The Apocalyptic Bobby Jindal

June 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

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Bobby Jindal is the governor of Louisiana. He talks like Kenneth from 30 Rock. He may or may not have participated in an exorcism. And, just a few months after urging his fellow Republicans to stop being so stupid (his word, his word), he’s had the following call to arms published, in Politico, under his name 

At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.

Why?

Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

Unless she’s one exceptionally prone to take offense, I think it’s pretty hard for a liberal to see herself in the above bit of textual vomit.  But, then again, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Jindal’s intended audience is anyone but the most hardcore Republican partisans and activists. After a rough patch as governor, Jindal probably was hoping to fall back, once again and if only for a moment, in the sweet embrace of the wing-nut ecosystem.

He’s coming off like a bit of try-hard, though, isn’t he?

Anyway, Ezra Klein makes a separate point: even by Jindal’s own standards, he’s failing. After previously arguing that Romney lost simply because Republicans waged a lackluster campaign, thinking the economy would take care of the rest (doesn’t jibe with my memory of 2012, but, then again, that was all of less than a year ago) Jindal, Klein notes, says the solution is for Republicans to…wait s’more!

But Jindal is proposing a variant of that exact same mistake. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the economy to win the election for Republicans, Jindal’s come up with a ridiculous caricature of liberalism and is assuming its failures will win the country back for conservatism. “Eventually Americans will rise up against this new era of big government and this new reign of politically correct terror,” he assures Republicans. When, exactly? ‘Soon,” Jindal promises.

It’s a fair dig, but one thing to keep in mind is that, even in this, Jindal is playing to the crowd. Apocalyptic thinking is hardly the exclusive property of conservatives, of course (see: Soviet communism); but this is the party of hardcore religious right. The wait-for-the-rapture logic can work just as well for politics as for religion. Better, even, because in politics the Devil isn’t an abstraction or a hidden presence. He’s right there, right in front of you, exploding the government, destroying 32 oz sodas, celebrating pornography and Lord only knows what else.

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Democrats and Identity Politics

June 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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According to HuffPo, some leading Democrats want to try out a new messaging tactic when it comes to labor reforms like paid sick days and raising the minimum wage. Instead of making an argument from economic justice or the like, they wanna make it about gender politics:

Democrats have long supported such worker-friendly reforms. What’s changing this year are their political tactics. Rather than frame these issues in the traditional terms of economic fairness, they’ll be repackaging them as a matter of gender equality and family stability. As they push specific pieces of legislation, Democrats plan to roll out an aggressive communications effort to pressure Republicans who’ve declared the workplace measures job killers.

The strategy takes a cue from last November: If Democrats have managed to trounce Republicans with women voters, then why not turn labor issues into gender issues in pursuit of progressive reforms?

David Kaib, while happy to see Dems pushing harder on this stuff, is nevertheless a little annoyed with the implications of the new framing. That is, the Party’s habit of avoiding the language of class or economic rights is now so all-consuming that it applies to issues you’d think couldn’t be understood as anything but. It’s certainly true that raising the minimum wage would help women, of course; but it’s far from intellectually coherent to engage in that kind of demographic segmentation.

Politically, however, I think these folks are right to think this might be a winner. What you can say for sure is that the modern Democratic Party is much better at, and more experienced with, focusing on what some would call identity politics than they are at a broader, structural critique of the status quo.

The reasons why this is are no doubt multiple and many. As Kaib notes, the demands of fundraising no doubt play a part. If you spend most of your time asking the wealthy to give you money, you might be rather hesitant to lead off with a treatise on how their individual success is the product of a corrupt and unjust system. But every single wealthy person — I can confirm this: every single one — has a mother. And many of them have daughters, wives, and sisters, too.

One last bit I’d emphasize is that, although the country may be moving to the Left on a host of issues, including perhaps redistribution to combat inequality, Americans still don’t particularly like the poor. The American Dream dies hard. So framing policies that overwhelmingly benefit the poor in less abstract terms, to reduce the millions of struggling fast-food workers to someone’s teenage daughter, is cynical but effective. Or rather it’s more effective than doing nothing, which is often the Democrats go-to move, after all.

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Small Arms in Syria

June 14, 2013 By 5 Comments

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The latest development in the ongoing civil war in Syria didn’t occur in Syria, actually, but in Washington, DC. The Obama Administration announced they have what is in their eyes definitive proof that the nominal Syrian government has used sarin gas against its own people, and thus has crossed what the president called a “red line.” The consequences of passing the red line, previously rather hazy, are now coming into view:

The Obama administration, concluding that the troops of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in his country’s civil war, has decided to begin supplying the rebels for the first time with small arms and ammunition, according to American officials.

Understandably, this freaks a lot of people out. Josh Marshall — last seen taking a whole lot of flack from his Left — calls it a “bad idea” and says of the Middle East:

This is a neighborhood we’re trying to get out of, not get deeper into. For all the individual reasons to try to get involved, I think, given our experience over the last quarter century, we’re at the ‘just say no’ stage of military interventions in the heart of the Middle East.

Daniel Larison, one of the most principled critics of US adventurism, meanwhile, writes:

This move will almost certainly prolong and intensify the conflict, which will mean that even more Syrians on both sides of the war will suffer and die. It’s a serious mistake, and one that will probably lead to even bigger ones in the future. Because it will prove to be ineffective in changing the course of the war, as opponents of this measure have said for years, it will serve as an invitation to further escalation in the coming months and years.

But — and no matter the issue, this tends to be the case — no one is as worked up as Andrew Sullivan, who’s written two longish posts already decrying the move as a “betrayal” by Obama of his most fervent supporters (Sullivan chief among them). I’ll always read a good Sullivan freak-out; but there’s a snippet of his second post that touches on something I’ve been kicking around in my skull lately:

Once you have committed to one side in a civil war, you have committed. The pressure from the neocons and liberal interventionists to expand this war will only increase – because either you fight to win or you shouldn’t fight at all. Yes, it’s the same coalition that gave us the Iraq catastrophe.

I can’t tell whether this is Sullivan’s position or rather that of the neocon/liberal interventionists, but it’s definitely a major factor in the politics of intervention. And it sucks because, really, it’s the pivot point at which an international action to stop an atrocity becomes something much closer to regular old imperialist meddling. The obvious example, to my mind, is Libya, where an intervention that was initially sold as an attempt to stop a potential genocide almost immediately turned into regime change.

I know there’s  some naivety in thinking the United States — or any major power — would put the kind of prestige on the line that comes with armed conflict and not expect out-and-out victory in return. But that’s what the Responsibility to Protect demands; and if the project of stopping the kinds of evil we saw in Rwanda and the Balkans during the 90s is going to succeed, the liberal interventionists need to disentangle the interests of the individual nation-states from those of the broader international community.

Otherwise interventions on behalf of human rights will continue to be seen by many — and not unreasonably — as neoimperialism’s trojan horse.

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Daniel Larison’s Libya Fixation

June 6, 2013 By 4 Comments

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Via Andrew Sullivan I’ve come across this Daniel Larison post on the ascension of Susan Rice and Samantha Power. It is not his best work, although its flaws are rather predictable for anyone whose read Larison on the Libya intervention before. And for those that haven’t, a spoiler: he really, really, really hated the intervention in Libya at the time, and still hates it today.

That’s fine. Intervening in Libya was hardly a no-brainer, and its implementation was far from flawless. While the Administration’s embrace of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is, potentially, one of its greatest achievements, the White House took shortcuts in order to make it happen. Even if the War Powers Act is traditionally more honored in the breach, Obama brushed it off like so much dirt on his shoulder.

And because they knew the intervention would never be truly supported but rather tolerated by the American people — and still this only if it happened quickly and with little to no American casualties — the necessary resources for a post-Gadaffi Libya were never secured, much less deployed. The result is an unstable country awash with arms and with little to no civil society to maintain cohesion and order. Not good.

But when Larison puts on his mind-reading cap, as he does here, he really goes too far:

Most of the immediate reaction to the news about Rice and Power has been to conclude that liberal interventionism is once again on the rise inside the administration. Some have interpreted the appointments to mean that more aggressive action in Syria could be in the offing. Given the record of both women and their advocacy for the Libyan war, those are understandable responses, and they might end up being proven right. Fortunately, it seems for now that they aren’t correct at least as far as it concerns Syria. As it turns out, Rice reportedly agrees more with Obama than with liberal hawks on this, and it seems that the Libyan war was a sufficiently sobering experience even for some of its original advocates that they aren’t eager to try again.

From what I can tell, he’s got absolutely no evidence for this bit of psychoanalysis; and that’s problematic, considering how dramatic a reversal this would be on Power and Rice’s part! Imagine, for example, I said that the reason Barack Obama hasn’t annihilated every last vestige of the George W. Bush anti-terror national security state is because he’s decided Bush was right about everything. That would be only a slight exaggeration of the logic Larison’s wielding here.

A more reasonable understanding of why Power and Rice are opposed to intervening in Syria — despite having advocated for intervention in Libya — is, of course, that the situations are not the same.

Libya was a politically and in significant ways geographically isolated country in which the embattled despot was marching on a rebel-held city after previously urging his partisans to “cleanse” the country of the rebel “rats” — words that immediately struck terror into anyone who’s studied genocide, war crimes, and the key role that dehumanizing language plays in their coming about. What’s more, the Libya intervention happened only after being sanctioned by both the Arab League and the UN Security Council, and supported by most of America’s closest allies in the West.

In Syria, on the other hand, it’s not clear who needs protecting from whom. And even if the “good guys” could be separated from the “bad guys,” there’s no chance that a similar international go-ahead would be forthcoming. These are hugely consequential differences, and when Larison ignores them, he creates the impression that advocates of intervention believe in it regardless of the circumstances or context, which is unfair and untrue in equal measure.

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Not Here to Make Friends

June 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid does ultimately invoke the so-called nuclear optionfor filibuster reform, he’ll open himself up to charges of being the type of person whose pants are aflame (emphasis his):

For a few weeks now — ever since Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) began stepping up pressure on Republicans to confirm key executive branch and judicial nominees — Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has come as close as it comes in the Senate to calling another member a liar…

McConnell’s referring to two different comments Reid made on the floor, two years apart. Both came after the two men agreed on trivial changes to Senate rules and customs, at the beginning of this Congress and the previous one. Most recently, Reid said any further rules changes in the current Congress would occur under regular order, which typically requires two-thirds support in the Senate. That time, his staff quickly clarified that Reid’s pledge was contingent upon Republicans adhering to the spirit of the rules reforms.

But in January 2011, Reid’s remarks had a “Read. My. Lips.” quality to them.

“The minority leader and I have discussed this issue on numerous occasions,” Reid said on the Senate floor, according to the congressional record. “I know that there is a strong interest in rules changes among many in my caucus. In fact, I would support many of these changes through regular order. But I agree that the proper way to change Senate rules is through the procedures established in those rules, and I will oppose any effort in this Congress or the next to change the Senate’s rules other than through the regular order.”

To step back for a minute: part of the reason why I write this blog is to emphasize the ineradicably conflictual nature of politics, especially for those interested in challenging established power structures. Paraphrasing comments from professor and political philosopher Corey Robin, the project of the Left is, to no small degree, that of dispossession. Taking power from some and giving it to others — or, more accurately, helping others claim it for themselves.

That’s empowerment; but for those who are losing a former privilege, it’s also dispossession.

What does that have to do with filibuster reform and judicial nominees in the US Senate? Well, if you’re going to recognize politics as a fight in which one side is trying to take something from the other, you’re going to have to recognize that winning the fight requires taking your opponent seriously as an opponent, not a friend. If Harry Reid takes Mitch McConnell seriously as his opponent (which he most definitely should), then he’s not going to spend more than a few seconds fretting over breaking his word. He won’t worry about losing a friend.

The idea that interpersonal relationships could have such a big role on a senator’s decision sounds absurd. And it is. But it’s also true. One of the reasons why the Senate is so dysfunctional is because senators (usually the old-timers) and some political observers (ditto) refuse to give up the fanciful notion that everything would be OK if senators were more buddy-buddy. The DREAM Act was just one more round of jäger bombs away from passage, I guess…

For most outside the bubble, this is silly, and a more believable explanation is that as the two parties have become more ideologically coherent, the Senate hasn’t changed with them. Back when you had New England Republicans and Southern Democrats — party members who could find members of the other side with which they had much in common — relying on compromise made more sense. But the situation today is much different, and a more majoritarian, parliamentary approach makes more sense for a climate in which the leftmost Republican is still well to the right of the rightmost Democrat.

All of this is to say: if Harry Reid breaks his promise and blows another hole into the sinking edifice of The Senate As We Know It, that’s a good thing. And if the price to be paid is a few icy stares and cold shoulders, a little awkwardness next time Reid and McConnell sit down to chew the fat, that’s more than OK. It’s true that you don’t win friends with salad; but you don’t win political fights by making friends, either.

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