Empire Notes

August 24, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- A Plague of Jeffersonian Democrats

August 18, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- "Death Panels" and the Paranoid Style

It's an amazing, made-in-America story. A Republican representative, now senator, from Georgia no less slips an innocuous provision in a draft health-care bill giving patients the right to coverage for counseling regarding hospices and other end-of-life issues -- a need many face at some point in their lives -- and ignites a firestorm of political craziness that makes the hysteria over the nonexistent "war on Christmas" look like a paragon of logic and reason.

The gap between an attempt to make sure that people are treated with respect and kindness when they are in extremis and "death panels" that the government sets up to adjudicate whether people who are old, sick, disabled, or unable to work are sufficiently useful to society to warrant health-care or whether they should instead be turned into Soylent Green and fed to the burgeoning proletarian masses would seem to be a large one, yet elisions like this are the stock-in-trade of Republican operatives in our benighted era.

As an article in the New York Times points out, the source of this nuttiness is not some fringe conspiracist but some of the mainstream conservative players that defeated Bill Clinton's health-care reform in 1993, including the editorial board of the Washington Times and Betsy McCaughey, famous critic of the previous bill and former lieutenant governor of New York.

It starts simply, with some dedicated staffer scouring a government bill for language that can be mocked and derided, twisted and distorted, or used as the launch-pad for insane flights of fancy. It has the same provenance as the idiot jibes about money for "volcano monitoring" (who could be so stupid as to want to know when a town might be covered in lava?), with the added fillip of the hard-core paranoia that characterizes the right.

When the woman who, inexplicably, was a heartbeat away from being a heartbeat away from the presidency took up the cause, it went national. Some commentators are already treating it as a political victory for the right and are predicting the demise of the public option.

Along the way, we've seen threatening mobs at town hall meetings, people carrying guns to presidential addresses, and swastikas painted outside the offices of congressmen. Strangely, since this is America, those swastikas are not statements of belief by the right-wing lynch mob but rather statements about the putative beliefs of the congressman (a Blue Dog Democrat, as it happens). Never mind the fact that it is precisely the people who might believe in a crazy notion like death panels who are susceptible to beliefs like perhaps that the Jews control society -- and, indeed, they are the lineal descendants of people who did and do.

The Washington Times, whose owner Sun-Myung Moon of the Unification Church was once a member of the World Anti-communist League, a rogue's gallery of former Nazi and Ustashi, Romainian fascists, Franco-supporters, and right-wing Latin American dictators, has twice compared this proposal to offer counseling to people facing death to the Nazi T4 Aktion program of euthanasia for the disabled, retarded, and chronically ill.

As journalist and historian Rick Perlstein points out in a Washington Post op-ed, this kind of craziness is not new -- it's as American as apple pie. When Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in 1961, after all, he didn't have Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to draw from. At the time he wrote it, the John Birch Society had a widely distributed pamphlet showing irrefutably that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union, continuing earlier Republican analyses of FDR and Truman. Today's Birthers, who claim that Obama was born in Kenya, get their name from the Birchers of yesteryear.

Says Perlstein, JFK, a warmonger who campaigned against Nixon on the laughable claim that the Soviet Union was ahead of us in nuclear missile technology and who dramatically increased the military budget when in office, was accused of wanting to disarm the United States because he was moving toward ICBM's and away from long-range bombers. And let us not forget Nixon and McCarthy, who found Communists under every tree.

The difference, says Perlstein, is that these claims were not afforded serious attention by the three nightly news broadcasts. Walter Cronkite never addressed whether or not Eisenhower had been a Communist. He is right. There was a patrician consensus about notions like "fact" and "reality" -- which included a fair amount of self-delusion of its own, incidentally (see Vietnam) -- and the opinions of the canaille were not allowed to intrude, no matter how many of them there might be at the gates.

With the impending demise of the newspaper, the last vestiges of that world are disappearing. I am not sanguine about what will take its place.

Posted at 11:32 am.

August 10, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Global Environmental Strain -- the Way Forward

Is there hope for humanity? Can we avoid the precipice at our feet or must we inevitably fall into the yawning environmental chasm before us?

Everybody is asking themselves this question, whether they realize it or not, but it is the wrong question. And, as is so often the case, when you ask the wrong question, the answer doesn't matter very much; the mere asking of the question is at the core of the curious passivity that much of the left and the global public are showing about the major issue of our time.

The heart of the mistake is the seemingly all-too-natural tendency we have to take a continuum and force it into a binary opposition, in this case catastrophe or nothing.

Actually, both poles of this binary opposition are unreachable or nearly so. There will never be a point where human society has lost hope and is irreparably doomed. And there has already been much damage done; there is no pristine earth that we can rescue if only we act now now now and likely little to no prospect of completely undoing the damage that has already been done.

The invocation of these poles drives the mistaken formulations I wrote about earlier. Those who want to believe that we can buy carbon offsets and weatherstrip our houses and help the economy by promoting green jobs without paying a price in the total reorganization of industrial society are implicitly working with a model in which little damage has been done and in which every problem has a technical fix.

Then there are those who are driven into passivity by certainty that the planet is doomed. What that might mean is often left unexamined, of course.

In the middle, there are those who think -- again, implicitly -- that we have essentially a pristine earth but we are right on the cusp of suddenly wrecking it. The next five years are crucial; if we don't get emissions under control, or eliminate them, or do something that is patently politically impossible and frankly incompatible with what we know of human society, then we are doomed.

This dualism also manifests its ugly head in other ways. One argument often made by good radicals who want to stress the need for human beings to change completely their consumption patterns is that we must get rid of our faith in technical fixes; every technical fix generates more problems and leads us further down the road to perdition.

Even more important, people who attempt to address global environmental strain in a serious way often fall into the trap of thinking of this as an existential issue rather than a political one. Again, there is no neat dichotomization; no issue can be freed from politics.

In truth, I think the most sensible and useful perspective is not a difficult one. Every day we make things worse. It's not necessarily a gradual process; there may be small precipices we slide down. But there is no "point of no return" we're just about to cross.

Instead, the task for us is to figure out a way to stabilize the environment and our interaction with it in such a way as to provide as soft a landing as we can. In this task, we will need technical fixes and changes in patterns of consumption. Most important, we will also need political and social transformation. And not by suddenly going over to a localized subsistence economy; this isn't going to happen.

We need to wreak a political transformation in our societies that makes it more possible for us to take serious measures to deal with the crisis we're living through; we need to wreak a social transformation that minimizes the effects of the environmental changes that are inevitable.

For example, over the next 50 years, we need to start moving people away from low-lying coastal areas. We need to start mitigating the extreme inequalities in the global economic structure. When more people start dying of effects of global warming, we need to make fewer die of tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS; we also need to make sure smaller numbers are vulnerable through extreme poverty or through dependence on crops whose productivity will go down as tropical areas warm.

We need a grand new campaign with multiple prongs, technical, political, and social, all working together. We need to talk more about the hard work that has to be done over a long period of time and less about the imminent catastrophe that will occur unless we do various impossible things immediately. We can do it; yes we can.

Posted at 10:57 am.