Talking about inequality and social mobility, Ezra says:
I’ve little hope that we’ll address this, though. The overarching evils of vast inequality and the transcendent good of do-it-yourself mobility are such foundational philosophical tenets of America’s two parties that I can’t see either coming to recognize that the fix, such as one exists, might be the same for both. Indeed, while the Democratic party may be convincible simply because the solutions line up with our proposed programs, Republicans will, for good reason, never relinquish the strict dichotomy they’ve created between individual mobility and general equality. The belief that large social programs must be avoided because they tamp down on individual virtues stretches back to Hoover and Associationalism, it’s not going to be given up now.
As I have argued before,at some tedious length, it goes back further than that. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and relates very closely to our little “problem” with slavery. It might even be said that the whole concept of American individualism rests on the back of racism.
It was long held that government guarantees of equality meant that the wrong people would get things they did not deserve or could not handle. There have been many of “those people” over the years, but the concept originated with slaves and free African Americans. And the reason is that they, unlike virtually every other poor sub-group, had no economic support systems like churches and ethnic organizations and instead had to depend upon government programs. The face of government largesse was, for many people, black. The “welfare queen” was only the most modern description of a phenomenon that riled up certain citizens for a long, long time.
Individualism became part of the American ethos as much as an expression of racial superiority as personal virtue.
I really think that calling Newsweek’s blunder “the press’s Abu Ghraib” is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn’t even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can’t say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek’s story.
Hindquarter, Powerline
Except, except…. Highpockets, here’s what your pal Lawrence DeRita had to say:
“The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it, suggest that they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned,” said DiRita.
No kidding.
(I’m not even going to address the ridiculous assertion that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were terrorists. He needs to do some homework on that subject. Suffice to say that repeating anything that the addlepated James Inhofe says is always a mistake.)
To any of us who were closely following the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo story last summer, this Koran in the toilet thing is old news. Really old news. I wrote a lot about General Geoffrey Ripper and the interrogation techniques down there, and in the course of reading all the informatin that was coming out about Gitmo at the time, it was glaringly obvious that religious desecration was on the menu. (Juan Cole points out in his post this morning that this may actually be a standard US military training technique.)
When the first four British detainees were released, they made some claims that sounded ridiculous. The stuff about desecration of the Koran hardly raised an eyebrow by comparison to the wildly improbable assertion that American women were rubbing menstrual blood all over detainees to get them to talk. How could you believe anything they said when they made up crazy shit like that, right? Right.
What’s so phony about the right wing explosion on this issue is that as Arthur Silber points out in this indispensible post, is that it’s not as if the Muslim world wasn’t already well aware of this practice. Detainees have been released and they have talked. As far back as December 2003, when Vanity Fair published David Rose’s expose of Guantanamo (sorry, not online), it was known that throughout the Muslim world, Gitmo was seen as an abomination. And it was known that practices in Guanmtanamo were creating more terrorism and more violence than they stopped:
One senior defense intelligence source gives a grim assessment of the camp’s backlash potential: “It’s an international public-relations disaster. Maybe the guy who goes into Gitmo does so as a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a full-fledged jihadist. And for every detainee, I’d guess you create another 10 terrorists or supporters of terrorism.”
The miracle is that the riots didn’t come much sooner. Guantanamo is the greatest recruiting tool in the jihadist arsenal and our absurd insistence on keeping it going (even though it has long since been shown to be nothing more than a puerile expression of national rage) turns us from simple over-reactors into stubborn fascists and self-defeating idiots.
David Rose, in his recent book based upon the Vanity Fair reporting, called “Guantanamo: The War On Human Rights” says:
Across the middle east, those pictures of the newly-arrived detainees kneeling in the dirt in their shackles have become a trope for cartoonists and pamphleteers, a graphic rendition of oppression which speaks to millions of Muslims. The unjust suffering of families and individuals engendered by this aspect of “Operation Enduring Freedom” is sowing dragons’ teeth, turning moderates into fanatics determined to smite the west.
On Islamist websites and in the Arab press, Guantánamo is cited time and again as a rallying point for jihad, as a justification for creating more suicide “martyrs”.
This little item in Newsweak is a pretext for action against interrogation techniques that are already well known. Which is why the quasi retraction over the week-end is such a chickenshit display of cowardice on the part of Newsweak. This is old news to anybody who’s been paying attention. The jihadists know it, those of us following the story know it and the government certainly knows it. The riots last week in Afghanistan and now around the world are orchestrated to gin up support and their followers are already pissed off enough about this stuff to get with the program quite easily.
Of course, as Silber says, this is probably going to end up being just another scalping party. And until the mainstream media cares about being played and used, the shrill shrieking harpies of the right wing noise machine will continue to treat them like the lackeys they are … and make examples of some of them every once in a while to keep everybody in line.
This will teach the media to report any more stories about fun loving hijinks and calling them torture. The Blog of the Year is on to you, MSM killers.
This is the only source I find with this information, so maybe it’s not true; if it is, it’s amazing:
The Syrian government signed an agreement with New Bridge Strategies to improve its image in the American society, convince President Bush that it seeks good relations with his administration and is willing to be extremely flexible in its cooperation with the White House.
The company was selected specifically because its CEO (Joe Allbaugh) had close ties with Bush. Allbaugh was Bush’s Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager when Bush was the Governor of Texas. He managed his 2000 campaign and later became Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of coordinating the public services and provide assistance to the victims of natural disasters.
I’m sure the fighting 101st keyboarders will will ensure that Allbaugh keeps his eyes open for all the WMD’s Saddam spirited into Syria before the war.
Allbaugh is extremely close to Junior. He was the third in the “Iron Triangle” with Rove and Hughes. Josh Marshall has reported how unseemly it is that he’s out there raking in huge bucks so soon after being in the administration anyway, particularly from the Iraq debacle which was never part of his portfolio. (He’s never been anything but a political hack.) But for him to be making big money lobbying for one of the officially proclaimed terrorist states while his good buddy is the president goes beyond the appearance of impropriety. For all the shrill caterwauling about liberals committing treason every other minute, this little deal really looks like it could be.
But IOKIYAR. It’s not like the guy went to a buddhist temple or had a haircut or anything.
Via Daniel Munz, who’s pinch hitting over at Ezra’s place, I see that my old pal “Mudcat” Saunders is offering some more good advice to Democrats:
“Bubba doesn’t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we’re going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat.”
The thing is, he’s absolutely right. To put together this great new populist revival everybody’s talking about, where we get the boys in the pick-up trucks to start voting their “self-interest,” we’re probably going to need to get up a new nativist movement to go along with it. That’s pretty much how populism has always been played in the past, particularly in the south. Certainly, you can rail against the moneyed elites, but there is little evidence that it will work unless you provide somebody on the bottom that the good ole boys can really stomp. As Jack Balkin wrote in this fascinating piece on populism and progressivism:
History teaches us that populism has recurring pathologies; it is especially important to recognize and counteract them. These dangers are particularly obvious to academics and other intellectual elites: They include fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre, and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses.
Is it any wonder that the right has been more successful in recently in inflaming the populist impulse in America? They are not squeamish about using just those pathologies — and only those pathologies — to gain populist credibility in spite of a blatant lack of populist policy.
Populism can have a very close relationship to fascism and totalitarianism. Indeed, it may be essential. Despite Dennis Prager’s confused blather, it wasn’t the intellectual elites who fueled the Nazi movement; the intellectuals were purged, just as they were purged by Stalin, by Pol Pot and by Mao during the “cultural revolution” in China. These are the extreme results of a certain populist strain — or at least the misuse of populist thinking among the people. That Mao and Stalin were commies has nothing to do with it. Populism, in its extreme form, is inherently hostile to intellectualism.
That is not to say that populism is evil. It is just another political philosophy that has its bad side, as every philosophy does. Balkin describes it in great depth, but here’s a capsulized version:
The dual nature of populism means that political participation is not something to be forced on the citizenry, nor are popular attitudes some sort of impure ore that must be carefully filtered, purified, and managed by a wise and knowing state. From a populist standpoint, such attempts at managerial purification are paternalistic. They typify elite disparagement and disrespect for popular attitudes and popular culture. Government should provide opportunities for popular participation when people seek it, and when they seek it, government should not attempt to divert or debilitate popular will. An energized populace, aroused by injustice and pressing for change, is not something to be feared and constrained; it is the very lifeblood of democracy. Without avenues for popular participation and without means for popular control, governments become the enemy of the people; public and private power become entrenched, self-satisfied, and smug.
Progressivism, or modern liberalism, takes a distinctly different view:
Central to progressivism is a faith that educated and civilized individuals can, through the use of reason, determine what is best for society as a whole. Persuasion, discussion, and rational dialogue can lead individuals of different views to see what is in the public interest. Government and public participation must therefore be structured so as to produce rational deliberation and consensus about important public policy issues. Popular culture and popular will have a role to play in this process, but only after sufficient education and only after their more passionate elements have been diverted and diffused. Popular anger and uneducated public sentiments are more likely to lead to hasty and irrational judgments.
Like populists, progressives believe that governments must be freed of corrupting influences. But these corrupting influences are described quite differently: They include narrowness of vision, ignorance, and parochial self-interest. Government must be freed of corruption so that it can wisely debate what is truly in the public interest. Progressivism is less concerned than populism about centralization and concentration of power. It recognizes that some problems require centralized authority and that some enterprises benefit from economies of scale. Progressivism also has a significantly different attitude towards expertise: Far from being something to be distrusted, it is something to be particularly prized.
That sounds right to me. What a fine tribe it is, too. Balkin goes on, however:
What is more difficult for many academics to recognize is that progressivism has its own distinctive dangers and defects. Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the “best and brightest,” isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.
And there you see the basis for right wing populist hatred of liberals. And it’s not altogether untrue, is it? Certainly, those of us who argue from that perspective should be able to recognise and deal with the fact that this is how we are perceived by many people and try to find ways to allay those concerns. The problem is that it’s quite difficult to do.
In the past, the way that’s been dealt with has been very simple. Get on the bigotry bandwagon. In some ways, everybody wants to be an elitist, I suppose, so all you have to do is join with your brothers in a little “wrong” religion, immigrant or negro bashing. Everybody gets to feel superior that way.
There was a time when the Democratic party was populist/progressive — William Jennings Bryan was our guy. (He was also, if you recall, the one who argued against evolution in the Scopes trial.) He ran his campaigns against the “money changers” in New York City; the conventional wisdom remains that his Cross of Gold speech with it’s economic populist message was the key to his enormous popularity in the rural areas of the west, midwest and south. I would argue that it had as much to do with cultural populism and Lost Cause mythology.
Richard Hofstadter famously wrote that both populism and early progressivism were heavily fueled by nativism and there is a lot of merit in what he says. Take, for instance, prohibition (one of Bryan’s major campaign issues.)Most people assume that when it was enacted in 1920, it was the result of do-gooderism, stemming from the tireless work by progressives who saw drink as a scourge for the family, and women in particular. But the truth is that Prohibition was mostly supported by rural southerners and midwesterners who were persuaded that alcohol was the province of immigrants in the big cities who were polluting the culture with their foreign ways. And progressives did nothing to dispell that myth — indeed they perpetuated it. (The only people left to fight it were the “liberal elites,” civil libertarians and the poor urban dwellers who were medicating themselves the only way they knew how.) This was an issue, in its day, that was as important as gay marriage is today. The country divided itself into “wets” and “drys” and many a political alliance was made or broken by taking one side of the issue or another. Bryan, the populist Democrat, deftly exploited this issue to gain his rural coalition — and later became the poster boy for creationism, as well. (Not that he wasn’t a true believer, he was; but his views on evolution were influenced by his horror at the eugenics movement. He was a complicated guy.) And prohibition turned out to be one of the most costly and silly diversions in American history.
It is not a surprise that prohibition was finally enacted in 1920, which is also the time that the Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself and became more than just a southern phenomenon. The Klan’s reemergence was the result of the post war clamor against commies and immigrants. The rural areas, feeling beseiged by economic pressure (which manifested themselves much earlier there than the rest of the country)and rapid social change could not blame their own beloved America for its problems so they blamed the usual suspects, including their favorite whipping boy, uppity African Americans.
They weren’t only nativist, though. In the southwest, and Texas in particular, they were upset by non-Protestant immorality. According to historian Charles C. Alexander:
“There was also in the Klan a definite strain of moral bigotry. Especially in the Southwest this zeal found expression in direct, often violent, attempts to force conformity. Hence the southwestern Klansman’s conception of reform encompassed efforts to preserve premarital chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for parental authority; to compel obedience to state and national prohibition laws; to fight the postwar crime wave; and to rid state and local governments of dishonest politicians.” Individuals in Texas thus were threatened, beaten, or tarred-and-feathered for practicing the “new morality,” cheating on their spouses, beating their spouses or children, looking at women in a lewd manner, imbibing alcohol, etc.
Yeah, I know. The more things change, yadda, yadda, yadda. The interesting thing about all this is that throughout the 20’s the south was Democratic as it had always been — and populist, as it had long been. But when the Dems nominated Al Smith in 1928, many Democrats deserted the party and voted for Hoover. Why? Because Smith was an urban machine politican, a catholic and anti-prohibition. Texas went for Hoover — he was from rural Iowa, favored prohibition and was a Protestant. Preachers combed the south decrying the catholic nominee — saying the Pope would be running the country. Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia went Republican, too. Now, one can’t deny that the boom of the 20’s was instrumental in Hoover’s victory, but rural America had been undergoing an economic crisis for some time. However, then, like now, rural American populists preferred to blame their problems on racial and ethnic influences than the moneyed elites who actually cause them. It’s a psychological thing, I think.
(By 1932, of course, all hell had broken loose. Nobody cared anymore about booze or catholics or rich New Yorkers in the White House. They were desperate for somebody to do something. And Roosevelt promised to do something. Extreme crisis has a way of clarifying what’s important.)
So, getting back to Mudcat, what he is suggesting is a tried and true method to get rural white males to sign on to a political party. Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest. There seems to be little evidence that bashing elites alone actually works. And that’s because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have — Aliens taking over Real America — whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever. And it seems that rural folk have been feeling this way forever.
It’s a surefire way to attract those guys with the confederate flags that Mudcat is advising us is required if we are ever to win again. On the other hand, short of another Great Depression, how we keep together a coalition of urbanites, liberals, ethnic minoritites and nativist rural white men, I don’t quite get. Nobody’s done it yet.
*I should be clear here and note that Jack Balkin does not necessarily endorse my views on nativism and populism in his paper. He notes that there has been some revision of Hofstadter’s analysis and that some scholars have found substantial regional differences among rural populists. I agree to the extent that I think this is a much more salient aspect of populism in the south. But history leads me to agree with Hofstadter that nativism and racism are powerful populist impulses pretty much everywhere. It may change colors and creeds, but it’s always there.
Balkin does point out some of the difficulties in creating a coalition of progressives and populists and suggests that academics in particular have a hard time because they really are, well, intellectual elites. It’s interesting. One of the more intriguing things his thesis alludes to is that the crusade against popular culture may be the least populist thing we could undertake. The rural populists really don’t like the liberal elites telling them what’s good for them.
Back in the day, before talk radio became a stroke inducing wingnut nightmare (and before Air America) I used to listen to KABC in Los Angeles, which has always been an all talk station. In the mornings it had Michael Jackson (not that one) a very erudite, well informed personality who had the world’s most impressive rolodex. He could get Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher on the phone and callers, before everybody became a right wing asshole, were invariably polite and well informed. It was the kind of talk radio that people like me — the snoozers who watch the History Channel and Lehrer — love. No yelling, no controversy, just a bunch of smart people palavering endlessly. Needless to say, this is so far out of fashion it might as well be a Nehru jacket.
Jackson was on from 9 to 1 and then that sanctimonious prick, Dennis Prager, would come on and blow the whole mood. Guys like him are a dime a dozen today, but he was my first modern wingnut gasbag, so he holds a special place in my … digestive system.
Today, on the Huffington Post, he says that the guy who heckled Ann Coulter is a Hitler youth. But the universities are also like Weimar Germany and Phd’s led the way to the death camps and the gulags.
None of that is factual or makes any sense. Weimar “decadence” was the target of Nazism, not the cause — unless you want to adopt the abuser excuse “she made me do it because she was bad.” And Nazism may have ostensibly been “secular, but it sure as hell used Christian nationalism when it suited them:
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.”
But whatever. That’s just typical Dennis Prager dribbling confusedly about barbarians and brown shirts because somebody was rude to Ann Coulter. Rude to Ann Coulter — something one would think he’d be embarrassed to bring up considering what a nasty piece of work she is.
Does everyone remember what the student’s outrageous question in that Q&A was?
“You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage,” said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?”
Think about that for a minute. When I first heard about it I thought he was saying something for the pure purpose of being (as he admits) a jackass and trying to put Coulter off balance. But considering the revelations of this week, in which it was revealed that a prominent religious leader enjoyed forcing sodomy on his wife against her will, it’s actually a serious question.
I agree with Prager that there are barbarians in our midst, but I think he needs to look a little bit closer to his own social circle.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional
Word.
Although I agree that these are fine words to live by, and I do, in this case he is specifically referring to her latest illustration of right wing paranoid victimology:
When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn’t it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?
There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.
Yes, and the MSM hates puppies and kitties and baby rhesus monkeys too. Goddamn evil bastards.
Roy swats down her absurdities like the pesky little nits they are and goes on to discuss the veritable deification of cops in our popular culture noting the somewhat disturbing CSI trend in which:
…cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)
This may be working against the police, actually, since now prosecutors such as those in the Robert Blake case find their TV addled juries unimpressed with any evidence that isn’t scientifically incontrovertible. They even call it the CSI effect. (I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess. Looking very hot, of course.)
Meanwhile, here in California, cops and firefighters are on TV every five minutes taking issue with the powdered and pampered Republican Governor saying of them, “These are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt.” Seems these unionized public employees didn’t care too much for that. Go figure.
As Roy says and I concur:
I don’t begrudge the police this heroic treatment — though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.
And that is why I join Roy in saying I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is delusional. And nuts.
By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the “nuclear option.” Embedded in that text message will be a link to the Senate switchboard. With the push of a couple buttons, your call – along with thousands of others – goes right through to the corridors of power demanding preservation of the filibuster.
This the first time flash mob technology’s been used for political purposes. Which means it’s just cute enough to get some press.
Both Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum believe, based upon findings in the recent Pew poll, that we would be better off if we liberals lightened up and accepted the 10 Commandments on public buildings and certain other somewhat trivial religious issues. I’m not sure how we do this, considering that this has been the interpretation of the courts rather than a legislative battle, but I’m sure that if we just give in on Pricilla Owen et al, we’ll see some change on this and other issues of importance to the Religious Right. I’m also sure we can then cherry pick those issues that are really important to us, but I’m not certain at all if the principle on which we make our argument will still be operative once we’ve tossed it aside for these trivial reasons.
As it happens, I couldn’t care less whether the 10 Commandments are displayed on public buildings as long as all religions are treated equally. I certainly hope that when a Hindu requests that his religion be equally represented that we liberals will also uphold his rights. Otherwise, we will have established a state religion, which I think is a really bad idea considering the millenium’s worth of blood that was spilled by our forebears in Europe over these issues.
Unfortunately, it seems we are on course to do just that. Or at least establish a “Judeo-Christian umbrella” state religion.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a Virginia county can exclude a member of a minority religion from offering prayers at county board meetings — even though adherents of “Judeo-Christian” religions are allowed to lead invocations.
In a unanimous ruling April 14, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against county resident Cynthia Simpson, whom officials denied the opportunity to offer prayers at meetings of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors.
Simpson is a practitioner of Wicca, a neo-pagan religion that she has described as interchangeable with witchcraft. She is a leader in a Wiccan congregation in the suburban county near Richmond. When she asked to be put on a list of those who could lead invocations at board meetings, the county attorney told her she would not be allowed, claiming that “Chesterfield’s non-sectarian invocations are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Simpson, working with attorneys from a pair of civil-liberties groups, sued the county. A federal district judge in Richmond sided with her, ruling in 2003 that the practice unconstitutionally discriminated against religions that do not stem from the dominant Western monotheistic traditions.
But the latest ruling reverses that decision, citing the Supreme Court’s 1985 Marsh vs. Chambers decision allowing “non-sectarian” legislative prayers before the Nebraska legislature. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, authoring the 4th Circuit’s opinion, said the content of the prayers Chesterfield County officials allowed was broad enough, and the fact that Simpson was barred from offering one was immaterial to the case.
“The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths,” Wilkinson wrote. “We need not resolve the parties’ dispute as to its precise extent, as Chesterfield County has spread it wide enough in this case to include Islam. For these efforts, the County should not be made the object of constitutional condemnation.”
Wilkinson has been widely rumored to be among the candidates for a Supreme Court appointment, should any slots on that body come open before the end of President Bush’s term.
Apparently, all religions that fall under the Judeo-Christian “umbrella” are non-sectarian, which I suppose is a form of progress. But you can’t just let any old religion be officially recognized in public functions. Ones that aren’t drawn from the old testament, anyway.
Clearly, just like guns and the death penalty and dozens of other things, the Democrats are going to cave on this issue. And in and of itself, it will not make much difference. Ever since the entire congress stood on the steps of the congress and sang “God Bless America” I knew that any pretense toward religious neutrality was over.
But, what makes anyone think that this will be enough to sway any votes or stop the rest of the theocratic agenda? Are people voting on the single issue of the 10 Commandments and if we give in on that we can start talking about the minimum wage? Just as people like Kevin and Matt and I don’t care deeply about whether the 10 commandments are displayed or a creche is put in front of city hall at Christmas, I doubt whether the full 70%+ of Americans who thinks the 10 Commandments should be allowed on public buyildings actually vote on the issue. Most people agree, just like us, that it isn’t a big deal — all except those who are fighting for the principle of it. Those people aren’t changing sides politically — and the rest just don’t give enough of a damn to change their voting behavior over it.
The danger is that the ones who are fighting on the principle that Christianity should be part of civic life are also the ones who are not giving any ground. And they won’t. They are thinking long term — patiently chipping away at the principle of separation of church and state, while the rest of us say “lighten up” to the ACLU, who is taking a principled stance on trivial issues so that we can make a consistent argument when it comes to fighting for the important ones. Like teaching creationism in the public schools.
As Matt points out, the other interesting finding in the PEW poll is that a majority believe that creationism should be taught along side evolution in the schools. (I suspect that most people do not realize that the goal of the Christian Right is to replace the teaching of evolution, and think instead that creationism is a worthy subject for a class on comparative religions, not science. But that’s just a hunch.) Kevin says we shouldn’t give in on that, but really, what’s to stop it?
I realize that we liberals believe that this is a matter of teaching fact based science as opposed to faith based religious belief, but the truth is that schools that aren’t funded by public money can teach creationism till the cows come home already. The state cannot compel anyone not to teach religion in place of science in the public schools unless we believe there is a constitutional prohibition against the schools promoting one religion over another.
So, on what will we hang our hat on once we’ve decided that religion — or more specifically the “judeo-christian umbrella” — is sanctioned by the state in regards to prayer in schools, the 10 commandments on public buildings and public displays of religion on community ground. These things are all trivial in themselves (although for some people, putting little kids in the position of having to pray or abstain is unconcionable.) But regardless of whether each little instance of religious tradition in the public square is in itself pernicious, taken together, if sanctified by the courts, it erodes one of the basic tenets of our system, which is the prohibition against the establishment of state religion. And that adds up to a greenlight to teach creationism or promote any other Christian dogma — with my tax dollars.
On a pracical political level, I might point out that electorally, getting religion may not be the bonanza everyone thinks it will be long term. The largest growing religious cohort in the United States is “non-religious”, doubling in the past decade and growing stronger. And it’s particularly true in the western states where there is a growing preference for “spirituality” over formal religion.
Contrast this with the studies that show Protestants losing ground for decades, perhaps stabilizing now, but certainly not growing, while Catholics remain fairly stable, but divided politically. The Barna group, which does the most in-depth polling on religion in America recently wrote:
“There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.
If we are to look at the electoral landscape, we will see that the hard core religious cohort is most influential in the south, which is no surprise. But if you take a look at this interesting map, created by USA today, you’ will see that “non-religious” is a rather large minority in the west and midwest swing states; when you combine it with liberal mainline protestant churches and liberal catholics you will see that the Christian Right is not the electoral powerhouse it’s cracked up to be. We should not fear them like this.
And needless to say, as our ethnic make-up continues to change, in which Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians and others continue to immigrate and pass their belief systems to their children, we are going to see a continuance of the explosive growth in those religions and philosophies as we’ve seen in the last thirty years. There is a huge potential for strife in our future if we continue down this road of establishing the “Judeo-Christian” umbrella as a quasi official religion.
There is good evidence that we are the victims of Republican hype on this religious issue, which perpetuates itself in the servile media, creating a faddish obsession with religiousity at a time when more people are actually leaving religion than coming into it. Like the phony campaign against Christmas, they are tying us up in knots with this theocratic correctness. For both practical and principled reasons, we shouldn’t let them do it.
And the “revisionist historians” proceed apace. Via Ted at Crooked Timber I see that the Highpockets and the boys at Powerline have endorsed the idea that the British should have held out against “Ghandi and his rabble” — to prevent violence, of course, which is why all good white men have to keep the wogs in line, don’t you know. Didn’t the Raj have any purple ink to pacify the little bastards? Dear me.
“It’s great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example:
Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided.” (quoting Roger Kimball.)
But really dear boy, while we’re praising British colonialism, let’s not stop there. One can’t help but observe that if they had just held out against Washington and his rabble a few years longer the tragedy of the civil war might have been prevented. Failure of nerve, I’m afraid. Yes, yes, it would have been bloody, but what isn’t, I say? Best to keep the swinish multitudes under one’s thumbs. (Of course, except for the slaves, the Americans were white, weren’t they? Makes a difference; indeed it does.)
Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings offers the substantive response for trolls who require one.
I think the thing I love most about the right wingers is their commitment to principle and intellectual consistency. For instance, on the Un Foundation’s blog UN Dispatch, Peter Daou took issue with Roger Simon’s obsessing over the Oil For Food program, while never having a kind word to say about the good things the United Nations does around the world. The right blogosphere is incensed that he would dare to tell a blogger what he should blog about, and besides the oil for food scandal is, like, really really bad.
Now call me crazy, but I seem to remember some wingnuts bleating every five minutes or so about how the news media is obsessing about all the “bad news” in Iraq to exclusion of the “good.” It’s been their mantra for the last two years as a matter of fact. John Tierney of the NY Times even said just the other day that we shouldn’t talk about the suicide bombers because it gives the wrong impression — that suicide bombers are everywhere and people’s lives are threatened. Even though the Iraqi people’s lives actually are threatened and there actually are suicide bombers everywhere. Best not to harp on the bad news.
Here we have an institution, the UN, that is enmeshed in a corruption scandal — and not one that appears to be unprecedented or shocking by corruption scandal standards. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the serious everyday violence that is taking place in Iraq. And yet we have right wingers obsessing about it to the exclusion of all its substantial and important good works around the world — while they constantly complain that the news media focuses too much on wanton violence and social chaos in a country we occupy, to the exclusion of insubstantial and meaningless happy talk about schools being painted (for 2 million dollars a piece.)
The sad fact is that the UN Oil for Food scandal is becoming another one of these right wing masturbatory obsessions — like Christmas in Cambodia and Vince Foster. There are always a few of these hobby horses out there, nobody knows why.
Meanwhile the UN actually does a lot of really important work, unlike the Pottery Barn debacle in Iraq, where we are supposed to get credit for fixing what we broke. Here are just a handful of the issues the UN has been working on while the wingnuts blather on:
This right wing UN fixation is another one of those issues that goes all the way back to the Truman era. I’ll say it again; anybody who thinks the Republicans are the party of new ideas are sadly mistaken. They haven’t even joined the last half of the 20th century yet.