problem is that when you have consciously created several competing discourses out there in the ether, it becomes quite difficult to control them. The concept of the winner writes the history may be true — but it’s damned hard to do it in real time. It’s just not a simple as it used to be to round up the rubes and tell them what they believe. And I don’t think this Elmer Gantry Salvation Show is going to fix it. They are part of the entertainment industrial complex with an agenda all their own.

Billmon also says:

One of the Straussians’ most important innovations has been to reconcile their brand of elite conservatism with Southern fried demagogic populism ala Huey Long and George Wallace. That’s a pretty radical concession for a movement with its mind (or at least its heart) planted firmly in the fifth century BC. But it’s solved the traditional dilemma of old-style conservatives in America: How to win power in a society that has no landed gentry, no nobility, no established church – none of Europe’s archaic feudal institutions and loyalties.

The rationale – or rationalization – for the populist ploy is that the common folk are a hell of a lot less liberal (again, using the Enlightenment definition of the word) than what the Straussians like to call America’s “parchment regime” – that is, the ideas and principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The masses want their opium, in other words, and with the right guidance, will happily sweep away the liberal elites who have been denying it to them.

This makes quite a bit of sense in another way as well. There actually is an echo of feudalism in America, isn’t there? It’s in the Lost Cause confederacy. In that sense, there is a lot more in common between the Straussians and the southern demagogues than might be readily apparent. Just as the feudal lords and the church could be counted upon to keep the masses in line, the right wing decendents of the old confederacy can be counted upon to also answer smartly to their higher authority and serve their leige lord.

As I mentioned, however, the southern church is going to cause some problems. Not because it doesn’t agree that they and their allies are preturnaturally gifted with the ability to govern the masses as they see fit — but because they are not truly organized around a hierarchy. The religious right is a bunch of loosely affiliated entrepreneurial businesses, not a top down corporation. They are quite nicely sharing the overlord duties right now, but I do not expect that human nature has been repealed. With power will come competition among them. In fact, it may end up being a world wide wrestling, NASCAR flame out, free-for-all, right in front of God and everybody.

And lest we forget, it was that bullshit that led to the enlightenment in the first place.

The problem for the Straussians and the Southern feudalists, I think, is that both the Po-mo marketing and the religious right fervor are taking on lives of their own. It’s getting away from them. And I think it is because neither modern media with its diffusion and reliance on sensation and spectacle, or evangelical religion with its newfound populist insistence that it actually knows better than the party mandarins, are controllable in the long run. These are not entirely manageable or malleable cultural instruments the way that feudal institutions were. I’m sure the right would like nothing more than to institute these feudal institutions in the US — it’s clear that William F Buckley and his confederate bretheren veritably yearn for it. But America is not a very good cultural fit for these ideas. Mega Churches are circus tents, not cathedrals. And we fought a very bloody war already, essentially over the idea that the Southern aristocrat knew what was best for everyone.

I don’t believe that there is any putting the enlightenment genie back in the bottle. But I do believe that that is what they are trying to do and the result is going to be a mess beyond our imagining — as Billmon says “insane, potentially catastropic.”

My smart brother, by the way, emigrated for good back in 1996.

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They’re Heee-ar

Kevin Drum, citing a very interesting article in Dissent by Michael Walzer, says:

In the end, then, we have a stalemate. The left in America has limited energy because its goals are fairly modest and its story is disjointed. The right has energy and vision to spare but its goals aren’t widely supported. Someone — or something — is likely to come along in the near future and smash this stalemate, but what? Or who?

It’s already happening. See post below:

Read Kevin’s entire post for context and read the Dissent article as well. Very interesting stuff.

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Slow Boil

I didn’t have a lot to say about The Pope Show because I like to show respect for other people’s beliefs and when a pope dies it’s a very big deal to catholics. (And judging by the wall to wall TV coverage, it was a big deal to many other people as well.) I also haven’t said much about the new Pope because while I know that he has had an influence on politics in this country, I haven’t felt that it was primarily my business to weigh in on religious dogma that I don’t share.

But on this, I call bullshit:

A key part of the Republican strategy is to claim that it is hatred of religion that has moved the Democrats to oppose these judicial nominees. “Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith,” a TV program produced by evangelical leaders, was simulcast Sunday via the Internet, just as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was preparing to call for a vote on the anti-filibuster measure. Evangelical Protestants have led the way in portraying Democrats as enemies of God, but the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has chimed in on the issue of judicial nominees in a mass mailing to parishioners timed to yield constituent letters just as the matter comes to a vote.

I thought it was wrong during the campaign for the church to take sides as it did, particularly after ruling that priests were not allowed to be involved in politics. (Apparently, this was only because the priests involved at the time happened to be liberals.) But it was a political campaign and individual catholics were ultimately going to have to decide for themselves what their priorities were. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t completely out of bounds.

This, however, is something else entirely. This is the church weighing in on an obscure senate rule that does not have anything overtly to do with religion or even morality. It’s a partisan political power play. It’s not that I don’t realize that all these conservative evangelizal churches are doing the same thing. But the Catholic church is an international, political body as well as a religious institution that has up to now been quite cautious about injecting itself into American power politics. It’s one thing to have that crank Donohoe preaching on the same pulpit as James Dobson; it’s quite another for the Bishops of the US Catholic Church — presumably under the direction of Pope Benedict — to get involved.

The author mentions Fritz Stern, who I wrote about a while back, and his views on if “it could happen here.” He had some very important insights into how religion plays into this. I took an unusual amount of flack for posting it (alongside the TIME cover with Dobson et al.) It’s worth repeating now, I think:

…the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.

We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?

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