P.M. Carpenter

Obama and King

Politico's Glenn Thrush has a shockingly thoughtful piece (shocking because it's in Politico) on the ideological intersections and divergences of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.'s careers. It gets at the enduring race-class divide in American political philosophy--as further separated by time, circumstances, political realities and personal temperament. Thrush's is a brilliant survey, which I recommend very much.

I do, however, somewhat differ with its suggestive conclusion, which is what makes stuff like Thrush's piece worth reading. Let's get right to it:

King dealt with issues of class and economic equality gingerly at the start of his career.

That was changing as he delivered his speech 50 years ago. “I Have a Dream” is a race speech--but King did allude to a broader movement to address economic inequality in the nation’s cities....

King didn’t embrace economic inequality as a central theme until the summer of 1967, when he began organizing a multiracial Poor People’s Campaign, an unsuccessful effort to prod the Johnson administration to pass a national economic bill of rights. He was murdered a year later supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

Yet even at the end of his life, King--unlike Obama--viewed his struggle as fundamentally racial, according to his biographer Taylor Branch.

It's the final passage's essence that I disagree with, although I readily confess that my disagreement comes in the form of a hard, yet unprovable, assumption.

It seems to me that when assessing King's career, one must look at the totality of its movement, its trajectory, its unfinishedness--and King's trajectory was clearly, I would argue, toward a synthesis that heavily favored a class-over-race analysis of economic inequality. (The commie-paranoid J. Edgar Hoover undoubtedly agreed.) Had King lived but another 10 years, that trajectory would have been confirmed, I think--blending, in the process, King's ideological approach more intimately with Obama's.

Boosting the body count

The Monkey Cage's Erica Chenoweth revisits a 2012 political science study which found that "military interventions in favor of the rebel faction (as opposed to pro-government or neutral interventions) tend to increase government killings of civilians by about 40%."

In other words, given the Syrian civil war's current, overall body count of 100,000, which is vastly the work of the Syrian government, that government's biochemical slaughter (which still awaits definitive proof) of nearly 400 civilians could--assuming the study has its empiricism correct--convert soon to about 40,000 more. 

Is "U.S. credibility" worth that? Is it worth the risk of that? But what am I saying. I shouldn't be asking you. I should be asking the potential 40,000.

The guns will blaze, answers to follow

NBC News:

Missile strikes against Syria could be launched "as early as Thursday," senior U.S. officials said Tuesday as the White House intensified its push toward an international response to the suspected use of chemical weapons....

A U.N. team of inspectors, which is in Syria seeking evidence of Assad's use of chemical weapons, isn't scheduled to leave the country until Sunday.

Right. It's not as though we've ever preempted a U.N. inspection team in a Middle East nation over an issue "suspected" but unverified, for which we then had to pay, oops, a rather steep price. Marx had it backward: First comes the farce, then the tragedy.

The paradox here is that should U.S. missile strikes go swimmingly--which is scarcely expected by most students of armed intervention--then its success will serve as positive reinforcement of hard-power thinking. Of course it's not as though we ever actually learn the inherent limits, once demonstrated, of such power--indeed, Iraq and Afghanistan were meant as refutations of Vietnam's tragic lesson--but episodic successes only encourage more risks, at least one of which is bound to suck you in.

We are embarking on a very dark, very blind journey. Not only are Assad, the Russians, Iran and Hezbollah unlikely to make nice in the face of American admonishment, we are militarily interposing ourselves into what, at its primordial roots, is a vicious religious war of 1,400-years duration. 

God help us--and let's hope he's not Shia. 

The Perfect Sturm und Drang

Congress remains on (another) vacation, we're about to go to war, its fallout is utterly unknown, the red, white and blue is slated to go fiscally dark at September's end (before which our congressfolk will have worked in session for nine days), and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announces that the three giddyups of the apocalypse--"the schedule, the inherent variability of cash flows, and the dire consequences of miscalculation"--should maybe compel this Congress to actually do something about the debt limit before mid-October. This Congress.

How seasonally appropriate, in a zeitgeisty kind of way, that we're sliding into The Fall.   

WH PressSec Jay Carney continues to speak in simple, declarative, "unequivocal" sentences about the debt ceiling--"We will not negotiate with Republicans in Congress over bills Congress has racked up"--just as the haunting House leadership continues to prattle in tangles of counterfactual horseshit: Reaching the debt limit is "a reminder that, under President Obama, Washington has failed to deal seriously with America's debt and deficit." (Other, that is, than slashing the latter in half--and at the worst possible time.)

Halloween really should be canceled this year, for reasons of superfluity. 

Kerry's "Too Late" Declaration

Not that we needed further confirmation of the administration's martial intent, but Secretary Kerry's "too late" declaration, minutes ago, capped it. The tyrant Assad was too late, said Kerry, in admitting U.N. inspectors to investigate the "moral obscenity" of chemical warfare (for moral ambiguity, see Foreign Policy magazine's "CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran"), so, so, so ... 

We're going to war--again. Of course Secretary Kerry didn't actually say that; but "too late" for what, or rather what else? A stern letter on top of the tongue-lashing?

I don't wish to seem unsympathetic to President Obama's lonely plight. But he is, after all, commander in chief, and he will be the one ordering missile strikes, and he will be taking it upon himself to perpetuate America's proportionate-response doctrine, even in muddled circumstances with vague intelligence against a foe who hasn't attacked us.

It's what we do.

Obama must be feeling a bit like the young Michael Corleone about now, hearing his saddened father concede the inevitability of embracing the family business: "There wasn't enough time, Michael, there just wasn't enough time"--to fundamentally change America's foreign policy course.     

Cruz's magic: meaningful pablum

Ted Cruz, chatting yesterday with Candy Crowley:

I'm convinced there's a new paradigm in politics, that actually has Washington very uncomfortable. And it has politicians in both parties very uncomfortable. And that new paradigm is the rise of the grass roots, the ability of grass-roots activists to demand of their elected officials they do the right thing.

To which Ed Kilgore reacts:

Now you can treat this sort of remark as meaningless pablum. Or you can look at it as part of a more general tendency on the Right to discount democratic institutions in favor of expressions of the "demands" of people whose opinions matter more than those of other Americans.

False choice. It's the meaningless pablum of the arrogant Right's anti-democratic dismissiveness.

Yet, there is a meaning in it, of a sort, and it's one that has fascinated students of demagoguery since ancient Greece: How do manifest charlatans such as Ted Cruz manage to so deeply appeal to so many with such an extraordinarily shallow message? 

And in Cruz's case, laughably shallow. Grass-roots activism as the new paradigm? Well yeah, sure, if you're Thomas Paine. 

Cruz's one-browed minions, however, will never stop to reflect on his Word--for his Word, the Word, is fundamentally one of flattery, which auditors seldom question. Yes, yes of course, they know what the "right thing" to do is--or so they hear themselves repeating--and they're unafraid to demand it, and that makes those powerful Washingtonians "uncomfortable."

Cruz merely imbues the anti-democratic rubes with a sense of their own fearsome potency, which, if they don't say so themselves, they find rather appealing.

Even Pentagonese can't muddy that

If there's any amusing reporting to be found in the horrors of the Syrian crisis, it is to be found at The Hill:

"The United States is looking at all options regarding the situation in Syria," [Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said today].

"[I]f there is any action taken, it will be in concert with the international community and within the framework of legal justification."

The punchline:

Hagel would not discuss the likelihood of a U.S. military response.

He just friggin' announced it.

Thanks, but don't call us, we'll call you

I didn't see it, but Politico's Reid Epstein did. And here's his characterization of yesterday's telling congressional twaddle on the Sunday shows, as twaddled on "Face the Nation" by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.): "Without offering much in the way of solutions on what Obama should do, McCaul repeatedly said he’s on 'the American side' of the Syrian civil war."

What, conceivably, does that mean? Our guess is as good as his, although I'm reasonably sure it means President Obama is on his own in choosing the least abominable option in response to Assad's chemical assault, after which the twaddlers will declare he chose the indisputably worst--and anyone could have told him that beforehand.

I did see "This Week," although it, too, came up somewhat short in the enlightenment department. While WaPo's Dan Balz dropped the credible observation that a U.S. missile strike would effect little more than "symbolism," Cokie Roberts' permanently fixed bobblehead promptly picked up on inanity, noting that sometimes symbolism means something. Hers was either excessively or insufficiently Wittgensteinian; I'm not sure which.

There was, however, this, from Colin Powell, also appearing on "Face the Nation": 

We shouldn’t go around thinking that we can really make things happen. We can influence things, we can be ready to help people when problems have been resolved or when one side has prevailed over the other, that’s when I think we can play a role. But to think that we can change things immediately just because we’re America, that’s not necessarily the case.

Supremely sensible, thus unrealistic. In opposition there is of course the imperishable bugaboo of "credibility," a rather odd little doctrine which dictates that the United States must always act, unilaterally if necessary, and especially when it shouldn't; and then there's the political ghost of "Democratic weakness," which is always haunting the next election.   

Obama's in a box, with no one but his own counsel. Nonetheless tradition is bearing down--and that, I would further guess, is "the American side."

Needed: A class-based approach

Harold Meyerson (of the Washington Post and American Prospect) has a concise history of the March on Washington's socialist ancestry, which he suggests, without using the term, was a victim of America's political exceptionalism: universal, white male suffrage.

Of the many reasons why socialism never became a major political tendency in the United States, as it did in Europe, is that working people--more precisely, white working men--gained the franchise here during the Jacksonian era, well before socialism had developed into a mass movement in Europe or America or anyplace else.

In short, the franchise was a release valve for American working-class whites; the illusion if not occasional reality of political power as a means of socioeconomic uplift kept the rustics and villagers from the hallowed gates of inherited privilege.

As Meyerson concedes, the United States lacked the other "many reasons" of Europe's socialist inclinations--centuries of feudalism, monarchy, catastrophic religious wars, Napoleonic grandiosities, nation-state homogeneity, and not least of all, ideological socialism's European birth itself--absences which of course fueled American (America's) exceptionalism and contributed to a tighter social compact. For white males.  

The much larger point to be pondered, however, is Meyerson's essentially race-based assessment of American socialism's failure:    

Capitalism devoid of social democracy, the socialist planners of the [1963] march believed, would never produce the broadly shared prosperity that was needed if blacks and other racial minorities were to win more equal economic opportunities. Fifty years after the March on Washington, those socialists’ presentiments have been tragically borne out.

To be sure, Meyerson's phraseology of "broadly shared prosperity" tempers his race-based analysis and gets at what orthodox Marxism would stress as that which is more profoundly needed: a "class"--not race--"consciousness." Naturally I tip my preferential hand by writing that. And in my opinion the radical right has always been way ahead of us.

Why does movement conservatism rail against the left's imagined "class warfare" as deeply unAmerican and indeed so often pretend that America is a "class-less society"? Because it's terrified of the potential power of (working-) class solidarity; thus it encourages and delights in racial-identity emphases, which only undermine the former.

***

I should note that Martin Luther King Jr. himself--contra the modern era's Al Sharptons--came to appreciate and embrace "the class approach."

Is Syria Kosovo, and Obama Clinton?

Trial-balloon statements like this, from a "senior administration official" to the NY Times, are likely just that--full of air--however they nonetheless make one fearful: "It’s a step too far to say we’re drawing up legal justifications for an action, given that the president hasn’t made a decision. But Kosovo, of course, is a precedent of something that is perhaps similar."

As a legal precedent for U.S. airstrikes on Syria, yes. But let's not conflate legalities with justness or prudence. Any given act might be as ill advised as it is legal; and besides, since when has any power been unable to find a legal justification for whatever it damn well chooses to do. From James K. Polk's unjust aggression to John Yoo's acrobatic logic, we have always found a pettifogging way.   

As a situational precedent? Kosovo was a separatist-ethnic conflict of Balkanized limits, whereas Syria's is one of sectarian strife of almost boundless geopolitical potential. And in religious wars, especially, there is never a saintly side.  

What's the alternative to Assad? That's the pressing if not the only legitimate question, and it has nothing to do with legalities.

GOP base to GOP: We're not conservative enough

Pew (as in Pepé Le ---) Research presents an eponymous finding: "50% of Republicans under 40 and 55% of those 40 and older favor their leaders moving in a more conservative direction."

To the best of my knowledge, that's no typo on Pew's part. A more conservative direction--Ideologie über alles, including any major-player future. The party's Palins and Limbaughs and Cruzes have the ineffably gullible thoroughly deluded.

They'd never acknowledge it, but the party just moved farther right--way farther right--in 2012, which only earned them asskickings in the presidential and Senate elections; House too, if one goes by the overall popular vote. But I wouldn't expect the base to acknowledge the past's realities any more than I'd expect them to vividly discern the future. They're ignorant because they listen to Limbaugh and watch Hannity, and they watch Hannity and listen to Limbaugh because they're ignorant.  

So that part makes sense; perversely, but I get it. What I don't get is what, say, Ted Cruz thinks he'll get out of this less-than Faustian bargain. Sure, to a shrinking, benighted base he'll play the hero, indeed he'll be a hero. But that's as far as he'll go.

The GOP can voter-suppress and party like it's 1910, but Cruz still couldn't drag 270 electoral votes along with his recklessly hoisted nomination to the White House. And to any pol with the presidential bug as bad as Cruz's--or Rand Paul's, or Paul Ryan's, or Scott Walker's, etc. etc.--nothing short of the Oval Office would ever do.

Move in a "more conservative direction"? That the base would encourage this is no surprise. But it's a self-dooming trap for the base's heroes--whose incentive to plunge in to the rabbit hole escapes me.

From Boehner, some really creative bullshit

Otherworldly is probably more accurate, but I'll just say welcome to John Boehner's Orwellian world of GOPSpeak, as blithered on a conference call yesterday to his membership: "The president's threat to shut down the government if we implement his sequester is not a defensible position. The American people won't stand for it, and we're not going to be swayed by it."

One can almost hear the tee-heeing ruptures rippling from throughout RadicalLand to Boehner's ear. Good one, John, we are amused.

Of course it goes without blithering that no one believes it; not Boehner, not his rank-and-file membership, not even the base. But that's entirely OK, since GOP politics has been reduced to self-anacondizing maneuvers of slow party strangulation. 

This "strategy" is baffling only to those whose calenders extend beyond early November '14.  

However I think, for now, Boehner thinks he has dodged the '13 shutdown bullet. In hustling a temporary CR he can avert his membership's apocalyptic slaverings toward the debt ceiling, which--and this makes it the perfect promise to the average GOP Houser--is even dumber and more destructive than a shutdown.

Boehner's calendar does extend beyond November '14. For now, though, he's just trying to avert one colossally clusterfucked-up mistake at a time. And every little bit of Orwellian raw meat--such as "the president's threat to shut down the government"--helps him. Or at least it can't hurt him.

Our Sitzkrieg

Rarely has indecision proved so promising. For hours yesterday officials from the Pentagon-Langley-Foggy Bottom complex huddled in the White House "to deliberate over options" in response to Syria's latest sectarian madness--options which, as one foreign diplomat put it, are "all bad," although some, such as U.S. missile strikes and air campaigns, are decidedly worse.  

So they fitfully slept on it, only to find this morning, no doubt, that bad is still bad, worse still worse. The Assad regime may be a ruthless gang of Alawite cutthroats, but it can sleep in some coziness knowing that its principal opposition is an amalgamated gang of Sunni cutthroats, ruthlessly alienating the world's affections and repelling assistance.

Still, there's the unshakable bugaboo of, and "political risk" to, "Mr. Obama's credibility," notes the NY Times. Administration hawks well understand the extortionate lure of yelling Democratic weakness in the fiery environ of a warroom, on top of which they'll pile the perils of global scorn. But--see preceding paragraph--Syria's regional equation just doesn't add up this time. The "good guys" there are not only some real bad guys; they are conceivably far worse than the other bad guys.   

What to do, what to do. How about nothing? Sit and wait it out, in sort of a decisively indecisive way.

It's official: The GOP opposes a GOP shutdown

Byron York reports on a GOP-sponsored poll in which "71 percent of those surveyed opposed a shutdown, while 23 percent favored a shutdown. Among Republicans, 53 percent opposed, versus 37 percent who favored."

Even Republican men can't scrape up a majority of shutdown-support (only 48 percent favor such an apocalypse), while Republican women seem virtually Democratic (61 percent are opposed, 29 percent are in favor).   

This all comes somewhat after the fact. Congressional GOP votes aren't there for a shutdown anyway, and they haven't been there for some time. That became apparent enough when Speaker Boehner began muttering about a short-term CR, which released all pressure on a September-end date. 

Nonetheless the remotest prospect of a shutdown continues to receive oodles of unmerited media attention (e.g., this post). In our public-entertainment-as-public-affairs culture, the whackjobs always receive top billing and the choicest of venues, while whacking the whackjobs just never gets old. Those on the right can strut their derring-do while we on the left can evince our superior civic virtue--and in that is a match made by the political gods, even if, regrettably, the country simultaneously goes down the shit tubes.  

At any rate, the Great Shutdown Scare of '13 is pretty much over. But that's OK, because it really does look like the ceiling's about to collapse.

And that's why I avoided it.

UCLA's Russell Jacoby is one of my favorite historians.

It would take a scholar of prodigious energy and inexhaustible masochism [writes Jacoby in New Republic] to document the extent to which the professoriate, decade after decade, remains thunderstruck by the most basic insight into the historical reality of life and thought.

Now you know why.