The Dish

A reader writes:

Permit this slow reflection from an avid Dish reader over many years, who has tended to skim your Sunday stuff. But two threads recently caught my eye and, as I pondered them over a lazy weekend, I’ve found myself (to the amazement of this life-long agnostic) pushed towards a re-appraisal of Original Sin.

First, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld: men who commit evil without “thinking much about it” (as you write) because it’s something “other people do.” Reflecting on this it suddenly struck me that Original Sin (which I’d long mocked as an absurdity) serves precisely as a prophylactic against this kind of complacency.

I’m no theologian, but an assumption that one is evil – because we are all inherently fallen – makes it one’s job as a human being to meditate on the evil (or, if you prefer the term, “error”) permanently inherent in oneself. Our obligation is to identify it and to try to root it out. Or at least (since rooting it out is by definition impossible) to moderate it, to channel it positively, to restrict it. Hence your passion for Pope Francis: “I am a sinner” is his first reply.

Nothing one can do, as a being born into sin, can be a “no brainer” (as Cheney describes his decision to permit waterboarding). A profoundly Christian obligation to meditate on his own evil would have led Cheney (and the grinning Rumsfeld) at least to the point of “wrestling with the choice” of whether to torture, as opposed to the glib certainty you, and so many of us, find, well, evil. (I guess there’s an argument that the deliberate choice of evil is morally worse than unreflecting self-deception … but we’ll leave that for another time.)

In other words – if I may be permitted briefly to mix religion and politics – Original Sin is a concept that liberals can embrace, from an epistemological if not a theological perspective. Perhaps after all it’s not something that should be “laundered out of our culture” (to quote today’s post on Sam Harris). We need Original Sin as a restraint against our arrogant – and possibly evil – self-certainty.

Another reader gives Cheney a civics lesson on Presidents’ Day:

The quote taken from Cheney reveals part of the problem in this thoughtless man’s life-long failure and/or inability to think. He said:

Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job, do what’s required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens.

But his job wasn’t to safeguard the United States of America. And it wasn’t even his job to safeguard the lives of American citizens. Presidents and Vice-Presidents do not swear to defend America or Americans. They swear that they will “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. The putative “no-brainer” would seem to become rather brain-intensive when this critical difference is taken into account.

To recap: No Constitutional obligation whatsoever to protect the borders, the soldiers, the buildings, or the people. On the other hand, an obligation to protect the Constitution that is as close to iron-clad and unambiguous as anything to be found in the document. He evidently never read the job description. The “honor” he sneers at is the entire point. It’s not one desideratum among many; it’s the only one.

Update from another reader, who doesn’t think it’s that simple:

Your smugly ill-informed “civics lesson”-giving reader has compelled me to do the unthinkable: stand up for Dick Cheney. (Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to shower afterwards.) To suggest that the job of the chief executive of the country does not include protecting its people and property is simply not true.

First, the presidential oath of office is not an exhaustive list of presidential duties. But even if it were, the oath is not limited to preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution. The first obligation of the oath is to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States” – protecting the Constitution is mentioned second as an additional obligation. The Office of the President of the United States, per Article II of the Constitution, includes wielding the “executive Power” of the federal government and being the Commander in Chief. Article II is, fortunately or unfortunately, silent about the contours of the “executive Power,” which is why we’re still debating the powers of the executive branch 225 years later. But as the first – and possibly the only universally agreed – role of the state is to be a “night watchman,” it is absolutely within the job description of the President and Vice President to protect citizens from enemies foreign and domestic.

None of this excuses Cheney or Rumsfeld, or the dime-store Eichmanns they employed, for torturing in violation of settled U.S. law and basic morality. I just can’t abide smug sermonizing by people who don’t know what they’re talking about and reification of the Constitution by people who can’t actually have read it. Thanks for letting me vent.

A reminder of the veep’s oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

One more reader:

No doubt a level of security is necessary for democracy. Figuring out where to draw constitutional lines is often difficult. But the point about the no brainier line is that he doesn’t even consider the constitutional issues valid. This is what drives so many of us nuts whether liberal or conservative: who are you to decide for me what liberties to take away for my safety?  We are entitled to make these decisions as a nation and not have the security apparatus hide behind top security clearance telling us “you can’t handle the truth” a la Jack Nicholson.

Some good news: the sheer breadth of the sanctioned discrimination in the bill designed to protect religious freedom has apparently doomed it. Maybe it was because, as I noted, it would be a terrible self-inflicted blow for the forces who want to stop gay couples from having stable marriages; or maybe because anti-discrimination really is now a universal maxim for the far right as well as everyone else:

Susan Wagle, a conservative Republican who is president of the Kansas Senate, raised opposition to the House measure, saying she had “grown concerned about the practical impact of the bill” and “my members don’t condone discrimination.”

A couple of final thoughts: it’s possible to mount real resistance to various crackpot, far-right initiatives … and win. And once even the far right oppose anti-gay discrimination, the terms of the debate have been set up for victory for gay equality.

Update from a reader:

I’ve enjoyed your coverage of the Kansas far-right implosion, especially since I have been working at the center of this mess for the past two weeks. I thought it might be helpful to highlight why the overwhelmingly negative response to this bill resulted in action from conservative Republicans. It’s a simple equation:

public outcry + legitimate opposition candidates = policy change. Without a legitimate challenger to Gov. Brownback, this bill could have gone forward and been signed into law without any repercussions. But the fact that Paul Davis, the presumed Democratic nominee for governor, raised over a million dollars in just four months and beat Brownback head-to-head in the only public poll to date made it impossible for Republicans to push this legislation forward over public objection.

Kansas Republicans did not wake up and realize discrimination is wrong. They did not have an awakening on the policy. Anti-discrimination is not a universal maxim in the Republican Party. Sixty nine GOP House members (out of 92) voted for this bill knowing it discriminated against the LGBTQ community. This vote shows how far-right Kansas Republicans think and act when people aren’t paying attention.

Political survival is a much more universal maxim and Gov. Brownback did not want to make a decision on this bill, so he had his Senate leaders spike it to protect his re-election campaign. It’s a less uplifting narrative, but also a helpful reminder of how to accomplish change in American politics – get organized, get loud, and scare both political parties into taking your demands seriously.

Peter Lawler claims the show is ideal viewing for conservatives, as it offers lessons “on how to make our nostalgia astutely selective”:

Downton Abbey shows us what’s best and what’s ridiculous—if not necessarily much of what’s worst—about being aristocratic. It also cele­brates the decent business sense of the middle class, the realistic love of the American woman, the nobility of living in service to a lord, the humane achieve­ments of modern medical sci­ence, the struggle of both aristo­cratic and servant young women to become somewhat displaced in a world that has their whole lives figured out, and even what’s admirable about the progressive idealism that liberates women and the Irish. Downton highlights the tension between aristocratic tradition­alism and modern progress, and forces conservatives to confront the good and bad in both.

George Will isn’t as impressed, seeing Downton as a sop to progressives:

It is fitting that PBS offers “Downton Abbey” to its disproportionately progressive audience. This series is a languid appreciation of a class structure supposedly tempered by the paternalism of the privileged. And if progressivism prevails, America will BE Downton Abbey: Upstairs, the administrators of the regulatory state will, with a feudal sense of noblesse oblige, assume responsibility for the lower orders downstairs, gently protecting them from “substandard” health insurance policies, school choice, gun ownership, large sodas and other decisions that experts consider naughty or calamitous.

Lawler thinks Will is missing the point:

Who can deny that today our upper class—our meritocratic cognitive elite—lacks and could benefit from some of the class of the Earl of Grantham and his family? That’s not to deny that the Lord Grantham is not so astute when it comes to the personal longing for freedom, turning a profit, tolerance of religious diversity, modern science, and even good government. He is astute enough, though, to accept, if reluctantly, changes that will make his way of life more sustainable and even admirable. He is also astute enough not to embrace the popular moralism that turns sins into crimes or even reasons for dismissal. My friend George Will, who finds me “normally wise and lucid,” mistakes, partly by presenting a quote out of its ironic context, my praise of the relational place called Downton Abbey as a progressive and paternalistic endorsement of the welfare state. There’s a huge difference between an aristocratic manor and a government bureaucracy! And I said Downton is an exaggeration for our edification—not a real place.

Stephen Mufson focuses on the economic lessons of Downton. Among them? “Beware of speculative bubbles fueled by cheap foreign capital”:

Faced with cash-flow problems for years, [Lord Grantham] married his rich American wife, Cora (a sort of corporate merger that only later grew more sentimental), to gain access to foreign investment, namely her family money. Nothing wrong with that: China in its early economic-reform days tapped U.S. and other foreign investment, and now many U.S. companies are looking for investments by successful Chinese firms.

Alas, Grantham violates the basic rules of financial management and fails to put his wife Cora’s injection of capital to good use. Instead of investing in his family business (the estate and its many tenant farmers) or diversifying his investments, Lord Grantham gets swept up in a speculative bubble, sinking virtually all of his wife’s money into a Canadian railway scheme that goes bust. Had he been alive today, he’d have been buying subprime mortgages or giving all his money to Bernie Madoff.