Discrimination on Other Fronts
Though the final word is not in yet, the great, great disappointment last night is the blow to equal rights in California in the form of proposition 8, and bans on same-sex marriage in other states. In the San Francisco Chronicle:
Opponents of the measure, gathered at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, tried to put the best face on the disappointing results.
“There are a lot of votes still to count, and we expect the race to go on late tonight and possibly beyond,” said Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, the guiding force behind the “No on Prop. 8” campaign.
Election officials estimated there could be as many as 2 million ballots left to count after election day, mainly from mail ballots that arrived Tuesday.
Supporters of the ban stayed cautiously optimistic.
“We’re confident voters did go to the polls to vote ‘yes’ to protect traditional marriage,” said Chip White, a spokesman for the Prop. 8 campaign.
Same-sex marriage bans won easily Tuesday night in Florida and Arizona. It was a rematch in Arizona, which in 2006 became the only state to ever reject a ban on same-sex marriage.
The campaign in California pitted those who argued that a same-sex marriage ban was nothing more than outdated discrimination against gays and lesbians, and conservatives and Christian groups who countered that the state and the courts have no right to unilaterally change a definition of marriage that has existed for centuries.
The End of an Era and the Start of a New One
Last night, I cried during a speech by a professional politician. I’ve never done that before, ever. Ezra Klein, I think, puts what happened last night into a larger context, in The American Prospect.
The bumper stickers say “Never Forget.” Easy enough, right? The images of September 11 are indelible. The awful film of that morning will be a mainstay in history classes. But the destruction of our most iconic cityscape was not the most lasting of the damage inflicted on America. It had been a long time since we, as a nation, had felt fear. And it did strange things to us. We simultaneously lashed out and shrunk back. We called forth spectacular shows of power from the greatest army mankind has known and we started docilely removing our shoes and bagging our liquids when we went to the airport. We yelled at our friends and ceased speaking to our enemies. We sought to prove we were very big, and instead found ourselves feeling very small.
America’s sudden sense of vulnerability was ruthlessly exploited by those who sought to dominate our politics. Max Cleland, an American hero who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War, found himself compared to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The cable news networks — led by Fox — affixed the daily terrorism alert to the corner of the screen. Love of country somehow became an arms race of accessories; flag pins and bumper stickers and car magnets became the loyalty oath of a consumerist society. Dissent was equated, both implicitly and explicitly, with treason.
In 2004, John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, actually devoted a portion of his acceptance speech to “those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country.” The fact that he felt it necessary to defend the patriotism of hundreds of millions of Americans did not, by that point, seem very strange. This was the 9-11 era. And last night, it ended.
Barack Hussein Obama was, arguably, the country’s most unlikely candidate for highest office. He embodied, or at least invoked, much of what America feared. His color recalled our racist past. His name was a reminder of our anxious present. His spiritual mentor displayed a streak of radical Afro-nationalism. He knew domestic terrorists and had lived in predominantly Muslim countries. There was hardly a specter lurking in the American subconscious that he did not call forth.
And that was his great strength. He robbed fear of its ability to work through quiet insinuation. He forced America to confront its own subconscious. Obama actually is black. His middle name actually is “Hussein.” He actually does know William Ayers. He actually was married by Jeremiah Wright. He actually had lived in Indonesia. These were not smears, though they were often used as such. They were facts. And this election was fundamentally about what happened when fear collided with fact.
Wednesday Poem
///
Let America be America Again
Langston HughesLet America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!///
The Next President
From The New York Times:
This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:
An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States. Showing extraordinary focus and quiet certainty, Mr. Obama swept away one political presumption after another to defeat first Hillary Clinton, who wanted to be president so badly that she lost her bearings, and then John McCain, who forsook his principles for a campaign built on anger and fear.
His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world.
More here.
The Content of Our Character
People,
I want to state publically that this is one of the happiest days of my life.
Yes, I know all the reasons not to be too happy, thank you.
I am happy.
It is something to have one’s faith restored, to feel connected to something bigger than oneself, to feel inspired, to feel ready to give rather than take.
As a non-white person who grew up in Pakistan, I took it for granted that white men ran the world. My father served in the British Government of India. Now, there is a person even darker than me who will be the leader of the free world. It is a wonderful and remarkable thing, and a testament to the true beauty of America. I am finally undeniably proud to be a citizen of this crazy melting pot, this so pleasing instantiation of brotherhood and tolerance, this America!
Last year, I became a US citizen at a time when I almost felt ashamed pulling out my blue passport when traveling; henceforth, I shall display it with pride.
I have not slept all night and must get some rest. To my fellow Americans, and also to everyone else, my heartfelt congratulations. Believe it or not, the world has changed today. For the better.
Yours,
Abbas
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Schulz’s “Cinnamon Shops”
Over at the Bruno Schulz’s Stories website:
IN JULY, my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, prey to the glowing white and stunning days of summer. We browsed — stupefied by the light — through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour, and had, deep inside, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears.
Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona* out of the fire of the enkindled day, tipping the sun’s colourful beauty from her basket — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skin, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed what would be realised in their taste, and apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons. And alongside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables calling to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with their wild and field aroma.
Africa: Many Hills to Climb
For the month of November, the current and 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal is free. Michelle Sieff on Africa, its diversity and its prospects:
Africa in 2033 will look somewhat like Africa in 2008: it will still face challenges, but different challenges than today. Internal wars, such as in Sudan, will no longer be the primary threats to the security of Africa’s populations. Instead, transnational organized crime syndicates and radical Islamist groups will become the greatest threats to civilian life in Africa. But there are positives too: economic growth will continue, democracy will spread, though its progress may be halting and unpredictable.
Today, some 50 years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa is far more complicated than the image of Africa in the popular imagination. All too often, Africa is still seen as the basket-case continent of Darfur and Zimbabwe, of “blood diamonds,” “resource curses,” and “poverty traps.” In reality, however, Africa is a humdrum continent, and is part of the general trend towards economic and political progress shared by other parts of the world.
Religion is not a stand alone category
Timothy Fitzgerald over at The Immanent Frame:
The invention of “religions” in the modern discursive form is also the invention of the secular state and the modern idea of “science” as essentially different from “religion.” In any given context of modernity we are always dealing with “religion” in various binary oppositions, which are all dependent on the bottom-line distinction between religion and whatever is assumed to be non-religion, now referred to rhetorically as the secular. In discussions about religion, its separation from, and thus relation to, other discursive non-religious domains such as science, politics or economics is usually only acknowledged tacitly and in passing, if at all, conveying (say) an untroubled and unquestioned sense that religion and politics or religion and science or religion and economics are essentially distinct, and thus in danger of getting confused.
Things to Consider as the Exit Poll Results Come In
Max Blumenthal over at pollster.com:
Following the 2004 election, when partial and misleading results leaked out at mid day, the network consortium that conducts the exit polls decided to restrict access to a small number of analysts in a “quarantine room” for most of the day. During the primaries this year, and presumably tonight as well, they release their results and vote estimates to producers and reporters at the television networks and other subscriber organizations about about 5:00 p.m. eastern time. While some of that information will no doubt leak after 5:00 p.m, anything you see before that time claiming to be an “exit poll” is probably bogus and certainly not part of the official network exit poll apparatus (Tom Webster, an employee of Edison Research, blogged some details about life inside the quarantine room just before the Super Tuesday primaries).
And while I have your attention, let me offer some advice: Ignore leaked exit polls tonight. I know, I know. How can you ignore them? Everyone wants to know as much as possible about the outcome of this election as soon as possible. But you will do youself a favor if you ignore what leaks out before the polls close, or at least try not to jump to any conclusions about the likely outcome based on what you see. Why? First, the McCain campaign is right: Historically, the leaked exit poll results have “tended to overstate the Democratic vote,” and as I reported in March, and the early leaked results during the primaries tended to overstate the Obama vote as well.
Does that information help? Can we apply our own informal adjustment (Obama minus some percentage) and get an precise result? Maybe, but I would not advise it.
Basics | Obama and McCain Walk Into a Bar …
From The New York Times:
While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:
A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”
B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”
C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.
Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study.
More here.
Barack Obama’s inner poet
From The Guardian:
Feverishly streaming clips of Obama over the past weeks, I’ve been struck by the freshness of his conversational style. In one interview on The Daily Show he explained how the electorate wanted to “look under the hood and kick the tyres” before they voted for him, implying solid construction while also invoking the American automotive tradition. If we unpack it a little further, there are other metaphors nestled within: he’s “roadworthy” and already has “a few miles on the clock”. In short, he has the necessary experience.
When faced with the thorny issue of whether Hillary’s experience as first lady had any bearing on her potential as a presidential candidate, Obama conceded that she had done “some heavy lifting on issues” during Bill Clinton’s time in office. The metaphor was damning and decisive, casting Hillary as a little oafish and clumsy, fit only for drudge work.
Kennedy knew the importance of words when he chose Robert Frost to speak at his inauguration. As he said in a speech in 1963 after the poet’s death: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses … When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.” But as Michael Donaghy pointed out, Kennedy wasn’t beyond co-opting a little of this for himself: the rhetorical techniques deployed in his inauguration speech mirrored those of the Robert Frost’s poem The Gift Outright.
More here.
Put It to a Vote
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
Democracy, as we all know, is a Greek word. Literally, it means “rule of the people.” To a proponent of democracy, then, it is not unfair to ask, “How have the people been ruling themselves?” In these days of election fever (or exhaustion), it is amusing, if not illustrative to remember that one prominent American openly proclaimed that the people stink and that democracy is a joke. I’m thinking, of course, of H.L. Mencken. Surveying the teeming hordes of American citizens, Mencken called them the “booboisie.” The booboisie is composed of idiots and mental children. “Ideas,” Mencken noted, “leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental — the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.”
Mencken wrote these thoughts down in 1926’s Notes on Democracy (recently published in a new edition through Dissident Books with an introduction by Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers). Fear, Mencken thought, is the essential force driving human beings. The vast majority of us look simply to quell the terror in our hearts with basic comforts. Give us sweet things to eat and some light pornography and we crawl back to our domiciles awaiting further instruction. Rarely, a human being will be able to conquer that basic fear and take a stab at truth or beauty. Rarely.
More here.
1 800 GET OBAMA
Max the Plumber
Stanley Fish in the New York Times:
My father, Max Fish, was a plumber. His Uncle Frank, to whom he apprenticed, was a plumber. My brother Ron was a plumber until he retired at an early age to build villas in St. Kitts. And, as the oldest son, I was supposed to have been a plumber; my father never did quite understand what I chose to do instead.
Given these pieces of autobiography, you can understand why I have been more than slightly bemused to find that another plumber – Joe by name (although his name isn’t Joe and he’s not a licensed plumber) – has become a storied figure in a national election.
Max’s was a better story…
More here.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Monday Poem
//
Dear Joe The Plumber,
In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Emma Goldman explains to character Evelyn Nesbit why Evelyn (having become recently newsworthy) has become such a celebrity:
“I am often asked the question,” says Emma, “how can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.”
American Games
Jim Culleny
I could be a millionaire!
All I need is some money.
They say having money’s
the best way to be a millionaire.
So maybe I’ll watch a game show
to see how it’s done.
Then I could become a supermillionaire and
get more money so I could become
really fuckin rich
–it’s what life’s all about,
isn’t it?
January 2005
Stop the Home Wrecking and Protect America’s Future
Michael Blim
Perhaps “the great crash,” to borrow the title from John Kenneth Galbraith’s study of the onset of the Great Depression, has been avoided. The seemingly irresistible fall in the American, European, and Japanese stock markets slowed a bit over the last week, and bits of commercial paper passed hands. The panic has spread to banks and stock markets in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and the damage to be done is not yet known. Whether their panics will redound upon the core countries where the troubles began is not clear.
Very uncertain still is how bad the world-wide economic recession will be.
Today, though, let us make a preliminary damage assessment. Supposing for the moment that the worst of the immediate panic has passed, how much damage has it done to the household economies of ordinary Americans? How has the panic affected the little economies of work, savings, and spending upon which each of us relies for our livelihoods and those of our familiars?
Because the panic began in the housing market, the damage is particularly immediate and widespread. Suppose instead that the massive financial speculation had occurred in commodities like gold, silver, oil, or even as in the crisis 1636, tulips. Or that it resulted from mis-allocating monies into new industries such as railroads in the 19th Century or into “dot.com” businesses 20 ago. These crises hit ordinary people as money becomes scarce and expensive, and banks fail. Demand shrinks, unemployment rises, and the misery thus spreads.
Our present crisis, surely the worst since the Great Crash, hits ordinary Americans this time much closer to home, or rather in their homes. It attacks their one key asset, their one great store of wealth — their life-long piggy bank that is their home.
Consider one very important fact: Homes represent one third of the combined net worth of all American households. Seventy percent of American households own homes, and it is thus the most widely distributed asset among households aside from cars and checking accounts. In contrast, though many American watch on in chagrin as their pension fund assets have been washed away in the panic, their financial commitments to retirement funds is only a quarter of the value of their homes. For low-income families, their homes are their only assets. (Brian Bucks et.al., Federal Reserve Bulletin, February, 2006)
The panic has exposed how vulnerable American households are to any economic crisis, but particularly how prolonged financial speculation in the housing markets now threatens their immediate well being as well as their future standard of living. As I have discussed two times before a year or more ago, foreclosure rates, now charted like the price of corn in daily newspapers, have skyrocketed. Today, according to David Leonhardt in The New York Times (October 22, 2008), one and a half million households are in immediate peril of losing their homes. Up to another 5 million could soon find themselves caught up in the same ruinous financial whirlpool. Though the yellow press looks hard for new kinds of “welfare queens” among those who are dispossessed of or walk away from their homes, few housing analysts see much more than financial ruin for those who do.
The panic has put governments around the world at the service of their banks. Even as the banks are saved from insolvency, or sold off quickly when they fail under the good offices of governments, the underlying problem – the housing crisis and the damage it is doing to American households – is receiving less attention.
Perhaps this is because the problem is mountainous – far greater than anything the banks or other financial agents face. As home prices continue to sink, more homeowners find themselves in peril. Leonhardt of The Times makes a back-of-the-envelope calculation that if the government intervenes decisively to help homeowners in trouble, it could find itself with $4 trillion in home mortgaged-related obligations. The sum would be roughly five and a half times what the government has currently allocated to spend on propping up banks.
Last week, the Treasury was reported to be working on a mortgage assistance plan, and J.P. Morgan Chase had committed $70 billion to support its plans for renegotiating mortgages with their customers in trouble.
So, attention is being paid, albeit somewhat belatedly.
At the same time, though, a kind of “just so” story is being concocted about those households that find themselves in peril. Put plainly, the line is: “It serves them right. They speculated with their homes and thus deserve the trouble that comes their way.”
Homeowners are pictured as folk who, if they were not house-flippers, were mortgage-flippers. They refinanced frequently, borrowed on equity, or simply bought houses they shouldn’t have.
People did both borrow and refinance a great deal, as the Federal Reserve report cited above notes. Forty-five percent had refinanced their mortgages between 2001 and 2004, and a third of these households had borrowed more than the then-current value of the house. The median amount of money borrowed in addition to the house value was $20,000; half of those who borrowed extra spent it on renovations, and another third on debt consolidation. Given the advantages of refinancing earlier in the decade, and given the heavy marketing applied to get people to do it, neither the refinancing rate, nor the extra amount of value extracted seems extreme.
From my vantage point, as American households faced stagnant or declining personal incomes, as their savings rates plummeted to compensate for income losses in the slow but steady creep of inflation, reaching into the mortgage “piggy bank” looks pretty rational. Not only were homes the one real asset in their possession, but they were the only things that had gained tremendously in value over the past 20 years. Once again, taking a bit of money off the table when refinancing must have seemed rational at the time, given that funds were needed to cover increased medical and educational expenses whose costs have out-paced inflation now for several decades.
The collapse of housing prices depreciates the single most important asset of America’s households. We cannot know now how much this wealth loss has been lost long-term, and how much of the loss is temporary. We do know that our homes are central to our standard of living and to any savings we might accrue for bad times, old age, or inheritance.
Our homes, thus, are our piggy banks, and in many cases like the big banks, they have been cracked or broken too.
Making banks whole will not make America whole again. If Americans are not fairly protected in their homes, the damage to our way of life, perhaps calculable in trillions of dollars now, will become incalculable in the future.
Given the crash in housing prices, supporting the debt of mortgage holders is less likely to spur new housing inflation. It should foster price recovery instead.
A guarantee of this magnitude, I believe, is more intrinsically valuable over the long run than other bail-outs currently underway. It should also trigger a national commitment to see what can be done to make home ownership a universal condition in America.
From Reagan Democrats to Obama Republicans
by Ram Manikkalingam
Barack Obama is the new Ronald Reagan. He can do for the Democrats what Reagan did for the Republicans. His election can set the stage for fashioning a new coalition of those who are left leaning on either economic or cultural issues, with those who have been traditionally left leaning on both economic and cultural issues. The Democrats (ever since Reagan) have struggled to expand their base beyond this group. Obama’s winning coalition gives them a real opportunity to do so. This could have a profound impact on US domestic politics – allowing for both redistribution (yes spreading the wealth around) and greater freedom domestically – and even on US international politics – permitting US engagement abroad (yes even to help build democracies) relying on diplomacy rather than arms, alone.
Over the past weeks, trolling through the web and watching the political shows on TV, I have been dissatisfied with the political explanations for Obama’s success. There have been many. He has run a great campaign by raising a lot of money, setting up a solid ground operation, and staying on message. His opponents have been in disarray – zig zagging from one message to another or looking erratic. The economy has slid and national security has slipped off the agenda, resulting in more support for Democrats who are traditionally stronger in the former. But even if all these explanations were true, it does not really explain whom he is winning over and why? Obama’s victory on Tuesday November 4th will be the result of Republicans – Obama Republicans.
We have heard a lot about Reagan Democrats. These are working class (they like to say middle class in the US) mostly White Americans who felt the government ought to do more for them economically (without taxing the rich) and interfere less with their freedoms (while banning Gay marriage and abortion). This is not the most stable of positions, and the Republicans held onto this group by emphasising religious belief (if you believe Gay marriage is evil in the eyes of God, then how can you let politicians decide), and counting on Democratic weakness (if you believe that everyone has to agree with you before they vote for you how can you ever win). This group has been with Republicans from 1980, when Reagan pulled them together, until 2008, when George Bush lost them. But those whom Obama gains, in the electorate from Republicans, is not the same group lost by the Democrats to Reagan in 1980 – it is a newer and different group – Obama Republicans not Reagan Democrats. Who exactly are they?
One way of identifying this group is the classic red state-blue state divide. But this is not helpful. It anthropomorphises states, and assumes that the states are monolithic favouring one party over another as a whole, when the reality is different. In most states, one party defeats the other usually by less than ten points and occasionally by 10-20 points. It does not tell us who they are and more importantly what they think about the world.
A simple way to identify Obama Republicans is to use the common division of “economic” and “cultural” issues. If Reagan democrats leaned left on economic issues and right on cultural issues, Obama Republicans lean left on either cultural or economic issues, not necessarily both. This has the potential for being an even larger group than Reagan Democrats.
Consider economic issues. Here we have the US version of the traditional left-right divide. The left-leaning are those who favour greater government assistance to get out of economic difficulty – and a belief that markets do not provide all the answers to social problems created by economic ones. In the US of course you have the peculiar twist of this same group “rejecting higher taxes to help the poor” while calling for programs that require them. But this simply requires re-describing redistribution – “getting government to lend a helping hand to those who are struggling”. The right leaning are those who believe – steadfastly – that the poor are poor because they ought to be, or government interference with the market always makes things worse – irrespective of why you think people are poor.
“Cultural” issues also have its peculiarly US variant. In most parts of the world cultural issues would usually refer to high culture (symphonies, orchestras and ballets) or nationalism, ethnicity, multiculturalism. But in the US it refers to values and views – among other things on fundamental beliefs about god, guns and gays. The right-leaning believe in more god, more guns and fewer rights for gays. The left-leaning believe in less god, fewer guns and more rights for gays. Of course there are other issues that come into identifying US values, such as hostility to government interference or individualism or “small town” values. But these cultural markers are “American” and cut across the US version of the left-right divide.
So if Reagan managed to win over those who were left-leaning economically, but leaning right culturally, Obama has pulled off a bigger coup with these elections. He has managed to win over those who are culturally left and economically right, as well as those who are culturally right and economically left. It is the combination of these two groups who are Obama Republicans. In part Obama won this by appearing to be all things to all people (most successful politicians have an element of this). But he also won it by being Reaganesque.
Ronald Reagan may have had many faults, but he had a remarkable strength. He did not come across as mean, personally. Even if you did not agree with him, and even if his policies may have been wrong or wrong headed, you never felt that he wanted to be mean. And this was partly because he exuded a sunny personality and optimism about the world. This is in stark contrast to the approach and image of the Bush-Cheney administration. Their divergent approaches to the main enemies they were fighting – Reagan’s towards the Soviet Union and Bush’s towards the “Muslim World” illustrates this.
While Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire, accelerated the nuclear arms race and attacked the Soviets in many fora, he never asked the question “why do they hate us?” Instead his approach was “they want to become like us and we must help them do so.” His winning smile and his smooth tongue, made it really hard to dislike him, even if you felt that he was avoiding difficult questions, taking the country towards a right turn and representing a politics that was different from yours. Obama’s successful pulling together of a coalition beyond the traditional left of centre culturally and economically – to include those who are only left culturally or economically – shows this same skill at papering over differences in order to bring people together into a winning campaign.
Whether this will be simply a flash in the pan or long-term part of US politics will on depend on political governance. And those of us who live in the rest of the world – where we have no vote, but are heavily affected by US politics – hope that good governance will follow a good campaign, and lead to redistribution at home and peace abroad.
Perceptions: on the eve of change
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Poole Contra Orwell on Language and Politics
Steven Poole at Unspeak:
George Packer at the New Yorker, whose writing I admire greatly, has had it up to here with the vocabulary of the current US election campaign:
When this is all over, certain half-dead words will need to be put out of their misery with a quick bullet to the back of the head. My candidates for a mercy verbicide: pivot, tank, cave, pushback, gravitas, message, game-changer, challenges, the entire litany of Palinesque nouns, attack dog, battleground, pork-barrel, earmark, impacting, and impactful. Other words that are too important to be executed will need to undergo a long and painful rehabilitation before they can be safely used again: change, experience, straight, truth, lie, victory, character, judgment, populist, and elite.
So far, so potentially interesting. But one’s heart sinks at what follows:
It was Orwell, of course, who first explained the relation between decadent language and corrupt politics.
Of course, it wasn’t. The relation had been explained previously by John Arbuthnot, Confucius, and Cicero, among many others, as I pointed out in the Introduction to Unspeak. Packer goes on:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” [Orwell] wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” In our time, the corruption takes a different form. Instead of defending the Soviet purges with Latinate words like “liquidate,” politicians and journalists use clichés mainly borrowed from sports, war, and rural life in order to seem to be saying something tough-minded when in fact they’re saying nothing.
Saying nothing? I beg to differ: when George W. Bush assures the American public that prisoners are being “questioned by experts”, or when Condoleezza Rice refuses calls for a ceasefire on the grounds of seeking a “sustainable ceasefire”, or when Martin Amis complains that his society is unable to “pass judgment on any ethnicity”, they are definitely saying something. The task (heroically shouldered by this blog, among others) is to figure out what exactly that something is. Packer claims to be offering a different diagnosis than Orwell’s, but really they are making the same claim: that politicians are not worth listening to.
Such nihilism is, in my view, Orwell’s most malign influence.