Month: February 2010

Liberty And Freedom For The Right People

by digby

CPAC has for so many years been dominated by war, of both the culture and terrorism variety that it’s quite interesting to see the program this year so devoted to economic and constitutional issues. Of course it’s all couched in “freedom” and “liberty” language, as usual and filled with the typical victimology — somebody’s always trying to take something away from them. But the substance of the program is different, even if the voices are the same.

There’s still a heavy Focus on the Family presence and John Bolton is a features speaker, so those issues aren’t off the table. But there’s a lot more of this sort of thing than I’ve ever seen before:

Saving Freedom from the Tax Collectors
Maryland Ballroom
Josh Barro, Manhattan Institute
Ryan Ellis, Americans for Tax Reform
Pete Sepp, National Taxpayers Union (INVITED)
Dave Weber, Association of Mature American Citizens

Moderator: Lew Uhler, National Tax Limitation Committee

“When All Else Fails: Nullification & State Resistance to Federal Tyranny”
Delaware Ballroom
Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty (1 hour)
Speaker: Dr. Thomas E. Woods
Open to All CPAC Attendees

Liberty Forum
Marshall Southwest Ballroom
Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty (2 hours)
Speakers: Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano
Moderator: Thomas Woods
Open to All CPAC Attendees

In fact, quite a few of the CPAC events this year appears to be sponsored by Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty. Very interesting indeed.

I have to say that this one really cracked me up:

Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Awards
Wilson C
Sponsored by Accuracy in Media (2 hours)
Speakers: Andrew Breitbart and Marc Morano
Hors d’oeuvres and beverages served
Open to all CPAC attendees

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The Rightwing’s Exploitation Of American Liberal Symbols

by tristero

David Barstow’s must read article about the scary people who have co-opted the Boston Tea Party is extremely disturbing. There is much to discuss but what interests me here is a rhetorical tactic that rarely gets noticed, yet is on prominent display in the article.

That these extremists have “co-opted the Boston Tea Party” is part of a deliberate strategy. The right regularly seize upon left, liberal and/or American imagery, symbols, and events, and then twist their meaning for their own sinister ends. And they do this over and over. And we rarely notice, or respond effectively.

Case in point is this picture which accompanies the article, of some white war veterans at a so-called Tea Party gathering:

Many of the younger folks amongst you will make the mistake of thinking that this is merely a crude display of rightwing arch-nationalism. But it is more. The American flag shirt has a history. I’m sure he wasn’t the first – probably flag shirts go back to the beginning of the Republic – but easily the most famous incident in modern history of someone wearing an American flag shirt was this one:

His name was Abbie Hoffman. He’s dead now. You can read about him here. And you can read about what Abbie’s shirt stirred up here.

This transformation of the flag shirt from a funny leftwing provocation into a crude fashion accessory for the extreme right was hardly accidental. In the Times, we encounter another attempt to exploit American left and/or liberal symbols, this time to forestall the charge of racism:

Gazing out at his overwhelmingly white audience, Mr. Mack felt the need to say, “This meeting is not racist.” Nor, he said, was it a call to insurrection. What is needed, he said, is “a whole army of sheriffs” marching on Washington to deliver an unambiguous warning: “Any violation of the Constitution we will consider a criminal offense.”

The crowd roared.

Mr. Mack shared his vision of the ideal sheriff. The setting was Montgomery, Ala., on the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger. Imagine the local sheriff, he said, rather than arresting Ms. Parks, escorting her home, stopping to buy her a meal at an all-white diner.

This is painful to read, because it is such total bullshit. Mr. Mack knows, and his audience knows, that neither he nor they could care less about Rosa Parks’ civil rights – and that is being kind. But the purpose of the bullshit is not to convince anyone. Rather, it does two things. First, it aligns the extreme right with a (now) highly-respected, indeed well-loved, representation of American Freedom. Second, it makes it harder for liberals to use Rosa Parks as a shorthand for the expansion of civil liberties.

Here’s the nasty thing about this tactic: reality matters not a whit. We can look up the history of the forces arrayed against Rosa Parks and learn that many of the same groups, or their forerunners, are involved in the so-called Tea Party. We can point to the irony of Abbie’s flag shirt being worn by people who probably rejoiced when Hoffman died. We can even look up the Boston Tea Party and discern that, at best, the issues involved have little relevance to today and, at worst, the Boston Tea Party was a rather sinister piece of work intended actually to keep taxes on tea high.

None of this matters. What matters is the mythology. These symbols represent America (the shirt), freedom (Rosa Parks), and liberty (Boston Tea Party). And the mythology works extremely well.

How to counter this? Do we engage these extremists, pointing out their distortions of history, thereby risking elevating the status of their myths to “a different point of view?” Do we normals create our own mythologies, justifying our efforts to smooth over the rough edges of our history as service to the “higher truth of a liberal society?” Do we, as Obama did with Reagan, coopt rightwing icons? Do we sidestep the whole notion of mythologies and find some new way to persuade people – and if so, what would that look and sound like?

I have absolutely no idea. But one thing I do know – whatever we’re doing now, it’s not working well enough. Kevin Drum, typically, thinks it’s quite possible that this latest surge in rightwing extremism will fade, especially if the economy improves. What I would give for Kevin’s optimistic personality and his lack of paranoia!

But I see no signs that this will go away. What I see is that the so-called Tea Party movement has enabled hitherto marginalized extremists – the militia crazies, the Birchers, the New World Order freaks – to move much closer to the center of public discourse. Oh, and I see no signs of the economy improving in a way that will impact this movement.

This is very serious stuff.

Primer On The Crazy

by digby

For your reading pleasure Batocchio has put together a very useful primer on American Political Insanity.

It’s getting very hard to keep score these days. This helps. If that doesn’t work, there’s this:

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Crisis Of Governance

by digby

Fareed Zakaria interviewed Paul Volcker yesterday:

ZAKARIA: When you look at this crisis, there are many regulatory problems. There are many issues that the bankers did wrong. There are many issues government regulators did wrong.

But many people argue that the one key issue, the biggest weapon the United States government has to slow down, to tamp down excesses, is to have raised the interest rate.

Do you believe, during this period, if interest rates had been higher, some of this would have been — some of this froth would have subsided?

VOLCKER: Well, I have certain rule that ex-chairmen of the Federal Reserve don’t comment on monetary policy of their successors. I’ll tell you how good monetary policy was 30 years ago, but I don’t want to comment on it now.

But I don’t think there’s any question that the Federal Reserve — and the other regulators, it wasn’t just the Federal Reserve — were not on the top of this housing picture, or they weren’t on top of the regulatory picture. And unfortunately, you know, when this was all going up, where was the SEC? And you ask, where was the Federal Reserve? Where was the comptroller of the currency?

There was a whole attitude, a kind of philosophic attitude that the market would take care of itself. And that became quite ingrained. The complexities, the so-called “financial engineering,” a whole school of thought said you don’t have to worry about a breakdown. These smart mathematicians are taking care of it. And all the risks have been dispersed to the point where they won’t upset anything.

Well, when the screws became loose, we found out a lot of the risks were pretty concentrated.

ZAKARIA: All in AIG, for example… VOLCKER: And AIG was one case.

ZAKARIA: … insuring almost all the risk.

VOLCKER: Part of the problem was that it got so complex, that a lot of the management, you know, couldn’t understand it, and didn’t understand it. But they were kind of reassured that somebody down in the bowels had it under control. But there was just a complexity which made it very opaque.

ZAKARIA: Is it true that you once said that the only financial innovation that you believe has added any real value in recent years is the ATM machine?

VOLCKER: I have said something like that to make the point, yes. And I guess I’ll have to add the ATM machine was a mechanical innovation.

ZAKARIA: Not a financial…

VOLCKER: But I’ll tell you, it is a very useful innovation. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Heavily used, efficient, saves you a lot of money.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you a final question.

What is the crisis you’re worried about now? Because one of the things people talk about is, does the United States still have the credibility to continue borrowing at the quantities we borrow? The people who — you know, the rating agencies are now saying our AAA creditworthiness might be in doubt.

Is it something that we need to worry about? Larry Summers says…

VOLCKER: I hate to give you this answer…

ZAKARIA: … can the world’s greatest power be the world’s greatest borrower?

VOLCKER: I hate to give you this answer, but the crisis I most worry about is the crisis in governance.

ZAKARIA: In government.

VOLCKER: In governance, yes. Have we got the capacity to develop programs, get them enacted and in a constructive way?

And that — it’s not just a political problem. That will underlie your question about the confidence in the United States, and confidence in American leadership.

ZAKARIA: And your basic concern is, can our democratic system make the hard choices that it needs to make…

VOLCKER: Yes. ZAKARIA: … the reform — to push these reforms forward?

VOLCKER: Yes.

True. And I think this is one area in which the punditocracy really gets it wrong.They seem to think this is a result of partisanship. And it’s true that one party is politically feckless and ineffectual and the other is politically reckless and radical and that’s causing gridlock and frustration. At this point it seems to me that it’s likely the second will end up back in charge and that will ease the logjam for obvious reasons. But will that make financial “reform” more likely? I don’t think so. There are many problems with governance right now. However the inability to enact financial reform is not caused by the differences between the two parties, but rather their similarities. That’s a much, much bigger problem.

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Coincidence After Coincidence

by digby

You have probably already heard about this, but it’s worth noting, nonetheless:

The Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent “Armageddon” appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a “righteous ‘Mission from God,'” as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society. As we reported yesterday, Gregory Girard, a Manchester technology consultant, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, say police. They believe Girard, who pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, was “preparing for domestic and political turmoil,” and feared martial law would soon be imposed. Girard’s wife said her husband had recently told her: “Don’t talk to people, shoot them instead,” and “it’s fine to shoot people in the head because traitors deserve it.” But it appears that Girard had lately found a community with which to share some of his growing fears. A “Greg Girard,” listing his location as Manchester, Mass., has a personal page on the “Patriots of America” online network, a popular site affiliated with the Tea Party movement. The phone number listed on the page is the same as the number listed on the website of Girard’s consulting firm, which appears to have been run out of his home.

Now I realize that this is just one guy. But I just recently read the galleys of Dave Neiwert and John Amato’s new book and there have actually been an astonishing number of these “lone nuts” discovered since the election of Obama.

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Savvy Savvy

by digby

Dean Baker explains what was so savvy about Goldman Sachs:

Perhaps the Goldman gang’s best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman’s concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.

In fact, Goldman actually recognised that many of these loans would go bad. So they went to the insurance giant AIG and got them to issue credit default swaps against many of the securities it had created. In effect they were betting that their own securities were garbage. Now that is savvy. (It says something else about the highly paid executives at AIG.) […]

But Goldman’s greatest triumph was to get the government to come to its rescue when the financial sector was melting down in the fall of 2008 as the housing bubble that they had helped to fuel began to collapse. The treasury secretary and former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson rushed to Congress and demanded $700bn for the banks, no questions asked. He dragged along Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke for support, along with Timothy Geithner, then the important head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now President Obama’s treasury secretary.This triumvirate somehow managed to convince Congress that we would have a second Great Depression if it didn’t cough up the money immediately with no conditions. At that point Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and most of the other major banks were staring at bankruptcy. While this cascade of bank failures would have been bad news for the economy, there was no plausible scenario in which it would have led to a second Great Depression.There was also no reason that Congress could not have put conditions on its money. For example, Congress could have dictated that as a condition of getting the money that bankers would get the same sort of paycheques as other workers, that they would get out of highly speculative activity, that the largest banks would be downsized and that the principle would be written down on bad mortgages. At that point, Congress could have told the bank honchos that they had to run around Wall Street naked with their underpants on their head. The bankers had no choice; their banks would crash and burn without government support.

But the savvy Mr Blankfein and the other bankers got the money no questions asked. In fact, Goldman even got the government to pick up the bankrupt AIG’s debts. Thanks to the government’s intervention, Goldman got paid every penny on its bets with AIG. This came to $13bn, enough money to pay for 4 million kid-years of healthcare under the Children’s Health Insurance Program.No one should doubt that Blankfein is a very savvy banker. Without his ingenuity Goldman Sachs would likely be out of business, its component divisions being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Instead it is making record profits and paying out record bonuses.

Here’s the thing. We were deep into a lame duck presidency and and impending election. It was easy to panic the horses and they did. But there was absolutely no good reason that the government put no conditions on that money or that Goldman got paid in full on AIG’s bad bets, when they knew ahead of time that those bets were bad — and had hedged them.

And there was every reason for Goldman and the rest of these people to keep their heads down for a good long time and behave with a little goddamned humility instead of whining and moaning about being denied their obscene bonuses and demanding that they be allowed to carry on as if they not only did nothing wrong, but are actually heroes.

If what you call “savvy” are people who rig the game, then these people are savvy. But it’s disconcerting, nonetheless, to hear the president of the United States endorse that definition.

Baker concludes his column with a description of these Randidan Supermen that would make their skin crawl:

[U]nlike the successful ballplayers to whom President Obama compared Blankfein, Goldman’s success is inherently parasitic. It comes at the expense of taxpayers and the productive economy. President Obama must decide whether he stands with the Wall Street banks or whether he stands with the workers and businesses who actually produce wealth.

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Vessels of Wishful Thinking

by digby

I just watched Evan Bayh’s unctuous speech, in which he declares himself to be so delicate and sensitive that he can no longer subject himself to the unpleasantness of partisan warfare. It made me look for an old post of mine and I accidentally stumbled on this one from October of 2006, just before the mid-term election.

The Villagers were already panicking about the prospect of the dirty hippies ramming through their “partisan agenda”, so I recounted the story of how the Republicans set out to kill bipartisanship during the 1990s, culminating in a nuclear presidential impeachment and a partisan Supreme Court decision which installed George W. Bush as president. It’s quite a story. But this is what surprised me (and I didn’t recall writing it until just now):

So, why am I taking this little trip down memory lane of which most of you are all too well aware and need need no reminding? Because we are very possibly going to win this election and you can very confidently place a large bet in Las Vegas that the cries to end the partisanship will be deafening. I have little doubt that the entire Washington press corps is gearing up for a full scale vapor-fest if the Democrats attempt to demand even the slightest bit of accountability for the past six years of corruption and failure. The Democrats have to accept that they will once again be fighting the entire political establishment.

You can see the outlines already. Time’s cover this week features Barack Obama, the latest empty receptacle of establishment bipartisan wishful thinking:

Obama’s actual speaking style is quietly conversational, low in rhetoric-saturated fat; there is no harrumph to him. About halfway through the hour-long meeting, a middle-aged man stands up and says what seems to be on everyone’s mind, with appropriate passion: “Congress hasn’t done a damn thing this year. I’m tired of the politicians blaming each other. We should throw them all out and start over!”

“Including me?” the Senator asks.

A chorus of n-o-o-o-s. “Not you,” the man says. “You’re brand new.” Obama wanders into a casual disquisition about the sluggish nature of democracy. The answer is not even remotely a standard, pretaped political response. He moves through some fairly arcane turf, talking about how political gerrymandering has led to a generation of politicians who come from safe districts where they don’t have to consider the other side of the debate, which has made compromise–and therefore legislative progress–more difficult. “That’s why I favored Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal last year, a nonpartisan commission to draw the congressional-district maps in California. Too bad it lost.”

This will, I predict, be the latest fad: bipartisan nothingness. Now that the Republicans have successfully moved the political center so far to the right that they drove themselves over the cliff, we must stop all this “partisan bickering” as if the Democrats have been equally partisan and therefore as must ask for and expect the right to meet them halfway, which they never, ever do. That means we must let their most heinous ideas congeal into conventional wisdom, let their criminal behavior go unpunished, clean up the global disaster they’ve created, do the heavy lifting to fix the deficit they caused. While we’re fixing things, they’ll count their ill-gotten gains, catch their breath and gear up to trash the place all over again.

Modern bipartisanship can be simply defined as Democrats repeatedly getting taken to the cleaners by Republicans. Until the rules of the game are changed it will remain so whether Democrats are in the majority or not. That pathetic Charlie Brown with the football ritual is what Joe Lieberman is running on and what Joe Klein is angling for with his Blankslate Obama love-fest. (Norquist called it date rape but that’s too kind — the Liebermans and Kleins love being in the spotlight giving wingnuts lapdances. They enjoy every minute of their rightwing orgy — they just don’t want to take responsibility when they turn up with wingnut transmitted diseases.)

It is going to take some deft media management and skillfull legislative action to stop this pattern, but stop it we must. We have had more than two decades to assess this and this is how the conservative movement works. You can almost feel the relief (and even the glee) in some of the recent right wing claims that losing will be good for the party.

Richard Viguerie says it right out loud:

“The importance of losing elections is greatly underrated,” he adds. “There’s not any way Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 1980 if [Gerald] Ford had been elected in ’76.”

This time the stakes are so high and the failures so manifest that we cannot allow this zombie revolution to rise again. No matter how tempting it is to let bygones be bygones and get to work to “fix” the problems, the Democrats must recognize that fixing the problem requires discrediting this Republican revolution once and for all. Until that happens, they will keep coming back and each time they do they destroy a little bit more of our democracy.

We may win this one but we are basically the janitors, winning the contract to clean up after the conservative frat boys trashed the place for the last few years. And Daddy Broder believes it when his boys tell him it was the cleaning people who caused all the damage. He just can’t bring himself to admit that the boys are out-of-control misfits because they come from good families and dress so nicely when they come to the club. We need to make sure the dean and all his friends have their noses rubbed in what their boys have been up to all these years before we can ever hope to do anything but take out the garbage and change the sheets every few years.

I feel ridiculous for having written that. Not because it was a fairly correct analysis of the dynamic. Anyone could have seen that. What’s embarrassing is the fact that I seemed so sure that the Democrats would change it. What a foolish miscalculation that was. Less than four years later, the “empty vessel of establishment bipartisan wishful thinking” is president. And my empty vessel of partisan wishful thinking — the Democratic party — is running for the hills.

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It’s Too Haaard

by digby

In a final act of perfidy, Evan Bayh walks away from reelection at the last possible moment, thus ensuring that the voters will not have a chance to choose and allowing the party apparatus to pick a Blue Dog creep to replace him. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

The good news is that we are separating the men from the boys. The Democrats have everything, but it’s all so icky and hard that a whole bunch of them are just walking away. Good riddance. If they don’t have the cojones to stick it out when their country needs them, then they shouldn’t be in politics.

I’m glad these guys weren’t in charge during the Depression and WWII. We’d all be dirt farming for the Greater Axis Empire today.

Update: Ron Brownstein made a similar point On Andrea Mitchell this morning:

It’s hard to see how he justifies this to other Democrats. But look it’s more broadly what’s happening with the Democratic Party. They’ve gone from 93-94, it took them 15 years to reestablish unified control of the House and the Senate and the White House as they did in 2009. And here they are, one year into it and the party seems to be in many respects losing its nerve. You have the Bayh thing as the latest in a series of –, Beau Biden, Lisa Madigan in Illinois, a variety of Democratic House members in tough districts walking away.

Look, politics is a contact sport and the Democrats have had the best opportunity they’ve had in 15 years to advance their agenda, and yet as they take all the flack that comes with that it feels like some of the party is crumbling and losing their nerve. Stunning decision.

Yes it is. But we’ve heard Democratic establishment rumblings that they’d actually prefer to have a Republican congress because then nobody can expect them to deliver anything but bipartisan neoliberal policy which is what they prefer to deliver. It’s hard to see how Obama rallies his base even for the presidential, though, unless the Republicans run Dick Cheney in 2012. Which is possible. The Democrats are a bunch of timorous little schoolkids, but the Republicans are flat out nuts. Oy.

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Admitted War Crimes

by digby

Andrew Sullivan makes the case that Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime yesterday when he said on ABC, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.” It sounded like a confession to me too. (And the twisted mutterings of a violent sadist as well — and not in the “red is my safe word” sort of way.)

Sullivan writes:

The question is therefore not if, but when, he is convicted as a war criminal – in his lifetime or posthumously.

In fact, the attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.

These are not my opinions and they are not hyperbole. They are legal facts. Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn’t. Cheney’s clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.

One would think so. However, after reading this thoroughly depressing profile of Eric Holder this morning in the NY Times, I think we can assume that Dick Cheney could go on television and admit to personally torturing KSM on the rack and nothing would be done. Eric Holder is no longer a non-political actor by his own admission. Or, rather, as a member of the Obama administration, he’s now operating as a functionary of the Republicans and the national security state.

In case you were wondering, Lindsay Graham is now the de facto Attorney General and he will be deciding all the legal questions surrounding terrorism. It’s an unusual arrangement, but the constitution does say that regardless of the outcome of elections, Republicans must be in charge of national security and criminal justice at all times.

Sullivan is correct that Cheney is now an admitted war criminal. But it will not be a problem for him in the United States. He might want to let that passport lapse though. He may not get such favored treatment in another country.

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American Story

by digby

A reader writes in to Talking Points Memo with this observation:

Why do you think Congressional Democrats have had such a hard time dealing with Republican obstructionism? It’s been apparent for months that Republicans are unwilling to compromise on legislative initiatives, unless by compromise you mean that they will allow Democrats to agree with their proposals. In such an environment, it is pointless for Democratic lawmakers to ask themselves whether there is a way they can craft legislation so that some Republicans will be willing to vote for their proposal – there is simply no provision that Democrats can add or remove from a bill that will make Republicans want to vote for a Democratic proposal. And yet we keep seeing efforts – like the Baucus jobs bill – in which leading Democrats tinker with or even gut their own proposals in a fruitless effort to get Republicans to sign on to the legislation.

Steve Benen wrote a thoughtful piece this morning on the same theme, saying that it’s unprecedented for any party to behave this way in the wake of such a decisive election. And it is. But it’s not unprecedented for a political faction to behave this way.

I’ve posted this many times, but it’s more relevant than ever. Here’s Lincoln speaking about the South at the Cooper Union in 1860:

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

The civil war didn’t really resolve the underlying problem, which wasn’t only slavery, but also the inconvenient fact that the country is really two different political cultures, one of which has always believed that the other looks down on them and in return loathes them for it. It’s that same stubborn ressentiment which animates the rump Republican party today. They have a chip on their shoulders the size of Mt Rushmore. And they will not be appeased even by capitulation. They demand conversion. At a time when the country is as politically polarized and economically stressed as it is today, this faction becomes very powerful, even if it doesn’t represent a majority.

There is not likely to be another bloody civil war, but we are in a cold civil war and have been for quite some time. In fact, except for respites for foreign wars and assorted other catastrophes and recoveries, we always have been. Whatever consensus we achieved was always papering over the differences, not transcending them. And at times like this, when the country desperately needs to solve some problems, the Democrats, representing the rest of the people, need to work past this faction and get the job done. Empowering them in these circumstances is a very bad idea.

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