In an earlier thread, fish made a comment in defense of the rhetoric that “there’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans”. In what follows, sections in italics come from that comment (and the addendum that follows it).
fish’s comment begins:
I know what you are saying about the “no difference” meme. I have held the position for a long time, but I think recent changes in the political climate are forcing me to soften that stance. There are a few points to make though that justifies that position more than I think you allow.
And later he notes, “the statement ‘there is no difference between the parties’ was more true pre Bush43.”
Given these retreats from a strong position, some of what follows may seem a bit of an over-reaction. However, this meme is a pet peeve of mine, and I hope fish will forgive me for jumping up and down on it a bit.
* * * * *
To fish:
First, I don’t think the current administration can be used as representative of Republican ideology or representative of even conservatism through US history, at least if that word has any meaning anymore. The Bush43 administration is more of an outgroup of profound stupidity, greed, and incompetence.
I don’t think the current administration is representative of any historical conservatism, but I do think it’s the endpoint of a trajectory that can be traced from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to DeLay to CheneyBush — in other words, what has called itself the “conservative movement” (however much of a misnomer that became). In this context, it is Bush41 that is the anomaly. (Also: despite the movement being generated out of his supporters, Goldwater himself seems to have become relatively estranged from the movement as such fairly early on.)
The various arms of the “conservative movement” — the politicians, media organs, propaganda houses, and fundie hives — have etched the mantra that “government is always the problem” into their bones and, whether they really intended to or not, turned the GOP into a machine that destroys government. Not “shrinks”, “curbs”, or “limits”, but “destroys” in the sense of “perverts to the point where it becomes useless for it’s original function”. It is not at all clear how the GOP can get from where it is now to being a functional conservative party under any rational meaning of “conservative”.
The most pervasive and reflexive tool they use to enact their agenda is brand differentiation: if a Democrat says it first, it’s wrong; if a Democrat takes a position, the opposite position must be taken (unless it’s a position they want, in which case the Democrat can be patted on the head for being “bipartisan” — cue David Broder, swooning); and if one of their own takes a position favored by Democrats, or otherwise deviates from the movement image, that person is now either a liberal (if that’s useful and a “D” can be stuck after their name on Fox News, e.g. Mark Foley) or a traitor (e.g. Chuck Hagel, who it is impossible to argue is liberal). This principle has been applied to, notably, torture; one of its purest expressions is Jonah Goldberg’s magnum opus. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” and one aspect of that reality is that liberals are always wrong.
In saying this, I’m not really trying to demonize Republicans as individuals or to say that all (or perhaps even a majority of) conservatives are aligned with that GOP machine. Sure there are a lot of real nuts, but even among the politicians I imagine there are many just caught up in the system who don’t see any other options (and others like Arlen Specter, who can be fooled every time). There’s no other model of conservatism in the US right now with any real political weight (pace Ron Paul supporters).
In order to say “there’s no difference between the parties”, it seems to me it is necessary to ignore what the GOP has become, and the degree to which it’s current form has become self-perpetuating and monolithic. And while the Bush43 years have illustrated all this more dramatically than in the past, I think enough of this was obvious in 2000, that it wasn’t a tenable formulation then either.
I’d be really happy to be wrong about all this, but this is what the evidence is telling me.
If you compare Bush41 and Clinton for example, I can’t think of a single policy that was substantively different.
Universal health care? Just because Clinton failed to achieve it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a policy that was substantively different. And he and Hillary did succeed in getting SCHIP passed. And, of course, he overturned the abortion gag rule when he entered office — in direct opposition to Bush41.
The simple fact that Democrats actually believe in government means that agencies under Democrat appointed leadership are more likely to actually function, see e.g. FEMA under Clinton, as opposed to either Bush.
Clarence Thomas. Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. (Yeah, it’s a low blow.)
After the universal health care bus went into the ditch, the Clinton years were, I suppose, marked mostly by fairly modest, often unglamorous, but not entirely insignificant victories along the lines of SCHIP and the Family and Medical Leave act. These were often disfigured by compromises forced on the administration by the GOP Congress, notably in the case of welfare reform — though, of course, these compromises were arguably made too easily in the name of “triangulation”. This record of incremental scrabbling was punctuated by the stunningly deluded corporate pandering of NAFTA and the other trade pacts, and misguided idiocy like the “Defense [sic] of Marriage Act”.
A friend of mine insists that the legislation desired by Clinton’s administration was, as a rule, vastly better than the scarred bills that eventually emerged from Gingrich’s chop shop, and that a great number of their legislative initiatives were just ignored or otherwise procedurally killed. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find this information online in any form that would allow me to make that argument myself without a prohibitive amount of research.
In any case, I think it’s pretty clear that Clinton’s and Gingrich’s priorities were not even close to comparable — a point which you arguably concede at the end of your comment, thereby undermining your own argument.
One might say that from the 30s to the 70s, the arc of the country followed the fortunes of the Democratic party — a Democratic party given progressive momentum by the earlier Progressive movement and militarist momentum by WWII. The progressive momentum was eventually killed by addiction to Cold War — stopping that stall was in some sense a real failure on the part of Carter, though perhaps an inevitable one. The country since then has followed the fortunes of the GOP as it descended into cultism and built a machine to take us over a cliff.
At the time their movement was taking its early steps, conservatives certainly felt “their” party had been greatly distorted by the years of liberal ascendancy — that’s partly why they were so rabid about turning it into something else. And progressives now are fully justified in feeling that “their” party has been dramatically distorted by the conservative ascendancy — and are fervently trying to change it, with the same recognition of 60s conservatives that it may take a while.
I find the formulation that “there’s no difference between the parties” maddeningly static and ahistorical. It ignores all the dynamics of change in US politics and in the makeup of the parties themselves over the past several decades. And it ignores the diversity within the parties that may or may not be being expressed at any given moment.
None of this is to say I don’t find the Democrats profoundly disappointing. If I had to say what reality I think the “no difference between the parties” language refers to, I would guess that it signals the perception that the Democrats are not currently a functionally progressive party in any meaningful sense, that there is no effective vehicle of left politics in the US — and with that, I agree. There are a lot real of progressives among the Democrats, but they in no way control the party, and the party is also riddled with narcissistic and spineless corporate panders. On many issues, the party does not function as an effective counterweight to the GOP. But even so there has never been a moment when equating them with the GOP was meaningful, and this extends back to the 1860s when it was the Republicans who were in the right.
As Glenn Greenwald says, political regimes are created by human beings and can always be remade by human beings. Given the practical options available in American politics right now, I choose as a motivation the shame of being associated with the failures of the Democrats over the righteousness of condemning them from outside. This has nothing to do with whether I like them. The “no difference between the parties” rhetoric just cedes to the corporations the only center of political power in the US with any progressive elements.
You said, in an earlier comment, “I will never vote Republican”. I find it hard to believe that only became true after Bush43 came to office. So what does “there’s no difference between the parties” even mean to you specifically? It obviously has no operative force: they are different enough that, given a choice, you know which one you’d choose.
The differences in positions were only a matter of degree and Clinton’s administration was way more conservative than Nixon’s for example (except for the paranoia thing). Nixon consolidated much of the positive gains of LBJ (expanding social programs, arts spending, and federal regulations on businesses) while Clinton rolled them back.
Yes, and Nixon had a Democratic congress while Clinton had a Republican one. The conservative movement was still relatively nascent under Nixon. What may be turning into a new, more broad-based progressive movement, was rarely even visible under Clinton. (I am also curious, given the dynamics of distortion I posited in the previous section, whether an argument could be made that Nixon governed to the left of Truman. I honestly don’t know.)
The same thing goes for the comparison between Bush41 and Clinton. The change in Congress made for a considerable leveling effect between what policies each might have pursued. The fact that there was a functional conservative movement and no effective progressive counterweight, plus the legacy of Reagan meant that the default path would end up being the conservative one.
As far as I’m aware, as regards overt corporatism, Clinton was, at the time he came to power, something of an anomaly among Democrats — he doesn’t seem to be the heir of LBJ and Carter anyway. (And I’ve never forgiven him for that elitist speech to the WTO during the Seattle protests.) Even if his “third way” rhetoric made political sense at the time, there was no reason that it had to be pursued in a way that ceded so much ground to corporate power (e.g. NAFTA).
Clinton is also not the Democratic party, even if until the rise of Obama, he was the party’s only major lodestar for so long, that it’s easy to identify his way of doing things with the party itself. However, a lot goes on in all the (not) dark, (not) hidden corners of the party that the media doesn’t pay attention to. And the increasing difference in treatment of the parties by the media is, as digby and Somerby will tell you in exhaustive detail, a necessary element of any assessment of their effectiveness.
If your measure is economic justice in some large sense, and you assume the parties are relatively uniform in composition, and you assume that what it was possible for Clinton and Bush41 to accomplish — even noting the variables of each one’s agenda, relationship with Congress, and level of public and institutional support during their time in office — represents the baseline of each party, and you assume that baseline is static, then ok, a case can be made that in that narrow comparison the parties appear equally useless.
However, if you use pretty much any other measure — quality of life, social safety net, secularism, fiscal responsibility, commitment to non-ideological science — I would say that, even accepting the other premises I stated, the Democrats in general, and even Clinton in particular, come out easily on top. And holding the line on these kinds of issues is critical precisely because economic justice is so utterly stalled in this country.
Even if you don’t accept that previous statement, I think the baseline premises are completely untenable. I think that by the time Gingrich takes control of the House, treating Bush41′s policies as representative of the GOP is ridiculous, and that such a premise becomes steadily more ridiculous through the rest of the 90s — let alone what’s happened since Bush43 took office. As far as I know, the GOP couldn’t reject Bush41′s policies fast enough after he left office.
I can certainly sympathize with the sentiment that most Democrats (and the Clintons particularly) are, on balance, useless as regards economic justice, but that is not enough to make them equivalent to the GOP. As I noted earlier: there is a big difference between saying “a plague on both your houses” and “there’s no difference between the two parties”.
LBJ expanded the war against communism that JFK started (I would use this example to counter your assertion about Democrats and war above),
“That JFK started“? A good argument can certainly be made that JFK had a fairly scary Cold Warrior mentality, but what element of the “war against communism” did he start? At first I thought you might mean that he started the intervention in Vietnam, but that isn’t really accurate either.
When I talk about the notion that “war equals national redemption”, I’m referring to the Michael Ledeen/Victor Davis Hanson belief in martial glory as the core element of national identity. That’s not a sentiment I associate with the Democratic party. Nor is it one that I associate with the Cold War in general — the nuclear threat was too real and too universal for armchair warrior theatrics. The combination of American Exceptionalism and a more run-of-the-mill militarism so common in the US is not the same thing.
Bush 41 was the president that formed the IPCC to begin to address climate change, while Clinton expanded authority on wiretapping and other invasions of privacy, shepherded NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO (the last two being deeply anti-constitutional) and started his own war.
[I forgot to write after Bush41 formed the IPCC, it was Clinton that first refused to sign Kyoto…]
I might be wrong on this, but didn’t Bush41 form the IPCC as a complete stall so that we wouldn’t “bet the economy on global warming”? If that’s correct, then (from the denialist point of view) the IPCC becomes an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Clinton (well, literally: Gore) did sign Kyoto. The Senate refused to ratify it in its original form. Unanimously. So hardly a mark in favor of Democrats, but not one specifically against Clinton.
A lot of progressives were also in favor of Clinton’s war. I remember there were various articles in The Nation where the authors puzzled over the fact that they found themselves in support of US military intervention. It is hard to argue that it was a situation perpetrated by the Democrats which progressives stood against with any unity. What is your take on the Kosovo intervention? Are you trying to argue that it is morally equivalent to, say, Bush41 in Panama?
Institutional liberals were in line for the Iraq war until it turned to s**t, then it suddenly became “mismanaged.”
I’ve never argued that a substantial portion of Democrats in power aren’t supporters of imperialism.
It is also the case that at the time the Iraq war began, Americans in general and Democrats in particular, didn’t know that Bush was insane. A lot of them really didn’t believe he’d pull the trigger. This is not an excuse, but it does indicate that the political dynamic among Democrats was not a direct support of the Republican policy.
It seems like the Republicans over the last 10-12 years have degraded to a point never seen before. Newt lead a charge which is now headed right over a cliff. But it is a recent anomaly ripe for a correction. We will see a correction in the next election and there will (out of necessity) be a reshaping of the Republicans back to Bush41 styles and the corporate/imperialist elites will be pleased again. Huckabee scared the s**t of of them…
As I indicated above, I don’t think Bush41′s policy is a baseline, and I doubt they could return to it if it was.
The glorious, oh-so-popular non-candidacy of Michael Bloomberg seems like an indication that our plutocratic overlords are rather puzzled over what to do. They will, of course, figure out something. Unfortunately, I suspect it will involve further, more direct co-optation of the Democrats.
Bush43 is not an aberration with respect to what American conservatism and the Republican party currently are — he’s more like the ideal. He’s what the movement has always wanted. On some level though, his version of capitalism — which basically consists of shoveling taxpayer money to his cronies — seems to implement self-interest actually too narrowly to serve the needs of the plutocrats as a class. Perhaps, the GOP, in achieving the dreams of avarice bestowed upon it by the plutocrats, has in the process become ill-suited to the purpose for which it was intended. Apparently though, if Naomi Klein is to be believed (and I haven’t read The Shock Doctrine, so I could be getting this wrong), that may be an overly optimistic assessment of what the plutocrats think at this point.
Don’t expect a Democratically controlled administration and congress to roll back the civil rights violations, the torture provisions, the war in Iraq, defense spending, or corporate patronage. We will see a little improvement on abortion rights, maybe gay rights, and at least a dialog on healthcare. Not issues to ignore, but thin gruel when our whole system is so profoundly diseased.
I think this, too, refers to a baseline that doesn’t really exist.
Overcoming the expectations of diappointment that Democrats have generated in recent years is admittedly a tough hurdle, but I honestly have no idea what to expect from an Obama administration at this point. It’s possible he might govern fairly anemically and just gave a good speech every so often, but it’s also possible he’ll actually try to bring real change to the system. And while he’s not going to go after anything fundamental (like, say, the legal doctrine that corporations are the equivalent of human individuals for purposes of civil rights), given how positively many Republicans (regular folks, not the pols) respond to him, if he does try, he might even have a chance to accomplish something worthwhile. Obama has made strong statements about ending the war and restoring civil rights that it would seem folly not to follow through on if elected.
Six months or a year ago, I would have predicted him to take the first of the two paths I mentioned above. Now I just don’t know — and he killed another substantial chunk of cynicism on Tuesday. But then, on some level, I’m an optimist.
Rumble in the Jungle!
I think this post should have been titled, “Fish vs Fowl”.
…fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly…
wow. plover brought the full pants on this one.
I deserve it plover, no worries.
It appears we might have an extended conversation here in the public spaces, I apologize to anyone put off by both my negativity and my distorted world view. I don’t think I can put together a coherent essay that wouldn’t be so poorly composed and completely disjointed that I would end up contradicting myself several times, so I will instead cut pieces out of plover’s post and respond. Hopefully this will clarify both positions I hold firm on and highlight points I will concede. It is going to be messy and as mandos might say tl;dr.
As a couple of starting comments, I have two personal obsessions that deeply color my opinions and probably cause me to overstate my positions: 1) US militarization and its desires for global hegemony, 2) the steady handing over of power from the “people” to the corporations that has been occurring in the US since the creation of corporations. In these two aspects, I would argue that, regardless of public proclamations made by either party, the actions taken by each party over the last century strongly suggest there are shared assumptions made by the elite rulers in both parties, and those shared assumptions systematically undermine the values the country is supposedly founded on. You will have swings in each party towards or away from the principles they are supposed to represent, pulled by the social tensions of the population in a particular period of history, but they will both return to the core principles that promote war and corporate power. I don’t know if I can effectively defend these arguments, but they are my starting core beliefs.
plover says:
I don’t think the current administration is representative of any historical conservatism, but I do think it’s the endpoint of a trajectory that can be traced from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to DeLay to CheneyBush — in other words, what has called itself the “conservative movement” (however much of a misnomer that became). In this context, it is Bush41 that is the anomaly.
I did concede last thread that there have been some recent, unprecedented changes in the Republican part. They may be permanent and my beliefs will have to change accordingly. I don’t agree that it traces back as far as you claim to Goldwater, but to a confluence of events around the time Gingrich rose to power. I think it is important to point out that the Republicans that took over the House and Senate rode in on a wave of “reform” after several scandals implicating mostly Democrats (the Keating 5 and ABSCAM being the two largest examples). It was the Democrats that were (justifiably) vulnerable to attacks of corruption, as well as cronyism (i.e. Tip O’Neil). Democrats were the ones viewed as incompetent (Carter) and corrupt (House and Senate). The problems started with Gingrich and his (uncanny) ability to control message with the media and ultimately within the ranks of the Republican Party itself. This discipline severely narrowed range of discourse and it seems like it has created a mentality that ultimately allowed the dittohead revolution. The most recent version of the Telecom Communications Act (Clinton administration) exacerbated this problem and powerful Republicans have exploited the opportunity to the fullest.
The most pervasive and reflexive tool they use to enact their agenda is brand differentiation: if a Democrat says it first, it’s wrong; if a Democrat takes a position, the opposite position must be taken (unless it’s a position they want, in which case the Democrat can be patted on the head for being “bipartisan” — cue David Broder, swooning);
Unless I have missed something, this has been a technique used by politicians on all sides from the beginnings of time.
and if one of their own takes a position favored by Democrats, or otherwise deviates from the movement image, that person is now either a liberal (if that’s useful and a “D” can be stuck after their name on Fox News, e.g. Mark Foley) or a traitor (e.g. Chuck Hagel, who it is impossible to argue is liberal). This principle has been applied to, notably, torture; one of its purest expressions is Jonah Goldberg’s magnum opus. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” and one aspect of that reality is that liberals are always wrong.
This, I think is reflected in the point I talked about above, the “new discipline” of the Republican party is (or I believe now was) unprecedented and caused the recent aberration of Bush43.
In order to say “there’s no difference between the parties”, it seems to me it is necessary to ignore what the GOP has become, and the degree to which it’s current form has become self-perpetuating and monolithic. And while the Bush43 years have illustrated all this more dramatically than in the past, I think enough of this was obvious in 2000, that it wasn’t a tenable formulation then either.
While the calculus you state became clear by 2004, I do not think this argument holds for the 2000 election. Bush Jr. came in with advice from all the same people that advised Bush41, no one could predict there would be a purge of the more “stable” (!) advisors within that group. I still maintain that Clinton’s time was not so different from the previous administration (see arguments below) and Nader could convincingly argue there was real little daylight between the parties in practical policies (his anti-corporate anti-imperialism myopias are admittedly similar to mine). Too many liberals allow themselves to be apologists for the Democrats when they make major decisions that deeply betray their professed beliefs. Bill Clinton was a huge beneficiary of such apologies.
Universal health care? Just because Clinton failed to achieve it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a policy that was substantively different. And he and Hillary did succeed in getting SCHIP passed. And, of course, he overturned the abortion gag rule when he entered office — in direct opposition to Bush41.
From wiki:
In August of 1994, Democratic Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell introduced a compromise proposal that would have delayed requirements of employers until 2002, and exempted small businesses. However, “Even with Mitchell’s bill, there were not enough Democratic Senators behind a single proposal to pass a bill, let alone stop a filibuster.”
For Bush41, the realities of the healthcare problem were really just beginning to be understood. His solution was tax credits for poor to middleclass families and cost controls (from 1992 SOU). This may sound familiar.
The simple fact that Democrats actually believe in government means that agencies under Democrat appointed leadership are more likely to actually function, see e.g. FEMA under Clinton, as opposed to either Bush.
Touche.
Clarence Thomas. Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. (Yeah, it’s a low blow.)
Clinton did pretty well with his appointments (although all the “liberals” on the court are consistently pro-business).
Also, Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan), David Souter (Bush41).
This record of incremental scrabbling was punctuated by the stunningly deluded corporate pandering of NAFTA and the other trade pacts, and misguided idiocy like the “Defense [sic] of Marriage Act”.
Even someone like yourself, whom I strongly respect for his/her ability to argue rationally and convincingly, uses words like “deluded” and “misguided” to describe Clinton’s actions. I would use words like “criminal” and “betrayal”. The Clinton’s successes in the halls of power are specifically because of these pro-corporate positions, not a function of them triangulating.
A friend of mine insists that the legislation desired by Clinton’s administration was, as a rule, vastly better than the scarred bills that eventually emerged from Gingrich’s chop shop, and that a great number of their legislative initiatives were just ignored or otherwise procedurally killed.
A charming delusion in my opinion. I will admit that is only opinion.
On many issues, the party does not function as an effective counterweight to the GOP. But even so there has never been a moment when equating them with the GOP was meaningful, and this extends back to the 1860s when it was the Republicans who were in the right.
This makes the fundamental assumption that the roles of the governing elites is truly oppositional. There are many critical aspects of policy where the elite are essentially unified and significantly in opposition to popular opinion (recent example: bankruptcy law). In general, I think they are all “in on it.” That is caused by a funnel of money coming from corporate interests. How can it be ignored?
You said, in an earlier comment, “I will never vote Republican”. I find it hard to believe that only became true after Bush43 came to office. So what does “there’s no difference between the parties” even mean to you specifically? It obviously has no operative force: they are different enough that, given a choice, you know which one you’d choose.
However, if you use pretty much any other measure — quality of life, social safety net, secularism, fiscal responsibility, commitment to non-ideological science — I would say that, even accepting the other premises I stated, the Democrats in general, and even Clinton in particular, come out easily on top. And holding the line on these kinds of issues is critical precisely because economic justice is so utterly stalled in this country.
At least Democrats talk the talk. The current incarnation of Republicans are so morally bankrupt that they can’t even pretend to be human. But Democrats are part of the fundamentally corrupt system out of balance. Do I believe that the system can fix itself or even critically examine itself? No.
When I talk about the notion that “war equals national redemption”, I’m referring to the Michael Ledeen/Victor Davis Hanson belief in martial glory as the core element of national identity. That’s not a sentiment I associate with the Democratic party. Nor is it one that I associate with the Cold War in general — the nuclear threat was too real and too universal for armchair warrior theatrics. The combination of American Exceptionalism and a more run-of-the-mill militarism so common in the US is not the same thing.
The nuclear threat was real and one of the huge reasons I was so pissed off at both Clinton and Obama for keeping nuclear options “on the table” like petulant children. The American Exceptionalism is alive and well in both parties. The cheering and use of the Balkans as an example of a “good war” (see Berube, DeLong, Marshall, Digby, ad nauseum) and repeated calls for interference in Darfur by those currently condemning the Iraq war is pretty common among liberals, completely ignoring that these actions are war crimes based on the treaties we have signed.
I’ve never argued that a substantial portion of Democrats in power aren’t supporters of imperialism.
But to me, this is at the heart of the problem. Clinton massively expanded military spending after the cuts made previously by, wait for it, Dick Cheney. Social justice, environmental stability, sane economies are all fantasies until we remove militarization from the equation. P of the discretionary budget is spent on the military. Taking data from the Borgen Project:
To quote James Madison:
The glorious, oh-so-popular non-candidacy of Michael Bloomberg seems like an indication that our plutocratic overlords are rather puzzled over what to do. They will, of course, figure out something. Unfortunately, I suspect it will involve further, more direct co-optation of the Democrats.
I agree, but I would argue the co-optation is a done deal from the beginning. /cynicism
Overcoming the expectations of diappointment that Democrats have generated in recent years is admittedly a tough hurdle, but I honestly have no idea what to expect from an Obama administration at this point. It’s possible he might govern fairly anemically and just gave a good speech every so often, but it’s also possible he’ll actually try to bring real change to the system. And while he’s not going to go after anything fundamental (like, say, the legal doctrine that corporations are the equivalent of human individuals for purposes of civil rights), given how positively many Republicans (regular folks, not the pols) respond to him, if he does try, he might even have a chance to accomplish something worthwhile. Obama has made strong statements about ending the war and restoring civil rights that it would seem folly not to follow through on if elected.
I hope you are right. I have not been so impressed with his antiwar stance. He leaves enough qualifiers in so that he can leave 50K troops in Iraq indefinitely and not be a liar (specifically I would like to know what this means:
To his credit he does say no permanent bases. Maybe I am just too cynical to believe him at this point.
On some level though, his version of capitalism — which basically consists of shoveling taxpayer money to his cronies — seems to implement self-interest actually too narrowly to serve the needs of the plutocrats as a class.
His true failing to the ruling class. This is why corporate money has begun to flow towards Democrats and why I predict that there will be a correction on the Republican side. The Rove/Delay strategy of abject pandering and fear mongering worked temporarily, but left the ruling class a broken mess of a party looking at its second trouncing in two elections. My prediction is that this extreme version of the Republican party is done, the benefactors will collect their winnings, some new version of Republican (maybe a Weld or Earlich type this time that panders to the yahoos without actually, you know, doing anything for them) will come around in 10 years after the corporations lock in their gains under the Dems, and we will start again.
The spam catcher ate my comment. Hopefully PP can release it.
Of course this will get through:
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At the risk of taking this discussion on a tangent only marginally related to the discussion at hand, I’d like to briefly address the issue of corporate “personhood” and what it means in the context of our political system.
There are good reasons for an organization, be it business, nonprofit, or governmental. to have at least some of the characteristics of a natural person. If one concedes that people will group themselves for any number of sensible purposes, those groups then need the capacity to contract, be sued, buy and sell property, and otherwise do the sorts of things we do as individuals. The idea of corporations is simply a way of accomplishing that.
To my mind, the issue is not whether corporations have “personhood.” In fact, stripping away the protection of the corporate form is more likely to negatively impact small companies while leaving the larger ones with the protection of vast armies of lawyers and financial reserves.
Instead, I see our problem as the concentration of wealth, which just happens to often come in the form of corporate control. Take away corporations and leave wealth concentrated and it’s hard to see how things improve much. On the other hand, if wealth is distributed in a way that preserves many small business entities, no one company would have the political and economic power of say a Microsoft. Alternatively, wealth could be equitably distributed so that the control of a large corporation was vested in the hands of a vast number of small shareholders. Of course that’s not the way it currently exists in the United States, but neither do lots of other things that can be changed.
Finally, one can certainly argue about the extent to which corporations should be allowed to spend money on political advertising or make political contributions or otherwise become directly involved in the political process. I acknowledge this is a problem, although I think the problem has less to do with the source of money in politics and more to do with the money itself. Like water, money finds its natural course. Hence the rise of the 527 advocacy groups. Short of an outright and clearly unconstitutional ban on political advertising it is very difficult to draft legislation in this area without edging into government regulation of speech based on its content.
I hear the Snagwagon, and I obey. As not as unevil as they think or claim to be, I still wish Google had bought a giant chunk of wireless real estate.
say it with me: parliamentary democracy!
and you let people beat the eff out of each other in parliament, a la japan, india and a host of other places. ROYAL rumble just got a new meaning!
fish:
Instead of responding in a point-by-point fashion, I want to see if I can pick out a few underlying premises first. I’ll probably respond to specific points in a later comment.
My impression is that one of the chief differences in emphasis between our analyses is that, in general, mine treats the Democratic party as a political battlefield, while yours treats it as a more fixed organ of elite power. Usually, the Republican party, too, is a battlefield. What’s weird about the current moment is that the GOP party apparatus has become so monolithic, and so locked into a particular ideological mode, that it fails to provide a meaningful outlet for the tensions in its coalition. Until the machine breaks, can the GOP actually do anything but continue to devolve in the direction of an authoritarian, nativist gang?
(For an interesting suggestion of how some of those tensions may re-emerge, see the discussion with E. J. Dionne, Amy Sullivan, and Michael Gerson that was floating around on C-SPAN yesterday — what Gerson has to say about differences between evangelicals in general and both the GOP and religious right leaders is interesting. I might summarize it as: David Kuo is not an anomaly.)
One problem with breaking the machine is that it is not just a machine for grooming and electing politicians, it also includes explicit ideological training for young people to insure that there is pool of “right-thinking” people to choose from and to staff everything. As I’ve said for a while: these days, right-wing activism is the counter-culture. They are taught to believe they’re rebels after all.
[plover attempts to stop madly digressing]
The plutocratic elite is not identical to the political elite — though obviously there’s all sorts of overlap and symbiosis. A party is a diverse collection of individuals. Elected officials are individual humans who bring their own concerns to their office which may or may not have anything to do with any societal elites — but even before they are in office, the battle is on between those elites and whatever other constituencies have a stake. The elites win most of the time not because the parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of Plutocracy, Inc., but because they know where the levers of power are (having been involved in designing most of them), they are always paying attention (that is, they can afford to pay people to pay attention for them), and when they do lose, their opponents generally pack up and go home and they don’t. And these elites can also be fooled, both by charlatans and their own perceptions of their interests, just like anyone else can. They were sold on the GOP machine until it started chewing them up too (some of them apparently still are, cf. Club for Growth). The increasing disparities in wealth in recent years just make it easier to buy influence to further rig the levers of power and, as elites always do, convince themselves their will be no reckoning.
You seem to be judging the parties by the outcomes of the battles, not by their internal dynamics. Of course, progressives lose most of the time even in fights within the Democrats, they haven’t been organized well enough in recent years not to. And that’s what the netroots (or whatever you want to call it) is trying to change. Even Steny Hoyer will thunder on the House floor against telecom amnesty when prodded far enough (damn, it was weird watching that).
In politics, you have to fight where the battle is. The battle for progressive ideas does exist in the US, and the arena where it currently has the most effect — probably the only one where it currently can have an effect in changing how things are set up — the arena that is actually connected to the levers of power, is within the Democratic party. (Sad, ain’t it?) The Nader strategy not only cedes that terrain to his opponents, it actively interferes with the efforts of those progressives who consider the struggle within the party legitimate, and, in effect, actively kneecaps his own side. It is true that with enough people behind you, you can create a new power center, but the structural hurdles in the US for creating another party — especially nationwide — are immense. If we want to have a more diverse selection of parties with real clout in this country, those hurdles need to be addressed. In terms of the presidency, the biggest hurdle derives from the Constitution: the fact that all a group needs to do to assume power is win the election — not create a majority governing coalition as in a parliamentary system — means that splintering the party closest to your side always weakens your own position.
The simplest way to alleviate this is probably Australian balloting — that or something similar strikes me as a far more effective thing for Nader to use his name recognition and influence to build a constituency for than a candidacy. What America needs right now largely isn’t third party candidates, it’s the structural elements necessary to make third party candidates viable — and that’s only going to come when the people demand it as it’s not in the interest of the current parties themselves. And such an effort should take a page from the Republicans: make it local, take it to the states and cities. It’s a federal system, use it. Also, whether or not we like it, an independent candidate who actually succeeded in getting elected President would also have both the parties against them, and would be stymied at every turn by Congress.
The elites rig the game, thus they win a lot. But the US government does derive its power ultimately from the people, and so it remains true that they only win because the rest of us let them. We don’t get to choose the battlefield, but we can attempt to change it. “People make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing.” I’m beginning to sound a bit platitudinous, but despite all the accretions that distort our system, at root these are the low-level mechanisms out of which the current mess is constructed, and out of which any change must also be constructed. What I have been calling Chomskyan style analysis (possibly inaccurately) can provide a snapshot of how the game is rigged at a given moment, but it is curiously unparticipatory and static. It often gives the impression that a political system is more like a completed engineering project than a dynamic ecosystem.
I doubt my frustration with the Democrats is really all that different from yours. I sympathize completely with the desire to be free of them, to not maintain identification with such a compromised party. And I even agree that the Clinton years, made that identification nigh insufferable (not to mention their resemblance through most of the Bush years to sea squirts — every time it looked they might grow a spine, they attached themselves to a rock and became filter feeders). But even so, I think it was also clear at the time that what Nader did, the way he did it, could only be a mistake. I also disagree that the speculative model of W’s presidency before he was elected was necessarily his father’s. I expected something more dangerous. Even during the 2000 campaign, I was worried he might turn out as bad or worse than Reagan, especially in light of reporting on his extreme religious views.
What I’ve tried to do here is provide a relatively concrete evocation of the differing views of power relations that I think underlie our positions. That’s as opposed to going off into philosophical abstractions about models of power and subjectivity. Am I actually succeeding in clarifying anything? Or do I seem to be mostly belaboring the obvious?
I looked back at a couple of our other exchanges such as this one and this one. We often seem to have approximately the same argument. Do you suppose it’s because we both know what the argument is, or because we’ve never identified the real point of difference?
Snag:
My point is about corporations and civil rights, not the legal fiction of personhood per se.
The conception of what civil liberties are proper to human beings is derived from the universal, concrete nature of human beings as biological creatures, located in space, possessing a limited life-span, and having certain material needs.
Those things are not true of corporations. Whatever rights may be necessary for their functioning, it seems to me, ought to be derived from other considerations, and as legal fictions, their rights should never trump those of actual human beings.
The corporate structure should also not shield the decision makers in the corporation from the legal consequences of their actions. It should not facilitate diffusion of responsibility.
Why, for example, should a corporation have a presumptive right to free speech? There is no guarantee that statements made by commercial corporations (beyond, say, “buy our product”) have any meaningful relationship to the opinions of the people associated with the company. If a company lobbies for certain provisions in the law, there is no guarantee that others associated with the company don’t think the benefit to the company of that law is outweighed by the harm it does to individuals.
Now, it is also the case that any kind of speech that a group of people might want to make as a group should be possible to do. So some corporate structure ought to exist for those purposes. The point is corporations don’t have any universal needs like human beings. So individuals can say what they want, and individuals can form groups to say anything they want, but not all groups necessarily have the right to say anything.
I can’t say I’ve ever tried to flesh out this line of thinking in much depth. And I expect any example I make will be easy to shoot holes in — but it will be easy based upon the assumptions inherent in the current system. I don’t think there’s anything simple about trying to take the basic idea I outlined above about the nature of rights, and turning it into a meaningful and functional set of legal doctrines.
People ought to be able to pursue their self-interest through aggregate entities like coporations, but the self-interest of those created entities should not be allowed to damage the interests of the tangible human beings that it is the ultimate goal of our laws and governments to protect. Maybe there are better ways of reconceiving how corporate and human interests interact, but what seems certain is that the current system is wildly weighted in favor of the corporations and, more to the point, the tiny subset of humans that are their wealthiest owners.
You suggest that the solution is to reduce the concentration of wealth (and in the end that would almost certainly be an effect of what I’m talking about). Any system of wealth distribution must be predicated also on some particular conception of the relations between various entities in society and how laws should be structured around that. There may be some ways of pursuing this that are simple changes to the structure we have now. But generally such things are easily reversed by elites with a little patience. How do we make those reverses structurally difficult?
plover smash. awesome. I’m such a lightweight.
plover:
Not sure you got our split point exactly right. As I read your description of the current political climate and dynamics of our political parties, I find myself mostly nodding. I don’t see the parties as static, although the battlefields you describe I believe more represent the diversity or range of elite opinion (a more restricted set then you allow for), and not the full diversity of American opinion. These limits are set by all the dynamics you describe for the rigged game and the added dynamic of our media discourse also being controlled by the ruling class thus limiting our discussions. I also believe the shattering of Republican power we are witnessing will cause a “restructuring that will marginalize some of the crazies to reclaim the Reagan Democrats. This is only prediction and may not happen. We may differ on specifics here (or maybe magnitude of effects), but nothing really substantial that should generate such prolific verbiage between us.
I think our differences really come down to how you ultimately grapple with the problem.
You are of the belief that using the mechanisms built into the system, sufficient corrections can be made by applying pressure from within. The recent internet influences, while modest, are real examples of democratization and the kind of pressure you describe, which is also why the Hoyers and Emanuels have such contempt for bloggers, they are a real nuisance to the smooth running of empire. If you believe (and your writing states this) that change can be made from within the Democratic party, then your conclusions are completely logical and justified.
I do not believe that change can be made from within.
I believe the internet effect is only temporary as the party machine get better at co-opting the most powerful online influences (Republicans had control of message from the beginning), they will fall in line with the needs of empire and the ruling elites (N.B. Kos, Daily; Lake, Firedog). You are absolutely correct that the power of the ruling class is derived from our acquiescence to power. If you believe as I do, that change is impossible from within, the choice is either continuing to enable the ruling class or completely abdicate both political parties. I know for all practical purposes, my vote no longer carries “meaning”, for now. I will wait on the sidelines fighting local battles for long reaching goals (I am an active participant in trying to get instant runoff balloting in Maryland, and was a happy participant in supporting the now passed legislation for Maryland to pledge its electoral votes to the popular winner of presidential elections) but I will not again vote for a kinder, gentler empire.
It may be that we are actually arguing issues of faith here and thus logic will ultimately fail.
As to the only marginally related topic into which I’ve sunk my teeth, aggregate entities regularly trump the rights of the individual. Government at the local level, for example, is often deemed a “public corporation.” That corporation has the right to take property (although compensation must be paid), pass penal laws, and do all sorts of other things that elevate the group above the individual.
What is the distinction between these and other aggregate groups? The profit motive? No, because we don’t grant nonprofits the right to imprison people or field an army.
The right of people to elect officers of the corporation? Maybe, although until the fairly recent past, poll taxes and property ownership standards resulted in voting requirements in public elections not much different than one would find in the corporate world.
So how do we decide which groups do not have rights that trump those of the individual? We pass laws regulating nongovernmental entities (however they are to be defined). In the long run, though, there are always loopholes and people will always band together to exploit those loopholes in furtherance of their particular goals. If wealth is distributed equitably, and constitutional protections remain in place for minority groups, other aggregates should not wield undue influence.
so I posted 25 times in the Yelp! thread, and yet I have nothing to contribute here. Yes i suck. \\
guess it’s on to youtube to find teh best Wilma Deering videos for me.
Snag:
Government at the local level, for example, is often deemed a “public corporation.” … What is the distinction between these and other aggregate groups?
I’m no expert on this stuff and have no systematic set of definitions, but here are the concepts that occur to me.
A polity is an aggregation which manifests a conception of sovereignty and/or enacts a social contract (or something along those lines). Both these ideas are slippery, and I do know they have been defined and critiqued from many different angles. Since this is a very (very) rough discussion, I’ll assume they can be used naively for my purposes.
A polity exists on some territory and expresses the sense of how the sovereign subset of the people inhabiting that territory (e.g. the monarch or land-owners or subjects or citizens or residents) define and maintain the social contract. In a federal system like the US, a given territory is part of a nested set of polities, and sovereignty is only partially defined at any given level.
In any case, the types of aggregations I discussed in previous comment are expressions of the interests of the members of a polity as expressed within an existing social contract, and are subject to the rules of that contract (though obviously one of the functions of political speech and organizing can be to change that contract).
There are obviously many similarities between polities and other types of aggregations that human beings create to pursue their interests. What I’m saying is that element that makes polities different is this element I’m calling sovereignty, which is not something either for-profit or non-profit groups within a polity may define for themselves.
I don’t want to push what I’m saying any further because my definitions are so loose. But in any case, traditional political philosophy defines a polity using something like the ideas I’ve mentioned, though I’m unsure whether modern political philosophy still finds these terms I’ve used tenable.
There are points in your comment that seem like they acknowledge what I’m saying here, so I’m a little unsure whether I’m clarifying anything or not.
*
I find your last paragraph, especially the last sentence a bit confusing. It appears to me that you intend it as a response to the final paragraph of my previous comment.
What I was saying, in effect, is that an “equitable distribution of wealth” requires a set of principles which define “equitable” and mechanisms for ensuring those principles are operative (after all, some people think the current system is “equitable”). What you say about loopholes applies to that as much as anything else.
And I agree that a just distribution of wealth helps maintain other forms of justice, and that the current system is not just. If some ambiguity in my previous comment obscured that, then I’m sorry.
In any case, I’m puzzled as to what exactly you are objecting to.
My last paragraph was in response to your comment that:
“Those things are not true of corporations. Whatever rights may be necessary for their functioning, it seems to me, ought to be derived from other considerations, and as legal fictions, their rights should never trump those of actual human beings.”
I may have been inartful in my own remarks and may have also misinterpreted you. My intent was to try to point out that some “corporations” do indeed have rights that trump those of natural persons and that we generally accept that as appropriate, as long as that corporation is sufficiently driven by public interest and subject to public control; generally but not always governmental entities (see the traditional model of public utility for an example of a private corporation so subjected to public control that it in return receives many of the powers of government, such as that of eminent domain).
Ultimately, I think we agree about the nub of the problem; an undemocratric concentration of power and wealth. I’m not even sure we don’t agree on the general way to approach the problem. I simply remain skeptical that legislation will go far in solving the problem unless accompanied by a tax system that prevents the concentration of wealth and the power that accompanies it.
I’m doing my best to suck some of that wealth from the upper echelon. Like Henry Rollins said of his movie career “I saw that they had lots of money. I didn’t. So I said ‘Gimme some of that money’”
Unfortunately, I kind of suck at it. So any of you that want to send a patrone my way, feel free.
fish:
I’m sorry my response is a bit delayed. Writing it is taking me a little while.
I’ll put it up as a new post when I’m finished — tonight or tomorrow, I hope.
Snag:
I can certainly accept that some of my comments about corporate rights need qualification as to the domain where they apply.
Reading the bit you quoted in light of what you have said, it seems to me that I’ve actually switched domains in mid-sentence without noticing. As I mentioned, I don’t really have a worked out system here. I was bound to screw up somewhere. IANAL and all that.
“Whatever rights may be necessary for their functioning, it seems to me, ought to be derived from other considerations, and as legal fictions, their rights should never trump those of actual human beings.”
The first part of this sentence is actually my primary point: “Whatever rights may be necessary for their functioning, it seems to me, ought to be derived from other considerations”. This is fairly universal. Indeed, it strikes me as actually describing how we go about creating our governments. The role of the state is (obviously) not considered equivalent to that of an individual within the state. A Constitution, in theory, using some conception of the rights proper to individuals, defines a set of powers for the state which include the ways in which those rights are protected, and the circumstances under which they may abrogated.
The end of the quoted sentence, “and as legal fictions, their rights should never trump those of actual human beings” is directed far more narrowly. It mostly refers to the fact that, at least in the US, by according entities like profit-making corporations equivalent rights to entities like human beings, we have been careless in our definitions in ways that impact human lives and fail to protect their rights.
Ultimately, I think we agree about the nub of the problem; an undemocratric concentration of power and wealth. I’m not even sure we don’t agree on the general way to approach the problem.I simply remain skeptical that legislation will go far in solving the problem unless accompanied by a tax system that prevents the concentration of wealth and the power that accompanies it.
I don’t disagree with any of this.
However, I find your last sentence slightly ambiguous — though I may just be reading things in. Are you simply adding the suggestion that tax policy plays an important part in limiting concentration of wealth? Or are you also implying that something I’ve said somehow denies or slights that? If the latter, then I’m still puzzled.
No, I think I’m saying what you’re hearing, which is basically that unless we find a way to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth, the wealthy will simply continue to find ways to manipulate the system regardless of the laws we pass.
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Scary to drag this back up…
But it’s totally worth it for the trading tips.
I recommend going back in time to yesterday and buying calls.
~
Plover was benefilial. I was filibenial.