Category: Keepers

Beth Haile takes issue with my definition of Christianism:

For Catholics, the “live and let live” attitude that Sullivan endorses is simply not a viable option when there are clear affronts to human dignity and rights at work in the world.

Christianity, especially in the way Catholics see it, is imminently public and political. It demands that Christians attend closely to the "signs of the times" and seek to change those laws, practices, and structures which violate the tenets of the faith, especially when it comes to affirming and protecting the dignity of all human beings, attending to the needs of the poor, affirming the family as the fundamental unit of society, and working for the protection of all of God’s creation. … While Sullivan is clearly frustrated with the religious right’s efforts to ban gay marriage or make abortion illegal, these actions too are part of the Church making an effort to act out her social mission, just as much as it is the Church making an effort to act out her social mission that led Catholics to criticize the Iraq war, to advocate for the protection of the poor and elderly in budget cut debates, and to lobby for universal health care (a position Sullivan himself supports).

Bearing witness to what are regarded as social evils is one thing, and my libertarian Christianity would fully embrace the power of words to persuade, inspire and evangelize. And I never saw Jesus advocating against "live and let live" as a political matter. Yes, Christians should challenge evil and evangelize, they can and should wield the power of nonviolent protest as well. But using the power of one party to criminalize, i.e. use the coercive power of the state, to combat those evils is a dance with worldly power that is inherently dangerous to both faith and politics.

I think bearing witness and deploying persuasion is the Christian way; taking over a political party to impose a religious agenda is not (and in this, Beth and I are not, actually, that far apart). Kyle R. Cupp also notes a critical difference:

I'm a Christianist if my only basis for opposing torture and working to outlaw it is my Christianity.  However, if I also have a non-religious moral basis in support of my attempts to outlaw torture, then I am not acting as a Christianist.

Exactly. Translating religious convictions into secular arguments is essential if we are to have any common weal at all in the modern world. Take my defense of marriage equality or condemnation of torture. Both are rooted in my Catholic faith. But I take extreme pains to present the case as neutrally as possible. Because my job is not to persuade Catholics, but to persuade anyone.

I rather glibly wrote recently that one reason president Obama has not opened a can of rhetorical whup-ass on those actually seeking the default of the US Treasury, is that he wants to avoid the "angry black man" trope. Once he is defined as that, the GOP needs nothing more to use the race card silently against him. That's why they keep arguing that the president who killed bin Laden, prevented a Second Great Depression and achieved universal healthcare in his first term is somehow another Jimmy Carter.

But of course he isn't. And of course he understands the political dynamic out there. He just knows that the one thing the far right wants – and needs – to do is get into a fight with him, elevating them, dimnishing him, and alienating the middle of the American electorate. His approach is the classic civil rights movement approach with a black leader addressing a largely white electorate: non-violence, reasoned argument … well, this Washington Monthly commenter puts it all far better than I can:

How does Obama break the iron unity of the GOP opposition to assemble a governing majority in the US Congress? …

Obama acts entirely within the tradition of mainstream African American political strategy and tactics. The epitome of that tradition was the non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement, but goes back much further in time. It recognizes the inequality of power between whites and blacks. Number one: maintain your dignity. Number two: call your adversaries to the highest principles they hold. Number three: Seize the moral high ground and Number four: Win by winning over your adversaries, by revealing the contradiction between their own ideals and their actions. It is one way that a oppressed people struggle.

Obama has taken a seat at the negotiating table and said “There is no reason why we cannot work out solutions to our problems by acting like responsible adults. That is what people expect us to do and that is why we have entered into public service.” That is the moral high ground.

Honestly, I have been reminded more than once in the last few months of those brave college students sitting in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, back in the day. Obama sits at that table, like they did at the counter. Boehner and McConnell and Cantor clown around, mugging for the camera, competing to ritually humiliate Obama, to dump ketchup on his head.

I don’t think those students got their sandwiches the first day, but they won in the end.

Obama is winning. Democrats are uniting behind him, although some white progressives think that they could do the job better. Independents are flocking to him. Even some Republicans are getting disgusted with their Washington leaders. Obama is not telling us about lack of seriousness of the Congressional GOP; he is showing us the vivid contrast between what we expect of our leaders and their behavior. The last two and half years have been a revelation of the essential conflicts in our society and politics.

If white progressives understood much about the politics of the African American struggle in the United States, we would see Obama in the context of that struggle and understand him better. And you don’t have to be African American to know something about the history of the African American struggle. The books and the testimony is there. It’s not all freedom songs. But you have to be convinced that it is something that can teach you something you don’t already know.

Let the Dish say Amen.

(Photo: Roslan Rahman/Getty.)

Michele Bachmann, fortified by two strong performances in the two most recent debates, kinda shares victory with Ron Paul, but will win the headlines nonetheless. I suspected she'd win because she is almost perfect for the kind of Republican you find in Iowa's base: a native of the state, a hard-core anti-gay Christianist, and a big believer that the US should have defaulted on its debts, rather than raise any taxes at all (even while lowering marginal rates).

She is to the right what … well it's hard to come up with a viable politician among the Democrats who can even begin to match her ideological extremism. Maybe if someone actually wanted fully socialized medicine on the British model, top tax rates at 98 percent, and affirmative action for gays in Hollywood. Ron Paul, meanwhile, the man who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and end the neo-empire, comes a very close second. In other words, the Republican most forceful about non-interventionism in the debate crushed the candidate most enthusiastic about interventionism, Rick Santorum.

Pawlenty has proven he's simply out of his depth here. He's neither insane enough to capture the fevered soul of the current GOP; nor charismatic enough to win them over with star power. Bachmann has two out of two. Ron Paul is just, well, Ron Paul. T-Paw picked a fight with Bachmann here and she chewed him up and spat him out. Put a fork in his campaign.

By the way, I don't buy the idea that Palin is now in deep trouble. Palin has a cult-following that will only chart a different course if Queen Esther instructs them to. Perry is the one now in trouble. He's in trouble because however red the meat he wants to throw at the base, Bachmann's is always redder. She is the rawest of the right, which means she can punch above her weight in these purity tests. A Perry-Palin debate match-up would flummox him, I think. And buttress her. He can't out-macho here, risks seeming very good ol' boy next to her, and got in late.

It's all silly speculation; but then so is this straw poll. But the other candidates muct now be looking at Pawlenty and wondering: "Could she do the same to me?"

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), her husband Marcus Bachmann and some of their children wave to supporters as confetti rains down in her tent outside the Hilton Coliseum at Iowa State University August 13, 2011 in Ames, Iowa. Nine GOP presidential candidates are competing for votes in the Iowa Straw Poll, an important step for gaining momentum in a crowded field of hopefuls. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Alan Jacobs criticizes my desire to see Christianism replaced with a more private, less political Christianity:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] could have stayed in his prayer closet instead of politicking; he could have attended to his own failures as a Christian, which of course were many; he could have forgiven white Southerners instead of judging them. But no. He became an "outside agitator," marching into ordinary American communities and telling them that their local laws, and indeed in some cases federal laws, were not to be obeyed — and why? Because they conflicted with the law of God! Notice the arrogance with which he associates his cause with God Himself.

His bottom line:

So maybe, just maybe, it's not an utterly privatized and "libertarian" Christianity that we need but rather one that reads the Bible better. But if that's true then the term "Christianism" is vacuous and misleading, and Andrew needs to step back and start over.

Christianism, in my definition, is the fusion of politics and religion for the advancement of political goals. And in that core sense, yes, King was a left-wing Christianist. He used the Bible to make his case, and fought to remove liberties from his fellow citizens in order to expand liberty for all in the name of God. I think it's possible that Christianism can lead to good results. How can one appreciate a man like Wilberforce without it? But it can equally lead to bad results: slavery, Prohibition, the subjugation of women, the persecution of gays, etc. All these were buttressed and perpetuated by Christianist power-politics for centuries. The question is: does this fusion of politics and religion, overall, help or hurt our polity?

I'd say it hurts, because the kind of absolute conviction that divine sanction gives to people is inherently dictatorial and indifferent to the compromises necessary in a diverse, pluralist society. And King's Christianism was crucially leavened by his manifest Christianity. I'd argue that it was his and his movement's moral example of Christian non-violence that truly changed America's heart and broke the politicized Christianist deadlock between the two camps. He didn't just preach his faith as politics, but he practised it in a way very close to Christ's, seeking punishment, enduring imprisonment, and risking death, to bear witness to a deep moral truth about the dignity of every person. This submission to violence, rather than its gun-totin' celebration, is what distinguishes King's Christianism from so much of today's. It embraced its powerlessness, as a paradoxical way to change the world. And that, truly, is Christianity more than Christianism. It is an indirect approach to power.

Imagine a pro-life movement that never sought to make abortion illegal but tried solely to highlight its profound moral implications. Or a Christian movement that simply upheld the virtues of traditional opposite-sex marriage, rather than seeking to ban gay marriage. It would remain a moral movement with possible political consequences. But it seeks first of all to change people's hearts and minds; not corral majorities to control other people's lives. It is about Christian witness, not Christianist power.

Similarly, the gay rights movement is peopled with many Christians, myself included, who deep down view their cause as advancing the Kingdom of God on earth. Our most powerful tool in all this is moral suasion, non-violence and personal testimony. But, for my part, I have never argued for the rights of anyone else to be abridged, just that the government itself should cease baselessly discriminating against some its own citizens. And while I have been quite candid in the religious and spiritual basis of my belief in gay dignity, you will search Virtually Normal for a single sectarian or religious argument for it.

Far from vacuous and misleading, I think this distinction is critical in rescuing conservatism from divine and ideological distortion.

(Photo: Mohammed Abed/Getty.)

I rather liked this tart assessment by the Economist's Lexington columnist on what has just happened in American politics:

The president, it is true, did not lose the fight because he lost the argument. He lost because he was not willing to be as reckless as the Republicans.

And yet s/he notes that the appearance of losing even a skirmish is still damaging. The far right is busy piling on insult after insult, and blaming Obama for the downgrade and other idiocies. They sense blood in the water. But that they wielded the stability of the entire global economy for a petty, short-term adrenaline shot tells you all you need to know about their fitness to govern. They are unfit to run a lemonade stand.

But it seems also clear to me that the crucial fight – presaged by the debt ceiling nonsense – is still to be had in the next few months. This was a skirmish on which the president's ideological opponents exhausted their heaviest leverage. Now, both sides are equal, and my worry is that Obama, advised by the same people who thought it was wise to duck the debt issue head on in the SOTU and budget, will let the Congress take (or not take) the lead again. Yes, the Congress needs to do this. But there is also an obvious way for Obama to use his bully pulpit to push the Super-Committee toward success. There's a way to fuse his core messages: that he wants long-term fiscal reform that is balanced; that we can get past the red-blue culture war through pragmatism; and that we can and must restore confidence in the economy now.

The answer is tax reform. It's clear that the GOP is resistant to any raising of taxes of the sort that is scheduled to occur in December 2012. And Obama, for reasons to do with keeping demand alive at all in this period, has conceded the logic that raising anyone's tax rates in a de facto recession is risky. So change the subject to a positive proposal: Reagan-style tax reform that is revenue positive.

In my view, Obama should focus on this in stump speech after stump speech in the fall. Let the country know where he stands with a specific position that is good for all of us and very resonant with Independent voters and Obamacons. Here's the gist:

We all know we have to tackle this deficit and this debt or it will keep on tackling us. But we need a balanced approach of more revenue and less spending to make anything like the progress we need. At the same time, we have a tax code of grotesque complexity, riddled with loopholes that allow the rich to get away with evasion, while working families struggle to make ends meet.

I propose a solution that slashes the debt, lowers tax rates, and sends the corporate lobbyists back under the rocks whence they came. By ending or phasing out all the loopholes and economic micro-management, we can reduce rates while we increase revenues. Reagan's Grand Bargain is the model. I implore the GOP to come together, to keep tax rates low, while raising the revenues necessary to balance the budget. I am prepared to put entitlements on the table; the GOP must be prepared to put defense on the table; but together we can agree on tax reform in the great bipartisan tradition of Ronald Reagan.

Keep it simple; make it look like the deus ex machina that really does square our ideological circles (because it does!); frame it as a natural outcrop of your core 2008 message that we need both right and left to succeed as a country and this crisis demands shared sacrifice and compromise on both sides. Explain that there are some things we cannot avoid: the catastrophic legacy of Bush, the European sovereign debt crisis, the Fukushima disaster. But note what we can also now do. Decline is not a fate; it's a choice. and radical reform of taxes will reduce the debt, undermine the lobbyist culture in DC, and level the taxation playing field between rich and poor. All the while reducing tax rates to improve the incentives for hard work that will create jobs. Cite Krauthammer in the red states.

Don't muddy the issue. And keep it simple and repeat it again and again: tax reform, not tax rate hikes. In my view, that should have been the core of the last SOTU. In the greatest error of his presidency (apart from Libya), Obama played the Washington game. He was elected not to play that game. He was elected to tackle the profound challenges we face with practical solutions.

And to those who believe we can never break this cycle of partisan warfare and political gridlock, raise the banner once more, and repeat after me: Yes. We. Can.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama pauses as he makes a statement at the State Dining Room of the White House August 8, 2011 in Washington, DC. Obama spoke on the economy, S&P downgrade and the loss of Navy SEAL members in Afghanistan. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

Politico has a classic piece today on the grim background for the president's re-election campaign next year. I think it overdoes things a bit – I guess they had to sell the piece somehow – but its content tells us something important, even if it's something we already know.

America has hit a wall. Its long term growth trend faltered at the end of the last century and has flatlined and then collapsed in this one, as Nate Silver grimly reminds us (also today). It is not as bad as the Great Depression (that's the only good news), but it is the next worst thing. You can attribute it to several things: the surreal debt-financing begun under Reagan and turned into "deficits-don't-matter" dogma under GWB; globalization which increased competitive pressure on the middle-class American worker more drastically than any other event in the nation's recent history; the resources gobbled up by a welfare state bequeathed when Americans saw it as their birth-right to get richer and richer and richer for ever; or something we don't quite yet understand.

But the upshot is that the music stopped on Bush's watch, like a needle scratching across a vinyl record, and the continued silence is deafening. It's foolish, I think, to believe that the stimulus hurt; it helped short-term and may well have prevented a second round of the 1930s. Ditto the astonishing turn-around of America's automobile industry (see today's GM news); and extension of unemployment benefits way past their due date. But none of this works up against the powerful forces now arrayed against higher growth or middle class revival.

For me, the scariest thing is that company profits are booming, and yet we still are trapped in this decline. The reason? Not just globalization, but our attempts to disguise the new challenges by bubbles: tech and real estate. These tonics gave us a temporary sense of still gaining wealth, but only intensified the crash when their snake-oil ran out. This seems to me to be the real issue here. It's deeper than Bush or Obama. The weak recoveries that follow financial crashes have made matters worse. The delusion that the US is still rich enough to police the whole world doesn't help either. And there's no reason this will end any time soon, except by a grim and difficult paying down of collective and individual debt, in the context of a depressed global economy (with China's growth still highly unstable).

Sorry, but elixirs won't change this. We have no money for them. There are things we can do – agree on long-term debt-reduction, reform taxes, cut the defense budget, hope education can help middle and lower middle class Americans compete better on a global stage. But until we get used to this new period of austerity, and accept it, we will bang our heads against walls.

I confidently predict that Americans have so little experience of stasis or relative decline, let alone long-term hardship, that they will continue to take out their woes on various presidents required to govern at a time like this. My fear is that this despond and despair will be exploited by crazies on the populist right, as they have been in history. But culture war won't create jobs. Even a civilizational war, as some on the far right are itching for, won't help. We are not in the era when mass mobilization can be achieved in war or peace.

The best outcome, I suspect, will be a return to American realism, a determination to do the things we can while avoiding the things that will only give us a temporary hit. In this, the president's best hope is continued honesty with the American people, calm, and resilience. In hard times, radicalism appeals. But so too does small-c conservatism. In dark economic times, people sometimes keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. But all this requires a stoicism at odds with American character and history.

I guess I'm saying that the long great ride seems to be over. The question is simply whether Americans can or will handle it without losing their heads.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Zoom out a little. Think of this latest skirmish, that ended tonight, as part of an endgame to a thirty years’ fiscal war in American politics. Reagan began it, by betting that slashing taxes would spur growth; he was right and wrong. Growth really did happen in the 1980s; but he bequeathed a debt that is with us today, and that he tried only fitfully to fix on his watch. The early 1990s saw the country draw down that deficit, by continuing Reagan’s tax hikes under Bush I and then Clinton, and thanks to a peace dividend. Clinton’s eventual surplus was, alas, more mirage than reality, for it hadn’t solved the long-term entitlement problem or the healthcare cost problem, and was inflated by the tech bubble. Bush II comes in and wreaks havoc. He doubles down on Reagan on taxes and declares that deficits don’t matter, while adding one major new entitlement, two massively expensive wars and throws in a financial collapse as a goodbye present. The result of all this was a recession that helped metastasize the debt even further. This was what Obama inherited. Despite this, the new president was able to borrow even more for a stimulus to prevent a second great depression, and insisted, even in hard  economic times, on a modest bill for universal healthcare. He got both. They used up a lot of political capital. What then? I think the Grand Bargain is the final step of this thirty year debt dance, (along with serious cost controls in the healthcare sector, pencilled into Obamacare). The Grand Bargain is a big entitlement-and-defense cut package balanced by higher taxes on those who have done so well during the last thirty years. Much of this, in the view of many economists, could be done alongside tax reform to minimize the impact of more revenue on marginal rates of income tax. Last fall, we had a chance to do this, with the Simpson-Bowles commission. But the bipartisan Congressional will to act on it was weaker than the desire of both parties to play politics with entitlements and taxes. And Obama decided to lead from behind on this one, and ended up following. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more time without a real solution to the deepest problems. That’s a huge defect in the current stop-gap deal. But it really is just a stop-gap deal. It points pretty quickly to a Grand Bargain in the super-committee, and for the first time has attached real incentives for both sides for it to work. What has just happened is, to my mind, therefore the following: 1. The Republicans used the debt ceiling as blackmail for a big cut in discretionary spending. This was a step too far, in my view, and redolent of a truly reckless attitude toward government and the American economy.  On the other hand, this was not just “another raise” in the debt ceiling as some have argued. It’s a debt ceiling of over $14 trillion. And it’s a debt ceiling that in every single poll, a majority of Americans did not want to raise, without the equivalent or more of cuts being imposed. In retrospect, it’s not a huge surprise that Obama, especially because he is actually a responsible character, surrendered. 2. But the terms of surrender are to Obama’s advantage. He has taken the nuclear weapon of the debt ceiling off the table till after the election, neutralizing his opponents’ main weapon against him. He has revealed a split in the GOP between those who are fixated on no revenue increases and those who want continued Cold War level defense spending. He has also made his preferred Grand Bargain more likely to happen with the terms for the super-committee. And he is now free – better late than never – to throw caution aside and campaign around the country for a balanced solution of tax hikes and spending cuts that can resolve our future debt decisively.

He has won his own battle: he is perceived as more likely to compromise than the GOP in a country whose independent middle wants compromise. If the battle of 2012 is between low taxes or high taxes, the GOP wins. But if it’s fought on whether we should balance the budget solely by spending cuts, often for the elderly and needy, while asking nothing from the wealthy, then Obama wins. 

For both Obama and the Republicans, a win-win scenario is therefore perfectly possible from now on, unless Obama has totally depressed his base or the GOP really wants to insist on an anti-government purity that isn’t shared by the public. In other words, the drama of this deal is far greater than the actual substance. It’s a tactical victory for the GOP; but for Obama, it could be a strategically pyrrhic defeat.

It’s still all to play for, in other words. This was just a ghastly revelation of the recklessness of the GOP’s current tacticians, not a measure of their strategic genius. Know hope.

It’s worth asking. The inarguable fact is that he is presiding over a debt of massive proportions in a weak economy – and the debt is scheduled to get far, far worse over the next decade. Most Americans favored a blend of tax hikes and spending cuts to move us toward fiscal sanity. But the GOP successfully stuck to its refusal to allow any more revenues, and Obama was ambivalent enough about new taxes in the middle of this low-growth recovery to allow them to get their way. In a negotiation where one party is insanely committed and the other is marginally ambivalent, we all know who wins.

He really had only one other option, as PM Carpenter notes: insist on a clean debt ceiling rise and promise to use the 14th Amendment to enforce it against GOP intransigence. Apart from the constitutional question, this would easily have made him look like the big spender in a debt-ridden country and made him more vulnerable next year. More to the point and to Obama’s character and temperament, I just don’t think he could do that and remain a responsible president. In a battle for the votes of ideological purists on the right and the left, Obama would have lost to the GOP, and lost his own critical brand as the mediator, the non-ideologue.

The fundamental constraint is that the debt is so high. He’s not really responsible for the vast majority of that, but that’s the way the gluten-free cookie doesn’t crumble. Some may believe the debt should go much higher to help the recovery along. But I see no political way to pull that off. Again: the debt is so high.

This is a not entirely apposite analogy, but I remember once trying to negotiate cutting an article to size at TNR. The author, a pompous law prof, produced a long, arcane piece that could do with lopping off about a third. I did so, with minimal damage to the core argument. But the author resisted. He told me he had just recovered from heart surgery and the stress of having his article cut might precipitate a heart attack. I’m not making this up. What did I do? I reinstated the whole article and ran it. I was not willing to be responsible for the death of another human being over 300 words.

I gave in. Sometimes, when dealing with fanatics, hostage takers or ornery authors, it’s what you’ve got to do. And to be fair to the GOP, they ran on a platform like this and won back the House. They have a legitimate place at the table even if they used it for blackmail. Obama surrendered because he really had no adult, responsible choice but to fiddle with the terms of surrender. The president is not a dictator. Nor should he be.

There is one, in the deal Reid appears to have now made with the White House and the GOP. Ezra puts it this way:

On Dec. 31, 2012, three weeks before the end of President Barack Obama’s current term in office, the Bush tax cuts expire. Income tax rates will return to their Clinton-era levels. That amounts to a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years, three or four times the $800 billion to $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that Obama and Speaker John Boehner were kicking around. And all Democrats need to do to secure that deal is…nothing. This scenario is the inverse of the current debt-ceiling debate, in which inaction will lead to an outcome — a government default — that Democrats can’t stomach and Republicans think they can. There is only one thing that could stand in the way of Democrats passing significant new revenues on the last day of 2012: the Obama administration.

But what if Obama does not get re-elected? And what if he is forced to campaign on those looming tax hikes? I don’t really see the advantage here.

The truth is that the GOP has successfully held the debt ceiling hostage to drastic cuts in discretionary spending, without any concession on revenue. If they’ve done it once, they can do it again. Will an imminent future tax hike be enough to produce support for a balanced revenue-and spending package in the super-committee? I just cannot see the House Republicans being that adult. And given Obama’s record on revenues, why would they? Each time they have called his bluff.

But the one thing that does seem to have emerged from the clusterfuck is that defense spending has proven less sacrosanct than low taxes for the current GOP. We may finally begin to have defense cuts that are somewhat proportionate to the level of collective bankruptcy we are in. That’s my silver lining.

That’s Jake Tapper’s verdict. The trigger deal:

If the super-committee tasked with entitlement and tax reform fails to come up with $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction that passes Congress, the “neutron bomb” goes off, — as one Democrat put it — spending cuts that will hit the Pentagon budget most deeply, as well as Medicare providers (not beneficiaries) and other programs.

If the super-committee comes up with some deficit reduction but not $1.5 trillion, the triggers would make up the difference.

There are now debates on how deep defense spending would be cut compared with programs for the poor. But it’s perfectly possible we’ll see the deepest defense cuts in memory. Revenues?

Democrats say –- if tax reform doesn’t happen through the super-committee, President Obama will veto any extension of Bush tax cuts when they come up at the end of 2012, further creating an incentive for the super-committee to act.

The good news for the economy: there will be no further debt ceiling moment until after the next election. It’s not done till it’s done, of course. And the magic moment will be when Boehner tries to sell this to his caucus. But this is a good sign that we will postpone jumping off the cliff for a while.