Goodbye, Creepy Old Opportunist

Goodbye.

“My Country, Tis of Me”: Nice Try, Kinsley

The definition of a Kinsley gaffe—when a politician speaks the truth—is one of those contributions to the political discourse so brilliant it’s almost ridiculous. Its progenitor, Michael Kinsley, has earned my envy and marvel on that score at least.

That instance of stellar insight is rare; even for Michael Kinsley if his recent attempt to cut down the Tea Party movement is any indication. 

The main thrust of Kinsley’s consideration of the movement (cutely titled “My Country, Tis of Me”) is the comparison (credited by Kinsley to the unbearably elitist and ideologically peripatetic David Brooks) to the progressive upheaval of the 1960s. 

[A]lthough the 1960s ultimately spread their tentacles throughout the culture and around the world, politically there was just one big issue: ending the war in Vietnam. No such issue unites the Tea Party Patriots. You might guess from some of their materials on the Web that the repeal of health-care reform is the TPPs’ Vietnam, their towering cause. But even for devoted TPPs, stripping health insurance away from people who’ve just gotten it is unlikely to summon the same passions that the activists of the 1960s brought to stopping a misguided war. Not only do TPPs not have one big issue like Vietnam—they disagree about many of their smaller issues. What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal.

To this very day Kinsley remains in awe of the anti-war movement’s definitive and clear organizing principle of ending the war in Vietnam, and raps the Tea Party movement for its dissimilar lack of a singular unifying policy goal. Firstly, Kinsley’s contention is highly suspect and not at all obvious. When the history of this era is written, it may well be said that the Troubled Asset Relief Program acted as the impetus of the fervor of Tea Party activism. It was the TARP program—with its lack of accountability, monstrous price tag, and subsequent departure from the law’s statute in appropriating its funds—that most recently claimed the scalp of Utah’s Bob Bennett and propelled anti-establishment figures like Rand Paul of Kentucky to prominence.

However, there is something to Kinsley’s notion that Tea Party people are mostly animated by “abstract resentment,” but I wouldn’t count that as a defect. To the extent frustrated voters are unable to clearly delineate the exact origin of and solution to the problems that ail them is a problem of the profoundly confusing times we live in. Simply put, you don’t have to a noted pundit to necessarily grasp the enormity, detachment, and misplaced ownership of our government, and be as hell about it.

The truly interesting part of Kinsley’s attempted smackdown is where he, like most establishment liberals that approach this populist object of their condescension, tries to project the movement’s lasting impact. Can you guess where he ends up?

The antiwar movement also worked, sort of. As did the civil-rights movement that preceded it. Antiwar protests ultimately turned the establishment itself against the war, though extracting us from it still took years. By contrast, the Tea Party Patriots, I predict, are just the flavor of the month: the kind of story that the media are incapable of not exaggerating. The antiwar movement and the 1960s changed America in numerous ways forever. The Tea Party Patriots will be an answer on Jeopardy or a crossword-puzzle clue.

With the very real exception of a small corner of boring hacks in the White House, everyone acknowledges—if begrudgingly—that Republicans on the cusp on something big in this year’s midterm elections.

Lest there be any doubt, any success the Republican Party finds in November is to be accrued to the Tea Party movement. The national Republicans, that feckless, miserable band of losers, were down and seemingly out not long ago. After the last presidential election, it had just lost the Commonwealth of Virginia to an inexperienced, polarizing black candidate—just to provide a view of how dire the situation was. It was the Tea Party protests that disrupted the conventional wisdom of the halcyon first days of the Obama realignment, and irrevocably changed the trajectory of American politics as a result.

Kinsley is careful not to wantonly toss around accusations of racism, and he continues to speak, convincingly, to some of the inner contradictions of the movement. To be sure, Tea Partiers are right to oppose Barack Obama and the Democrats but we must be very clear as to why. As a self-described left-wing Tea Party person, I believe we have much to fear from the “Big Government” of Obama but we must also guard against blanket reactionary hostility to the safety net itself. Medicare, that program we often see seasoned Tea Partiers defending, was implemented in spite of anti-government idolaters who bow at the altar of the mystical “free market.”

Conversely, Michael Kinsley and that entire pathetic crowd of liberal sycophants must understand what we’re dealing with in terms of the modern Democratic Party. What we have is mostly a collection of Wall Street liberals, reflexive statists, radical “environmentalists,” and other noxious malcontents that came together recently and eviscerated Medicare (to the tune of $500,000,000,000) in the service of a newly-minted corporatist health-care program.

Would it be too much to ask for Kinsley liberals to have a fuckin’ clue? For once? Ask not.

The Long March of Narcissistic Clintons

These are fascinating times for observers of Democratic politics—immensely so if you’re a PUMA Democrat. PUMA (i.e. Party Unity My Ass) Dems were, of course, the spontaneous, rankled, mostly unorganized sect of the Democratic base pathetically loyal to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the depressing closing days of the ’08 primary. And I was one of them. It was an unusual fit—obviously—with me being a young black male voter in what seemed like an agitated movement of middle-aged white women voters. 

For most of 2007 (and her entire political life, really) Hillary had been immersed in Elizabeth I phase—with all of her splendid royal pomp and none of her substance; typified by a frosty carapace of presumptuous entitlement. It had long been impolite, heretic even, for liberals to acknowledge what can generally be called the soullessness of the Clintons. (The reason this was true has to do something with the repulsive, Tartufian character of the Newt Gingrich opposition.)

It was in the heady countdown to the Iowa caucuses that I gave Hillary a second look. Hillary, Inc. was in decline and an unlikely hero of liberal conventional wisdom called Barack Obama was on the ascent. The phenomenon of Obama was disturbing to me because it seemed so… not political. To be sure, politics is mostly illusory bullshit but even by the usual plastic standards, the movement around Obama was an unbelievable rat’s nest of mass irrationalism, racial condescension, and lame hype. Discontent with sociopath John Edwards (whose entire populist pose was nothing more than the co-opted MoveOn wing of the Democratic establishment) I began backing Hillary who marvelously transformed into a heroic, rogue Norma Rae character.  

And now she (they) could be coming back.

A couple days ago Bill O’Reilly—bombastic assclown—invited Dick Morris on to discuss a commentary of Hillary’s that piqued his attention. (Interestingly, it was Rewriting History, Dick Morris’s case against Hillary from the political right that had once convinced me I was against her.) In a 60 Minutes interview—that’s still going?—Hillary lamented the sluggish state of the American economy as it has made her attempts, I guess, at smart power more challenging. What seemed to me like an attempt to answer a question and make it through Scott Pelley’s boring inquisition was interpreted by O’Reilly as a “jab” at her boss, the president.

Morris got on to explain that there assuredly as been “a subtle distancing” than began with Hillary’s leave of absence from the heath care reform brawl, and that we should take the possibility of a Clinton-led mutiny seriously.

Let me be clear (as an erstwhile PUMA): Hillary Rodham Clinton should not be president in 2012.

If Obama loses both houses of Congress, sees a precipitous evaporation of his political capital, and comes to be regarded as a miserably failed president, that would be an opportunity to radically shake up Democratic politics for years to come. The temptation of Hillary to make a stab at the nomination should be regarded as an obvious attempt to ensure radical change, post-Obama, doesn’t occur. A Hillary effort, supposedly on the model of Ted Kennedy’s fateful attempt in ’80, is not about policy at all but personality.

Anyone with the balls to challenge the president for his nomination should have one question put to them first: What would you have done differently? Nothing else matters. It’s not enough to dump Obama, recognizing that his great unpopularity would elect a Republican. (That’s nothing more than a cynical political calculation.) There has to have been substantive breaks with the president on policy, and for the right reasons.

It is clear to me on many of the most pressing issues President Clinton would have acted the same as President Obama. Just two examples: (1) The most odious element of ObamaCare is the unconstitutional individual mandate that Hillary steadfastly insisted on while Obama supposedly was against it during the primary; (2) Clinton and Obama both voted for TARP, and I can easily imagine Clinton as the titular head of the Democratic Party corralling Democratic votes in Congress in support of the bailout as Obama did. It’s possible, but certainly not self-evident, that Hillary would have been a more competent manager. It does seem unlikely that self-conscious Hillary would have so publicly agonized over the Afghanistan deliberation, or unwisely pledged the shuttering of Guantanamo within a year.

It’s evident now that the main difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton was simply that of two ambitious people who wanted to be president of the United States at the same time. The rest is just distractive political theater. We mustn’t allow the Clintons to get away with this. They are oligarchical elitists like all the rest. Even the praise that an otherwise hostile media occasionally bestows on them—that they’re smart and wonkish—is revealing. By this, they mean the Clintons are privileged, technocratic statists. (Why just yesterday Bill Clinton, whose deregulatory Treasury operation in  the late ‘90s bares great responsibility for the current depression, was on CNBC extolling the virtues of a monstrous, regressive value-added tax.) 

This is a party that is terrible need of a drastic reorientation. Foreign policy is far more complicated, but at the very least the party needs to break with the economic policies of the corporatist ruling elite. (This includes the Malthusian regime of “environmentalists” like Al Gore, and the fanatical outrage of anthropogenic climate change from which it grows.)

Like Hope and Change, the pantsuits lady from Foggy Bottom will merely be a stalking horse—that is to say, a vehicle through which the establishment prevents a truly cathartic political revolution. 

The Compulsory Enlightenment of Christopher Hitchens

As an avowed atheist, I absolutely adore Christopher Hitchens, New Atheist par excellence. Although I take issue with his hard-line activism and questionable priorities, I must always credit the work of Hitch for first crystallizing my nascent skepticism. It was a rather healthy advancement and for that I am intellectually indebted to him. 

His latest offering will invite heavy criticism from sundry quarters; including this one. (Indebted, not neutered, I said.) 

Here he is:

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.

 I've always been astounded by the rather peculiar logic of folk who oppose the burqa to the extreme of prohibiting it. Hitchens and his sort are not animated by religious bigotry; obviously, the precise opposite is true. No, this is basically compulsory enlightenment. Atheists, and others, like me who support the right to veil recognize this as an issue that is fundamentally about individual liberty. Burqa banners begin with the essential premise that the decision to don a burqa or veil is anything but a free determination. They basically reason that the preponderance of women who embrace the burqa are motivated by the religious repression of the relevant men in their lives. To which I answer: trust people. 

Banning the burqa makes good, practical sense unless one stops to remember the proper role of government. Ultimately, the New Atheists are not shy about using the instrumentalities of government to rudely shake up cultural dynamics. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing but radically degenerates into something awful once we consider the specifics of the issue. I may be an atheist (scornful of the dogma of organized religion as well as the fantastic belief in a Creator), but in terms of personal behavior, I'm basically a libertarian. The New Atheists are anything but. It's not enough to ban the right of men to impose the burqa on their wives, or even to mightily penalize such repression; we must outright ban the burqa itself! 

Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity. I do not deny the right of the KKK to take this faith-based view, which is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I might even go so far as to say that, at a rally protected by police, they could lawfully hide their nasty faces. But I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into the bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to.

 Let me be clear: I'd be a little more than hesitant about allowing a "hooded man or woman" near my children or drive my taxi, too. But that is obviously different matter altogether. I haven't any issue at all with a different set of rules to govern certain public establishments. People shouldn't be allowed to cover themselves in line at the Bank of America any more than they'd be allowed carry a gun there--that's rudimentary procedure in a critical security situation. Otherwise, we ought to trust people with the right to cover themselves as they wish. In return, they ought to be prepared to brave the consequences of what would likely be a lonely, eccentric existence on the periphery. That's what freedom of association is all about.

This is all a very clear expression of the sort of militant atheism that defines Hitchens. I'm all for tearing down the rigidity of religious conformity, and faith period, in our lives, in innumerable ways. But once we begin imitating the superstitious reactionaries in our own clever little way--constructing laws founded on the repudiation of faith, as opposed to centrality and supremacy of faith--we must stop and ponder what we're ushering in. The answer, I'd submit, is a regime of muscular, intolerant anti-theism. Sure, it will be shrouded in the moralistic rhetoric of equality, egalitarianism, and reason, but that only makes it more insidious... and creepily fascistic.