Month: July 2013

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes me:

I wouldn’t be bothered with his Baldwin-like inability to own his own anti-gay record, if he weren’t obviously trying to win the White House back again, by-passing the 22nd Amendment via his wife.

Okay dude, I’m not gonna bicker with you about the proper amount of penance for Bill Clinton. It’s fruitless, and because the HIV travel ban affected you so personally and directly, I don’t see that much movement is possible in that discussion, which is fine.

What’s less understandable is your reversion to the third-term-for-Bill meme. What happened, man?I’m off to work and don’t have time to dig governor-elect-lurleen-wallace-and-her-husband-outgoing-governor-george-wallacethrough your archives, but its a real reversal for you to start treating Hillary like some political pawn for her husband’s machinations again, or like a Lady to his Macbeth. Did you just forget the last four years? If she becomes the President, she’ll be the President, not her husband.I don’t think you’re being fair to Bill, but god knows he wasn’t fair to you. But to reduce a remarkable, accomplished, and frankly gracious woman like Hillary to the backdoor into power for her husband is (however unintentionally) sexist and blind.

That wasn’t my intent, and I’m sorry it came out that way. I have long seen both Bill and Hillary as an equal power couple, and have faulted Hillary’s feminism for not demanding the first crack at national power. Another reader:

Hillary Clinton is many things, but she’s surely not a pushover or a mere front for her husband. We’re not talking about Lurleen Wallace here [seen above with her husband, George, whom she succeeded as governor], and it boggles the mind for you to suggest so.

Agreed. Hence my apology and clarification. Another reader:

The gal can’t win.

When she was First Lady, she was condemned for wielding imagined power.  Now that she may become president, are we supposed to see her as made of tissue paper, with Bubba pulling the strings?  Ugh.

I have qualms about power families.  But I think Hillary Clinton has demonstrated enough independence and political ability in her own right that this line of thinking is moot.  She is more obviously qualified than George W. Bush or, heck, even Bill Clinton circa 1992.

Maybe this was just a snarky one liner, not meant to be taken literally as a sexist belittling of Hillary Clinton.  Irony anyone?

I do agree that in some respects having Bill as a husband is a liability.  As a progressive, I am well aware of Bill’s cynical, triangulating ways.  But I also recognize that in the face of the toxic, nihilist modern GOP, the man got things done.  He brought the Democratic Party back to national significance.  In the last election, that speech he gave at the Democratic Convention was an ass-kicking that nobody else in the party could have delivered.  And whatever flaws in his character or leadership are far, far outweighed by the sleazy villainy of his political opponents.

Anyway, I know you are getting lots of emails on this, so I don’t want to pile on.  It does seem to me you are quite forgiving of some folks, and relentlessly unforgiving of others, but I guess all of us can be like that.  You write a blog, and you wear your emotions on your sleeve, and that is often a good thing.  You have a lot of anger about liberals in particular, their hypocrisy and political correctness.  I can see that.  But please don’t forget the bullshit Republican craziness that has been going on since the early nineties in ever increasing amounts.  This stuff does have a political context.

Another:

I read your blog constantly. It’s usually such a well-rounded, smart take on what’s going on in the world that it’s a “must click” at least hourly. But lately I’ve been clicking less – this week you seem to have homed in on this relentless effort to take down Bill and Hillary Clinton and Alec Baldwin in some sort of half-assed effort to shore up your independent bona fides. Well, it just comes across as cranky, whiny and stubborn. You’re clearly not going to let your Bill Clinton-bashing go, but just when I’ve thought you had come to see the light on Hillary (i.e., she’s not evil), today you decide that in the spirit of your cranky “I hate the Clintons” diatribe, you’d decide to write off the Baby Boomer generation entirely (“God save us from another Boomer president”). I’m far from a Boomer, but what? That’s such an uneducated and overboard stance that you have to know that you come across like a humorless, unhappy asshat.

As my friend and fellow Dishhead put it, hopefully P-town will chill you the fuck out this holiday weekend.

Morsi Out

https://twitter.com/CynicalIslamist/status/352503797924368386

https://twitter.com/basildabh/status/352504280500015105

https://twitter.com/maxstrasser/status/352490603075993600

https://twitter.com/bradleyhope/status/352495868517167104

America Can’t Control Egypt

Jeffrey Goldberg wishes the US had put more pressure on Morsi:

The crisis of the past few days, which may end in a military coup (which would then start the next crisis), might have been avoided had the Obama administration used its leverage — the $1.5 billion in aid the U.S. is giving Egypt this year, for starters — to force Mursi to include the opposition in his government from the outset. It didn’t. And the Egyptian masses noticed.

Charles P. Pierce is puzzled:

The argument seems to be that the administration didn’t bring sufficient pressure to bear on the current Egyptian government to diversify its governing coalition. Withholding military aid seems to be the suggested technique, although how that would have made Mursi and his government less autocratic will have to be explained to me better than Goldberg does here. Mursi is, after all, the elected president, no matter how badly he may have turned. Withholding arms from him would have given him his own special piece of anti-Americanism to use among his followers.

Marc Herman flags research showing that the “seemingly intuitive move to use aid as a carrot to encourage democratic reforms—and as a stick when those reforms disappear—may cause more instability than it prevents.” Larison thinks Egyptians will hate the US no matter what we say or who rules Egypt:

As long as the U.S. provides aid to the Egyptian military, the U.S. is bound to be resented by whichever political groups do not control the government. That isn’t going to change even when the government is a genuinely elected one. If the protesters are successful in driving the extremely unpopular Morsi out, there will always be an incentive for the forces defeated at the last election to stage mass protests demanding the early resignation of the incumbent. There will also be an incentive for those protesters to identify the U.S. as the incumbent’s supporter in order to blame Washington and to vilify the current leader. Because the U.S. will presumably continue to provide aid to the Egyptian military for reasons that have little to do with internal Egyptian politics, there is no way that Washington can “fix” this by throwing its support to the “right” people.

Using Elections To Thwart Democracy

Koplow looks at how Morsi has subverted the will of the people:

In Egypt, which is not yet a democracy no matter how many people would like to believe otherwise, Morsi became president following democratic elections, and has ever since pursued a narrow, sectarian policy in which he has made clear that he believes he is the president of the Muslim Brotherhood rather than all Egyptians. He too has fallen back on the fact that there were elections to justify all sorts of policies that rankle most Egyptians, and the fact that Egypt this week saw what were likely the largest demonstrations in human history makes no difference to him. He cloaked himself in the mantle of elections in order to shunt aside Egypt’s courts and force through a new constitution six months ago, and during the crisis of the last two days, he has refused to acknowledge having made mistakes or grant that changes need to be made because he his policies have the ultimate legitimacy emanating from the fact that he was elected. Morsi is using elections not only to justify his position, but to justify any actions that he takes.

Much like Bush after the ’04 election. The Big Pharaoh explains why Egyptians are in the streets:

The failure of Westerners to understand why Egyptians revolted against an elected regime is stemming from the fact that they, the Westerners, are secured in their inclusive constitutions, bills of rights and rule of law. We have nothing of these. We only had one facet of democracy – election – which brought a cultic organization with a fascist twist that decided to cancel the other facets.

Is Egypt About To Erupt?

https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/352472608442290176

Eric Trager believes that, at this point, violence won’t do the Muslim Brotherhood any good:

[T]he Muslim Brotherhood has suggested it might organize its cadres into formations, and equip them with clubs and helmets. On Tuesday, these makeshift units ran laps around the Brotherhood’s main protest site at Rabaa El-Adawiya chanting, “Strength, determination, faith, Morsi’s men are everywhere!”

Yet far from projecting strength, the existence of these units only reinforces Morsi’s utter powerlessness. Moreover, the fact that some of the would-be combatants are armed with tree branches gives the entire operation a certain Lord of the Flies quality. But more importantly, these units—and the Brotherhood’s protests more broadly—are completely outnumbered given the massiveness of the opposition’s outpouring. So while violence is inevitable given what’s at stake for the Brotherhood, it will be hard for Morsi’s allies to leverage the kind of violence that ends the protests and thereby saves his presidency.

Shiraz Maher compares Egypt to Pakistan:

In many respects the country is beginning to resemble the failures of Pakistan. Its civic institutions are weak and, where functioning, are threadworn and riddled with corruption. The country itself is also deeply divided, fractured between urban elites and the rural poor, divided between secularists and religious fanatics.

Transcending all this is the army. Seen as a truly national institution that protects both the country and its people, the armed forces operate beyond the law, are unaccountable, and exercise greater power than the civilian administrations they ostensibly serve. A Zogby poll conducted in May revealed that the Egyptian army’s approval rating stood at 94 percent while Mursi’s had slumped to just 28.

Dalia Ziad comes out in favor of the military:

The people trust the military more than they trust any other institution in the country. This is partly because of the military’s historical legacy that has left it as the strongest in the region. Another important reason is that military officers, who are very much part of the fabric of the country, are very patriotic and loyal to no one but Egypt. Much of this is because the military has sustained a professionalism that has allowed it to be independent in making its own decisions. The interests of the military are not dependent on the interests of the regime or any supreme authority in Egypt.

That is why it was easy for the military to abandon Mubarak in 2011 in favor of the people, something that the police, for example, could not do because their existence relied heavily on the existence of the then regime. Mubarak’s Egypt was not a military state: rather it was a police state that abused the armed power of the police to fasten the regime’s grip on the neck of the opposition.

The Lede is live-blogging the situation. Recent updates on the Dish here and here.

The Most Influential Public Intellectual Of The Past 25 Years?

Tyler Cowen thinks it might be me:

Doesn’t Andrew Sullivan have a reasonably strong claim to that title, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage?  Sullivan was the dominant intellectual influence on this issue, from the late 1980s on, and that is from a time where other major civil liberties figures didn’t give gay marriage much of a second thought, one way or the other, or they wished to run away from the issue.  Here is his classic 1989 New Republic essay.  Here is a current map of where gay marriage is legal and very likely there is more to come.

Ross generously expands on Cowen’s argument:

I think the case of his work on gay marriage is distinctive. No doubt there would have been a major push for same-sex wedlock without Sullivan: Deep trends favored its adoption, other eloquent writers made the case, and other countries and cultures have taken different routes to a similar destination. But no writer of comparable gifts was on the issue earlier, pushed harder against what seemed at the time like an unassailable consensus, engaged as many critics (left and right, gay and straight) and addressed himself to as many audiences as Sullivan. No intellectual did as much to weave together the mix of arguments and intuitions that defines today’s emerging consensus on the issue — in which gay marriage is simultaneously an expression of bourgeois conservatism and the fulfillment of the 1960s’ liberative promise, the civil rights revolution of our time and a natural, Burkean outgrowth of the way that straights already live. And no intellectual that I can think of, writing on a fraught and controversial topic, has seen their once-crankish, outlandish-seeming idea become the conventional wisdom so quickly, and be instantantiated so rapidly in law and custom.

Again, it’s awfully hard to separate ideas from tectonic shifts in culture and economics, and I have enough of a determinist streak to doubt John Maynard Keynes’s famous maxim that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” But just as Keynes heard clear echoes of “academic scribblers” and “defunct economists” in the rhetoric of his era’s politicians, so I hear echoes of arguments that Andrew Sullivan, and often Andrew Sullivan alone, was making thirty years ago in almost every conversation and argument I’ve had about gay marriage in the last ten years. There’s no other issue and no other writer where the connection between things I read as a teenager and lines I hear today is as clear and direct and obvious. And if that isn’t evidence of distinctive, far-reaching influence then I don’t know what is.

Dreher nods:

What Sullivan did — and he wasn’t alone, but as Douthat says, he was there first, and most effectively — was build off the ground cleared by the Sexual Revolution — the bourgeoisification of what were, within living memory, outlaw sexual values — and claim it for the ultimate outlaws in the traditional Christian vision of sex and sexuality: gays and lesbians. What Sullivan and those he helped lead did was radical — and he achieved it by making a kind of conservative case for a revolution, by forcing what people in the post-Christian West already believed about sex, religion, and individual liberty to its natural conclusion. That’s something. That’s something huge.

What’s Left Of The Left? Ctd

Several left-liberal readers tackle the question:

I live in Texas, and believe me, there is plenty left to fight for that is noble and righteous and shouldn’t be left-only but is, if only for the same Christianist factionalism you Protesters In Texas Statehouse Block Texas Lawmakers From Passing Abortion Billdescribe as regards marriage equality. Voting rights? Women’s health care? Any healthcare at all? Sitting here in Texas I can celebrate a special Pride weekend (as did 400,000 Houstonians and our openly lesbian mayor) but all other kinds of shit is about to rain down on us.

It is possibly just a matter of days before photo IDs for voters become required in Texas, that the unfair Texas redistricting that under-represents Hispanics was sent back to the drawing board by the courts will simply become fact, and our state of 26 million will have but five clinics where abortions are available?

The Democrats’ new sweetheart, Wendy Davis, was almost redistricted out of office before – perhaps she will be now! Perry is refusing to add folks to Medicare and Planned Parenthood clinics (not just the ones that provide abortions) are shutting down everywhere. Studies show that last year Texas had about 11,000 additional unplanned and unwanted pregnancies that bore live children thanks to reduced access to birth control. We have one of the lowest rates of health insurance, highest child poverty rates, and our governor has CUT education, CUT healthcare funding, and refuses federal funds for the latter. Andrew, there is PLENTY left to fight for.

Another reader:

Short answer: Climate change.  Long answer:

Preventing or slowing climate change is the biggest social, economic, geo-political issue that will define the left. Through action or inaction, this will be the defining issue. If the left has any sense or courage, they’ll make this their defining issue of the early 21st century.

The goal, I think, is not solely to prevent climate change from changing our planet for the worse. Rather it is to change our culture and economy to reflect the sober reality of how gravely human activity impacts the rest of the planet and thus protect the delicate balance amongst complex natural ecosystems and contrived systems surrounding human activity. Industries, ingrained behaviors, and our collective expectations of what economic progress looks like will need to change. The notion of an “entitlement generation” as you’ve spoken of recently, neatly applies to our current cultural expectations regarding consumption and economic enfranchisement.

While abortion, the death penalty, gun control, and numerous other causes heralded by the left spark the passions of both sides, these issues exist in disparate microcosms of American life which only seldom overlap (which may explain the inability of the left to secure lasting progress in these areas). Letting climate change stampede onward however, whether through total inaction or impotent half-measures, will touch each and every corner of American life.

I don’t mean to write these other issues or those who fight for them off, and I do feel strongly about each of these, but they seem to be legacy issues of the current left. Those struggles will continue, no doubt. But what can really be said of the struggle to stop climate change and secure this abstraction “sustainability”? It is only just beginning and its importance will only become more pronounced as time goes on.

Another:

You basically thread-jacked yourself. You posed a question – a very good question – and then instead of considering it you ended up talking about how (a) gay marriage is not solved and (b) gay marriage isn’t even left. I agree on both points.

I also agree with Friedman and Lithwick that the left in this country has effectively lost its way, and I think that it’s been like this since Carter left office in ignominy. Clinton was no leftist; Obama is clearly no leftist. In the last five years, which might as well be the last 20, I find it very difficult to find even a single issue where I – a dyed in the wool, Greenpeace-supporting, union-dues-paying leftist – can look at the actions of the Democratic party and applaud.

What is Clinton famous for? Welfare reform; intervention in Bosnia; NAFTA (and Lewinsky and DOMA). What has Obama done? A healthcare reform that left every progressive idea off the table; a fiscal policy that just gave the biggest government spending cut in history to the Tea Party on a platter; tremendous latitude given to banks and finance; militant foreign and domestic justice policy; and continual cold water thrown on environmental concerns. Moreover: an unconscionably high incarceration rate, an unconscionably high deportation rate, targeting whistleblowers, an escalation of the surveillance state, a blind eye to war crimes.

His singular “progressive” achievement is that he was willing to change a few executive branch policies on gay marriage that, apologies to you and your readership (and my Facebook feed), is just not a significant issue when millions of people are being thrown in jail unjustly and destroying their families, when millions are falling into abject poverty, when a seven-figure balance sheet is a prerequisite to pursuing national office, when 121% of the increase in wealth over the recovery accrued to the top 1% (pdf), when infrastructure is failing and when our collective inaction on climate change is now materializing in violent and costly ways (which, of course, affect primarily the poor). This is a profoundly conservative era in this country, and gay marriage is just the cherry on the top of it.

Another:

Excuse me, but what?  Corporations and banks run roughshod over the government on all manner of issues, particularly with a Supreme Court that nearly always puts their rights over the lives of working people.  The amount of long-term unemployed continues to grow as companies take subsidies and tax breaks and ship whatever jobs they “create” overseas.  That we have to fight so hard just so that two people who care for each other can begrudgingly get official recognition of their status shows how remarkably ignorant and backwards we continue to be.

And one thing we’ve definitely seen is that the right never stops fighting, never sleeps, and given an inch, they’ll take a mile.  Ever watch an old rerun of All In The Family?  That show aired 40 years ago but you’d think it was current, because we’re still fighting those same tired old battles we thought we’d won.  Because the rich and powerful true conservatives will always want a government that protects their interests at the expense of everyone else.

That gay people are freer to get married today than they were a few days ago is a good thing, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the work that needs to be done, that will always need to be done, to create a more perfect union.  In every age and under all circumstances, as Teddy Roosevelt said.  The fight goes on.

(Photo: State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Ft. Worth) holds up two fingers against the anti-abortion bill SB5, which was up for a vote on the last day of the legislative special session on June 25, 2013. A combination of Sen. Davis’ 13-hour filibuster and protests by reproductive rights advocates helped to ultimately defeat the controversial abortion legislation at midnight. By Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

Can The GOP Double-Down On The White Vote?

Brit Hume recently downplayed the importance of the Hispanic vote:

Weigel explains why continuing to focus on white voters is attractive to many Republican politicians:

As they contemplate 2014 and 2016, Republicans are looking at elections where the white share of the vote may increase compared with 2012. They compare elections when Barack Obama was on the ballot against elections when he wasn’t. The white shares of the vote in 2008, 2010, and 2012 were, respectively, 74 percent, 77 percent, and 72 percent.

But Waldman thinks that winning a larger share of the white vote requires attempting to win minority votes:

[I]f you decide that you’re going to focus your efforts on turning out the white vote, you won’t only be sending a message to Latinos (and African Americans, and the fast-growing Asian American population) that you’re not interested in them, you’ll also be sending a message to moderate whites that your party might not be the kind of place they’d feel comfortable. This goes double for young white voters, who have grown up in a much more diverse culture than their parents and grandparents, and aren’t going to be so hot on joining the Party of White People.

Relatedly, Drum argues that the GOP should stop worrying about who gets “credit” for immigration reform:

Democrats get tremendous mileage by demonizing Republicans and winning ever greater shares of the Hispanic vote. Once immigration reform passes, they can’t do that. There will always be smaller issues out there, but they just won’t have the same impact as immigration reform. Taking that off the table sucks the air out of the Dem balloon and gives Republicans a better chance of setting the terms of the political debate, both within and without the Hispanic community. That’s why it’s a net winner for them, not because they’ll get “credit” for allowing it to pass.

The question is whether their ideology allows them to tolerate anything that might also get support from Democrats and Independents, let alone president Obama. These next couple of months will tell us a lot about whether we are watching a nose dive they can pull out of in time. So far, sadly, the omens are not good.