Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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A Reverent Moment

Josh Marshall has been following the Princeton Filibuster which is being held in front of the Frist Campus Center. Among the many things they read throughout the rainy night, along with excerpts of the constitution, was the American classic “My Pet Goat.”

snicker

And to the pedants among you — and you are legion — please refrain from correcting the name of the book. I know it is “The Pet Goat” I prefer “My Pet Goat” because “My Pet Goat” is funnier; thus it will always be “My Pet Goat” on this blog.

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Impulse Control

Quick, somebody ask head security mom, Cokie Roberts, if she thinks it’s ok for Republicans to act like juvenile delinquents on the taxpayers dime? The children are rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators. And no, this isn’t happening in some obscure local backwater. It’s in the US House of Representatives:

DEMS: a Nadler amendment allows an adult who could be prosecuted under the bill to go to a Federal district court and seek a waiver to the state’s parental notice laws if this remedy is not available in the state court. (no 11-16)

GOP REWRITE:. Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have created an additional layer of Federal court review that could be used by sexual predators to escape conviction under the bill. By a roll call vote of 11 yeas to 16 nays, the amendment was defeated.

DEMS: a Nadler amendment to exempt a grandparent or adult sibling from the criminal and civil provisions in the bill (no 12-19)

GOP REWRITE: . Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 19 nays, the amendment was defeated.

Thank goodness the chairman of the committee stepped in and took control of his unruly charges.

Oh wait; he didn’t:

“And instead of decrying what I certainly expected would be revealed as a mistake by an overzealous staffer…The Chairman stood by those altered
amendment descriptions.

“He made very clear to the Rules Committee that the alterations to these members’ amendments were deliberate.

“When pressed as to why his committee staff took such an unprecedented action, the Chairman immediately offered up his own anger over the manner in which Democrats had chosen to debate and oppose this unfortunate piece of legislation we have before us today.

“In fact…He said, and I quote…”You don’t like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don’t like what you said about our bill.”

Oh boo fucking hoo. The Republicans are in total control. The Democrats can sit around all day long and call them a bunch of fascist nazi bastards and it doesn’t mean anything. And they still can’t stop whining.

The problem is that these people don’t really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized. What a bunch of big babies. It’s not enough to win, the other side must completely capitulate — and apologize.

As Tim Noah observed in this Slate article:

The fact is that the GOP doesn’t have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price.

The Republican party has a bunch of action items and a bunch of constituencies who want specific things, but this erstwhile great party of sober, prudent conservatism has shown that when it comes to running the country is more like an wild gang of teen-agers, terrorizing the neighborhood and drawing graffitti on the capital building. They operate on impulses that they cannot control.

There is a strain of macho, pouty, puerile, “Lost Cause” psychology in American politics going back a long way. These same people wielding almost total power and attempting to run our government as an expression of their sense of righteous victimhood is a uniquely undignified and degrading spectacle.

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Charming The Ladies

There has been a lot of talk on the left about how to appeal to the married woman voters who migrated to George W. Bush.

Perhaps we should just tell them that the spiritual leader of the conservative movement for which they are voting (and dear friend of Tom Delay and George W. Bush) has this to say:

“My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership.”James Dobson

I just have a feeling that the vast, vast majority of American women might find that a little but insulting. In fact, they might just find George W. Bush’s metaphorical soul kiss with the religious right kind of insulting when they see it in those terms.

Check out this post by Publius at Legal Fiction for an excellent rundown of quotes that we should put on posters and bumper stickers in anticip[ation of the next election.

Here’s one more from our favorite dachshund beater:

Newt Gingrich chooses somebody to respond to the president. Who did he choose? Christine Todd Whitman, the absolute antithesis of everything that [our] constituency stands for. She is pro-homosexual activism. She’s pro-condom distribution. She’s pro-abortion. She’s pro-partial-birth abortion. . . . They put a symbol [Whitman] of the immoral, amoral constituency up in front of the people who had just handed leadership to the Republicans.

That big tent is getting a little bit claustrophobic, isn’t it?

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Who Are We?

Ezra takes Kos to task for his proposed slogan “The Democrats are the party of people who work for a living” saying that it isn’t as effective as the successful Republican mantra “small government, low taxes, family values and strong national defense.” He says that the slogan should reflect an actual agenda, not some ephemeral platitude. I actually think they are both misunderstanding what that Republican list really is. Kos thinks it identifies who the party represents and Ezra thinks it’s a legislative agenda.

I don’t think it’s that simple. The Republicans say they stand for small government, low taxes etc, not that they’d like to pass “small government, low taxes, family values etc.” It isn’t a specific legislative agenda. Neither does it identify who the party represents. It’s a statement of belief. (Which, by the way, is used most successfully as a contrast to the “big government, high tax, ‘make-love-not-war'” hippie straw man they’ve constructed to represent liberalism.)

I’ll take a pass at a simple description of what Democrats stand for that we might successfully use to contrast our beliefs with the other side.

How about “fair taxes, a secure safety net, personal privacy, civil rights, and responsible global leadership?”

Update: Attaturk has a more straightforward idea:

“We aren’t as big a fuckups as those dumbasses.”

That’s good too.

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Hans and Franz

Kevin worries that using John Bolton’s malevolent personality as a reason for scuttling the nomination is bad news for us because it gives people like Bill Kristol an excuse to make the argument that Democrats are sissies.

It seems to me that nominations are almost always scuttled on trivial charges rather than the substantive ones. Nowadays, people are creating nanny problems for troubled nominees who don’t even have nannies. There seems to be a unspoken agreement that nominees will be allowed to bow out for some mistake or character quirk rather than a charge of incompetence or malfeasance. Perhaps it’s a strange form of face saving for the president who nominated the person.

And anyway, this isn’t really the Democrats’ play. As we all know, if it were only Democrats opposing Bolton he’d be in New York destroying the UN as we speak. It’s Republicans who are standing in Bolton’s way and it’s Republicans who Kristol is really taunting with that painfully stupid “girly-man” line.

I guess Voinovich is a girly man by Kristol’s standards, but he looks like a he-man to everybody else. He’s bucking a very powerful Republican machine and that takes cojones. That’s what Kristol is trying to stop. Who knows what might happen if the Republican moderates really start to flex their muscles?

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How Ever Will They Resolve This?

Can you believe this kabuki bullshit?

The Bush administration issued a veto threat again Tuesday against a popular highway bill, saying the president would be likely to reject any legislation that exceeds a White House-set spending ceiling or adds to the deficit.

The administration, in saying the legislation “should exhibit funding restraint,” was at odds with many in Congress, including some conservatives, who say the deteriorating state of the nation’s roads, bridges and public transport demands more aggressive spending.

[…]

The bill currently on the Senate floor, like the House bill passed in March, approves $284 billion over a six-year period for highway, mass transit and safety programs. The White House says anything above that number would subject the legislation to a veto.

It issued a second veto threat Tuesday on any new borrowing that “negatively impacts the deficit.”

[…]

The popularity of the bill was demonstrated when the Senate voted 94-6 on Tuesday to proceed with it. All six voting no were Republicans, several because they said the bill was too expensive.

But the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, James Inhofe, R-Okla., said, “Those of us who are conservatives really believe this is something we should be doing here.”

Man, that codpiece is tight. Junior’s not gonna let a renegade Republican Majority pass that deficit spending crap. He’s tellin’ ’em to straighten up and fly right, damn it.

Still, with a vote of 94-6, it’s a little but unusual for a president to issue a veto threat since it could easily be over-ridden. How odd.

But hey, guys like Inhofe can at least say they voted for the highway bill which is almost as good as actually passing one. And heck, even if they end up passing one, The Big Kahuna shows that he’s a tough guy, which is almost as good as actually being one.

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Giving Voice To The Voiceless

I must admit that I too am very excited about Ariana Huffington’s new blog. As Roger Ailes put it so well:

The “MSM” has for too long silenced the voices of Jann Wenner, Barry Diller, Walter Cronkite and Norman Mailer.

Tony Blankely for too long has been denied a platform to slander George Soros.

Where else could Conrad Black’s dogsbody, David Frum, find a space to suck up to his beleaguered master?

Where else would Michael Medved find an wide audience for his completely sane theory that “oil companies are always anti-semitic.”

Where would the malnourished John Fund find a buffet that hasn’t blacklisted him?

And where but such a blog could Mort Zuckerman publish his thoroughly researched, scholarly papers on tort reform?

Finally, a forum for those who’ve been shut out of the dialog for far too long. This could be the blogging breath of fresh air that could finally shake up the establishment.

As the New York Times reports:

Having prominent people join the blogosphere, Ms. Huffington said in an interview, “is an affirmation of its success and will only enrich and strengthen its impact on the national conversation.”

Absolutely. None of these people have nearly enough influence on the national conversation. It’s long past time they spoke out.

Update: Lest anyone think I’m being a snotty nobody, let it be known that I think it’s great that Democrats (which Huffington now proudly calls herself) are putting some money into countering Drudge. But I do think the idea that these people need a separate media platform to be heard is kind of hilarious. Is anyone in the least bit in the dark about what Tony Blankley thinks about everything?

I am, on the other hand, curious to see if Maggie Gyllenhall has anything interesting to say. She was one of the few celebs who had the guts to speak out against the Iraq war when she was getting an acting award (Independent Spirit) so I find her admirable. Everybody ese, except for the Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore were disgustingly chickenshit. So, I’ll give her posts a read, out of appreciation for her courage if nothing else.

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