AK's Ruminations

Injudicious Activism

2011-08-12T16:23:00.004-04:00

“‘Judicial activism’ in defence of liberty is no vice,” wrote political columnist David Harsanyi last February on the Web pages of the libertarian magazine Reason. In this, he is joined by legions of his sympathizers, who maintain that the judiciary should take the lead in downsizing the post-New Deal regulatory state and curtailing its purported violations of individual freedom. This libertarian case for judicial activism has been iterated with increasing frequency since the recent invalidation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on constitutional grounds this year, first by two federal district judges and most recently by the US Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit. As the argument has it, the judges who ruled “Obamacare” unconstitutional either in whole or in part did not violate Americans’ democratic will as expressed by their elected representatives. Rather, they appropriately exercised judicial review to check an out-of-control government that had violated one constitutional right too many.

As a libertarian who would like to minimize government intrusion, coercion and confiscation as much as any other, I beg to differ.

For as long as I have known what the term means, I have deplored judicial activism in all its ideological stripes. I first became familiar with the term when I took a course in Constitutional Interpretation in college. I soon learned that no single political camp has monopolized the practice of fighting its battles, and imposing its agenda on the country, via the unelected branch of government. The Supreme Court of a century ago spent a generation obstructing the establishment of the welfare state, based on a “liberty of contract” that is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. The liberal mid-twentieth-century Court brought us other unenumerated rights like privacy in general and abortion in particular while temporarily striking down the death penalty. Through it all, each of the major political factions predictably cheered when its weltanschauung was gratified and bleated in protest when it was thwarted. I have always looked with disgust at this most salient of hypocrisies in American politics. Everyone is a judicial activist—when it suits him.

So I read my fellow libertarians’ defenses of this abuse of judicial review with great dismay, for several reasons. The first is the aforementioned disingenuousness. For instance, it seems to have become an article of faith among my co-ideologues that the Constitution protects the “liberty of contract” recognized by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York in 1905. This liberty, of course, is conspicuous by its absence from the text of the supreme law of the land; but no matter. According to the Ninth Amendment, “the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Liberty of contract is one of those other rights “retained by the people,” so the Constitution protects it as well, even without mentioning it.

Were I still the confirmed leftist I was in my adolescence, I would look aghast at the havoc this would wreak on minimum-wage laws and sundry other regulations deemed necessary for society’s general welfare. My retort would not be long in coming. I would see the libertarians’ constitutional right to liberty of contract and raise them a constitutional entitlement to universal health care.” Neither of these “privileges or immunities” is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution; why read one into this venerable eighteenth-century parchment and not the other? Indeed, some liberal legal scholars have already advocated judicial recognition of such “constitutional welfare rights”—particularly Berkeley Law School professor Goodwin Liu.[1] Would libertarian boosters of judicial activism graciously acquiesce if the courts were to read such a government-expanding right into the Constitution? Quaestio respondet sibi.

At any rate, I have yet to make my peace with the idea of unenumerated constitutional rights. If rights left unmentioned by the document are as valid and enforceable as their textually entrenched cousins, why enumerate any of them at all? What is the larger purpose of putting those freedoms in writing in the first place? In my view, the point of doing so is to create an empirically verifiable, objective record of which rights are in fact protected by the Constitution—and which ones are not. Pace the Ninth Amendment, conjuring up brand-new rights and privileges and inserting them into an unamended text vitiates that purpose. For one thing, it is a veritable recipe for judicial overreach, since the courts have the last word on constitutional interpretation. It leaves judges free to run off half-cocked, reading into the Constitution whatever provisions they deem necessary. Why should any American politicos—liberals, conservatives, moderates or libertarians—trust unelected jurists to do the right thing at all times, when the latter need not fear being turfed out of office if they overstep?

For another thing, leaving the process of constitutional interpretation completely unmoored from the text would shield a literally infinite list of privileges against democratic majorities’ ability to abridge them. Those who believe that public policy should be broadly guided by the will of the people should think twice before endorsing this methodology. Is there no form of proactive governance that Americans should be free to implement? Are we to believe that most forms of government intervention are so odious that the Constitution should forbid them—no matter how much the American people might desire them? Yes, it is crucial that a democratic constitution protect certain rights and freedoms from the “tyranny of the majority” of which Tocqueville warned. It is equally crucial, however, that those fundamental freedoms be finite, lest the will of the people be not merely circumscribed, but completely emasculated.

This brings me to perhaps the most fundamental reason why libertarian judicial activism rubs me the wrong way. First of all, it insinuates that the Constitution is basically a libertarian document, just as liberal judicial activism treats the Constitution as though it were intrinsically liberal, and conservative judicial activism similarly mangles the document from the Right. These philosophical conceits offend the democratic spirit. For any constitution to play ideological favorites, tilting the public policy playing field in favor of one political camp at the others’ expense, would be almost self-evidently unjust. In a true democracy, opposing political visions ought to compete—vociferously, to be sure, but peacefully and equitably nonetheless—for the hearts and minds of the people. In this never-ending struggle, an authentically democratic constitution and the judges who interpret and enforce it are supposed to remain as neutral as possible, not take sides.

At any rate, I think it self-denigrating to suggest that our libertarian philosophy needs such constitutional coddling. Are our powers of persuasion really so feeble that we cannot win our countrymen over to our side? Many argue that “the people” are too easily misled and deceived to see the libertarian light, or perhaps simply too apathetic to follow it. This strikes me as a lame excuse for us to fold our kiosk in the marketplace of ideas. Moreover, it is disingenuous in the extreme for us to look with such contempt on the very people whom we mean to liberate.

I am a libertarian. I, too, wish to keep the government out of the people’s faces to the greatest extent possible—in all areas of human endeavor. Nonetheless, such matters are not, and should not be, the province of the Constitution or of the courts; that job should be left to the people’s elected representatives. I recognize that not everyone shares my convictions, and that other worldviews deserve to go a few rounds in the ring with mine. Rather than run after unelected judges’ apron-strings, I prefer to tackle my ideological opponents head-on and beat them fair and square. When government violates a right that the Constitution does explicitly protect, that is the time to take our fight to the courts. When the Constitution is silent about the freedoms we defend, our battle belongs in the court of public opinion. I believe in libertarianism—but I believe in democracy more.

[1] Goodwin Liu, “Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights,” 61 Stan. L. Rev. 203 (2008).

Citizen Chen

2009-12-20T09:16:00.000-05:00

I have always believed that the citizens of a free society should not be punished for acting, within reasonable bounds, to protect themselves or their property from criminals. When the police are able to deal with the robber or attacker in a timely and effective fashion, the job should indeed be left to them. When this is not the case, individuals who are able to bring the perpetrators to heel in a responsible manner should not flinch from doing so. Nor should the state penalize them for doing what needs to be done, which officers of the peace may be unable—or unwilling—to do.

As an ongoing travesty of justice in Toronto in shows, Canada’s criminal justice system would beg to differ.

It was last May that surveillance cameras at the Lucky Moose market in Toronto’s Chinatown captured a man stealing $60 worth of plants riding away with them on a bicycle. 51-year-old Anthony Bennett, a man with a petty crime rap sheet 33 years long, returned to the same store an hour later, presumably to help himself to some more merchandise. This time, however, he was confronted by the store’s owner, David Chen, and fled on foot. Mr. Chen and several store employees gave chase and caught Bennett, reportedly hog-tying him with twine and trapping him in a delivery truck until police arrived several minutes later.

What happened next boggles the mind and makes a mockery of the very concept of justice. For apprehending the thief and restraining him until the authorities showed up, Mr. Chen was charged by police with unlawful confinement, assault, concealing a weapon (he happened to be carrying a box-cutter at the time), and kidnapping. Worse still, the perpetrator, who was originally supposed to serve a 90-day jail sentence at the prosecution’s request, was able to finagle a mere 30-day bid out of negotiations with the court—in exchange for testifying against Mr. Chen.

I would love to be able to say that the Crown did the “decent” thing by dropping the kidnapping and concealed weapon charges several months later. Unfortunately, decency had little to do with it. For the most serious charge, that of kidnapping, Mr. Chen would have had to be tried before a jury, where he almost certainly would have been acquitted. At any rate, the Crown initially offered to drop the more severe charges if Mr. Chen would plead guilty to assault and unlawful confinement—an offer he promptly refused. This plea bargain suggests that Crown prosecutor Colleen Hepburn’s eventual decision to drop the aforementioned charges anyway was not made as a matter of conscience.

The legal case against Mr. Chen is that in Canada, such “citizen arrests” are lawful only when the perpetrator is in caught in the act of breaking the law. Since Chen ran Bennett down before the latter was able to filch any more goods upon his return to the market, the argument goes, what he did was illegal. Yet it appears that this is less clear than the Crown and its sympathizers would have it. According to University of Alberta criminal-law professor Sanjeev Anand, Canadian legal precedent permits such citizen arrests if there is reason to believe that the perpetrator has committed an indictable offence. The surveillance camera footage of Bennett’s initial theft gave Chen that reason.

Yet even if the Crown is right, Chen’s case raises an important normative question. Should Canada’s laws be amended, as Immigration Minister Jason Kenney recently mused, to protect this sort of citizen’s arrest from prosecution? I, for one, believe so, for I see nothing in Chen’s action that should be considered worthy of punishment under the law.

Did Chen and his employees truly “assault” Mr. Bennett in any meaningful sense of the word? I think not. They applied perfectly reasonable force in stopping him; they did not beat the stuffing out of him, as others would have done. Did they “take the law into their own hands”, as some have alleged? Hardly. They did not try to punish Bennett themselves, as real vigilantes do. They trussed him up—strictly to stop him from escaping—and turned him over to Toronto’s Finest at the first opportunity.

Some argue, as the Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee did last month, that Mr. Chen endangered himself in pursuing the larcenous Mr. Bennett. What if the perp had pulled a knife or a gun on him? This flimsy argument, however, is annoyingly paternalistic in its implications. If an individual is willing to risk life and limb to catch a fleeing thief, that is his business. The government should not punish him for doing so in order to shield him from the potential consequences of his own actions. Eyewitnesses who report violent crimes or rescue their victims, or who testify against criminals in court, potentially make themselves targets for the perpetrators’ reprisal as well. Are they to be prosecuted for that?

“In such an encounter, anything can happen,” wrote Mr. Gee. “That’s why we reserve the right of arrest mainly to police…Passions run high when people think they have right on their side, and things can easily get out of hand.” This, of course, overlooks the countless incidents in which things have spun far further out of control than they did in David Chen’s case, despite—and sometimes because of—police involvement. It also ignores the judiciousness Chen exercised by merely restraining Bennett until the police’s arrival. What’s more, since Bennett might have escaped had he not been caught, Mr. Chen, if anything, did the police a favor. Had he handled this situation by the book, calling 911 when he caught the thief without giving chase, Bennett could have made a clean getaway before the police arrived.

Can law-abiding citizens afford to depend so heavily on law enforcement for their safety? In a perfect world, in which cops are irreproachable angels who always arrive in time to collar the crooks, this would be the perfect approach. In the world we actually inhabit, however, that is too often not the case. To require citizens to wait for police to rescue them, even when the latter are unable to do so until it is too late, is nothing short of unjust. In some situations, that could cost a victim his or her life. This is one major reason why the law permits, for example, the use of violence in self-defense: because police are not always well positioned to take care of business. Case in point: as Chen and countless fellow shopkeepers—who have rallied to his defence—have pointed out, Toronto police generally give shoplifting cases short shrift. Store owners’ tax dollars, it would seem, are not so hard at work.

This case relates to the larger issue of whether restricting individuals’ ability to help stop crime discourages them from acting in cases where such courageous intervention could save lives. In the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, the men in a room commandeered by gunman Marc Lépine meekly obeyed his order to leave, allowing him to slaughter fourteen women left behind. Two summers ago, travelers in Western Canada fled a bus after one psychotic passenger savagely butchered another. (The RCMP, for their part, left the murderer alone on the bus for hours before boarding and arresting him, allowing him to decapitate and cannibalize his victim’s body.)

A little retaliation on bystanders’ part might have at least mitigated these tragedies. Consider, for instance, the shooting at Virginia’s Appalachian School of Law in 2002, when a disgruntled student shot six people, killing three, including a school dean. Two other students ran to their cars to retrieve handguns from their glove compartments and confronted and disarmed the shooter. Such bravery need not be expected of all citizens—most of us are not cut out for such impromptu combat—but it is not to be punished either. It is easy to imagine how laws that discourage that kind of intervention could infantilize and enfeeble the citizenry, enabling or exacerbating such crimes in the future.

The case of David Chen revives the age-old question of the proper relationship between the citizen and the state. Free men and women should not have to entrust any aspect of their destinies—their health, safety, prosperity etc.—to the agents of government so slavishly. In most cases, yes, the boys (and girls) in blue should be the ones to bring the bad guys to justice. Yet there are times when John Q. Citizen must do his part—beyond cooperating with investigations, serving on juries or testifying in court—to take a bite out of crime. This includes cases in which John Q.’s livelihood is violated by someone whom he can apprehend with minimal violence and without usurping the legitimate role of the police. Citizen Chen does not deserve to be put on trial. If anything, the rest of us should consider taking a page from his book.

To War or Not to War

2009-12-20T09:10:00.002-05:00

In early September, conservative pundit George Will declared in the pages of the Washington Post that Afghanistan’s persistent downward spiral is America’s cue to exit. There soon ensued another Will column urging that US troops be withdrawn from Iraq within the next year. Bucking the trend on the Right, the National Review’s Peter Hesgeth argued that the US cannot remain locked into such nation-building endeavors forever. The conservative wall of silence, if you will, is beginning to show cracks over these latest overseas projections of American power.

The fundamental lesson to be learned from the tortured US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is the importance of picking one’s fights wisely. There are two main criteria on which the decision to go to war should be based. First of all, is the war necessary? Second of all, is it winnable? In answering these questions, it is instructive to examine how the last counterinsurgent quagmire the US faced, the Vietnam War, became such a drawn-out and futile bloodletting. Notwithstanding the hackneyed use of that war to caution against every new American military adventure, rarely have the correct conclusions been drawn from it.

In the Korean War of the early 1950s, the coalition fighting to reverse communist North Korea’s invasion of the South was ultimately shoved back by a massive Chinese counterattack. This taught US policymakers that China was loath to tolerate any anti-Communist beachheads on its border. A decade later, North Vietnam’s location next door to China enabled Moscow and Beijing to supply the Vietnamese communists with relative impunity. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could not sever the enemy’s supply lines without risking another direct—and possibly nuclear—confrontation with China. Hence they settled for carpet-bombing North Vietnam and slaying as many Viet Cong guerrillas as they could until the South Vietnamese army could defend the country independently. Unfortunately, the South Vietnamese army proved incompetent and cowardly, and the regime for which it fought grew autocratic and corrupt. This, and the military havoc wreaked on the country, alienated South Vietnamese civilians in droves, pushing many into the arms of the Viet Cong. Moreover, the North Vietnamese possessed greater patience—and a far higher tolerance for bloodshed—than the American people had. Conclusion: the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

Furthermore, in training its sights on Southeast Asia, the United States had picked a fight with the wrong commies. North Vietnam never served as a bastion of Soviet-sponsored subversion. Like Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was Marxist, but neutral between the dueling superpowers, fearing Russian and Chinese as well as American domination. In fact, after Hanoi emerged victorious in 1975, Vietnam was at war with its Communist neighbors in Cambodia and China before decade’s end. Conclusion: the Vietnam War was unnecessary.

I see the true lessons of Vietnam as follows. First, do not target enemies that pose no threat, for that leads to unnecessary war. Second, avoid fighting counterinsurgencies in locations where the military cannot choke off the rebels’ supplies at the source, for that leads to unwinnable war. The Bush Administration, in its hegemonic hubris and profound historical ignorance, learned not one of these lessons. The guerilla warfare that followed the toppling of the Taliban and Ba’athist regimes caught Uncle Sam with his striped pants down. Having never seen these insurgencies coming, the Pentagon put too few boots on the ground to grapple effectively with the rebels in either country. Hence the belated troop “surge” implemented by President Bush in Iraq in 2007, and the current surge President Obama has ordered in Afghanistan. These have to be two of the deadliest games of catch-up ever played.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have found supplies and shelter in neighboring Pakistan, while Iraq’s Shi’ite militias benefit from aid from their coreligionists in adjacent Iran. The US military cannot tackle Iran directly, and the Pakistani government has so far proven unable to suppress the Taliban sympathizers within its own borders. Once again, the US has gotten itself—and its NATO allies—into a scrap with guerrillas whose sources of supply are all but untouchable. That US forces have yet to win the hearts and minds of Afghan and Iraqi civilians only compounds these colossal blunders.

Conclusion: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may well prove to be unwinnable.

The news that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to anyone besides his own people grew stale years ago. At this point, it almost goes without saying that the Iraq War was unnecessary. The casus belli in Afghanistan, however, was virtually unassailable, complicating the question of that war’s necessity. Al-Qaeda had planned the greatest civilian mass slaughter in American history from its caves in Afghanistan; their ruling Taliban allies refused to turn the perpetrators over to the US to be brought to justice; therefore Al-Qaeda, Taliban and all had to go.

Yet the Taliban regime was toppled, and the country cleansed of Al-Qaeda bases, almost eight years ago. The counterinsurgency that ensued has aimed to enable the Afghan government to prevent the Taliban’s return to power on its own. It has also struggled to bequeath to Afghanistan at least the basic framework of a stable, durable democracy. On both counts, the war has thus far gone atrociously. On at least the latter of those two counts, the same can be said for Iraq. Both countries’ new constitutions establish Islam as the state religion and enshrine Islamic sharia in the laws of the land. Have we forgotten the Afghan who was prosecuted for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity some years ago, and had to leave the country? Has the law recently passed by the government in Kabul making it legal for husbands to rape their wives already slipped our minds? Whatever these laws are, they are not democratic. Clearly, the backward cultures that make such injustices possible are inhospitable to democracy.

Conclusion: the initial military campaign in Afghanistan was necessary; the sanguinary nation-building, democratizing effort that followed it may not be.

So why the reluctance to “bug out” of both conflicts? Once again, a comparison with the ignominious US retreat from Vietnam in 1975 comes in handy. The US withdrawal was indeed followed by a bloodbath; thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled the country’s Communist crackdown in the late 1970s. The disco era also saw Marxist forces gain strength throughout what was then still known as the “Third World”. From Nicaragua to Grenada to Angola to Afghanistan itself, it seemed that America’s defeat in Vietnam had emboldened its enemies to seek ever greater advantage. Nor was it only the Soviets and their clients who concluded that the US was in fact a “paper tiger”. Iran went Islamist in 1979, and has been a persistent thorn in America’s Middle Eastern flank ever since. Shortly before Syria invaded Lebanon in 1976, President Hafez Al-Assad is said to have sneered to Henry Kissinger: “You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be around when you get tired of Israel.”

When the US beats a hasty retreat from a conflict to which it has committed immense amounts of blood and treasure, anti-American forces worldwide take note—and take advantage. Osama bin Laden took inspiration from the US pullout from Somalia in 1993, concluding that the Great Satan lacked the belly to quell a protracted insurrection. Thus American war hawks’ insistence on “staying the course” should not be dismissed out of hand. Islamist forces, whether Sunnis sympathetic to al-Qaeda or Shiites allied with Iran, will not be kind to any country the US leaves in the lurch.

President Bush, then, painted the US into a corner by invading Iraq unnecessarily and arguably overstaying America’s welcome in Afghanistan. In so doing, he has left his successor quite the dilemma. President Obama can either soldier on and risk wasting more American lives and dollars to no avail, or begin pulling the troops out and risk allowing both war-torn countries to collapse into even greater mayhem—and strengthening America’s mortal enemies into the bargain. Either outcome would cost the United States, and those who depend on it for their survival, dearly. If the US is to continue to lead the free world, its leaders must learn to avoid plunging into these dead-end conflicts in the first place. Being—and remaining—the world’s greatest power means knowing when to stay off the warpath. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Barack and the Straw Man

2009-09-16T16:55:00.002-04:00

In the winter of 2008, knowing that the next president of the United States would be a Democrat, I decided that President Barack Obama, whatever his faults, would be preferable to President Hillary Clinton. This had nothing to do with their policy differences—which were scant—and everything to do with many Americans’ deep personal dislike of Hillary Clinton. The country had just endured eight years of monomaniacal Clinton-bashing from the Right, followed by another eight years of equally unhinged Bush-bashing from the Left. Could America not use a leader whose detractors could oppose his policy agenda without hating his guts?

Silly, silly me. At the time, I failed to anticipate that left-leaning elites in the US media, intelligentsia and commentariat would leap to blame any and all opposition to Obama’s politics on racism. For shame! I might have known that one fault line in American politics would promptly be replaced by another. The partisan vitriol would rage on unabated, thanks to the profound revulsion felt by conservatives and even many independent voters toward the aforementioned insinuation. What else could result from so many liberals’ readiness to paint Obama’s critics with the brush of bigotry?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd fairly somersaulted onto that facile bandwagon on September 12, writing, “Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.” This, strictly speaking, was true: some of President Obama’s opponents are doubtless racially motivated. Dowd was reacting to South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s disgraceful exclamation at the President during the latter’s recent address to Congress. Wilson may indeed be guilty as charged. His membership in an organization called Sons of Confederate Veterans, and his leadership of a 2000 campaign to keep the Stars and Bars flying over the South Carolina state capitol, are legitimate cause for suspicion. Yet Ms. Dowd and company are not content to denounce Joe Wilson alone; most or all Obama opponents have to roast with him.

Hence Dowd implied, for instance, that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford refused to accept stimulus funds from Washington because the President is Black. Appraising the raucous opposition to Obama-style healthcare reform at town hall meetings nationwide last August, Princeton professor Paul Krugman wrote that “the driving force…is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship.” James Ridgeway of Mother Jones magazine declared that the “election of Barack Obama adds even more fuel to nativist rage.” The Washington Post’s resident hand-wringer E.J. Dionne likened the town hall confrontations to the lynching and disenfranchisement of Blacks in the Jim Crow South. Most recently, former President Jimmy Carter told NBC News, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he’s a Black man, that he’s African-American. […] That racism inclination still exists, and I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of [the] belief among many white people…that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.” Interminable is the list of leftists who have refused, as Reason magazine’s Matt Welch put it, “to begin considering that limited government sentiment is not automatically a form of sublimated racism.”

These allegations would be more convincing if there were some indication that a white Democratic president, one as liberal as Barack Obama, would have received gentler treatment from the Republican opposition. I think this question answers itself. It is difficult to imagine Caucasian Hillary Clinton arousing much less ire from conservatives, were she in the Oval Office today. Her equally Caucasian husband was hardly pampered by Republicans during his turn in the White House. So what basis is there for blaming Obama’s opposition on racism?

Last spring, for example, actress Janeane Garofalo insisted that the anti-government activists at one “Tea Party” demonstration must be motivated by racism rather than by conservatism, because they had never protested George W. Bush’s asinine fiscal policies. Of the protestors’ hypocrisy on that score, there can be little doubt. Yet hypocrisy and racism are two different things; to attribute the former to the latter automatically is simplistic in the extreme. Far more likely is that these Tea Partygoers are Republican loyalists, and were reluctant to criticize their party’s leader for any reason. This irrational bias is partisan in nature—not racial.

Lest I overstate my case, let me acknowledge that some of these demonstrators have indeed shown signs of racial bias. Most disturbing to me was a photo of one Tea Party marcher holding a sign reading “Stand idly by while some Kenyan tries to destroy America? HOMEY DON’T PLAY DAT!!!” This, of course, was only one example among many. Yet the photos and footage I’ve seen of Tea Parties and town hall protests suggested that such displays were in the minority. This is corroborated by the testimony of other direct observers of these events (besides Janeane Garofalo, and far less partial). Smearing all the participants as racist is no fairer than characterizing all the anti-globalization protestors of yesteryear as violent anarchists. Would it kill President Obama’s backers to restrict their complaints to the truly bad apples in the barrel?

The principal case against “ObamaCare” has nothing to do with race, one way or the other. There are quite legitimate arguments to be made that the President’s reform plan would exacerbate the federal budget deficit, gradually crowd out private health insurers by luring more and more Americans onto the public option and undercutting private insurance premiums, eventually lead to government rationing of healthcare and the around-the-block waiting lines that come with it, stifle innovation in medical technology, and so on. This case is driven by a philosophical leeriness of activist government. There are fair grounds for rebuttal of all of these arguments. The claim that they are racist is not one of them.

This left-liberal race-baiting is most damnable not in its unfairness to its targets, but in its intellectual laziness, cowardice and perhaps even desperation. Whenever its proponents tire of making the substantive case for Obama-style healthcare reform, they resort to playing the racism card. To fall back on accusations of racial prejudice in this context is to attack a straw man, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Employers of this tactic do their own cause few favors, for they are unwittingly responding to only a minority of their political adversaries. These kneejerk allegations do nothing to discredit most of President Obama’s critics, who would hardly be cheering on his big-government policies if he were white.

Liberals forget that two can—and do—play at that game. Does no one remember the political climate in 2002 and 2003, when right-wingers merrily impugned the patriotism of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq? They, too, were attacking a straw man. Most of the war’s skeptics (within the US, at any rate) were anything but un-American. In any case, the point was moot, for even genuinely unpatriotic antiwar sentiment would not have made the war itself turn out any less disastrously. Likewise, even if ObamaCare opponents were racist, that in itself would not make the President’s plan any better an idea.

Can Americans really look forward to another 3 ½ to 7 ½ years in which the President’s defenders see bigoted bogeymen behind all resistance to his policies? If so, we can probably expect the unnecessarily bitter partisan strife of the past sixteen years to worsen. The sentiments underlying Bush-hatred and Clinton-hatred can only be exacerbated by adding race into that already toxic mix. Can liberals imagine no legitimate, non-racist conservative (or libertarian) rebuttal to the change President Obama has in store for America? If not, then the President will have a hard time achieving his aim of bringing Americans back together. Roughly half the country will not take kindly to being portrayed as crazy or evil—or both.

One last issue bears mentioning. African-Americans, in my view, should be leerier of glibly playing the racism card than anyone. First of all, perhaps no other community can less afford to risk undermining its own credibility by repeatedly crying wolf. Secondly, America’s long-awaited “conversation on race” can only be poisoned by this thinly veiled indictment of so many of its intended participants. Moreover, unsubstantiated presumptions of bigotry arguably demean President Obama himself. Surely truly xenophobic opinions have no legitimate place in public discourse. If almost every iota of opposition to the President is held to be the product of white racism, then what are we to conclude? That his complexion should exempt him from virtually all criticism?

I doubt President Obama himself feels the need for such coddling—certainly not on account of his race. Nor, for that matter, does any African descendant. We are a people who suffered more than four centuries of enslavement, subjugation and persecution—and yet still produced innovators, entrepreneurs, financiers, physicians, scientists and, now, a leader of the free world. What we are not is a race of tenderfeet.

Of Persians and People Power

2009-06-26T19:38:00.001-04:00

In politics as in so much else, talk is cheap; it is deeds that have coinage. This has been one of my key criticisms of US President Barack Obama since the spring of 2008, when the luster of his political ascendancy began to fade in my eyes as his gaseous campaign rhetoric burrowed deeper and deeper under my skin. I looked askance as his handlers and speechwriters set him up in one vainglorious set-piece after another—promising to “heal the planet” and “slow the rise of the oceans” after the last Democratic primary, speaking in front of a row of ridiculous Roman columns at the Democratic National Convention, and so on. Windy rhetoric in politics has never sat well with me, no matter how young, intelligent or charismatic the politician.

Even less am I impressed by the idea that oratory alone can move mountains; hence the skepticism with which I greeted Obama’s “race speech” in Philadelphia last year and his speech at Cairo University earlier this month. America’s perpetual “conversation on race” has not made any readily obvious progress since March 2008; and as for the claim that Obama’s address to the Muslim world has won over many hearts and minds throughout the umma, well, seeing is believing.

On the whole, eloquent oratory that is untethered to any concrete, effective action is worse than useless in my book. Highfalutin words are best backed up with meaningful deeds; when nothing meaningful can be done, silence—or careful circumspection, at any rate—is golden.

This is why I look with contempt at the flak President Obama is now taking from the Right over his refusal to openly support the Iranian opposition in its current confrontation with the mullahs in Tehran.

Iran’s clownish and hateful President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was credited with victory in the theocracy’s recent elections by an absurd margin. (According to www.someecards.com: “The unrest in Iran makes me proud to live in a country where corrupt politicians are smart enough to keep rigged elections close.”) Ahmadinejad’s chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, promptly demanded a revote while his supporters took to the streets of Tehran in multitudes, objecting to this naked affront to the will of the Iranian people. The country has been roiled with protest ever since, prompting widespread speculation about the potential consequences for the regime’s longevity—not to mention the more, shall we say, controversial elements of Iran’s foreign policy, namely its nascent nuclear program and its support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

President Obama has so far taken the wisest of all available tacks with regard to Iran. He has expressed his skepticism about the election results and his disapproval of the Iranian regime’s thuggish crackdown on dissidents. Yet he has been careful not to go too far in denouncing the regime or in endorsing Mousavi or his supporters—a smart strategy on both counts. The mullahs and their flunkies, after all, are still armed to the teeth, and can brutally crush this largely unarmed uprising at any time, Tiananmen-style. Mousavi, for his part, has not called for an end to the regime’s nuclear ambitions, to its sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah or to its enmity with Israel. It remains unclear whether his supporters seek to overthrow the Shi’ite theocracy altogether or merely to replace one mullah-approved marionette with another. This is not the kind of horse on which Obama would be wise to bet.

The last negotiating partner the US needs is an Iranian regime flush from the victory of flattening an internal insurrection—and incensed at the President’s endorsement of that revolt to boot. In such a scenario, Obama could no longer expect to get the mullahs to beat their uranium centrifuges into ploughshares—and forget about convincing them to rein in Israel’s terrorist tormentors. With the odds already stacked against that success even in the absence of the current strife, President Obama is in no mood for his plans to be disrupted by the events in Tehran.

Nonetheless, a growing chorus of mostly conservative critics has been braying for President Obama to bless the Iranian protestors with just a touch of his oratorical magic, in the name of democracy. It would be foolhardy for him to take their advice, for the United States has no leverage over Iran at present. Armed intervention is out of the question with American troops still bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Economic sanctions would only supplement the largely ineffectual ones already in place, and it is ordinary Iranians who would probably feel the pinch. A US-sponsored coup d’état is no option; the country’s Islamist theocrats are eager enough to blame the unrest on Yankee interference as it is. In any case, the US and Iran have already gone down that road once before, in 1953—with miserable results for everyone involved.

Given the limited options available, why pillory the president for exercising caution? How can the same conservatives who, like me, were happy to deride Barack Obama’s treacly cant not so long ago demand even emptier rhetoric from him now? Why vociferously denounce the mullahs’ skullduggery when the US can do nothing to back it up? Of what use would such inspiring words be without commensurate deeds?

In August 2008, President Bush’s strong objections did not stop Russia from manhandling tiny Georgia. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush’s public musings that the Iraqi people should overthrow Saddam Hussein led to a bloodbath, when the Kurds and Shi’ites proved too weak to finish off Saddam and the US refused to help them get the job done. In 1989, the world watched helplessly as China’s Deng Xiaoping bloodily shattered the Tiananmen Square protestors’ dreams of democracy in a country that called itself a “People’s Republic”. Poland in 1981, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, East Germany in 1953: on goes the long, tragic list of popular uprisings that failed because tyrannical regimes had the muscle to suppress them and the will to use it—and because the US had no way of stopping them.

Displays of “people power” such as the current one in Tehran never fail to thrill and inspire; but their chances of success depend on how well organized and well armed—and how ruthless—both the people and their rulers are. If the latter are mightier, and neither the US nor any other outside benefactor is in a position to step in to level the playing field, the rulers will likely win out, at least in the short term. The Iron Curtain was rent in 1989 primarily because Mikhail Gorbachev refused to use Soviet might to prop up the Eastern European Communist regimes any longer. South African apartheid began to crumble the following year because the regime eventually wilted under the international community’s ostracism. These rulers caved partly because they lacked the bloody-mindedness it took to keep locking up or gunning down their opponents.

Only time will tell whether the mullahs will similarly lose their nerve. If not, then they will probably win this confrontation. It would be treacherous for President Obama to egg the protesters on if he cannot have their back if and when the crackdown begins in earnest. Fortunately, whatever his shortcomings, Barack Obama is not the treacherous type.

Comfort and Dependency

2009-06-26T19:34:00.001-04:00

I will never forget the surprise and disappointment I felt as a child when I first discovered that the word used to describe opponents of Quebec sovereignty was “federalist”. Even at the tender age of ten, I was dismayed that as Canada teetered on the brink of dissolution, this dry, wishy-washy term was the best its principal defenders could do. “Federalist”? Nothing more stirring, such as perhaps “loyalist”? Not even merely “unionist”? “Federalist”?

What poor ammunition this made for the NO forces in the near-death experience that was the 1995 referendum! Against the YES campaign’s appeals to Quebecers’ fierce pride in their identity and heritage, against the onslaught of Lucien Bouchard’s embittered yet seductive demagoguery, against stirring separatist slogans like “solidarity” and “independence”, Canadian unity revolved around a bloodless geopolitical abstraction like “federalism”. What kind of cause was that, I asked myself. Where was the passion there? Where was the pride? Where was the patriotism?

I eventually learned with great chagrin the reason for this flaccid anti-separatism: that Canadian patriotism per se is lost on most francophone Quebecers. Several years ago, pollster Maurice Pinard found that only about 12% of Quebec francophones self-identify as “Canadians”. Approximately 30% identify as French Canadians specifically; more than half of the rest call themselves “Québécois” and nothing else. This rings a bell; my Québécois acquaintances’ attitudes towards Canada generally range from shrugging indifference to outright hostility. Whatever patriotic fervor they feel is reserved strictly for Quebec. I cannot but agree with journalist Richard Gwyn that culturally and emotionally, most of Quebec effectively separated from Canada long ago.

Hence the age-old federalist focus on Canada’s capacity to accommodate Quebec’s autonomy, while noting that one can be both a proud Quebecer and a proud Canadian. Since so little passion for Canada beats in the average Québécois breast, the federalist case of the past three decades has also included a less high-minded dimension. I refer to the essentially mercenary argument against sovereignty—that it would endanger Quebecers’ access to unemployment insurance, family allowances, old-age pensions and all the other strands of Canada’s bounteous social safety net. “You may not love Canada exactly,” the federalists tell Quebecers, “but you know where your bread is buttered.”

Sovereignists have spent three decades bemoaning the effectiveness of this cynical federalist pitch. Denys Arcand’s 1981 cinematic polemic Comfort and Indifference, for instance, blamed Quebecers’ bourgeois comforts for their reluctance to fly the Canadian coop. I used to dismiss this lament as so many sour grapes from separatist sore losers. Arcand’s footage of interviews with ordinary Quebecers during the 1980 referendum campaign made me think twice. A former Radio-Canada employee asked PQ minister Claude Morin what would happen to 5,000 CBC jobs in Quebec. A taxi driver worried that the price of gasoline might double after a Yes vote. A group of retirees fretted over the fate of their old-age pensions, and a middle-aged homemaker wondered whether the loonie’s value might plummet. “Do you bite the hand that feeds you?” asked an elderly film librarian. All of this reminded me of the dire predictions I heard as a child during the 1995 referendum campaign—e.g. then-Finance Minister Paul Martin’s warning that separation would jeopardize up to a million Quebec jobs.

Though they helped avert the separatist threat, these fears troubled me deeply. These fine folks did not resist the Péquistes’ blandishments out of love for Canada; they were simply afraid that their province could not hack it on its own. Was there no way to keep Quebec in Canada without exploiting its dependence on the Canadian social-welfare crutch? Was Canada worth preserving if the task required such Machiavellian tactics?

This cold-blooded realpolitik has elicited justifiable accusations of fearmongering from sovereignists for decades. Yet the separatists deserve little sympathy, for they have brought this on themselves. They have wrapped Quebecers in the embrace of a welfare state so generous that Quebec could never finance it alone without raising its already onerous tax burden—even now the heaviest in North America. This leaves Quebec City heavily dependent on equalization payments from Toronto, Edmonton and Victoria, relayed by the very Ottawa the separatists so despise. Small wonder, then, that Quebecers have twice balked at the sovereignist offer. Indeed, they know where their bread is buttered—with a maple leaf-engraved knife.

Given its strident insistence that Quebec can handle its own business, the Parti Québécois’ history of relying on Canada’s largesse to shower Quebecers with social programs is downright hypocritical. The Péquistes actually have more reason than anyone to try to wean Quebec off of its dependence on Ottawa’s fiscal charity. Quebec would likely suffer a punishing fiscal crisis in the aftermath of secession due to the loss of transfer payments from Ottawa—one of the main fears impeding Quebecers from taking the sovereignist plunge. To rectify this, the Péquistes must either persuade Quebecers of the need to be less dependent on government to prop them up (what a tall order!), or prepare Quebecers for the even higher taxes the province would need to finance its lavish nanny state by itself.

Otherwise put, the sovereignists have a vested interest in nudging Quebecers towards greater self-reliance, either individual or collective. Either course would require great sacrifice on Quebecers’ part; but to reject both would perpetuate their fear of striking out on their own. Many Quebecers find sovereignty appealing, in the abstract at least. They have yet to seize it because too few of them prize independence highly enough to be willing to pay a price for it. To break that logjam, the sovereignists will have to tackle the very culture of entitlement they have nurtured in this province for generations—the mentality that holds that Canada owes Quebec a living.

When the Péquistes eventually return to power, with or without the “winning conditions” for another referendum, they will be wise to begin building the substance of true independence—the willingness and ability to provide for oneself—if only to prepare Quebec for eventually acquiring its trappings.

In Comfort and Indifference, a succession of YES voters lamented the trepidation that led almost six of every ten Quebecers to reject sovereignty in 1980. A voluble carpenter from Daveluyville diagnosed the malady thus: “You want to know who screwed us? We were screwed by Quebecers—by people who don’t take their responsibilities!” Another artisan from Saint-Jérusalem lamented Quebecers’ bourgeois insecurities: “When the time comes for us to stand up and be counted, the first thing people say is, ‘What’ll it cost us? It’s too expensive!’” Retired boxer Réginald Chartrand, after soundly thrashing his federalist opponent in an exposition bout, proclaimed, “I wanted to show Quebecers that they must take risks. Nothing has ever been given to us for free.” He went on to say, “The only path in life is the difficult path. The easy path is for imbeciles. We Quebecers don’t have the right to choose the easy path, sitting in our slippers, waiting…”

If only the Parti Québécois were as hardy as these fearless militants!

Ain’t No Respect in the Heart of the Campus

2009-05-06T17:08:00.001-04:00

As a recent graduate of Princeton University, I am occasionally treated to e-mail messages from Princeton Pause, which styles itself as “a monthly e-greeting that brings Princeton closer to Princetonians everywhere”. In short, the university tries to avoid becoming too distant a memory in the minds of its departed students, partly in the hope of eliciting generous alumni donations to its Annual Giving program. The latest such Valentine I received featured a short video clip of a speech by the estimable Anthony Grafton—a former History professor of mine—on “what makes Princeton unique”.

This question has crossed my mind often of late. On the whole, I enjoyed my time at Old Nassau, and will forever cherish the memories and hopefully lifelong friends I made there. In just the past several weeks, I have been pleasantly reminded of the key role my Princeton experience has played in my personal development by sporadic visits to campus, encounters with former classmates and attendance at various alumni gatherings. Yet not until I recently learned of a despicable episode at the University of Massachusetts did I begin to approach answering the question of what makes Princeton unique.

The episode in question concerns the appearance of conservative columnist Don Feder on UMass’ Amherst campus on March 11th of this year. Feder opposes hate crimes laws as a criminalization not only of acts but of thoughts and beliefs—“hate” being a state of mind rather than a form of conduct, or so the argument goes. This viewpoint predictably incurred the wrath of most of UMass Amherst’s student body. The result was that Feder’s speech, which was sponsored by UMass’ Republican Club, was systematically disrupted and derailed by a swarm of left-wing student protestors. As shown in a video posted on YouTube by a group of the protestors themselves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJPmv1vTbjc), the students hissed and booed Feder. Some noisily reversed their chairs to turn their backs to him. One student loudly interrupted his speech with a statement about one victim of an allegedly racist and homophobic hate crime. The harassment mounted to a fever pitch, until Feder finally gave up protesting this unseemly treatment and left the podium.

The case against this disgrace is obvious—and virtually unassailable. Whatever Feder’s detractors might think of his views, it is beyond dispute that he had a right to express them without intimidation or disruption. Feder’s speech was to be followed with a question-and-answer session in which his student opponents could have critiqued his position as extensively as they liked. They denied themselves that opportunity, however, by effectively running him off the stage. “This is free speech,” cried one young woman in defense of the students’ shenanigans. It seems not to have occurred to her that Feder’s speech deserved to be as “free” as hers and her schoolmates’.

Are there any circumstances under which the protestors’ actions may have been justified? The only such case I can imagine would be if Feder had engaged in what the US Supreme Court’s free speech jurisprudence has described as “fighting words”: speech that deliberately incites violence or other forms of criminal conduct. Had Feder taken the stage to advocate acts that would have qualified as hate crimes, that would have been a different story. Yet he did no such thing, merely arguing that violent crimes committed for bigoted reasons should be punished in exactly the same way as all other violent crimes. There may be a mountain of sound, rational arguments to make against this thesis. Not one of them was heard at UMass two months ago.

This, unfortunately, was not an isolated incident. Such nonsense has become more and more common on college campuses across the US in recent years, as political polarization of the American electorate has set in and the American academy has drifted further and further leftward. On at least two occasions in the past several years, African-American advocate Ward Connerly met a similar fate when he took his campaign against affirmative action to the University of Michigan campus. This unseemly behavior, of course, cuts both ways on the ideological spectrum. I still remember with unease the war fever that gripped the US before and during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the widespread intolerance for the expression of opposition to the war that came with it. New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, for instance, was forced from the stage by protesters during his commencement speech at Rockford College in Illinois after criticizing the war. Conservative pundits in general were as likely to applaud as to protest such shameful conduct.

The relevance of these incidents to Princeton’s virtues is no doubt obvious by this point. I have heard of at least one case in Princeton history in which jeering protesters discombobulated an appearance by a speaker deemed controversial by much of the student body. On March 5th, 1970, during President Richard Nixon’s brief expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, almost fourscore antiwar students at an ecology conference in Jadwin Gym heckled Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel to distraction while then-University President Robert F. Goheen looked on furiously. As far as I know, however, such cases have been mercifully rare within the Orange Bubble.

In all my time on campus, I recall no such foolishness taking place. From the “Frist Filibuster” in the spring of 2005, to the running battle over abortion waged in the letters section of the Prince throughout most of 2006, I cannot remember any incident on campus in which one or more parties to a debate found themselves bullied into silence. I remember attending a presentation in the spring of 2007 at which anti-abortion advocate Dr. Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council gave a speech entitled “How Abortion Harms Women”. Sponsored in part by the Woodrow Wilson School—it was hosted in Bowl 16 of Robertson Hall—this event, as hot-button as its topic was, proved a model of civility. Dr. Yoest’s speech was followed by a Q&A session in which the students—a mostly pro-choice lot that included Sara Viola ‘08, then head of Princeton Pro-Choice Vox—subjected the speaker to rigorous scrutiny and criticism of her views. Through it all, not a sentence was cut off, not a personal attack made, not a voice raised in anger.

During my time on campus, I heard countless complaints about how politically jaded, complacent and apathetic Princetonians were, at least as compared with their counterparts at, say, Columbia. This criticism was well enough taken by me; but I hope Princeton never travels so far down the road of political activism as to become another UMass or University of Michigan.

Is it too much to ask that all students at all communities of higher learning show a similar tolerance and respect for opposing viewpoints? Am I to believe that only elite institutions like Princeton can hold their students to this same standard? Surely—hopefully—not. However, if civility and rationality in public (and especially political) discourse, and the free contention of a hundred or more schools of thought, are to remain primarily the province of America’s top-notch universities, that makes me that much more grateful to have attended one of those schools. There are many advantages to a Princeton education, most of which are obvious enough that I need not regurgitate them here. One that usually receives far less emphasis than it deserves, however, is that Princeton is the kind of place where neither Don Feder, nor Ward Connerly, nor any of their ilk would ever find themselves muzzled by an unruly mob—no matter how abhorrent their views might be to the bulk of the student body.

This does not make Princeton “unique” in the strictest sense of the word—ours is hardly the only university whose students behave so civilly and intelligently. Yet in these politically polarized times, Old Nassau may find itself approaching this kind of uniqueness asymptotically. And you know what? That’s good enough for me.

Star Wars Episode VII: Missile Defense

2009-04-10T10:49:00.001-04:00

So President Barack Obama has delivered yet another stirring speech to a vast crowd of European well-wishers, this time in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 5^th. This time, however, he threw his fans something of a curveball. President Obama made clear that he would not scrap the ongoing development of a nuclear missile defense shield. “As long as the threat from Iran persists,” he declared, “we will go forward with a missile-defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

At this, the raucous crowd fell largely silent. Missile defense rubs Europeans entirely the wrong way. I, however, was pleased to see the president prick his transatlantic pep squad’s bubble. The sooner Obama’s fawning foreign acolytes—and America’s overseas enemies—learn that he will not conduct a “kum-bah-yah” foreign policy, genuflecting constantly before the altar of the United Nations, the better.

That said, though I am sympathetic to missile defense in principle, I am unconvinced of its desirability in practice.

The policy as we know it originated with President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI (derisively nicknamed “Star Wars” by its detractors). The primary purpose SDI served was to flummox the Soviet Union. The Russians feared that their entire nuclear arsenal would be rendered obsolete by Reagan’s proposed anti-nuclear umbrella, while they would remain vulnerable to America’s nuclear ordnance. This realization, combined with the pain Reagan brought to the Soviets by funding anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide, helped propel Mikhail Gorbachev to the negotiating table, ultimately lowering the curtain on the Cold War.

It was this use of SDI as a geopolitical bargaining chip that Reagan Administration officials found useful. Reagan himself, however, eschewed this view. What is seldom remembered today is that Reagan personally advocated SDI not only to “psyche out” the Soviets, but also to render obsolete all nuclear stockpiles—including America’s own. To the chagrin of most of his own national security advisors, as well as certain hard-nosed foreign allies like Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Reagan had come to embrace a seemingly impossible dream, one now espoused by Barack Obama: that of a world without nuclear weapons.

Of course, a generation later, missile defense still has not achieved liftoff, as it were. Nonetheless, Reagan was on to something here. If a Star Wars-style defense shield could be perfected, and could one day be expanded to protect the whole globe, no country need ever again fear being targeted with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. The best way to dissuade countries from pursuing nuclear missile technology is to minimize its usefulness, and comprehensive missile defense, in theory at least, would do that. For this reason, the principled objections raised by opponents of missile defense—that it wrongfully alienates America’s allies, that it violates the arms-limitation treaties of the past, and so on—leave me cold.

It is the practical objections to missile defense that pack some punch. An article I read in The Economist soon after September 11^th argued that jettisoning missile defense at that juncture would be akin to scrapping one’s flood insurance if the house caught fire. This was the wrong analogy. Pragmatically speaking, pursuing missile defense is more like buying flood insurance for a house in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

What credible threat of a nuclear missile attack against the US or its allies actually exists? The old Cold War doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” remains very much a thing of the present. None of the less responsible nuclear powers—regional rogues like North Korea, hotheads like India and Pakistan or fanatics like the mullahs in Iran—dares ever launch nuclear warheads at anyone, anywhere, for they know the fate that would await them. Even a purely conventional American military response could still bring most nuclear perpetrators to heel.

This is why I scoffed at the chorus of condemnation that followed Hillary Clinton’s election campaign vow to “obliterate” Iran if it ever tried to nuke Israel. The good Senator, if you’ll forgive the expression, was simply keeping it real.

It is also why I do not quake at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. The worst the mullahs would have the chutzpah to do is use their nukes to deter any potential foreign intervention, enabling them to sponsor terrorist groups like Hezbollah with even greater impunity. Quite frankly, this would not be much worse than the status quo.

The real danger is that Iran (or North Korea, or a Pakistan taken over by Islamists) might relay nukes to terrorists who would not hesitate to use them. In such a situation, missile defense would be worse than useless. No terrorist group possesses the resources or facilities to even maintain nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, let alone deploy them. An antimissile shield would not stop terrorists from carrying nukes in suitcases or smuggling them in cargo containers. This is likely the principal nuclear menace of the 21^st century—and missile defense would be helpless in the face of it.

Even if the technology is one day perfected, then, it may not be worth the price Uncle Sam will have paid in fiscal and diplomatic capital. The policy has generated as much consternation among America’s allies as among its rivals and enemies. Given this geostrategic disruption, and given its exorbitant expense—especially in this era of industrial bailouts and bloated stimulus bills—how wise an endeavor is this?

On the whole, the technology formerly known as “Star Wars” is a noble pursuit in principle, but a misguided one in practice. It could never rid the world of all nuclear weapons, and the only nukes against which it would protect us are the ones no one would ever have the gumption to launch in the first place. President Obama would do best to heed Winston Churchill’s wise warning in his last address to the US Congress: “Be careful, above all things, not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure…that other means of preserving peace are in your hands.”

A Black "Next Great Prime Minister"?

2009-02-27T18:30:00.001-05:00

When I was asked to contribute a piece to Concordia University's student newspaper The Link on the role my African-Canadian identity played in my participation in Magna International’s The Next Great Prime Minister competition in 2006, I first remembered a passage from Norman Snider’s 1985 book The Changing of the Guard. In one passage, then Liberal Party leadership candidate Jean Chrétien was accosted by two rank-and-file Toronto Liberals—one of Portuguese roots, the other Jamaican—protesting the dismissal of their ethnic communities’ concerns by the party’s head honchos. “[Can you] sit down and assure us,” demanded the Portuguese gentleman, “that we are going to get a piece, a small piece of Canada for everybody?”

According to Mr. Snider, the problem was not the political parties’ prejudice. Leading Liberals in particular would have been delighted to welcome a Greek, Haitian or Vietnamese rising star into the highest echelons of political power. Unfortunately, the pool of ethnic volunteers for such top-tier positions was painfully small and hence largely untapped. The cultural and social cohesion of ethnic groups in Canada makes even their most qualified members reluctant to enter the political arena, lest they lose touch with their origins. “By and large,” wrote Snider, “multiculturalism meant that Canada’s ethnic communities…huddled in on themselves. To date, their bright young men and women had not taken the path out of the neighborhoods and into the corridors of power. […] After all, such a path successfully negotiated would take a man far from his roots, and few seemed willing to attempt it.” This, it seems, is as true today as it was in 1984.

In August 2005, when I first heard of The Next Great Prime Minister from a friend of my mother’s, I jumped at the chance to submit and defend my own proposals for political reform in the marketplace of ideas. I advocated striking down trade barriers between the provinces and reforming our system of government to elect the Prime Minister separately from Parliament. Good ideas, or so I thought at the time; but they had nothing to do with the peculiar concerns of the Black community. Why?

Years of avid reading had taught me how rarely Canada’s political establishment tackles issues of specific concern to ethnic communities. Earlier in The Changing of the Guard, Mr. Snider noted the paternalistic stance the Liberal Party in particular took towards minority groups—“helping them with immigration matters, giving them grants to maintain their distinctive cultures” and so on. Yet beyond this old time religion, little real political clout accrued to ethnic Canadians from their Liberal loyalties. On those rare occasions when political heavy hitters do address minority concerns, they usually do so superficially and clumsily at best. In one of The Next Great Prime Minister’s preliminary rounds, I was asked what needed to be done to stop the wave of killings plaguing Toronto’s black neighborhoods. As a young black man, surely I would instinctively grasp what drives this fratricidal mayhem, right?

Well, actually, wrong. At the time, anyone’s guess was as good as mine. Yet my questioners seemed to assume that as the sole Black finalist—and quite possibly the sole Black contestant—in the competition, I must be their “go-to guy”, their resident expert on all things pertaining to blackness. I will probably never know whether any of my fairer-hued competitors were asked that question.

It bears notice that beyond Toronto’s murder rate, ethnic issues played no role in the debates around which the competition revolved once I advanced to the final round in January 2006. We focused, rather, on matters such as the health care system, the war in Afghanistan, and Iran’s nuclear program. In truth, that was just the way I liked it. I’m not sure that politicians should be focusing their attention on dealing with specific ethnic grievances. In my view, their energies—and our tax dollars—are generally better spent addressing issues that concern all Canadians, regardless of cultural origin.

Since participating in The Next Great Prime Minister, my congratulators have often gushed that I could be the first Black Prime Minister of Canada. I don’t doubt this possibility, and I refuse to rule it out. Yet I believe that the various branches of the African Diaspora have placed too much emphasis on politics as a means of achieving social equality. Historically, the minority groups that made the fastest rise from poverty and persecution to prosperity and power were those who embraced education and built up their own business and professional classes, as well as those who maintained strong, stable families. Those who prefer to dispatch swarms of politicians to the citadels of government in order to dole out fiscal goodies to their communities, while ignoring aberrant rates of school dropouts and absentee fatherhood and a dearth of entrepreneurial ambition, are doomed to be left behind. Without tackling those problems, even electing a million Marlene Jenningses or Yolande Jameses—or Barack Obamas, for that matter—will never bring us to Dr. King’s proverbial Promised Land.

Race & the Republicans

2009-01-02T16:52:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine posted an interesting (if not terribly original) New York times editorial by Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman on Facebook recently:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02krugman.html?ex=1388638800&en=f88eb7c84f5e06c5&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

As usual, Mr. Krugman is on to something here--just not as much as he thinks. The race-related issue he didn't address was how true racial equality is achievable when so many blacks and other minorities remain so dependent on government charity. While the good professor, like most liberals, doesn't aim to keep Americans dependent on government for its own sake, reducing that dependency is not a priority for him.

Republicans should make building a maximally self-reliant citizenry part of the centerpiece of their future outreach to nonwhite demographic groups, particularly African-Americans. This may or may not work politically, but it's an infinitely more intellectually and morally respectable position than the politics of racial resentment the GOP has admittedly played since the Nixon years.

As for conservative economics being discredited by the financial crisis, Krugman disregards the massive role government intervention played in creating the crisis. Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac were government-sponsored enterprises, remember? But that's a comment for another day...

Rotten Onion

2008-12-08T15:35:00.002-05:00

I'm a huuuuuuuuuuuge fan of The Onion, though I have a way of forgetting to check it more than once every, oh say, three weeks or so. And I'm not the only one who has that problem.

Strange.

Still, I love the website. I especially admire their way of poking fun at politicians and ideologues on both left and right, Democrat and Republican alike. In addition, their satire usually tends to be of a relatively ideologically neutral bent, which I appreciate. However, I just stumbled upon an Onion article poking fun at President Bush that reads more like a typical DailyKos screed than a genuine piece of comedy. Check it out at http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_really_gonna_miss

Which is not to say that I disagree with the piece, necessarily. But does anyone else find this article starkly political in tone, rather than comedic? I don't think couching a political attack in sarcastic tones automatically makes it funny...even if it is true! This strikes me as somewhat out-of-character for The Onion...what say you?

Canadian Politics X

2008-12-03T18:48:00.002-05:00

Five years ago, when I first returned home to Canada from college in the United States to enjoy the Christmas holidays, I learned to my great surprise that former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin had taken over from his predecessor Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister of Canada a month previously. About two months later, when I returned home during our week-long holiday between semesters, I learned of the breaking of the infamous “sponsorship scandal”, in which—in a nutshell—hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars were wasted on a campaign to boost the federal government’s visibility and popularity in the province of Quebec. It was then that I realized just how much I had allowed my awareness of recent developments in Canadian politics to lapse during my studies at Princeton. I remember thinking to myself, “Damn—just as I leave to go to school in the States, Canadian politics decide to get interesting for a change!”

Now, having recently graduated from university and returned home for the foreseeable future, I no longer feel I am missing out on the action.

The aforementioned corruption scandal depleted the Liberal Party’s political capital to the point where it eventually lost power, in January 2006, to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, which won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons—meaning more seats than any other single party—but not an absolute majority of seats. As a result, Prime Minister Harper has since then headed a “minority government”, in which his party composes the entire executive branch—the Prime Minister and his Cabinet—but is outnumbered in Parliament by the opposition parties, who have always had the power to unite at any time to defeat a piece of the government’s legislation. Under Canada’s British-inspired parliamentary system, this scenario demonstrates that the government has lost the “confidence” of Parliament, in which case the party in power must seek a new mandate from voters via a new election. Seeking to prevent such a turn of events, Harper called a snap election in early September 2008, hoping to win a majority of seats in the House that would ensure his ability to govern without legislative obstruction for another four or five years. Unfortunately, though Harper’s Tories did increase their seat total from 127 seats to 143, they fell short of the 155 seats needed to form a majority of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. Result: yet another minority government, with all the instability and uncertainty that comes with it.

This is where the situation becomes still more interesting. The Canadian political system boasts a so-called “first-past-the-post” system, in which candidates in each electoral district (or “riding” in Canadian parlance) need only win a plurality of popular votes within that district in order to win its seat in Parliament. Moreover, the party that wins the greatest number of seats in Parliament—whether this is an absolute majority of seats or a mere plurality—gets to form the government, composing the entire executive branch and generally driving the government’s agenda. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, most governing parties in Canada, even when they do win a majority of seats in the House of Commons (which is usually the case), usually fail to win a majority of the popular vote. In other words, political power at the national level is almost always monopolized by a party that commands the support of a minority of Canadian voters.

Yet Canada also possesses a badly balkanized body politic, featuring not only the Liberal and Conservative parties but also the socialist New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois (whose goal is the secession of the mostly French-speaking province of Quebec, and which therefore fields candidates only in that province). Each of these peripheral parties commands too little popular support nationwide to ever win enough seats to form the government by itself. However, each party still siphons just enough popular support away from the Liberals and Conservatives to make it extremely difficult for either of those primary parties to ever win an absolute majority of Canada’s popular vote. Moreover, in the country’s current political climate, it appears fiendishly difficult for any one party to even win so much as a majority of parliamentary seats. Canadians, you see, are generally a left-leaning lot, and hence remain wary of giving the Conservatives a majority government. Yet they continue to distrust the corrupt Liberals, whose arrogant sense of entitlement to political power has been legendary for decades, stemming from their having governed Canada for two out of every three years in the twentieth century.

Thanks to this twisted state of affairs, it remains unclear when Canada will see another stable, durable majority government. This poses a problem, for although whichever party wins the most seats in Parliament—even short of a majority—is supposed to form the government, that party will still lack the support of a majority of Canadian voters. In addition, the current Conservative minority government is outnumbered by the Opposition parties, who between them possess a majority of seats in the House and command the support of a majority of voters. Therefore, should those Opposition parties unite in a solid coalition, acting as a single political party, they will then posses a majority of seats in Parliament—and thus will have the right to force the Conservative minority government from power and form their own government.

This, of course, is precisely what took place earlier this week, for the very first time in Canadian history. The leaders of the Opposition Liberal and New Democratic parties and the Bloc Québécois shocked the nation several days ago by announcing their plans to force a vote of no confidence on December 8th to turf the Harper Conservatives from power. These opposition parties have already signed a written agreement to then take power as a unified coalition government. This flies in the face of precedent, for successful no-confidence votes in the House of Commons—which only afflict minority governments—usually result in the dissolution of Parliament and calling of a new election. This time, however, Canada’s Governor-General (who acts as the representative of the Queen of England and thus as the official head of state in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) would be well within her rights to approve the Opposition parties’ request to unseat the ruling Conservatives and form their own government—because that coalition would indeed possess a majority of parliamentary seats.

The Opposition parties’ rationale for staging this daring political power play is twofold. First, Prime Minister Harper, after sounding a conciliatory tone in his victory speech after last October’s election, violated the trust of the Opposition parties by announcing his intention to cut off public funding for election campaigns, thereby threatening to effectively bankrupt his political opponents. Second, Harper has thus far adopted a sort of “wait-and-see” approach to dealing with the ongoing global financial crisis, while the Opposition parties clamor for the passage of a massive stimulus package to boost Canada’s sputtering economy. By snatching the reins of power from Harper’s Tories, Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion claims, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition can act to save the country from a grinding recession.

In reality, however, the Opposition’s case is irrelevant to the central issue around which the current political crisis revolves: the issue of democratic legitimacy. It has been decades since Canada has been governed by a single party that commanded the support of a solid majority of Canadian voters. Now a coalition of parties threatens to take power without having been elected to the position at all. It is disingenuous to argue that they derive legitimacy from their winning a majority of popular votes between them. In this fall’s election, the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes did not campaign as a coalition; rather, each party campaigned strictly on its own behalf, as in all elections past. Otherwise put, those Canadians who cast their vote for the Liberals, for example, did so in the hope and expectation that only that party would form the government; the same goes for those who voted for the NDP or the Bloc Québécois. Not a single Canadian voted to elect a Liberal-NDP-BQ coalition to power, for Canadians were never even given that option.

For all the democratic shortcomings of the Conservatives’ majority-lacking government, at least that party won more popular votes and parliamentary seats than any other. To bring to power a coalition for which not a single person in all of Canada voted, without requiring that coalition to seek a true mandate from the Canadian people, would be to effectively hijack the ship of state. As Winnipegger Reenan Keam told a CTV journalist the other day: “They don’t care what we said. We voted for a Prime Minister, and they’re saying, ‘You know what? That doesn’t matter—we don’t like him’…Then why did we have an election?”

Yet at the moment, the aforementioned hijacking remains a distinct possibility. Canada’s current Governor-General, Michaelle Jean, has cut short a trip overseas to return home to deal with this crisis, yet she has yet to signal publicly how she plans to do so; indeed, she may have yet to even make that decision. Her options at present appear to be threefold. First, and most obviously, she can grant the Opposition’s request and allow them to take power in the wake of next week’s no-confidence vote. Second, she can grant Prime Minister Harper’s likely request and “prorogue” Parliament—in other words, shut the whole circus down temporarily and reopen it next January, whereupon the Conservatives will submit a new annual budget for Parliament’s review. Third, she can react to the looming no-confidence vote in the traditional way—by dissolving Parliament and calling a new election.

The first measure, as already argued above, would be a sort of legalized, bloodless coup d’état. The second would likely only delay the inevitable, since the Opposition coalition, should it survive into the winter, could always topple Harper’s government then. If Harper can effectively use the intervening time to convince a majority of Canadians (many of whom already seem miffed at the Opposition’s shenanigans) of the wrongness of such a move, he might be able to intimidate his opponents into abandoning their planned power grab, on the grounds that Canadians would eventually punish them for it at the polls later on. Yet it is entirely possible that the Opposition parties would simply call Harper’s bluff, betting that they could ride out any storm of public disapproval that ensued, until ordinary Canadians simply turned their attention elsewhere, leaving the coalition government intact. This would not be an unreasonable calculation on their part.

The third measure is, in my view, the only one that would be both feasible and just. I am no more enthused than anyone else at the prospect of facing yet another election campaign, especially so soon after the last, useless, one. Yet if obeying the democratic will of the Canadian people is at all a priority in this situation, then that will must first be ascertained. There is at present no way to be certain how much popular support there is for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Québécois coalition government, for no such scenario was ever presented to Canadian voters as an option in the last election campaign; indeed, numerous Opposition partisans denied its very possibility at the time. If the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes truly crave a government with democratic legitimacy as they claim, then they should not be averse to making their case directly to the people, this time campaigning for power as a coalition. As Winnipegger John Malek told CTV News recently: “I’d rather vote than be told, ‘Okay, I’m your leader now.’”

Should the Opposition coalition then collectively win a majority of seats under that aegis, let them by all means rise to run the show in Ottawa. To pretend, however, that they currently have a mandate to do so is ludicrous. It may be that every Canadian who voted Liberal, NDP or Bloc on October 14th would vote for a coalition of those parties in a new election; but that is a possibility, not a certainty. I, for one, strongly suspect that more than a few Canadians who balked at casting their vote for Harper’s Conservatives last time around would equally balk at voting for a coalition that includes Quebec separatists, whose goal it is to take Canada’s second-largest province out of Confederation forever.

Ultimately, if a duly elected minority government can be toppled so abruptly by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, without an election, on the grounds that the governing party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, then clearly minority governments, by their very nature, are so devoid of democratic legitimacy that they should not even be allowed to take office in the first place. Perhaps we could mandate that in the event of an election in which no political party wins a popular or parliamentary majority, there ought to be a second round of voting in which Canadians return to the polls to rectify the situation. In the event that another minority government ensues, the Opposition would be forbidden by law to carry out a vote of no confidence against the governing party, at least for a certain minimum time period. They would be allowed to vote however they like on individual bills, to be sure, and to defeat government bills if need be; but no such defeat could legally cause the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new election, or the replacement of the government by an Opposition coalition, until a certain amount of time—perhaps 12 to 18 months, perhaps more—had elapsed.

The only alternative I can see to such a reform would be to institute a system of proportional representation in Canada from the get-go, along with the virtual guarantee of perpetual coalition governments that would come with it. Either measure would be preferable to a system in which an Opposition junta can seize power without the people’s consent.

As far as democratic legitimacy is concerned, there is an even deeper and more significant lesson to be learned from the current conundrum. The issue that underpins this crisis is the parliamentary “confidence” convention. As mentioned earlier, a governing party that fails to pass a key piece of legislation through Parliament is said to have lost the “confidence” of the legislature, and must therefore face a new election campaign. (Other than the annual budget, exactly what constitutes “key” legislation is pretty much left to the Prime Minister to decide.) This particular tradition is meant to enable Parliament to check the power of the executive branch of government. Closer scrutiny, however, exposes it as a poorly-thought-out paradigm that throughout Canadian history has actually had the opposite effect.

To be precise, the confidence convention inadvertently concentrates more power in the hands of the Prime Minister. When the latter knows that the failure to get his bills passed could result in his losing power, he is driven to bend all his energies toward the goal of ramming legislation through the House of Commons at any cost. In recent decades, this has led PM after PM to ensure the support of his own parliamentary caucus by threatening his MPs with expulsion from the party if they fail to toe the official party line. In other words, the executive branch is normally able to effectively dictate policy to the legislature—the exact opposite of the confidence convention’s original intent.

The exception is in the case of a minority government, in which the Opposition parties actually outnumber the governing party’s caucus in the House of Commons. This arrangement makes it much harder for the Prime Minister to bully Parliament; yet it also engenders its own set of problems. As we now know, it enables the Opposition parties to join forces and effectively usurp political power on the misleading grounds that it is they who command the support of a majority of Canadians. This scenario, always a theoretical possibility, has never before occurred because (a) the Liberals governed through most of Canada’s history, usually with a majority, and (b) Canada used to have a three-party system in which the Opposition—usually composed of right-leaning Conservatives and socialist New Democrats—was too ideologically polarized to ever unite to unseat the governing party, even a minority one. On those relatively rare occasions when the Conservatives ran things, the Liberals could usually expect to return to power before very long, and so felt no need to join forces with the NDP to overthrow the Conservatives. Nowadays, with five parties in Parliament—each attracting too little popular support to ensure itself a durable majority—and with an economic crisis providing the Opposition with a convenient casus belli, it’s a different story.

The “confidence” paradigm, then, is fatally flawed in all circumstances. It allows the Prime Minister of a majority government to ruthlessly crush dissent within his own party in order to be able to govern without constantly looking over his shoulder, fearing his caucus may stab him in the back. In times of minority government, it engenders instability and confusion; in extreme cases like this, it can even enable the Opposition parties to conspire to depose the duly elected government of the day, regardless of the democratic will of the people. Ladies and gentlemen, in the real world, this is no way to run a government.

Yet even if the confidence convention actually defeats its own purpose in practice, is it justified in principle at least? I, for one, think not. Exactly what is meant by “the confidence of Parliament” anyway? No legislature in any true democracy is a monolith; in every responsible government, Parliament is composed of at least two separate parties with opposing viewpoints on most issues. Does “confidence” then mean that the governing party cannot function without the approval of every party in Parliament? Obviously not; the minority parties are not called “the Opposition” for nothing. If anything, it is their job to be thorns in the government’s side. How silly it would be for the governing party to have to seek a new mandate from the people on the grounds that it could not convince the opposition parties to endorse its agenda!

Surely, then, maintaining the “confidence” of Parliament does not mean maintaining the confidence of the Opposition—unless “confidence” means merely a faith in the government’s basic managerial competence, rather than an agreement with all of their policy objectives. This, however, is a dubious stipulation at best; in Canadian politics, all opposition parties routinely accuse the government of rank incompetence, among other mortal failings. If “confidence” means “the assent of the governing party”, or even merely “the governing party’s faith in the executive’s administrative competence,” it is largely redundant at best. It is a bizarre political party indeed that willingly follows leaders who do not know how to run a government. And if a party’s leadership is revealed to be so incompetent, then that leadership needs to be sent packing by its own party’s rank and file—not toppled by Parliament in a no-confidence vote. (For more information, see Margaret Thatcher, circa 1990.)

The hell of it is that the very inventors of Westminster-style responsible government have moved on from reliance on the “confidence” principle, in practice if not necessarily in theory. The Brits clearly no longer believe that the defeat of a single government bill, or even several of them, necessarily means that the government has lost the confidence of Parliament and must therefore fall. As a matter of fact, every single British government since the 1970s has seen one or more of its bills slapped down by the House of Commons and survived. And quite frankly, why should they not have?

These British governments—both Labour and Conservative, both majority and minority—survived in part because Parliament recognized that occasional legislative defeats need not force a government to seek a renewal of its entire mandate. It simply does not logically follow that because Parliament rejects one or more particular bills sponsored by the executive branch, the people must therefore no longer trust the Prime Minister and Cabinet to govern competently or honorably. There is no reason why Parliament cannot reject a minority of the government’s bills while still approving most of them and maintaining the aggregate integrity of the government during the term to which it was, after all, democratically elected by the people.

Nor is there any reason why Canada’s Parliament could not do likewise. Yet even if Canada’s teeming political classes ever are truly awakened to the secret absurdity at the heart of responsible government, the chances of their acting on this enlightenment by relaxing their rigid adherence to the principle of parliamentary confidence are slim. First, clinging to the confidence convention gives impatient and domineering politicians in the executive branch of government the pretext they need to bully Parliament into doing their bidding. Second, equally cynical opposition politicians are only too happy to use any defeat of government legislation as a pretext to fell their opponents in a vote of no confidence. In short, the entire edifice of Canadian political power is built on a disingenuous foundation in whose perpetuation too many politicians have a vested interest. The unlikelihood of our ever seeing that foundation shattered in our lifetimes is all the more tragic because the shattering would be so relatively easy and painless.

A New Take on Homer

2008-11-28T21:31:00.003-05:00

I just read a fascinating essay on the moral and ethical implications of the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer. You can read it at http://www.artsandopinion.com/2008_v7_n5/stevekowit.htm.

In a nutshell, the author expresses his dismay and disgust at modern interpretations of literary masterpieces from Antiquity such as the Iliad and the Odyssey that completely overlook the fact that many of the protagonists' exploits are morally reprehensible, at least by today's standards. Here, by way of example, is the paragraph I found most striking (if flawed):

Imagine this: four hundred years from now some inspired bard pens a masterful epic poem concerning the exemplary adventures of that great warrior-king, Adolf the Bold, a leader who, in courage, physical beauty and steadfastness of purpose is almost godlike. For several lines the poet describes, in loving detail, how Adolf's army of stalwart heroes triumphantly throw their malignant enemies -- the Semitic, Roma and crippled captives -- into the ovens by the tens of thousands. It is, however, only a quickly passing episode. In the main, Adolf, Sacker of Cities, is kindly if wily, compassionate if remorseless, and altogether steadfast of purpose. Should enchanted readers simply delight in the splendid hexameters, the bard's wonderful psychological portraits and vividly dramatic episodes and not concern themselves with the fate of those unnamed background characters who are simply part of the heroic pageantry of The Hitleriad?
I'm honestly interested in hearing others' thoughts on whether it is even worth bothering to pass the kind of moral judgments on ancient Greek society that Mr. Kowit urges. It is doubtless that Homer reflected the mores of the society and the era in which he lived--a time and place in which the sexual enslavement of women captured in war, as well as general plunder and pillage of enemy territory, etc., were par for the course. Mr. Kowit leaves this issue insufficiently examined. Moreover, his juxtaposition of Hitler and the Holocaust with the barbarism in Homer's epics is flawed, for part of the reason Hitler's atrocities were judged to be crimes against humanity in the court of global public opinion is that such acts had come to be perceived as heinous by most civilized societies at that point. This distinguishes the Nazis' savagery from the acts of Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus et. al., who were simply doing what warriors of their age generally did.

Yet to completely whitewash the perfidy of such practices on these grounds smacks of just the kind of relativism I have always deplored.

In the same way that certain practices that prevail in certain cultures are intrinsically reprehensible, no matter what that culture's unique perspective (the ancient Hindu custom of suttee, for instance, or the more modern practice of female genital mutilation), so certain practices are intrinsically despicable, regardless of the dominant mores of the era in which they prevailed. For example, slavery is inherently evil, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Therefore, it must have been every bit as evil several centuries or even millennia ago, when its practice was still widespread around the world, as it is today. Accordingly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are no longer given a "pass" for their ownership of slaves, despite their other towering contributions to human history and the general cause of liberty. So should a great historical poet like Homer be given a pass for the rapacity and bloodlust he glorified in his epics? More significantly (since I doubt Mr. Kowit's essay has Homer spinning in his grave exactly), should current literary and historical appraisals of Homer's works--especially those taught in academia--include an appreciation of the brutality he extolled?

Adventures in Absurdity, Pt. I

2008-11-21T22:20:00.003-05:00

I recently came up with the idea to post a comment here every time I come across an example of silly rhetoric in my perusals of political punditry, particularly in the blogosphere. Perhaps one day I can compile all the entries into a reasonably comprehensive list of nonsense that people ought to avoid in their political commentary, yes?

So here goes. Why not start with a comment reputed made by conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum on National Review Online's Media Blog early last September:

"It's often said that some parts of the South (northern Virginia, the research triangle in North Carolina, south Florida) are trending Democratic because migrants from the north are transforming them. If that were true - if the Democratic trend were driven by people's movements - why aren't the places from which the migrants come becoming less Democratic? You know for every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction [italics mine]..."

Oh, boy.

"For every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction"? Sure, I know that--in frigging physics! When it comes to politics, of course, it's a different matter entirely. To put it concisely, in what universe does it make sense to take a law of natural science that determines the motion of inanimate objects in space and time and apply it to the elective behavior of sentient, self-aware life forms who possess the power of free will? As far as I know, no such universe exists. The historical and political landscapes, of course, are littered with examples of quite disproportionate reactions--of actions that provoked barely any response whatsoever (such as Italy's 1930s invasion of Ethiopia, to which the West more or less turned a blind eye) and of those that invited much larger reprisals (like Hezbollah's 2006 kidnapping of several Israeli soldiers in the summer of 2006, prompting an extended bombing campaign that devastated much of Lebanon).

As I told Mr. Frum in a direct e-mail response to his comment, that particular Newtonian law of physics may sound clever as hell for the purposes of pithy punditry, but that in no way means that it actually carries logical merit. The hell of it is that it is not even difficult to tell how little sense it makes to apply a law of physics to politics. Yet for some reason, this sorry excuse for a saying keeps popping up in so much of the political discourse I read and hear nowadays. Now it is even being cited as an argument in support of dubious statistical claims, even by a man of Mr. Frum's learning and wisdom. I think my college classmate and good friend Stephan was right: The modern political universe badly needs to take classes in basic logic and good, old-fashioned common sense, especially when it comes to their writing.

Hmmm...can anyone say "talk show "? Now there's a career path. Hell, I could even be like the black Dr. Phil...in politics. Eh? Whaddaya say, folks? Any takers? Come on...you know you can dig it.

Capitalism in the Age of the Bailouts

2008-11-20T21:33:00.001-05:00

The events of the cruel autumn of 2008 have made me wonder more than ever whether capitalism may be too important to be left to the capitalists.

Not content with handing Wall Street a $700 billion get-out-of-jail-free card, it seems, Congress is now contemplating drawing America’s bumbling auto industry into Uncle Sam’s warm, loving embrace. Years of mismanagement, engineering mediocrity (at least as far as my gearhead friends are concerned, and I am happy to defer to their infinitely better-informed judgement), and labor union avarice have combined with the recent financial meltdown to bring Detroit’s age-old woes to the boiling point. True to recent, demoralizing form, the managers who have finally run America’s Big Three auto manufacturers into the ground are now going to Uncle Sam on bended knee, fairly begging to be hoisted out of the wreckage—and given a stipend with which to purchase a new ride.

It was perhaps inevitable that the recent Wall Street rescue package, once approved, would spawn countless demands for similar disbursements of public funds to other struggling constituencies. Hard on Detroit’s heels now follow a slew of fiscally foundering city governments also braying for handouts from the federal government. Apparently, those who run these budgetary basket cases can no longer be counted on to take responsibility for their own failures, as grown men and women are normally expected to do. Perhaps worst of all, these stumblebums show not even the slightest shame at having to beg Washington politicians to rescue them from the consequences of their spendthrift ways.

This disgraceful spectacle is most galling coming from the same business class that spent decades lecturing Americans and the world about the inefficiency of government and the supremacy of free markets. Mind you, they were correct on that score, in my view; but in so doing they obviously forgot the timeless admonition to “preach by example”. Businesspeople are often the worst violators of the principles of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and survival-of-the-fittest that underpin the capitalist system at its best. While the current bailout brouhaha is the most egregious recent betrayal of free-market values, even it is only the tip of the iceberg. Corporate elites the world over have almost always been attached to their governments by unpublicized fiscal umbilical cords, ingesting copious amounts of state largesse in the form of subsidies, grants and tax breaks. (This, of course, is not to mention the occasional trade-strangling tariff or quota to protect the tenderest corporate feet from international competition.)

This political-industrial racket flies in the face of a basic home truth: that freedom entails responsibility, and that therefore, if enterprise is to be free, it too must be responsible. More specifically, companies that are unable to compete effectively on their own merits must be allowed to fail, so that more competent merchants can take their places in the market, providing consumers with goods and services of higher quality. When government intervenes to prop up inefficient or obsolescent firms and industries, it wastes taxpayers’ money and risks subjecting consumers to more expensive and/or lower-quality goods and services than they would otherwise be able to purchase. In short, such meddling distorts the market in counterproductive ways.

In the real world, however, these failing firms are unsurprisingly reluctant to join the dinosaurs in the annals of extinction. They are thus willing to go to remarkable lengths to get the state to tilt the playing field substantially in their favor. That this suggests an inability to stand on their own feet in the business world appears not to faze them. Generations of corporate apparatchiks—in industries from steel to utilities to the infamously subsidy-dependent agricultural sector—have maintained, straight-faced, that society benefits from pampering them. The funds they donate to politicians’ election campaign war chests serve to grease the wheels of this corrupt system of corporate welfare. Invariably, taxpayers and consumers—the vast majority of any country’s population—end up shouldering the lion’s share of the resulting burden.

This sordid circus has never been lost on capitalism’s most learned defenders. No less an authority on the free market than the late economist Milton Friedman has noted that the business community simply cannot be counted on to consistently observe the principles of free enterprise in toto. As Friedman wrote in an article in the libertarian Reason magazine thirty years ago: “Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger…Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy.” As Friedman understood, too many businesspeople themselves rely on busybody government to be credible defenders of a system that demands that individuals and businesses pull as much of their own weight as possible.

This is how we end up with a scenario in which auto company executives can fly into Washington on private jets to beg Congress to save them from the consequences of their own managerial ineptitude with taxpayers’ money.

The principal argument advanced in favor of the proposed auto bailout is that the automakers employ far too many workers, and generally take up too much space in the US economy, to be allowed to go bankrupt, especially in the midst of the necrosis the economy seems to be undergoing at present. This begs the question of why the $25 billion that Washington policymakers—primarily Democrats—are contemplating pouring down the Detroit drainpipe cannot be reallocated to the task of helping the automakers’ employees themselves. Of particular use would be programs to help retrain these working stiffs—to build up their skill sets so as to enable to them to qualify for more secure jobs in more viable companies and industries. Now there’s one form of government intervention all of us—small-government conservative and libertarian as well as centrist, liberal or even socialist—should be able to support. I have in mind the kind of government intervention that truly empowers ordinary people, helping them help themselves—one that teaches a man how to fish, thereby feeding him for a lifetime, rather than giving them a fish and feeding him merely for a day.

What seems utterly lost on both Congress and the Big Three themselves is that allowing these firms to go bankrupt needn’t be the end of the world—or even the end of the automakers. As any expert on these matters will tell you, a company that files for bankruptcy does not necessarily cease to exist. A company that is hemorrhaging cash and yet still has valuable tangible assets can use corporate bankruptcy to reorganize its operations, renegotiate its contracts (particularly the $70-an-hour wages and bloated benefits which the Big Three lavish on their workers), restructure its debt and ultimately emerge stronger and more profitable then ever before. Perhaps Congress should do whatever is in its power to facilitate and expedite this process. One key element of that process should be the requirement that most, if not all, of the Detroit automakers’ current management be jettisoned immediately, without debate, delay or negotiation. It is high time that incompetent executives pay the price for ruining the businesses they are hired to run, rather than their hapless workers.

I am far from the first to propose such a scheme. Yet the odds of Congress’ adopting so creative an approach to this crisis seem rather svelte. And the incoming President-elect has yet to announce whether he plans to stand up to the relevant special interests—mainly the union that has bedeviled Detroit for so long, the United Auto Workers—to put the kibosh on this latest boondoggle. Only time (another two months, to be precise) will tell; and indeed, even should Obama wish to send Detroit’s malefactors of great wealth packing, he may not even get the chance, as the Pelosi-Reid Congress may cave in before January 20. I suppose I, and all those who prefer their governments small and minimally intrusive and their individuals and businesses maximally self-reliant, will have to content ourselves with daydreaming about a different New York Daily News front page spread that, alas, may never be printed: OBAMA TO BIG THREE: DROP DEAD!!!

McCain vs. Obama: Debate #3 Real-Time Commentary

2008-10-15T21:02:00.002-04:00

9:03: Ask Obama how he can cut taxes for "95% of Americans" when at least a third of Americans pay no income taxes to Washington at all presently.

9:04: Is McCain going to try and tie Obama to Fannie and Freddie now...?

9:06: Obama: "The fundamentals of the economy were weak even before this crisis..." Clever dig at McCain.

9:07: Ah, yes--the plumber incident. I have this feeling Obama's going to slap McCain down on this one. Wait for it.

9:08: Now McCain looks directly at the screen, addresses Joe the plumber directly, and tries his damnedest to connect with the voters on a personal level. Cute, but it won't be enough. And what's with the stammering?

9:09: Okay, so not quite the smackdown I anticipated. But--this is a perfect opportunity for McCain to point out the discrepancy I noted in my very first comment in this post. Will he rise to the occasion?

9:11: The answer to the above question, apparently, is "no". And here McCain goes attacking Obama's "spread the wealth around" comment. And, nooooo--not the old "class warfare" chestnut!!!

9:12: I'm totally digging this round-table, face-to-face debate format though...can I get a witness?

9:12: It should have occurred to McCain and his economic team long before now to tailor his fiscal plan in such a way that oil companies wouldn't benefit. Hmmmm...

9:13: All right--a deficit question. Yessss!!! Take it to 'em, Jim!

9:15: I'm skeptical of Obama's ability to actually make his proposals revenue-neutral as he's currently claiming. Hard to articulate why at this moment, though. Stay tuned.

9:17: A proposal made by Senator Clinton...? Is he still whoring after Hillary's disgruntled base?

9:17: At least McCain's answer about his spending freeze proposal directly answers the question--finally--in a head-on manner that voters, I think, can easily understand. How good a fiscal idea it is is a different kettle of fish.

9:19: $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium? Damn. Next we'll hear about the $200 hammer again.

9:19: Here comes Obama's wise answer about earmarks--about the tiny sliver of aggregate federal spending they make up. Has no one hyped McCain to this salient fact yet? I was reading about this shit in Reason magazine nine months ago!

9:20: Is McCain still promising to balance the budget four years from now? Nut.

9:21: "Senator Obama, I'm not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." Rhetorically, a pretty good comeback--and it just might be the kind that will make an impression on viewers/voters. They'll be cheering over this at National Review Online, I'm guessing.

9:22: Challenging Obama on standing up to his party's establishment...ballsy and theoretically a good idea. Unfortunately for McCain, Obama has a plausible (though in my view still somewhat flimsy) answer to it. I wonder who'll come out on top in voters eyes?

9:24: So McCain's getting the last word on this matter? No way to tell whom voters will believe more.

9:24: McCain rattling off his policy disagreements with his party's establishment....probably helps, I guess...

9:26: Hmmm. They're actually going to get into over the mudslinging issue? I don't believe in candidates whining about being the objects of negative campaigning, as McCain is doing now. It's unseemly at best. And Obama, of course, can always come back and point out how McCain's backers have been savaging him for several months now. What's the point?

9:28: Obama rightly downplays the candidates' "hurt feelings". I have to say I'm discombobulated to see the liberal Democratic candidate showing more apparent emotional fortitude--balls, as ordinary people usually call it--than the conservative Republican candidate. McCain's whining like a hand-wringing liberal, and it's disgraceful.

9:30: Oh, for God's sake, McCain. Didn't you hear what I just wrote?!?

9:30: "Unprecedented in the history of negative advertising"? Damn...can you actually back that up, Senator McCain?

9:31: Still with Lewis' remarks? Come on, John. This is beneath you!

9:32: Here comes Obama with the "new style of politics" crap again. Only this time, McCain's lending him credibility on it with his plaintive pleas!

9:33: Be careful not to misquote Obama on this rally epithets issue, McCain.

9:34: What things have been yelled at Obama rallies? I wonder. Not that I think it hasn't happened--I wouldn't put it past many of the more rabid left-liberals out there, especially those of the DailyKos variety. But wouldn't it make more sense for McCain to either back up this allegation with specific examples, or better yet, just drop it altogether?

9:35: Obama's focusing on the issues, and McCain's throwing barbs at Ayers and ACORN?? Have none of McCain's advisers and strategists warned him not to appear to be focusing on sideshows and allow Obama to claim the substantive, policy-oriented high ground?

9:38: By focusing on ACORN, McCain's only making it easier for Obama to make McCain look like he's prone to taking his eye off the ball, especially since Obama's connections to ACORN are tenuous at best. Sorry for the redundancy, but this bears repeating.

9:39: Oh, boy. Back-and-forth factual disputes between candidates in the heat of debate, I'm convinced, are of little use. How are untutored voters supposed to separate the real from the fake?

9:40: Hmmm...questions about running mates? This one's a chin-stroker. Unfortunately, as jokey a character as Joe Biden is in certain respects, and as questionable as his vaunted foreign-policy expertise actually is, I think this issue's a bigger Achilles' Heel for McCain than from Obama, given the Alaskan airhead he chose as his running mate. And believe it or not, it actually pains me to talk that trash about Governor Palin, because I think I would actually like the lady personally if I ever met her. I just don't think she can quite hack it when it comes to in-depth familiarity with the issues.

9:42: McCain: "Sarah Palin is...a role model to women": Another play for Hillary voters, perhaps...?

9:43: Here McCain goes again, singing his sweeping, vague praises of Palin as "a reformer", etc. I can't stand this shit!

9:45: All right, McCain! Way to take down Biden's ridiculously overblown foreign policy reputation! Thank you!!!

9:46: Obama should have gotten a chance to respond to McCain's attacks on his spending proposals, there. Not giving it to him opens up the moderator to potential charges of bias, however dubious.

9:47: Way to point out that NAFTA-renegotiation crap Obama proposed last winter, McCain, and how it could--theoretically at least--adversely impact US imports of oil from friendly countries like Canada. "Overheated and amplified rhetoric," my ass.

9:49: I'm feeling these noises Obama makes against borrowing from China to buy from Saudi Arabia. To hell with them both.

9:49: McCain had better point out that these wonderful alternative technologies Obama keeps plugging for (and rightly so) will also likely take another decade or more in their own right to kick in sufficiently.

9:51: I badly need to read up in detail about the kinds of labor provisions Obama says he wants to include in trade deals like NAFTA once they're renegotiated. I always wonder exactly what they'd consist of and how enforceable they'd be, given that capital is so mobile and labor is so static.

9:52: Ah, yes--Colombia. Point out that now is no time for the Democrats to screw America's honorable and crucial ally, Alvaro Uribe, just when he's been so helpful to the US and when he most needs its help in return. Preach, McCain!!!

9:53: Obama and the Democrats are talking out of their asses with this business of Colombian labor leaders being targeted for assassination. This is clearly a facile pretext they're using to oppose the free trade deal with Colombia. From what I've read, killings of Colombian union leaders have plummeted in recent years, thanks in large part to security measures Uribe's government has taken. But since Uribe is a conservative and a US ally (and opponent of Hugo Chavez' odious socialist regime), that's not good enough for the Democrats.

9:56: All right, McCain. Way to point out how Herbert Hoover screwed the US economy in 1929-1932 with his tax hikes and protectionist measures, turning a stock market panic into the Great Depression!

9:57: Now we're on to health care, Obama's (and Democrats') natural strong suit. There's no way to know how well or how poorly either candidate's plan would work until he gets a chance to actually implement it. As I'm so fond of saying, time alone will tell.

10:00: McCain, do not test Obama on this business of mandating the purchase of health insurance by consumers and the provision of it by employers, or on the attendant punitive fines. It's been well known for months that that's not what he's proposed!

10:02: An article I read in The Economist today corrected the record on Obama's characterization of McCain's $5,000 health-care tax credit. Apparently, McCain's tax credit is actually "substantially larger than the tax break on employer-provided insurance that it replaces (which is typically worth less than $3,000), the vast majority will be better off [italics mine]." Believe it or not, I really will take The Economist's word over any political candidate's any day.

Now if only McCain would make that point himself now!

10:05: "Senator Government": ROTFLMAO. 'Nuff said...except to add that maybe that Freudian slip will become a recurring theme of the rest of the campaign!!!

10:06: I have to admit I felt a stone drop into my gut upon hearing the very words "Roe v. Wade". Sigh...my broad pro-life sympathies don't blind me to the tiresomeness of this issue. Mind you, agree with McCain that Roe v. Wade was a garbage decision and has got to go. But good luck explaining that to ordinary Americans.

10:09: MCCAIN!!! Ask Obama to quote the passage in the Constitution that mentions "privacy"! Ask him--because it doesn't exist!!!

10:10: Hmmm. Partial-birth abortion. Are you sure you want to go there, John?

10:13: From everything I've read, Obama's denial of his "no" vote on the Born Alive Infant Protection Act's state-level Illinois cousin is downright dishonest...but I'll admit, maybe I haven't read widely enough.

10:14: McCain has what looks like a haughty, shit-eating smirk on his face right now. And it won't go away! Bad form, Micky C.

10:23: Obama: "I don't think America's youth are an interest group. I think they're our future." Oh, pleeeeaaaaaase. That one was so cheesy, I'm tasting brie on my breath already.

10:25: I can only wonder what voters will make of this education policy debate. I myself have a hard time judging which candidate's plan would be better for American public education.

10:26: Too bad McCain's smiles tend to look like snarky smirks. (I chalk it up to the painfully thin lips.) And that seemingly churlish--and not altogether clear--smartass remark about school vouchers at the end may very well work against him. As rough and tough a people as Americans--largely rightly--imagine themselves to be, they are actually quite soft in some respects, and this is one of them: they react badly to any appearance of obnoxious conduct on the part of one candidate to another.

10:30: Obama: "...policies that will lift wages and benefit the middle class..." How about policies that will inflate the deficit and national debt?

McCain vs. Obama Debate #2: Real-Time Commentary

2008-10-07T21:14:00.003-04:00

9:16: Smart of Obama to point out how unhelpful it is for candidates to get bogged down in he-said she-said bickering and "pointing fingers". How is any ordinary person, with absolutely no expertise in these complex issues of public policy, supposed to be able to tell who's telling the truth and who's lying?

9:16: But I'm not as confident about the economy's short-term prospects as Obama is. Only time will tell who's right.

9:18: It's equally smart of McCain to explain precisely what he meant by "the fundamentals of the economy are strong", though he'd do well to go into it in a little more depth. Then again, of course, there are those pesky time constraints...

9:19: Thanks, Sen. Obama, for noting that most ordinary people are tightening their belts--spending less money in the midst of this economic crisis. If only the federal government could do the same...but of course, a few seconds later, here the good Senator is already laying out all his plans to spend more money as President, despite the titanic federal budget deficit and national debt.

9:21: McCain, if you're smart--and if you've got an ounce of heart left in you--you'll point out precisely what I just did above. But who am I kidding--you won't do that. You're washed up these days. The John McCain of the 2000 Republican primaries is long gone. Plus you'd have a gay old time trying to reconcile that with your own reckless and irresponsible tax cuts anyway.

9:22: All right, so there you are pointing out Obama's spendthrift liberal track record and campaign platform. Smart move...though we'll see how many voters remember it on Election Day. And what about your damn tax cuts?

9:24: Tom, you're the man! THANK YOU for bringing up entitlement reform!!! Now let's hear McCain...speak on it!!!

9:24: Awww, damn! Surely you can give us more on entitlement reform than just "We'll sit down with our friends in the other party [whom we've just spent the past couple of years maligning, lol] to find a solution to this issue." How about some specificity?

9:25: Fair comment on energy independence, Sen. Obama. Given the national security implications of it, it makes sense to keep that on the front burner.

9:27: And good point on analyzing both sides of the government's balance sheet! If it doesn't make sense to spend recklessly, how much sense does it make to cut taxes recklessly?

9:28: So far, McCain's answer to this question on Americans' sacrifices in times of war and crisis isn't speaking to what I think the questioner (a member of the Greatest Generation, if I heard correctly?) had in mind. Cutting the less necessary and least efficient government programs is good talk, all right, but what direct, non-passive sacrifice does that demand of ordinary Americans in their day to day lives?

9:30: This preamble of Obama's--as treacly as it sounds--actually hit the question dead on. He seems to have understood the thrust of the question better than McCain did. Not that I think the rest of his response will answer it any better than McCain's did...but we shall soon know for sooth.

9:32: Incentives to live more fuel-efficient lifestyles...hmmm. If the government is giving you incentives to do it--essentially making it profitable for you to do it--I don't see the altruistic self sacrifice there. Clearly election campaign debates are no time or place for logical niceties.

9:33: Good for you, Senator Obama! There's no reason to expect more financial responsibility of ordinary Americans than of their elected representatives. That damn deficit needs tackling! But how do you do that while still spending an extra several hundred billion dollars--on top of existing expenditures, not to mention this $700 billion bailout of the financial sector?

9:35: Oh, boy. Here goes McCain about Obama's tax plans again...well, hear what. Obama keeps insisting he's going to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. Senator McCain, why not point out that approximately 40% of Americans already pay virtually (or actually!) no federal taxes (thanks to America's system of progressive income taxation)? How can as many of 95% of Americans get a tax cut when 40% of them pay little or nothing to Washington already?

9:38: All right--back to entitlements! Of course Obama is going to duck this one. He is, after all, a liberal Democrat. And sure enough, here he goes back to the tax issue again, after giving what was basically a vague non-answer on the entitlement issue! Then again, wait--he's doing it to point out the 95%-tax-cut thing. Not like I didn't see that coming.

9:39: Hold up. Now it's 95% of American businesses that will get a tax cut from Obama? Is it individual American taxpayers who'll get the tax cut, or 95% of American businesses? I'm no fiscal actuary, but I have this sneaking suspicion that these two different proposals will have very different ramifications--and chances of success. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

9:41: Social Security will be easy to reform?!? Whatever McCain's hopped up on, I want to know where I can get my hands on some...I'm sure it'll get me through the brutal Canadian winter that awaits me. Or maybe McCain's actually sober, and has simply forgotten how President Bush abjectly failed to reform SS three and a half years ago, despite his party's then-commanding control of both houses of Congress?

9:43: All right, McCain, point out your bipartisan work on climate change and environmental issues generally. Whore after those independent swing votes like there's no tomorrow...it's your only hope.

9:46: Way to use McCain's 2+ decades of Washington experience against him, Sen. Obama. If he's been there this long, why hasn't he done more about it before now...?

9:47: I have another sneaking suspicion: that most ordinary Americans prefer cheap gas to protecting the environment. Call me crazy.

9:48: "That one"? I was looking at my computer screen instead of my TV screen just then..was McCain referring to Senator Obama?

9:49: Right on, Sen. McCain, pointing out the basic economic fact that increasing supply decreases prices, or at least keeps them from spiraling out of control. But haven't economists objected that there's not enough oil under American soil to make much of a dent in global oil prices?

9:51: Aha--here comes the health care bomb! Obama (and the US Chamber of Commerce) are quite right that McCain's proposal would unravel the employer-based health insurance system. But isn't that specifically McCain's goal--and isn't it a worthy one? Hasn't the existing system imposed excessive burdens on American businesses--the very same impediment to their competitiveness that Obama himself referred to earlier in this debate? Isn't the status quo untenable? Wouldn't it be better to free up the whole system, and better enable Americans as individuals and families to buy their own health insurance affordably, without letting their bosses get in the mix?

9:54: What's this about hair transplants? Was that a dig at Biden?

9:55: Careful, McCain, with these "mandate" critiques. I thought Obama's refusal to mandate health insurance coverage for individuals was the main--if not the only--difference between his and Hillary Clinton's health care proposals? This sounds like a blatant distortion of Obama's position as he's articulated it over the past, uhhh, year and a half!!!

9:56: Now we get to the philosophical heart of the health care debate--is it a right or not? Obama, of course, said "yes"--straight up. Can someone remind me of McCain's answer to that? I must have been looking at my computer screen again. Or maybe I was flipping through the satellite cable channel guide to find out when Kitchen Nightmares is rerunning...

9:59: Oooohhh, nice question, Mr. Elliot! Reminds me of the "fungibility" of American economic power as taught to me in my International Political Economy class of two years ago.

10:00: Okay, McCain, here we go...keep emphasizing the importance of judging when American military intervention is warranted and when it isn't...remember, I suspect that were you president instead of George W. Bush, you might never have invaded Iraq at all (though I also suspect you would have rightly put the screws to Saddam to make him let the UN weapons inspectors back in.) So prove me right, you old coot!!!

10:02: Not that I didn't see Obama's inevitable retort about the Iraq invasion coming! And sure enough, there's my mom hollering "Thank you! THANK YOU!!!" at the TV upstairs in my kitchen!

10:03: Hmmm. Obama wants to do something about the genocide in Darfur, does he? Will he go to the UN Security Council for its seal of approval first, like he wanted to do in response to Russia's invasion of Georgia? Fat bloody chance of that happening...America's creditors in Beijing would never allow it. Which is just as well, because even if China (not to mention Russia) were to assent to such an intervention, America's ballyhooed European allies would still sit on their hands, like they've been doing since the crisis started. And even if they didn't, Uncle Sam would still shoulder the vast majority of the burden of any intervention--for isn't that what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, even with a Democrat in the Oval Office?

10:08: Who is that bug-eyed, cross-eyed lady behind the questioner?

10:09: Fair point about Iraq distracting America's attention from Afghanistan, Senator Obama. Way to take your eye off the ball, President Bush.

10:10: I declare, I wish someone would ask both candidates about that British ambassador who recently called for withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan and the installation of "an acceptable dictator". Then again, I don't wish it. They'd both respond with some dismissive bullshit anyway.

10:11: Aw, hell. A "my hero" answer, John? "Walk softly and carry a big stick"? You know what always annoyed me about that particular "favorite quote" of Teddy Roosevelt's? The fact that TR himself actually walked--and talked--pretty damn loudly, and carried a decidedly small stick! (Other than that Panama Canal thing, of course.)

10:12: John, you're right that an incursion into Pakistan--however brief--would turn Pakistani public opinion against America. But, uhhh--hasn't it already been turned against America for the longest time? And didn't the invasion of Iraq have that exact same effect--and not just in the Arab world, either? Clearly the effect of American interventions abroad on public opinion in the subject countries isn't such a dispositive factor...

10:16: AHA!!! An "acceptable dictator" question! Lovely!

10:18: Hmmm. Maybe I'm too hard on Sarah Palin. My main criticism of her is of her inability to debate these issues in greater detail and depth. Yet how capable are ordinary people--i.e. voters--of wisely judging which candidate's factual claims are more credible, and which proposals are sounder? Not very, I'm guessing.

10:20: There's no point belaboring this Russo-Georgian War thing, Sen. McCain, without pointing out how Senator Obama spent three days scrambling around like a chicken with its head cut off for three days last August before finally coming around to the same position on the issue that you, McCain, staked out right out of the gate.

10:21: Senator Obama: "We've also got to provide them [i.e. former Soviet satellite states on which Russia now has resurgent imperial designs] with..."...NATO membership, Senator? Missile defense protection, perhaps?

10:23: Good job, Senator Obama, in pointing out how energy independence would blunt the sharper edges of Russia's current muscle.

10:25: Audience member question: "Would you react to an Iranian attack on Israel by committing US troops to Israel's defense, or wait on UN Security Council approval?" What kind of transparent softball question for McCain's benefit is that?

10:28: Funny, though, how Obama ends up answering that question more directly than McCain did--and turns it to his own advantage, no less? Smart brother!!!

10:29: Great idea, Sen. Obama, about choking off Iran's oil supply in order to "put the squeeze on 'em"! Now I want to hear you say you'll take just those kinds of measures before meeting with the sons of bitches--in much the same way that Ronald Reagan spent the first three-quarters of his presidency kicking the Soviets' asses from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to Angola to El Salvador before sitting down with Gorbachev (which I believe is one of the main reasons why those negotiations worked). Now that's what I call a precondition!

10:32: McCain: "We don't know what's going to happen..." As facile as this sounds, it's actually a very wise and intelligent point. How a potential leader would respond to completely unforeseen occurrences is one of the major factors anyone should take into account in deciding whether or not to follow that leader. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said, in response to a question about what is most likely to blow a government off course: "Events, dear boy, events."

Response to "This is Your Nation on White Privilege”

2008-09-25T00:00:00.002-04:00

Tim Wise’s article “This is Your Nation on White Privilege” (http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege) sure has been making the rounds lately, hasn’t it? I’ve been sent it by three people in the past week alone. All right, since the damn thing won’t leave me in peace, I’ll take a good stab or two at it. Believe it or not, it didn’t all sit poorly with me.

The earliest section of it actually struck a chord with me. I agree that Republicans are being hypocritical in holding Sarah Palin blameless for her daughter’s premature, out-of-wedlock pregnancy; as Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out on The Daily Show a while back, this is the diametrical opposite of their reaction to, oh say, Jamie Lynn Spears’ teenaged pregnancy, for example—not to mention their usual reactions to the out-of-wedlock pregnancies of young, inner-city black women.

Bristol Palin’s brother is clearly a backcountry douche bag, as his MySpace page originally made clear. Yet he is getting away with this character flaw in ways no black youth ever could. In addition, the critical juxtaposition of Sarah Palin’s academic career and those of many academically disadvantaged black youth also rings true to me.

I’ll focus the rest of my response on the stuff I disagreed with. Virtually every criticism of Obama by conservative Republicans referenced in Mr. Wise’s article actually stems from the former’s ideology, not his race. On the whole, I don’t think Obama is getting any worse treatment than his white Democratic predecessors did in years gone by—not in the areas mentioned in Mr. Wise’s missive, in any case.

The fourth paragraph is where I begin to disagree strongly. Being an undistinguished first-term US Senator and two-term state senator with zero notable legislative accomplishments is hardly superior—as a qualification for the presidency, at any rate—to being a small-town mayor or governor of an oil-rich state. Senator Obama is untested, as untested in his own way as Governor Palin. This, mind you, hardly means he can’t be a great president; there are too many historical examples to the contrary.

“If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me”: I’ve heard it argued that Governor Palin was referring to general references to God on government literature and in government correspondence rather than to the “under God” in the Pledge strictly. This could, of course, be quite wrong. Only an incisive follow-up question could set this record perfectly straight, so my personal jury’s still out on that one.

As for reading criminals their rights: there is actually nothing in the Constitution that says that this practice is required. Liberal judges’ belief that governments should have to perform such a practice (which also happens to be my personal policy opinion) does not mean that the Constitution actually requires it. Neither the US Constitution—nor any other legal document, for that matter—can plausibly be held to “require” something it doesn’t even mention.

I agree that all gun nuts should be perceived and treated equally, regardless of their melanin count. And advocates of excessively stifling gun-control regulations, or outright bans on gun ownership, should take a moment of pause from the little-known historical fact that the first gun control laws in the United States specifically targeted blacks, aiming to keep weapons out of their hands so as to render them defenseless against racist attacks. http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html

I seem to remember Democratic heavy hitters like James Carville relentlessly mocking Sarah Palin’s erstwhile small-town mayoralty almost a week before she ever got to speak on Obama’s community organizing experience. Democrats with glass jaws should not throw sucker punches. Moreover, Obama’s experience—according to what I’ve read so far, at least—included nothing so momentous as “fighting for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor” but with rather more mundane matters like removing asbestos from housing projects (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). As for giving women the vote, ending child labor and mandating the 8-hour workday, those struggles date back eighty years and more, long before Obama was born. They may nonetheless be fair defenses of community organizing in and of itself, but if the first viable black presidential candidate had nothing to do with them, I fail to see how they effectively lend themselves to proving the existence of white privilege in America.

I never figured many women voters would jump on the Palin bandwagon simply on account of her gender—nor should they. On the other hand, do I think her candidacy is “a step backward for women”, as some feminist pundits have been alleging? Hardly. A woman vice-president’s a woman vice-president, no matter how conservative. Moreover, even electing to the vice-presidency a woman who holds views with which most women disagree still furthers the cause of women’s advancement. It demonstrates that a woman needn’t stuff herself inside a left-wing ideological box in order to blaze a trail for her sisters in the professional world. (Think of Margaret Thatcher.) It also reinforces the principle of women’s equality with men by demonstrating that, just like men, women are entitled to their own opinions—even controversial ones—since they are, after all, fully independent individuals who can think for themselves, just like men.

All politicians are at least somewhat cynical in their behavior over time. It’s almost impossible to be politically successful without it. As for insinuations that Obama is corrupt, they are a product of his having come up through Chicago machine politics as he has (not merely “knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago”). These insinuations are not a product of Obama’s race. The corrupt Chicago ward machines are generally controlled by whites, as they have been for more than a century. That doesn’t diminish their corruption—and wouldn’t make Obama any less corrupt, were he a white man—in conservatives’ eyes.

I agree that Republicans who associate with far-right Christian pastors should be subject to as much opprobrium as Obama was for his association with Jeremiah Wright. But to describe the latter’s sermons as merely “talking about the history of racism and its effect on black people” is facile and dishonest. For instance, I can hardly give anyone wrong—whether they are white or black, liberal or conservative—for being repulsed by Wright’s moronic and grotesquely paranoid claim that the AIDS virus was invented by the US government to kill black people. And Wright did not merely “note that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy”; he went beyond that to suggest that America deserved the attacks of September 11^th as a result. (That’s what “chickens coming home to roost” means, FYI.) So the 3,000 innocent American civilians who died on that tragic day deserved it, because of the vagaries (and admitted flaws) of their government’s foreign policy? Neither Wright’s nor Obama’s blackness is enough to explain white Americans’ disgust with this insinuation.

It’s true that Bush got away with his “regular guy” image waaayyyyy too easily—especially with populist conservatives—considering his very blue-blooded pedigree. But as I understand it, it wasn’t “being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College , then Columbia , and then to Harvard Law” that made conservatives accuse Obama of “looking down on regular folks”. What brought this criticism down on Obama was his comment about working-class white Americans clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia out of bitterness at their economic plight. (Mind you, I myself never much faulted him for making that comment, for I’ve always felt there was a powerful element of truth to it—call me an elitist, too, if you will.)

As for Obama’s and McCain’s relative academic records: being a brilliant scholar hardly automatically qualifies a candidate for the presidency. You can be bright and academically accomplished and still screw up big time as president. Don’t take it from me—take it from JFK, with his foul-up of the Bay of Pigs invasion or his embroilment of the military in the Vietnam War. You can also lack a college degree altogether and still make a damn good president. Just ask Harry Truman.

McCain’s jokey jingle about bombing Iran was damned stupid, no doubt about it. Yet Ronald Reagan 1984 joke about “outlawing Russia forever” and “beginning bombing in five minutes” didn’t stop him from drastically speeding up the Soviet Union’s demise. And Obama’s proposal to meet, without preconditions, the leaders of a host of hostile, repressive rogue states, all in his first year in office, regardless of whether or not he is bargaining from a position of strength, does smack of dangerous naïveté and immaturity. This is a product of his liberal worldview and ideology—not his race.

Obama is accused of ducking questions for two main reasons. First, he does sometimes duck them, like all politicians do. (Did any of you really fall for that bullshit he told Rick Warren about the question of when human beings begin to have rights being “above his pay grade”? Because it’s sure as hell not above mine.) Second of all, he’s a liberal, and so of course conservative pundits and campaign strategists will call him out every time he does duck a question, just as liberal pundits and campaigners (rightly) do to conservative candidates. A white Democratic candidate would have been accused of evasiveness—or any other political shortcoming—by Republicans just as much as Obama has been. Or have Democrats already forgotten all about poor John “flip flop” Kerry, Michael “tank commander” Dukakis, Walter “let’s raise taxes” Mondale or Jimmy “malaise” Carter?

It can be plausibly argued that being tortured by communist jailers for five years is a greater burden and a harsher experience than anything Obama has ever gone through, given his relatively peaceful childhood and privileged higher education at such august institutions as Columbia and Harvard. I don’t necessarily agree with this argument, but I find it one deserving of serious consideration. What does seem clear to me is the fact that whatever racism Obama has experienced has certainly not substantially obstructed his pathway to success in life. Suffice to say that no Ivy League-trained lawyer, US Senator and presidential candidate can plausibly claim to have been the victim of insurmountable racism.

White privilege is not the “only” thing that could allow a putative ally of George W. Bush to become president. Voters’ ignorance of political issues, widespread belief that McCain would govern differently than Bush (based on his heterodox track record over the past several decades), and any number of other factors play into it. But of course, that doesn’t make for hardly as catchy or as entertaining an article as blaming all of the electoral hurdles Obama faces on white privilege.

An overestimation of the power of white privilege, in short, is arguably as big a problem as white privilege itself.

From This, Too, a Philosophy of Umoja

2008-09-07T23:20:00.010-04:00

Umoja is a Swahili word meaning “unity”, and it was this that African-American scholar and political activist Ron Karenga had in mind forty-two years ago when he fashioned the holiday of Kwanzaa in honor of black America’s African heritage. It is the value that figures so prominently in the columns published in the venerable pages of Montreal’s Community Contact by the redoubtable Yvonne Sam. And it is the issue that has crisscrossed my mind all summer, thanks to countless news items, group discussions and one-on-one conversations pertaining to the economic advancement and social solidarity of the peoples of the African Diaspora.

One valuable thing I have learned in recent months is that philosophical and empirical support for umoja can be found in the unlikeliest places—if only one takes the time and trouble to look.

In my readings for a course in Conservative Political Thought that I took last spring, I stumbled upon a series of articles written on the issue of American race relations in the late 1960s by a number of regular contributors to the conservative National Review. Penned at the height of the sturm und drang of the Black Power movement and the racial strife then rending America’s cities, these missives roundly condemned the urban ghetto riots and radical agitation of that era. They insisted that the “profound wrongs” African-Americans had suffered for centuries “cannot be righted by destroying the foundations of a free constitutional society”—the most crucial such foundation being the preservation of law and order. They chided well-meaning white liberals for their “cherubic innocence” in claiming that white racism was to blame for all of black America’s problems—and firmly rejected welfare-state policies as solutions to those problems.

I found plenty to criticize in this, from the writers’ rather cavalier dismissal of racial discrimination and police brutality as a cause of the riots to their apparent disinclination to condemn open racism when they did encounter it directly. Yet I was struck by the prevalence among these authors of proposals that were startlingly compatible with principles of black self-consciousness, unity, and grassroots independence from white-dominated institutions. These stodgy white men unabashedly propounded ideas that are virtually unheard of among the mainstream conservatives of today.

To begin with, these conservatives argued that white racism was at worst one of many factors that contributed to the socioeconomic underdevelopment of the black community. In March 1968, sociologist Ernest Van den Haag argued that even if white America did deserve the racial unrest due to the historical subjugation of their black counterparts, this did not necessarily mean that this oppression was the cause of the riots. “For,” he wrote, “if all the grievances of the rioters were justified (and I think most are) [italics mine] they would not ‘explain’ the riots.” Van den Haag pointed out that African-Americans had made great economic and professional strides toward full equality even before the legal dismantlement of Jim Crow racial segregation in the mid-1960s, beginning after World War II. He noted that many other countries had even larger gaps in wealth between racial and ethnic groups, yet had experienced no race riots. And he tellingly observed that the riots themselves did not occur in those parts of the United States in which blacks had been worst treated—that is, in the former Jim Crow South. Indeed, many of the most destructive riots ravaged cities in decidedly liberal regions of the country that had been showered with social-welfare spending from several levels of government for more than a decade.

In June of that year, Dartmouth College English professor Jeffrey Hart published his article “The Negro in the City” in National Review. I could not help but feel mounting awe as I read the wise and powerful words of this conservative curmudgeon—a mid-twentieth-century white man, the product of a cultural background so vastly different from my own—in this remarkable piece of prose.

He emphasized that blacks in general were advancing rapidly in the professional realm as legal bastions of racial discrimination crumbled. He also argued that there was more to African-Americans’ enduring woes than the tyranny of the majority race. Specifically, demographic groups who start out as ill-educated peasants and migrate into industrial cities always take decades to rise to collectively realize the American Dream. “The problem does not look like one of racism,” Hart wrote, “but rather like the lag to be expected when a group with a predominantly agricultural background attempts to adjust to urban conditions and new goals. […] We need to remind ourselves that previous groups took at least three generations to make the advance from manual labor to proportional representation in the white collar jobs and in the professions.” Hart went on to point out that “At every level…whether high or low, education proves to be the key. Job equality depends upon qualifications, and they, in turn, depend upon education. Yet the improvement of Negro education faces a number of obstacles, some of which are formidable.”

Hart next took aim at the popular American myth of the “melting pot”: the narrative of the gradual but complete assimilation of immigrant groups into the American mainstream, becoming barely distinguishable, in a cultural sense, from the WASPs who founded the country. This, he argued, was in fact nonsense: newcomers to America had so much in common with their fellows from their respective countries of origin, and encountered so much prejudice upon their arrival on America’s shores, that they could not help but coalesce into readily identifiable, geographically and culturally cohesive groups that largely stuck together on their American journey. This ethnic solidarity ended up forming a linchpin of these immigrant groups’ eventual rise from the ghettos which greenhorns populated immediately on arrival to the suburbs in which their descendants would eventually dwell.

As a result, stressed Hart, the emphasis placed on racial integration by the civil rights movement and its allies in the Democratic Party was wrongheaded. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the whole stress on integration as a primary goal is based on the myth that America is a completely homogeneous country, whereas to a significant extent America is a nation of distinctive groups.” In making this point, Hart cited Beyond the Melting Pot, the final report on the study conducted by liberal sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan which established the continuing distinctness of American ethnic groups for generations after the arrival of their immigrant forbears. “The groups,” Hart wrote,

are given structure and solidarity through interest, family, and fellow-feeling; they produce distinctive institutions and associations; they vote differently; many have their own neighborhoods; they have different attitudes toward education, sex, religion; they are “in many ways as different from one another as their grandfathers had been.” The weakness of the program aimed at total Negro integration is that it attempts to impose on the whole area of Negro-white relations a novel and abstract pattern which has not been followed by the other historic American groups. It is for this reason that laws designed to achieve integration have been so largely ineffective…

“No one really believes that Negroes will cease to be a distinctive group,” Hart continued. “Integration therefore should be redefined to mean ‘integration into the pattern of American group experience,’ that larger pattern which involves work-save-study-earn-rise.” It was with this argument in mind that Hart began to delve into the issue of black social solidarity—and its ramifications for the trajectory of economic development in the black community.

The following sentence in Hart’s essay was the one I found most captivating, and the one that perhaps best summarized the most valuable insight that can be drawn from it. “The real problems of the Negroes,” Hart wrote, “have less to do with Negro-white relations than with the relationship of Negroes to one another, and it is to these real problems that the Negroes, together with other Americans, can most valuably direct attention.” He went on to unpack and examine the internal social factors that distinguished African-Americans from other ethnic groups—and inhibited them from coalescing in the kind of day-to-day manner that would enable them to hoist themselves up the socioeconomic pole as other minorities had. “Social scientists,” he noted, “have pointed out that Negroes have not developed a comparable degree of group solidarity, and that this failure is an important factor in retarding advancement.”

He focused on how this lack of cohesion manifested itself in the realm of enterprise, pointing out how, due in part to “the relative weakness of clan and extended family feeling among the Negroes,” American blacks were less likely to hire one another in certain industries, to form business partnerships with one another, to lend money to or invest in each other’s businesses, to refer one another to potential employers, etc. Pointing out that “business, historically, has proved the effective road to advancement for the various ethnic groups,” Hart referred repeatedly to the commonplaceness of these practices among other ethnic Americans—and not only the white ethnic groups, either. “The Chinese restaurant buys its food supplies from a Chinese distributor, uses a Chinese laundry, [and] hires Chinese help. The Italian who owns a grocery store gives a break to a friend or a relative who is working his way up as a salesman….Chinese income from Chinese-owned businesses is, in proportion to their numbers, 45 times as great as the income of Negroes from Negro-owned businesses.”

On the whole, wrote Hart, compared with other minority groups, “Negroes have been much more atomistic, less aware of the need to advance as a group, less aware that the fortunes of one are connected with the fortunes of all.” Sound familiar?

Hart next trained his sights on the much-maligned (yet to this day still untackled) problem of the breakdown in the structure of the black family. He noted the dismaying fact that at the time, approximately one quarter of black households lacked a male authority figure, while African-American children were born out of wedlock at fourteen to fifteen times the rate of whites. (In the forty years since the writing of “The Negro in the City”, of course, these social ills have been grotesquely exacerbated, to the point where, for example, a large majority of African-American children are born to single mothers today.) “We do not know with assurance the effects of these circumstances on the children,” Hart lamented, “but we cannot doubt that they adversely affect the performance of the Negro child in school, and, therefore, later on in the society at large.”

How, Hart asked, were black children to have the encouragement and reinforcement they needed to succeed in school without positive role models of both genders, without being grounded in a stable home environment, without both parents working together to instill in them the habits and values that are necessary for academic and professional advancement? And furthermore, how much good could well-motivated government policies designed to combat racial inequalities, such as school busing and affirmative action, be expected to accomplish when the fundamental building blocks of upward social mobility were so conspicuously lacking? Even if all vestiges of white racism could be eliminated overnight, argued Hart, African-Americans would not be well-positioned to take advantage of the resulting opportunities that would open up to them without substantial improvement in their family life. Uplifting the race, it would seem, begins in the home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hart and his conservative brethren generally neglected to examine the possible historical origins of these social pathologies. It seems not to have occurred to them that these social problems in the black community may be rooted in the trauma of slavery, with its separation of blacks from their original cultures and traditions, and in the practice of trading slaves—men, women and children—between plantations and its devastating effects on the black nuclear family unit. I thought this the most glaring omission from the authors’ otherwise highly compelling critique of modish liberal attitudes toward the race question. Nonetheless, Hart and the others demonstrated some understanding—however understated—that whatever the root causes of the social deficiencies among African-Americans, they could be and were passed down from generation to generation in a vicious socio-historical cycle. “Poverty, high fertility, high rates of illegitimacy, widespread family disorganization, and similar conditions that hold lower-class Negroes down could continue for decades after the influences originally responsible for them were virtually eliminated,” observed sociologists Leonard Broom and Norval Glenn as quoted in Hart’s essay.

Furthermore, it should be noted that many of these problems not only were worse in the 1960s than they had been earlier in the 20th century, when white racism was a vastly greater obstacle to black advancement—and, indeed, a greater threat to their very lives—but moreover, these problems have gotten even worse since the 1960s. If problems of illegitimacy, family dysfunction and social division were strictly the result of slavery, the opposite should have been the case, as many prominent black conservatives like reputable economist Thomas Sowell have pointed out. If these social ills could really be laid entirely at slavery’s door, then they should have been at their low point in the decades immediately following slavery’s abolition, and at worst they should not have deteriorated over time. That they did logically suggests that factors other than slavery—in addition to it, mind you, not in its stead—must also be at fault. What those factors are, however, is still a matter of widespread conjecture.

Hart’s next step was to zero in on the very question of what historical development had taken place among African-Americans. He identified three general phases of this development since emancipation. The first, between the Civil War and the turn of the century, encompassed both Reconstruction and the “period of submission and accommodation” that followed its demise, with the eventual withdrawal of Northern troops from the defeated Southern states and the erection of the apparatus of Jim Crow segregation thereafter. The second included the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to Northern cities, beginning during the First World War and accelerating during the Great Depression. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the third and final phase began: that of increasingly forceful protest against institutionalized racial oppression. “This last phase,” Hart wrote, “…reflected an advance in overall condition, an advance in white-collar work, skilled and semi-skilled employment, and purchasing power. The initiative in the demonstrations did not arise out of hopelessness, but from ambitions that had been stimulated by advances already made.”

Thus Hart reiterated the conservative argument mentioned earlier in this article: that the increasing restiveness of the African-American population pointed as much to the strides that had already been made towards their advancement as it did to the injustices they continued to face. This was based on the sociological finding that historically oppressed groups generally begin to rise up in disruptive and sometimes even violent protest only after their condition has actually begun to see substantial improvement. Legendary black abolitionist Frederick Douglas once noted that the slaves who were most likely to rise up in revolt against their masters or flee their plantations were actually the ones who were generally less severely treated, while those who were most brutally suppressed and abused by their masters were least likely to entertain such thoughts. Much the same dynamic was at play in the case of blacks in the postwar period, explained one Detroit sociologist quoted by Hart: “The closer the distance becomes between the lower and the middle class, the more militant and aggressive and assertive the lower class becomes.”

In the next section of his essay, entitled “Turning Inward,” Hart argued that by 1968, almost all legal barriers to racial equality had been broken down, and the obstacles that had yet to be confronted could not be overcome by petitions, speeches, demonstrations or riots, however emotionally gratifying such forms of protest might be to their participants. It is here that Hart began to examine the kinds of action that could be taken to solve these problems. Wrote he: “Negro energies, it seems clear, should be turned inward to the problems of the Negro community, rather than directed outward toward confrontations with the rest of society. Negro energies should be invested in improving the Negro condition rather than wasted in self-defeating expressions of resentment.” Earlier, in Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan had written that “If anything can be done, it is likely that Negro agencies will be far more effective than public agencies and those of white Protestants.”

This, however, did not mean that the rest of society should sit idly by while the black community handled its own business all by its lonesome. Hart urged that the quality of education made available to African-Americans be drastically improved, calling for pre-school nursery programs that would focus on teaching black children “standard English and personal discipline” and instilling in these children “attitudes conducive to a good performance in the classroom later on.” Whatever expense—whether public or private—such programs entailed, Hart argued, might be more than compensated for by the eventual decrease in the amount of taxpayers’ dollars that would need to be spent on welfare and other public assistance programs such as food stamps in the future.

The white, male, conservative Professor Hart even had some kind words for programs aimed at building a sense of pride, solidarity and cultural consciousness in the black community. Hart seems to have been keenly aware of the crucial role that a certain reasonable degree of ethnocentric sentiment has always played in the socioeconomic ascension of all demographic groups who originally started out poor and destitute. As he wrote:

We have seen that the Negro community has largely failed to develop the kind of solidarity and group pride possessed by other ethnic groups. It may be that school and community programs in Negro history, culture and literature, in America and, particularly, in Africa, can strengthen the Negro’s self-image and make for greater solidarity with the community to which he belongs. There is no treason why such programs should not be encouraged.

Unlike many of his conservative heirs today, it seems, Professor Hart was wholly unafraid of the ideals of black unity and black pride. He had nothing against black consciousness per se and even saw reason to encourage it, understanding that a black community that stuck together more had to begin to prosper sooner or later. He was not alone among his conservative colleagues of that era, however. The editors of National Review, writing collectively, wrote in August 1967 that the more responsibility African-Americans took for their own destiny as a community, the better. If blacks were to take charge in ways that might be anathema to conservatives forty years later, so be it:

“Black Power”, besides its savage connotation in the mouths of the Carmichaels and the Rap Browns…can suggest also “black responsibility”, and why should there be objection to that, once we step outside the assumption of “integration”? Do Negroes want to run the towns where they are a majority? Very well. They have the vote. Let them use it, take over, lawfully, and seen how they can do. Even if it’s not very well, they may prefer their own mistakes to Whitey’s skills; and their white neighbors, if they dislike inordinately the way things go, can pack up and get out. In New York and several other cities last year, there were demands that Negroes should administer schools in Negro neighborhoods. If this exercise of Black Power really is, in a given case, the wish of a large majority of the parents, it might be worth the experiment. The quality of education might suffer, true enough; and then the parents could decide which they preferred for their children, the power or the schooling.

Professor Hart, for his part, also clearly perceived the need for the emergence of a black business class, and the importance of black solidarity in bringing about this emergence. Hart had the good sense to appraise those American businesses that were already owned by blacks—and the flaws that negatively impacted their self-sustainability. He observed that they had a higher failure rate and tended to be smaller (and thus unable to take advantage of economies of scale) and less efficient than their white counterparts. This particularly made it harder for them to borrow money or attract the investment they needed to be able to expand—yet another self-perpetuating deficiency that held blacks back. In addition, he noted, black businesspeople had too few entrepreneurial role models among their own people to teach them the tricks of the trade, so to speak.

How, then, could this problem be effectively tackled? Hart’s answer:

Yet it is important that Negroes come to own…businesses, especially those operating in Negro neighborhoods. Property, after all, tends to produce responsibility and dignity. Assistance to this end could well take the form of state insurance for loans extended to qualified Negro businessmen, or potential businessmen, for capital investment. The private sector could also do much here. Perhaps civic-minded businessmen in the various fields could set up committees for the purpose of advising Negroes who are initiating enterprises.

Here, Hart underscored the indispensability of private enterprise to improving the condition of the black man, in America or anywhere else. To be sure, pushing pro-business policies would be old-time religion to a conservative like Hart; but that should not obscure the essential fact that no community—whether it be an ethnic group, a city, state, province, region or country—can hope to claw its way to the top of the economic heap without nourishing a strong entrepreneurial drive among its people. Before wealth can be redistributed, it must first be created; and the reality that it is almost exclusively created by the capitalists of the world—not by politicians, bureaucrats or administrators of social programs—is inescapable. The sons and daughters of Italy, Russia, Hungary, Greece, India, China etc. who came to America to build a better life did so in large part by learning how to beat the native-born Yankees at their game of free enterprise. There is no reason not to think that the offspring of the Motherland—brought to America in chains, freed from bondage by civil war and savagely subjugated for a century thereafter—will ever reach the proverbial Promised Land without learning and applying that same lesson.

Hart spent the rest of his article enumerating other obstructions to black advancement, such as predominantly white labor unions that sought to exclude black workers from membership, minimum-wage laws that inadvertently decrease the number of available jobs, and the lack of black representation on urban police forces, particularly in the work they do in black neighborhoods. He closed his piece by noting that the scourges of violence and lawlessness in the late 1960s were not confined to the black community: “The white family is often no rock of Gibraltar…We hear much of Negro violence. But at every level of the society an increasing number of people are empty and violent, depraved and irresponsible. Those all too modern murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood were not Negroes.”

Perhaps most importantly, Hart emphasized that all the measures that could be taken to improve the black man’s condition in America, however effective they were, would take time to kick in, and could not be expected to meet with success in an immediate, short-term, emotionally gratifying manner. Hence, aside from solidarity, ethnic pride and independence from the society’s charity, patience would be perhaps the most important virtue that African-Americans and their sympathizers could bring to the effort to uplift the race. “We cannot expect spectacular results in the short run,” Hart wisely warned. “The advance of the Negroes, like the advance of other groups, will come mainly, if at all, through the efforts of the group itself.”

This is a lesson that not only African-Americans, but African descendants the world over would do so well to take to heart. The challenges faced by the American branch of the African Diaspora have never been and never will be perfectly identical to those faced by West Indians, African-Canadians, or Afro-Latin Americans, to say nothing of our cousins in the Motherland itself. Furthermore, much has changed in the forty-odd years since Hart and his conservative comrades pronounced on the race question in America. Most, if not all, of the official legal bastions of racism have been leveled, while more and more descendants of the slaves brought to the New World in chains join their countries’ middle classes each year.

Yet the sad commentary is that fundamentally the same social ills identified by Professor Hart et. al. continue to plague black people today, and in all branches of the Diaspora. Our family structure still totters, as we suffer higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and absentee fatherhood than ever; we still fail to coalesce as a community in the most crucial ways, especially in the economic realm; and we still rely far too heavily on the guilt-driven charity of white folks for our subsistence. This is as true in Montreal's Little Burgundy and Toronto's Rexdale as it is in Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant; no less accurate in Kingston, Jamaica, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago or Rio de Janeiro’s City of God than it is in South Central Los Angeles. Even if all these scourges could be blamed on racial oppression in general and slavery in particular, that would not change the fact that they are our problems, and only we can ultimately solve them. The sooner we as a people come to that realization, and begin to act accordingly, the better. If it takes the stern admonitions of the conservative white males of yesteryear to open our eyes to these truths, then so be it.

Knocked Up

2008-09-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

I think it unfair for a vocal minority of mad-dog Democrats to use the pregnancy of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol as dagger with which to attack Governor Palin herself. We have no idea whether Sarah Palin has ever talked to her kids about sex, safe or otherwise (though admittedly, her socially conservative views would suggest she probably hasn’t, except to urge them to save themselves for marriage). Even less do we know whether Bristol and her boyfriend—whose own MySpace page makes him out to be something of a douche bag—ever talked about sex before having it, whether they had unsafe sex, whether they tried to use protection but used it incorrectly, or whether they used it correctly but it nonetheless failed. Without that information—without knowing how much the pregnancy had to do with Sarah Palin’s purported parental irresponsibility—it makes little sense to use Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a battering ram against her mother. With that information, mind you, it might be fair game. But somehow I doubt that’s one body of facts we’re likely to come by.

The pregnancy, however, might make a more reasonable anecdote in an argument in favor of sex education in schools. I myself support sex ed and oppose abstinence-only education, mind you, though it strikes me as reasonable and prudent for such programs to encourage teenagers to preferably abstain. But as a former college classmate of mine argued convincingly today, the finding that even teenagers who have been taught to abstain not only at school but also in the home are still having sex would seem to undermine the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs, if not necessarily their soundness in principle. And as a staunch pragmatist, I firmly believe that a policy that has been shown not to work in the real world—however well-motivated or morally just it may be—should be discarded.

Also, can we all learn a lesson from this, and treat claims made by the fire-breathers at DailyKos just a liiiiiitle more skeptically? Whatever criticisms are to be made of the major media outlets’ coverage of Sarah Palin’s candidacy so far, they are to be commended for refraining from picking up the original hateful rumor DailyKos spread about young Trig Palin being Bristol’s daughter, not Sarah’s, and the latter’s “pregnancy” being a lie to cover up her daughter’s impregnation. Some folks just aren’t cut out to be reliable journalistic sources.

Of Elections and Experience

2008-09-03T11:54:00.008-04:00

Has anyone else had their fill of both parties' fetishistic fixation on "experience" in this election campaign?

First, Hillary Clinton, after perusing her own policy platform and that of Barack Obama and finding precious little difference between the two, had little choice but to fall back on the purported experience gap between them as her ace in the hole. Once the wily Obama nonetheless unseated her and won the nomination himself, Republicans wasted little time in picking up where Hillary had left off, warning American voters not to trust a rookie Senator with the position of leader of the free world. It was almost certainly in partial response to this criticism that Senator Obama selected as his running mate knock-around Senate veteran Joe Biden (one of the most voluble members of an institution notorious for its stable of pompous blowhards). Biden's 36 years of Senate experience, Democrats argued, more than offset Obama's green-as-grass pedigree, particularly in the area of foreign policy. Then Republican nominee John McCain selected first-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, opening himself up to retaliatory Democratic assaults on her inexperience. Since that announcement, the campaign has--I hope temporarily--degenerated into a to-and-fro argument between Democrats and Republicans, not over whether experience matters to the presidency nor over how important it is, but over which ticket is more experienced and therefore better entrusted with the presidency.

What gives?

As I already pointed out in a response to a comment on one of my earlier posts, neither Senator Obama nor Governor Palin would be the first top-tier executive in the United States government without extensive experience in that field, whether in the executive or legislative realm. Nor would either candidate be the first successful such executive, should either one end up performing well on the job, of course. Abraham Lincoln (remember him? saved the Union? freed the slaves? or at least kick-started the process that ultimately freed them?) was a railsplitter, lawyer, Illinois state legislator and Congressmen before becoming President. Not much experience there, quite frankly. Theodore Roosevelt was not only not very experienced--he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for about a year, as New York Governor for about two years and as Vice President for less than a year before moving into the White House--he was also the youngest president ever, replacing the slain William McKinley as president at the tender age of 42. Both their faces--Republican faces--have graced Mount Rushmore for eighty-odd years.

Nor have all arguably experienced presidents turned out to be terribly good ones. Richard Nixon served as a congressman for six years, and then as Vice President for eight. Those years of experience, apparently, did not teach him enough humility or respect for the law to avoid Watergate. Lyndon Johnson's twelve years as a Texas Congressman and further twelve years as a Texas Senator did nothing to help him handle the Vietnam War any better than he did. And it's not only past presidents who make for useful case studies in how unreliable "experience" is as a gauge of a given candidate's public policy judgment. Joe Biden's much-ballyhooed foreign-policy experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not stop him from making a series of hopelessly wrong calls in the domain of US foreign policy over the past couple of decades. It did not stop him from voting against the first Gulf War in 1991 or for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or from opposing the undeniably successful troop surge in 2007. Nor did it stop him from advancing his understandable yet nonetheless misguided and ill-conceived proposal to split up Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines in ways that would almost certainly have proven practically unfeasible, would have exacerbated sectarian divisions both in Iraq and in the Middle East at large, and would have vastly strengthened Iran's geopolitical position in the region at America's expense.

Every time I hear Democrats and Republicans joust over this or that candidate's experience, I wonder why no one seems to remember that George W. Bush deliberately surrounded himself with quite experienced Cabinet secretaries--many of them alumni of his father's administration--partly to compensate for his own complete lack of foreign policy know-how. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz--these Bush Administration luminaries and more had been kicking around Washington for decades, amassing copious amounts of foreign policy experience before ascending to the heights of the executive branch of the US government. This did not stop any of them from utterly bollixing up the occupation of Iraq during the four years between the invasion and the surge.

Vice President Dick Cheney, the first President Bush's secretary of defense, cogently made the practical case against invading Iraq in 1991, pointing out the quite foreseeable difficulties of keeping the peace between the Sunnis and Shiites, suppressing the inevitable nationalist and Islamist resistance to any US military presence on Arab soil, staving off a lurking Iran, and keeping the restive Kurds from rocking the boat in the north of the country. This was to say nothing of the task of divvying up the country's oil and gas spoils between all of the above parties to everyone's satisfaction. Yet this cautionary wisdom of the early 1990s seems to have been completely lost on him in 2002 and 2003.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for his part, was reportedly hell-bent on using Iraq as a testing ground for his plans to reform the US military into a nimble, agile force that could strike deep into enemy territory at record speed, overthrow and defeat America's enemies, and come home in a prompt and timely fashion. It seems not to have occurred to him that he might have an insurgency and an incubating civil war on his hands shortly thereafter. He thus did not plan for the kind of military presence in Iraq that could have quelled either the insurgency or the Sunni-Shiite troubles in their infancy. Thousands of American troops and tens, and perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis have paid the price for his incompetence--which his decades of experience totally failed to correct.

What, then, is the significance of experience as a presidential qualification anyway? Can we not expect either presidential candidate, not to mention his vice president, to be surrounded by advisers and managers who will guide him through the nitty-gritty of running the country? In light of this--and many other considerations too numerous and intricate to scrutinize here--can we not agree that judgment is a far more reliable and significant barometer of how well or how poorly a given candidate would perform as president? Must we rely so heavily on a crass tally of how many years he has spent wheeling and dealing, pork-barreling and just generally bullshitting in any elected office at any level of government?

Just a question.

Conventional Wisdom

2008-08-28T20:53:00.005-04:00

As I listen to Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver, Colorado, the thought that crisscrosses my mind is my wish that John McCain had won the Republican nomination for president in 2000.

Had Republicans had the sense to give McCain that victory, hopefully followed by a McCain win in the general election, I strongly suspect that Barack Obama would not now have the opportunity to score easy points against his Republican opponent--whoever that opponent would have been--by stating simply that the latter had voted with the incumbent president ninety percent of the time, for even if that statistic were true, it would not have been such a political liability. Obama's fellow Democrats could not have lambasted the GOP for exacerbating the federal budget deficit and national debt, for a President McCain would not likely have pushed through unnecessary tax cuts, signed a massive new entitlement program into law and allowed federal spending to spiral out of control, as the current occupant of the White House has. Obama would not have been able to push his Iraq withdrawal strategy on the back of the success of the troop surge, either because the surge would have come at the time it should have--during the initial invasion of Iraq--or because, as I suspect, a President McCain might not have invaded Iraq at all.

Had Republicans not put their party's reins into the hands of a swaggering simpleton, they would not have handed the Democrats an opportunity to defeat the GOP candidate simply by associating him with the current president. Had they not relied on kneejerk cultural conservatism and gung-ho jingoism to narrowly win elections, then stupidly predict a "permanent majority" for their party, they would not have unwittingly placed a political parvenu with barely any governing experience and zero legislative achievements to speak of within spitting distance of the presidency. Had they done a better job of choosing their battles abroad--avoiding biting off more foreign wars than they could chew--and of adhering to true small-government conservative principles at home, they would not have put the Grand Old Party's faithful in a position in which they simply cannot point to substantial recent accomplishments, or impressive empirical results of their policies, to bolster their candidate's claim to the White House.

This is why I cannot wait to hear what the heirs to Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan plan to offer American voters at the Republican convention next week. Frankly, I am dreading the spectacle. This president's on-the-job performance has been abysmal in almost every respect, and those ideas of his administration that were arguably sound in theory, he has executed with the most atrocious incompetence. He has left his party's congressional cohort in tatters; even with the current Democratic Congress' subterranean approval ratings--less than half the president's, if that can be believed--the Dems are still expected to reinforce their grip on both houses of the nation's legislature this November. He has left conservative principles discredited in the eyes of most ordinary Americans, at least for the time being. He has robbed his partisans of any chance of regaining political advantage in the foreseeable future. He has left them in a position in which only the party's most notorious maverick would have made a viable presidential candidate--in which the Republican nominee's only hope in hell of winning this election depends on treating his own party's leader like a leper escaped from the colony.

Poor Republicans. What are they to do in such chilly climate? I, for one, suggest they take advantage of their current (and quite well-deserved) spell in the penalty box to train the new generation of rising stars in the party--the Jindals, the Sanfords, and the rest--for future leadership, wise leadership of the kind that will not leave the GOP so humiliated and disgraced in Americans' eyes ever again.

They must confront the increasing economic inequality in American society, the difficulties faced by the middle class and their disenchantment with Republican doctrine--face up to these issues and address them with coherent policies to combat them. They must discover new and innovative means of reducing the size and spending of the federal government--without abdicating Washington's basic social responsibilities to the people--before cutting taxes, rather than choking off crucial revenue streams while borrowing Chinese renminbi to make up the shortfall.

They must develop policies to empower Americans to bounce back from economic tribulations and adapt to economic evolution, rather than shielding them from global competition or propping them up in ways that diminish their incentives to work. They must find ways to rein in avaricious corporate executives and reckless Wall Street moneylenders, preventing them from bleeding their workers dry or derailing the economy without penalizing the entrepreneurial elan on which any society's prosperity is truly built. And they must learn how to wield American wealth and power more prudently and shrewdly on the world stage while continuing the tough work of gradually setting more and more captive peoples free, and without rewarding unscrupulous global actors (both state and non-state) for the dirt they do or sacrificing America's security on the altar of internationalism.

Quite the mouthful, this laundry list. Yet it is only a taste of the Herculean task that awaits today's beleaguered Republicans. If the party that abolished slavery and defeated the Soviet Union is to redeem itself from its current dishonor, then the sooner it begins the 21st-century overhaul it so desperately needs, the better.

Tempest on a Magazine Cover

2008-07-15T22:39:00.009-04:00

What bizarre bedfellows and blood enemies this presidential election campaign has made. Each week seems to produce some new episode that, far from stoking the smoldering embers of partisan warfare, actually pits one faction of the American Left against another, causing them to fall upon each other like so many frenzied hyenas while non-liberals gaze on with bemused smirks, sometimes even lending a kind word of support to one side or the other. Like all entertaining spectacles, the primary clash of those two Democratic titans, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had to come to an end eventually; but it was not long before America’s knack for crass bacchanalia stepped in to pick up the slack. In the past month alone, the 2008 campaign has brought us quadrennial shit-disturber Ralph Nader accusing Senator Obama of “talking white”—for failing to propose nationalizing the banking industry or abolishing unearned incomes, one imagines—as well as corporate shake-down artist Jesse Jackson’s stated wish to amputate the good Senator’s gonads for the principal sin of “talking down to black people”.

The third week of July has thus far treated us to the hue and cry over the cover art of The New Yorker’s latest issue. Its depiction of a turban-wearing Senator Obama fist-bumping a camouflage-clad, assault rifle-toting, fully-Afro’d Michelle in the Oval Office, with a wall-hanging portrait of Osama bin Laden overlooking a star-spangled banner merrily roasting in the fireplace:

...has sent America’s chattering classes into their latest fit of outraged conniptions. “The New Yorker may think…that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” lamented Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” It was not long before McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds and, eventually, Senator McCain himself hopped on the bandwagon, adding that they could see how many would find the cover offensive. Several months ago, the de facto Republican nominee commended Hillary Clinton, claiming she had indeed been the victim of sexist smears during the Democratic primaries. Now Senator McCain repeats that feat, defending one liberal voice from the purported mud-slinging of another. Meet Pair of Strange Bedfellows #1.

A frankly disturbing number of observers appear to have taken the magazine’s cheeky cover at face value. Does no one do any homework before passing political judgments anymore? Does no one realize that the New Yorker is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal publication, one that is openly sympathetic to the Democratic Party in general and to Senator Obama in particular? Indeed, the magazine is emblematic of the very same wealthy, white, college-educated, intellectually haughty, insufferably self-satisfied “limousine liberal” demographic that happens to constitute a pillar of Senator Obama’s electoral base. True to this form, The New Yorker has been harshly critical of the nonsensical caricatures of the Senator and his wife peddled by some of his less scrupulous conservative detractors. Given the content of the magazine’s cover, the track record of the publication itself and the context surrounding this whole situation, it is plainly obvious that the creator of this latest cover was taking aim at Senator Obama’s least reputable critics, not at the Senator himself. Yet that has in no way deterred legions of professional hand-wringers from braying over this latest faux pas. Now, here I am, implicitly defending the same temple of supercilious liberalism I lambasted in an earlier screed of mine. Say hello to Pair of Strange Bedfellows #2.

Needless to say, no such outcry was ever raised over the caricature of a caged, trussed-up John McCain being poked with sharpened bamboo sticks by President Bush and Senators Clinton and Obama, clad in Viet Cong-style black pyjamas, featured in last month’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine:

Surely I needn’t point out how grotesque and disgraceful this cartoon was, especially when one considers that Rolling Stone—the hip, youthful, sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll, rage-against-the-machine liberal counterpart to the effete New Yorker—unquestionably meant for it to be taken quite literally. I am unsure when half a decade spent being tortured by communist jailers in the service of one’s country became an appropriate object of mockery and derision. What I am reasonably certain of is that Senator Obama himself has shown a great deal more good sense in his own personal response to the flap over the New Yorker’s cover than have his throngs of disciples. In his interview with CNN’s Larry King tonight, Obama coolly commented, “It’s a cartoon...and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment. And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it…I’ve seen and heard worse. I do think that…in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But, you know, that was their editorial judgment.”

As tempted as I am to dismiss this reaction—unimpeachably lucid and sagacious to the untrained eye and ear—as just so much good-goody posturing, I have to conclude that it is sincere, given that it suits the generally unflappable demeanor of the Democrats’ newly minted nominee. If only the good Senator’s followers would take a page from his book on this matter.

Aha...

2008-07-01T22:54:00.004-04:00

Today's Washington Post featured an article by E.J. Dionne that began by asking, "If the long conservative era that began with Ronald Reagan's election is over, will the judges appointed during the right's ascendancy be able to block, frustrate and undermine the efforts of a new progressive majority?" In a nutshell, Mr. Dionne spends the next thirteen paragraphs answering this question with a resounding "probably".

He may very well turn out to be right, and I share his belief that unelected conservative judges have no business thwarting the clearly expressed democratic will of the American people based on their own personal ideological biases. Almost needless to say, however, Mr. Dionne entirely ignores the myriad cases with which the jurisprudential landscape is littered in which liberal judges did just that. This is not to mention the, shall we say, rather overstated litany of potential horrors he fears a more right-leaning Court may perpetrate which he parades in front of the reader.

"It's not hard to imagine the cases that conservatives would bring against laws passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a President Barack Obama," Dionne writes. "Why wouldn't a movement that has tried to eviscerate wetlands laws and the Endangered Species Act challenge cap-and-trade legislation aimed at dealing with global warming? If Congress ever passed a "card-check" law to make it easier for unions to organize, those who never much liked the minimum wage or collective bargaining would certainly try to overturn the new labor right in court. And what would be the legal fate of new regulations on banking called forth by the economic devastation of the subprime mess, or bank bailouts that may be necessary to keep capitalism on track, or mandatory mortgage renegotiations to keep people from being thrown out of their homes?"

It's quite the doomsday scenario our friend has painted for us, isn't it? Well. While I wouldn't quite put it past legions of fulminating right-wing lawyers to mount constitutional challenges to many, or perhaps even most, or perhaps even all of the afore-enumerated liberal policies, I rather suspect that the odds are against the Court's striking down many, if any, of them on constitutional grounds. Let us disregard the obvious riposte that few or no such challenges could honestly be said to be grounded in the Constitution's written strictures--after all, this would prove no great obstacle to truly activist judges, even those of a conservative bent. Mr. Dionne, I think, has greatly overestimated the conservatism of today's Supreme Court. There are still only four reliable, consistent conservatives on the Court today: the boilerplate-spewing Thomas, the old originalist warhorse Scalia, and the new kids on the block, Roberts and Alito. As last week's decision rejecting the death penalty as punishment for the unspeakably brutal rape of a young girl showed, this right-wing cohort is more than effectively counterbalanced by the aging liberal luminaries Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg. Chief Narcissist Kennedy, meanwhile, ricochets between liberal and conservative positions with merry abandon. Today's Court isn't right-wing; it's polarized, is what it is.

That may change, of course, should John McCain pull off the remarkable feat of winning the presidency--and the right to make Supreme Court nominations for at least the next four years with it. I say "may change" rather than "will change" simply because it is not unheard of for a president to grossly misperceive the true ideological leanings and judicial philosophy of one of his appointees to the Court. (The incorrigibly liberal David Souter was, after all, appointed by the first President Bush on the mistaken expectation--fed by Souter's own nomination hearing testimony--that he would hew to the conservative, "originalist" wing of the bench.) Nonetheless, even this possibility hardly gets Mr. Dionne off the hook, since as the above excerpt from his article shows, the scenario he draws presupposes the accession of a certain apostle of Audacious Hope to the Oval Office.

Even if McCain should beat the odds and win the White House, however, and eventually dispatch more conservative gavel-pounders to One First Street Northeast, Washington, D.C., and said Justices do deep-six a slew of liberal pet projects, it will still prove my essential argument. Because if this (unlikely) scenario does play out, we can rely upon Mr. Dionne and his co-ideologues to condemn said jurisprudence, in the strongest terms, as a form of "judicial activism" or "judicial overreach"--which is precisely what it would be. It would be a golden opportunity for right-wingers to puff up their chests and say, "So, you liberals want to appoint judges who'll legislate from the bench? Well, two can play at that game!" This would be just the rude awakening liberals need as to how judicial activism lends itself just as well to right-wing causes as to left-wing ones, and prove that the intrinsic principle on which such activism ultimately rests is neither liberalism nor conservatism, but quite simply the raw, virtually unchecked power of the judges themselves. May such a turn of events finally open liberals' eyes to the folly of allowing unelected and unaccountable judges to remake the Constitution in their own ideological image and likeness. Now that is an audacious hope indeed.

"Mexicans and Machines"

2008-06-25T22:16:00.004-04:00

I'm no fan of Drew Carey's comedy--I still consider his sitcom the unfunniest one that ever sullied my TV screen--but I have to say, the man makes a righteous political commentator. Just take a look at this latest missive on Reason TV, in response to certain politicians'

and prime-time talk show gasbags'

rampant anti-NAFTA demagogy:

http://www.reason.tv/video/show/451.html

Seriously! Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out!!

A Breath of Fresh Obamair

2008-06-25T20:49:00.000-04:00

Senator Barack Obama, today: “I disagree with the decision [i.e. the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for child rapists as cruel and unusual punishment]. ...I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances, for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child--six or eight years old--is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that, under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution. Now...had the Supreme Court said ‘We want to constrain the ability of states to do this to make sure that it's done in a careful and appropriate way’, that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.”

Fascinating.

It's nice to hear a prominent Democrat finally showing a willingness to disagree with a Supreme Court decision that happens to adhere to his party's orthodoxy. It is safe to presume that liberals, many of whom oppose capital punishment in toto, pretty much all oppose it as punishment for any crime other than murder. A five-Justice majority has just endorsed this position. I actually personally share this particular view; I'm just not sure that the (unelected and unaccountable) Supreme Court is justified in forcing it on (democratically elected and accountable) American policymakers, given the vagueness of the Constitution's “cruel and unusual punishment” clause. (I especially can't abide this “evolving standards of decency” bovine excrement—definitely one of the most ludicrous excuses for a constitutional test the Court has cooked up since the ditzy “penumbras” and “emanations” of yesteryear—that Justice Kennedy dusted off from the Roper v. Simmons case of several years ago to employ once more.)

Can it finally have dawned on Senator Obama that the Justices on the Court—even the liberal ones!—cannot be trusted to substitute their own judgment, heavily colored as it is by their ideological predilections, for the guidance provided by the written text of the Constitution itself? That activist interpretations of that august eighteenth-century parchment—with their dubious distortions of the Constitution’s meaning that go far beyond what the Framers and their successors enshrined in writing—are no more legitimate when they happen to suit his liberal policy agenda than they are when they happen to suit his opponents’? That the Constitution means only what it actually says—nothing more, nothing less?

Of course, I have my doubts, and even if this salient fact has dawned on the esteemed Senator, I imagine he wouldn’t dare risk unnerving his base even more than this latest statement probably already has by saying so in public. Suffice it to express my own personal pleasure at seeing Obama’s display of a modicum of political courage in critiquing a decision handed down from on high by the Gnomes of Foggy Bottom that must have warmed most liberals’ hearts. Obama seems to have be on the cusp of the realization that there is more to being a solid interpreter of the Constitution than “having empathy for the powerless” or “knowing what it’s like to be black, or female, or poor, or gay”, to paraphrase the criteria based on which he has claimed he would select his Supreme Court nominees as president.

The hell of it is that this particular decision needn’t have been the catalyst for this potential epiphany, for as stated above, the Court’s opinion in this case may not necessarily be a case of judicial activism per se. At least this majority opinion actually had a textual leg to stand on—namely, the Eighth Amendment—and the Justices may arguably be on solid ground in using their own judgment to interpret the unhelpfully vague Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause, lest this crucial star in the constitutional firmament go completely unenforced. If only the Court would discard such deeply flawed tools as the fatuous “evolving standards of decency” test, I might actually side with the Learned Elders of First Street against the Democratic Party’s newly christened Boy Wonder.

"Screwing the Pooch"...

2008-06-09T10:51:00.003-04:00

...as I while away my days looking for post-graduate employment, the above-mentioned naughty little expression crosses my mind. When did bestiality become a metaphor for idleness anyway?

Obama & Hillary's Debt

2008-06-07T12:17:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post to express my amusement at recent proposals, made most prominently by inveterate Clinton supporter and former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, for the Obama campaign and its supporters to donate money to the Clinton campaign to help defray the latter's debt. Only liberal Democrats could come up with such a jokey scheme. God forbid Senator Clinton should assume full responsibility for running her own campaign into the ground and deal with the consequences of her ineptitude. Does the mind really not rebel against any scenario in which the fair-and-square winner of a political contest owes the loser compensation?

A Harvard-Trained Lawyer on John McCain’s Court

2008-05-28T20:16:00.000-04:00

I do so hate it when I am quietly flipping through one of the daily or weekly publications I read religiously on mornings—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, even my own campus’ dismal Daily Princetonian—and stumble upon an opinion piece so aggravatingly simplistic, so lacking in nuance or critical thinking, that I literally cannot help myself but fire up my computer and pound out a furious rebuttal. For such a glib piece of work to come from a Harvard-trained lawyer (and legal commentator of TV network news fame) only adds insult to this injury.

Yet that is precisely what occurred this morning. Jeffrey Toobin’s piece in the May 26 edition of The New Yorker set my blood aboil with its doctrinaire liberal stance on constitutional interpretation, to say nothing of its complete refusal to subject the facts underlying the issues on which he spills his ink to any halfway decent scrutiny. More importantly, in so doing, he has ruined my breakfast. For that, he must pay the price to my word processor.

In his appraisal of John McCain’s recent speech on Supreme Court appointments at Wake Forest University, Toobin digs into McCain’s reference to the 2005 Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that struck down the death penalty for murderers under the age of 18 as unconstitutional. In his speech, McCain expressed disapproval of the majority opinion in Roper—written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—in its reference to “the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.” Toobin writes, “Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.”

One wonders whether Toobin means to argue that the Supreme Court ought to judge the constitutionality of policies enacted by democratically elected representatives of the American people based on how commonplace such policies are in the other countries of the world. Such an argument, of course, would be deeply problematic at best, not only in its logical ramifications for US national sovereignty, but also in its complete neglect of the question of whether there is any solid basis for such a judgment in the Constitution of the United States itself. This is not to mention the distinct possibility that McCain does not necessarily believe in the juvenile death penalty, but rather simply believes that its practice or abolition should be decided by American voters, not by the unelected Supreme Court. In true-blue liberal fashion, Toobin leaves these questions completely unexamined.

As for the facts of the case itself, Toobin conveniently glosses over the fact that the defendant slated for execution in Roper v. Simmons was only several months short of his eighteenth birthday. He committed a carefully orchestrated, calculatingly premeditated, heinous murder of a completely innocent woman, tying her up, locking her in the trunk of his car, driving her to a national park and throwing her off a fifty-foot bridge onto sharp rocks in swirling rapids. Toobin takes little notice of this, failing even to question whether someone who is that close to legal adulthood—and therefore surely more than mature enough to grasp both the evil of his actions as well as their consequences—should be eligible for capital punishment for a homicide so depraved as the young Mr. Simmons’.

Leaving these loose ends left so messily untied, Toobin goes on to lambaste McCain for the latter’s objection to the Court’s reliance on the “penumbras” that supposedly “emanate from” the rights explicitly enshrined in the text of the Constitution. He explains that those words come from the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which established the purported constitutional right to privacy that formed the basis for that opinion’s prohibition of bans on birth control for married couples as well as for later decisions striking down anti-abortion laws in the states. Toobin decries McCain’s speech as “a dog whistle for the right—an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teenagers.”

A Harvard Law School alumnus like Toobin is surely aware that neither the word “privacy” nor any of its possible synonyms appears anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Yet he doesn’t let that stop him from pillorying McCain for daring to protest the Court’s unilateral amendment of the Constitution to include a right that simply isn’t there. Nor does he even bother to explain exactly how the Third Amendment to the Constitution, with its ban on the quartering of troops in private homes—and nothing more—or the Fourth Amendment, with its prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures—and nothing more—somehow translate into a blanket right to privacy. The Griswold Court’s comically flimsy pretext that these rights have “penumbras” that include a right to privacy is taken by Toobin as gospel truth, with not even the barest pretense of critical analysis on his part. Meanwhile, the implications for democracy of such an exercise of raw judicial power (with its addition of a new right to the Constitution by judicial fiat rather than by the will of the American people) are left not only unevaluated, but completely unmentioned.

Let us count the ways in which Toobin’s sophomorically superficial appraisal of McCain’s constitutional philosophy could actually militate against his own political views. He implicitly defends Justice Kennedy’s reliance on the legal conventions of foreign countries to provide what the latter called “respected confirmation” for the Court’s decision to strike down the juvenile death penalty. How would American abortion jurisprudence turn out if it were subjected to this same interpretive modus operandi? As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has pointed out ad nauseam, many European countries, for instance, actually have abortion regulations that are at least somewhat more restrictive than the untrammeled access to abortion that the Supreme Court has force-fed the American people since 1973. These are the kinds of regulations that precedents like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would require the Court to strike down in a fetal heartbeat. Conversely, if the Court were to apply Justice Kennedy’s—and Jeffrey Toobin’s—philosophy consistently, Roe, Casey and other such bastions of judicial oligarchy would have to go out the window. Personally, I have my doubts about the likelihood of that ever happening. Ideologues like Mr. Toobin, whether liberal or conservative, are not known for letting logical consistency stand in the way of their respective agendas.

Let us now turn to the Griswold Court’s “penumbras” and “emanations” nonsense which Mr. Toobin worships so abjectly. If indeed this was a sound legal and logical basis for the Court’s privacy jurisprudence, why not apply it to other constitutional controversies as well? What would then be the argument against finding in “penumbras” of, or “emanations” from, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause a “liberty of contract” that would invalidate minimum-wage laws and sundry other economic regulations? After all, this would not differ much from a series of opinions the Supreme Court has handed down in the past. I refer, of course, to 1905’s Lochner v. New York case, in which the Court ruled that New York State’s laws limiting the number of hours a bakery could require its employees to work was an unconstitutional breach of the liberty of each worker to negotiate the terms—all the terms—of his own employment contract with his boss. Mind you, neither the Lochner Court nor its successors (which spent the next thirty years obstructing the establishment of the American welfare state on these same grounds) relied on “penumbras” or “emanations” to do their dastardly deeds. Yet surely we could agree that the last thing they needed was another useful pretext for it, no?

One should consider that Toobin’s article is guilty of precisely the same shortcoming of which he accuses McCain: slyly omitting certain inconvenient elements of the issues under scrutiny. I have already pointed out his failure to explain the facts of the Roper v. Simmons case. Later in his article, Toobin notes that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts’ leadership has “approved a federal law that bans “a form of abortion”. Naturally, he neglects to mention the grisly nature of the “form of abortion” in question, scientifically known as “intact dilation and extraction” and more colloquially known as “partial-birth abortion”. This entails pulling most of the fetus’ body from the birth canal, then puncturing the base of the fetus’ skull and suctioning out its brain to allow its head to be removed as well.

Though I have my own opinion on whether such quasi-infanticide should be legal, I do not mean to denigrate the legitimate debate that is to be had about it. Rather, I believe that given the Constitution’s silence on this or any related issue, and given the complex vagaries of the matter itself, the debate should be had, out in the open, by the American people, and that it is their judgment that ought to prevail—not that of nine robed judges on an unelected court.

This point leads directly to the root cause of Mr. Toobin’s insatiable appetite for left-wing judicial activism. It is fundamentally the same as the root cause of many movement conservatives’ appetite for right-wing judicial activism (of the kind that wishes to strike down policies like affirmative action, for example). I refer to the inability to distinguish between the political and the legal—or more precisely, between the political and the constitutional. There are too many minds on both left and right that seem to believe that almost any policy they disagree with must be unconstitutional. As a result, there are too few souls who truly oppose judicial activism in toto; the general tendency is to approve of it—or, more accurately, to characterize it as something other than judicial activism—whenever it yields policy outcomes that suit one’s own ideological predilections.

Mr. Toobin is a picture-perfect example of this. He believes, for instance, that abortion should be legal. A long-ago Court decided, on the flimsiest of premises, that legal abortion was not only right in principle and in practice, but a constitutional requirement as well, and those who beg to differ have yet to build a solid majority on the nation’s loftiest bench since. As a result, Mr. Toobin and his ilk believe that legal abortion is not only the most just policy, but a constitutional right as well, and therefore insist that the Supreme Court enforce that particular viewpoint on society as a whole—the democratic will of the American people be damned.

Omitted from the underpinnings of this childishly kneejerk stance is any consideration of whether the Constitution itself actually supports this view or any other like it. The Supreme Court is treated by Mr. Toobin and his liberal sympathizers, and by their opponents on the right, not as the institution responsible for ascertaining, as impartially and as free from political bias as possible, what the Constitution’s objective verdict is on the issues facing society, but rather as a rubber-stamp for forcing their own biased political opinions on the nation as a whole. If the Court issues decisions that fly in the face of liberal orthodoxy—such as allowing American voters, via their democratically elected representatives in the states or in Congress, to write policy on issues like abortion and capital punishment—well, then, the Justices responsible must be crazy or even bigoted, and more “progressive” types must be appointed to the Court, pronto. What the Constitution itself actually says—or, just as importantly, what it doesn’t say—about these contentious social issues is the last thing on your average politico’s mind.

Nothing else could be the impetus for Toobin’s characterization of the Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia conservative cohort on today’s Supreme Court as “more radical than any that the Court has seen since FDR’s appointments”. To Toobin, only a “radical” could possibly believe that governments should be allowed to ban the puncturing of a half-born baby’s skull and the suctioning out of its brains, or that said governments should not be allowed to forbid a child to attend a school which is already attended by too many other students of his or her skin color.

To Toobin, the age of Chief Justice Earl Warren was “the noblest era in the Court’s history” as much because it was the most liberal era in the Court’s history as for any other reason. Were many of those liberal decisions largely disconnected from well-informed, well-reasoned interpretation of the Constitution itself? Did they inadvertently usurp much of the authority of the American people’s democratically elected representatives in the process? Even if they did, reply far too many judicial liberals, so what? It’s a small price to pay for edging American society a little bit closer to the left-liberal conception of “social justice”.

Perhaps the most dismaying element of Mr. Toobin’s puerile approach to constitutional interpretation is that it comes from a graduate of Harvard Law School. If one can make it through that august institution of higher learning without gaining a more nuanced view of the world’s finest democratic constitution than this, I just may have to take a rain check on that LSAT prep course.

My Favorite Things

2008-05-11T01:07:00.000-04:00

January 2007

I like the scent of Princeton, New Jersey and sunset on the golf course behind Forbes. I like the bustle on Nassau Street and the uterine warmth of the Terrace TV room. I like the Dinky's whistle and the Sunday morning sound of the Grad Tower bell calling the faithful to worship. I like the view of the Montreal skyline from the mighty St. Lawrence. I like the cobblestoned streets of Old Montreal and the wooded slopes of Mont Royal and the brilliant copper dome of St. Joseph's Oratory at night. I like the bars on Crescent Street and the nightclubs on The Main and the backyards of Notre-Dame-de-Grace and the porches of the Plateau and the cafes on St. Denis. I like the rolling hills of the Cimitiere Notre-Dame-des-Neiges and the monuments to the great Montrealers buried therein and the eerie peace I feel when visiting my father's grave.

I like the taste of shish taouk and beaver tails and $1.99 spaghetti bowls from Peel Pub and dark honey beers from Brutopia and ribeyes from L'Entrecote St. Jean. I like rum and Coke and flaming Dr. Peppers and Bacardi Select and Crown Royal and Southern Comfort and smooth shots of Appleton rum. I like the saintly smells that come out of my mother's kitchen. I like meditations at the Unity Church of Montreal and parang at Christmas and steelband practices in dingy uptown duplexes and Jump-Up every summer. I like canoeing on a quiet lake outside Ottawa and bake-and-shark on a Trini beach and grinding with a bevy of beauties at a soca jam on a boat on Lake Ontario. I like politics and history and moral philosophy. I like the courage of the warriors thanks to whom ordinary people sleep in peace (see George Orwell). I like Sustained Dialogue discussions and reading Supreme Court decisions and selecting tunes in the Terrace taproom. I like twangy Canadian French and honeyed Southern drawls and sweet Spanish voices and the beguiling lilt of Trinidadian women. I like nappy hair and Latin eyes and Mediterranean noses and African lips and fiercely sun-kissed skin. I like historical fiction and crime dramas and the charisma of a good movie villain. I like blaxploitation soundtracks and Prince's ballads and I-Wayne's grooves and David Rudder's classics and patriotic anthems and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I like big, boisterous families and the sound of a newborn's cries, the sound of life's longing for itself. I like individual liberty and personal responsibility and closing the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be. I like the honor of a man and the strength of a woman. I like my threads, my voice, my wit, my charm, and my sass. I love my Creator, my family, my hometown and my University. I love the land of my people, the land of my birth and the land of the free and the home of the brave. I love freedom, honor, faith, family and truth. I love life and I thank God for everything and apologize for nothing.

How are the Mighty Fallen

2008-05-11T00:52:00.000-04:00

April 20, 2008

Few quirks of modern politics aggravate me quite as much as idolatry: the wrongheaded and ultimately self-defeating tendency of ordinary people to put popular politicians up on a pedestal. The disappointment that ensues when these figures inevitably succumb to the cynicism and dishonesty of politics would be comic, were its implications for citizens’ engagement in the democratic process not so tragic.

A couple of months ago, I noted with satisfaction the apparent end of many African-American voters’ infatuation with former President Bill Clinton and, by extension, current (and irritatingly persistent) Democratic presidential contender Senator Hillary Clinton. I have for some time derided both the glandhanding, pseudo-liberal triangulation that kept the former in power for eight years and the latter’s smug sense that she is entitled both to her party’s nomination and to the presidency. I have long been frustrated with so many African Americans’ loyalty to the Clintons regardless of whether they could readily name any Clinton policies that had directly and substantially improved their lives. And I was frankly disgusted with Toni Morrison’s claim that Bill Clinton’s origins in poverty and a broken home made him America’s “first black president”. Steve Harvey’s standup comedy be damned; this was a degrading conflation of African-American culture with a slew of crippling social pathologies that would make legions of quite authentically black people—myself included—as white as the driven snow.

As pleased as I was—and remain—with the twilight of Clinton worship in the black community, I was annoyed that it was catalyzed by the tendentious misconstruction of a number of the Clintons’ public statements last winter. Senator Clinton in no way denigrated Martin Luther King’s legacy by acknowledging the crucial role President Lyndon Johnson’s support played in bringing the civil rights movement’s goals to fruition. Even if Bill Clinton had called Barack Obama’s career a “fairy tale”—which he didn’t; he called Obama’s unfavorable comparison of Hillary’s Iraq war voting record with his own a “fairy tale”—there would have been nothing intrinsically racial, let alone racist, about the comment. And what was so racist about Mark Penn’s suspicion that unscrupulous Republican strategists might use Obama’s past drug use against him in the general election?

Still, if these teapot tempests prompted black voters to look at the Clintons more skeptically, I was and am willing to live with it. Bill and Hillary have always struck me as political opportunists who seek the presidency for its own sake, rather than to actually solve America’s problems—soulless machine politicians with little principled vision of where they want to take the country. So I was pleased to see the Clinton brand take a beating not only in the black community but also among those Democrats who used to reflexively close ranks around Slick Willie whenever he stood in the Republicans’ crosshairs. I watched with glee as liberals looked aghast at the Clintons’ arrogance in this campaign and asked themselves, “You mean Bill and Hill really are a couple of slick, power-hungry politicians after all? Could the Republicans have been right about them all along?”

I thus fêted Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from total obscurity just four years ago to the brink of the Democratic nomination for president today. I am delighted to see an African-American candidate have a realistic shot at the presidency, due in large part to his transcendence of fruitless racial grievance-mongering—à la Sharpton or Jackson—and his resulting ability to unite Americans of disparate backgrounds behind him. And the underdog-lover in me could not help but cheer as he pulled ahead of Hillary to sit within striking distance of sewing up his party’s nomination.

Alas, with political viability seems to have come the almost inevitable corruption in political character. It was not long before my other instincts—including the aforementioned abhorrence of idolatry and my hatred of cheesy cant—began to kick in. As the winter of 2008 wore on and Obama won caucus after primary, his boyish, big-ear-to-big-ear grin began to smack of smugness, and his gaseous, meaningless mantras—“We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; “Yes we can!”—increasingly grated on my ears. His doctrinaire liberalism squares poorly with my right-leaning centrism. His deification by googols of college kids frankly unnerves me, given my contempt for the snotty, jejune gauchisme that passes for “progressive” thought on most college campuses these days. And I actually have nightmares about that embarrassingly obsequious portrait of Obama with a halo behind his head—seriously!—with which the groupies at Rolling Stone magazine recently disgraced their cover.

Yet none of Obama’s flaws disappoints me more than his capitulation to the same Clintonian hypocrisy to which he claims to be immune.

The illusion of that immunity crumbled in the face of the news that an economic advisor to Obama’s campaign had assured a Canadian TV news network that his candidate’s denunciations of NAFTA—and promises to renegotiate or abrogate the treaty—were mere election-year posturing. Not that I was terribly surprised at the news. I had never figured Obama to have the cojones to screw America’s closest neighbors and trading partners so egregiously. For that matter, I always wondered how he planned to reconcile such a move with his stated goal of restoring America’s image in the world. Now it was exposed as the same old mendacious pandering we’ve come to expect from politicians. “So much for Obama’s new style of politics,” I remember thinking to myself.

So much, indeed. In his recent Philadelphia debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama denied ever having supported a total ban on handgun possession—a denial that flies in the face of his filing of a questionnaire with a liberal advocacy group in 1996 that called for just such a ban. And his promises to begin to withdraw American troops from Iraq immediately upon coming to office did not stop him from claiming, at General David Petraeus’ recent testimony before the Senate, that “no one’s asking for a complete pullout without regard to conditions on the ground” (to paraphrase his words as reported in the New York Times). I will say just this: if you seriously believe President Obama will keep his promise to bug out of Iraq even in the face of the bloodbath that is likely to ensue, I’ve got a subprime mortgage loan to sell you.

I recently had a spirited argument with an acquaintance of mine on this very subject. A committed Obama disciple, my friend conceded the scant difference between Obama’s and Hillary’s policy proposals but put his faith in the former’s ability to “inspire” the American people. Stifling a groan, I asked the obvious question: “Inspire” them to do what? And how is one of the hardest-core liberals in the Senate supposed to particularly inspire more than about half the electorate? And how easily could he inspire them after they are let down, as they are sure to be, by the inevitable compromises of his presidency? I am still waiting on his answer.

Not that any of this will necessarily take much of the bloom off Obama’s rose. The peculiar stubbornness of political idolaters can endure long after the objects of their affection have taken their final bow. John F. Kennedy’s image of bold vision and youthful vigor has been only minimally afflicted by the taint of his foot-dragging on civil rights or the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan’s image as a paragon of fiscal discipline has suffered relatively little—among his fans at least—from the mountainous federal deficits he left in his wake. Ah, well—what does it matter? They inspired people. And thanks largely to that inspiration, I see little hope of persuading people to treat politicians—all politicians—with the skepticism they so richly deserve.

Won’t Get Fooled Again

2008-05-11T00:50:00.000-04:00

September 2007

I was eagerly leafing through a recent issue of The Economist magazine when I stumbled upon an article entitled “Presumed Guilty” that brought me to a full stop.

The article concerned a new book, Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson, and its subject, the Duke lacrosse rape case of April 2006, in which African-American exotic dancer Crystal Mangum accused three members of the Duke University lacrosse team of having racially slurred, beaten and gang-raped her at a team party. I was taken aback not at the news that the charges against the lacrosse players were eventually dropped a year later, of which I was already aware. Indeed, upon hearing that news last spring, I had sort of subconsciously assumed that the charges had been dropped not necessarily because the charges were false or the defendants innocent, but simply because neither the available evidence nor the victim’s testimony were solid enough to stand up in court. No, what floored me was the discovery that Ms. Mangum’s accusation against the lacrosse players, far from being merely vulnerable to the glib sophistry of a slick defense lawyer, was in reality, as the Economist puts it, “a transparent lie from the start”.

As Mssrs. Taylor and Johnson detail in their book, it seems Ms. Mangum, who was picked up by the police shortly after the incident, never mentioned having been assaulted in any way until it appeared she might have to spend some time in a mental health facility. In the course of her questioning by the authorities, she subsequently recanted her initial claim—then later withdrew that recantation. Her various accounts of the night’s events included a number of mutually contradictory claims; at different times, for instance, she described her attackers as numbering anywhere from 2 to 20. The police officers who interrogated her on the first night understandably viewed Ms. Mangum’s story with outright incredulity—particularly in light of her admitted history of alcohol and drug addiction and her penchant for “making up far-fetched stories”, according to the Economist article. What made the biggest impression on me, however, was the statement made by her fellow stripper. In the latter’s view, Ms. Mangum’s claims were, in a word, “a crock”.

None of this stopped unscrupulous Durham Country D.A. Mike Nifong—then facing a tight campaign for reelection—from charging three Duke lacrosse players with rape several weeks later. None of it stood in the way of the sordid and in some cases downright illegal tactics to which he resorted, including smearing the defendants in the press and initially withholding contradictory DNA evidence from the defense team, and later simply ignoring it. Nor did it rein in the media circus and political feeding frenzy that predictably ensued. We all remember the public flagellation of the defendants by legions of self-righteous interlopers whose limhited knowledge of the facts of the case was tainted by the implicit bias resulting from Nifong’s prosecutorial misconduct. The newspaper headlines screaming about “a night of racial slurs, growing fear and finally sexual violence”. The students protesting at Duke and on campuses nationwide. The Duke administration’s pusillanimous failure to urge that their own students be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The insipid prattle of crusading left-liberal professors who gave lectures and TV interviews denouncing the hapless athletes without laying eyes on a shred of evidence. And this parade of horrors would hardly be complete without the demagoguery of that slick racial warhorse, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the hordes of media lemmings who have effectively crowned him the de facto Voice of Black America.

None of the aforementioned bandwagon-riders would warrant the scorn heaped on them on this page if the charges against the lacrosse players had been true. But they weren’t. They were false—utterly, shamefully false—and their falsehood should remind us of what common sense should have told us from the giddy-up. As outsiders, as third parties completely uninvolved in the case, who were not at the scene of the alleged crime nor had any firsthand knowledge of the evidence concerning it, we had no way of knowing whether the lacrosse players were innocent or guilty. The right response to the original allegations, both from the black community and from society at large, would have been to at least wait for the criminal trial to proceed and a verdict to be handed down before making any judgments of the defendants. But alas, too many observers felt the need to immediately roast the defendants in the court of public opinion, without any pretense of dispassionate assessment of the case on its merits.

Implicit in this detestable rush to judgment was a deeply poisonous kneejerk assumption on the part of so many of the talking heads: the accuser was a black woman; her alleged violators were affluent whiteboys; therefore these “young, white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape, maraud, [and] deploy hate speech”, to quote former Duke English professor Houston Baker, must have been guilty as sin. I can only hope there is no need to dissect this claptrap in too much detail. If it is not self-evident to you, the reader, that white skin, masculinity, and playing an upper-crust sport at an elite university do not make a person a natural-born racist and rapist any more than poverty, femininity and black skin make a person a saint whose word is to be taken as gospel truth, then, truly, I fear for your future.

The hell of it is that this is not the first time a troubled African-American woman has desperately resorted to bearing false witness of rape against white men—tragically tainting the credibility of real rape and hate crime victims into the bargain. Almost exactly twenty years ago, young Tawana Brawley accused six white men in a small upstate New York town of abducting and raping her, only to see the case collapse for lack of any evidence to substantiate her claims. (The good Rev. Sharpton made his bones representing Ms. Brawley, leading the pack with a string of libelous charges hurled at the defendants.) Unfortunately, it seems, America has not learned the lesson of Tawana Brawley.

I remember the early Republican primaries in the 2000 election, in which the panel of questioners asked candidate Alan Keyes—and only Alan Keyes—for his “thoughts” on the case of the NYPD killing of Amadou Diallo the year before. I myself am no fan of Mr. Keyes, but I still applauded when he wisely replied that he was neither a witness to the shooting itself nor a direct observer of the investigation or the evidence, and so quite naturally drew no conclusions and had no “thoughts” on the matter. There’s one page we should all take from Keyes’ book.

At least some true justice has finally been done in the Duke case: the abominable Mr. Nifong has been disbarred and was jailed for one day for his shady deeds, while Duke President Richard Brodhead publicly apologized for abandoning his students to the hounds. As for me, this shameful business has reminded me of my older brother’s wise admonition to take everything I hear with a grain of salt—a bit of advice I intend to act on, particularly when gender and race are involved. My friend’s father recently asked me if I’d demonstrated in support of the Jena 6. I told him I hadn’t, but didn’t have the heart to tell him why: not because I think the defendants had the original attempted murder charges coming—for all I know their cause is entirely just—but because I quite simply do not and cannot have the right answer. After the Duke debacle, I no longer trust the media, outspoken Facebook groups or Al Sharpton to give me an unbiased, credible picture of what happened in Jena. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I won’t be fooled again.

Fear Not, Borat Fans: There's Hope for America Yet

2008-05-11T00:38:00.000-04:00

Nov. 26, 2006

Much ink has been spilled about the American bigotry exposed in British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I, for one, think it unfair to conclude from this film—many a blogger and pundit has done recently—that America is a nation “as backward as the fictionalized Kazakhstan from which Borat hails”, as one very good friend of mine here at Princeton's Nassau Weekly put it in a recent article of his.

My learned colleague wrote, “Sure, Baron Cohen and his cohorts selected the best clips from the endless footage they recorded, but the fact that they managed to cull such responses at all is off-putting at the least.” Surely, however, it takes more than one anecdotal “hateful old redneck” or three loutish fratboys to prove that a society as massive and complex as America is as hateful as he. My friend has a much stronger point about comfort levels and the light they may shed on cultural mores in situations like these. But I think this is canceled out by Borat’s potential backstory. We have no idea how many rodeos Baron Cohen had to visit in order to turn up a homophobe like Mr. Rowe—and we probably never will, since Cohen rarely conducts any interviews as himself, preferring to remain constantly in character whenever in public. (Even his recent exclusive Rolling Stone interview shed no light on this.)

Borat should be appraised more critically than the talking heads have done. “Slightly less appalling…is the moment when Borat is told, without hesitation, that a 9MM or a .45 would be the best defense against Jews,” my colleague writes. Never mind, of course, that the gun shop owner ultimately smells something fishy about this ignorant Kazakh and refuses to sell him a weapon. The next offense in this parade of horribles: “Don’t ignore the fact that the rodeo crowd applauds when Borat professes support for America’s ‘War of Terror’.” Dig a little deeper, I say. A crowd of rodeo fans are not going to be listening closely enough to distinguish the phrase “War on Terror” from “War of Terror”, especially coming from a completely unexpected interloper. This rings especially true considering Borat’s heavily affected accent. Some fans may well have noted the error but forgiven it as a slip of the tongue by a man who clearly can’t speak English well and continued cheering out of sheer charity. My Nass colleague himself admits that “a novice like Borat might make such a prepositional mistake.” Mightn’t the rodeo fans have reached that same conclusion and acted accordingly?

Remember that part of Sacha Baron Cohen’s shtick is to deliberately lead his subjects to believe that his character is not only primitive but also not very bright. Interviewees usually humor this bumptious Kazakh and play along perfunctorily, whether out of political correctness, condescension or sheer hospitality. That they cheered Borat’s vow to slaughter “every man, woman and child in Iraq”, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that they took his words literally and actually endorse genocide. At least as likely is that they were just playing along, thinking the poor mook was merely mangling the King’s English. I might well have done the same—and I’m Canadian.

Think of that antique furniture store in Texas. I was as disgusted at the sight of the ubiquitous Confederate paraphernalia as anyone else. But why blithely ignore the elderly owners’ patience and even temper when Borat completely trashes their most valuable inventory—and offers them pubic hair as compensation?

Such “unthinking obsequiousness”—as my Nassau Weekly counterpart rightly decries this tendency—is often motivated by political correctness, as well as the instinct to give a tragically ignorant foreigner the benefit of any situational doubt. This is hardly a fair canvas for the brush of virulent bigotry with which my compadre tars his countrymen. The intentions behind this reflex are honorable, even if they may pave the road to Hell. The salient error is in attributing this slavish politesse to naked prejudice rather than to a cheesy postmodern cultural “sensitivity” and political correctness. (This error is shared by the legions of liberal pundits eager to read in Borat a searing critique of the conservative red-state American culture they constantly bemoan—a delicious irony, given that this sensitivity, and the cultural relativism it engenders, is largely a product of modern American liberalism.)

There is no better proof of this than the dinner party in Alabama. Put yourselves in the shoes of stodgy Southern blue-bloods welcoming a tourist to dinner to teach him American etiquette. Imagine being rewarded with a slur on one of the female guests’ looks, an insult to another guest’s wits, and a display of pictures of Borat with his buck-naked “son”—with close-up shots of the boy’s genitalia. Would you have mollified the other guests by pointing out the “huge differences” between Borat’s culture and your own, and insisting that he could be taught how to conduct himself in polite American society? How would you have reacted to Borat’s return to the dinner table with a big ol’ turd in a plastic bag? Would you have taken him back to the loo to give him a crash course on how to use a toilet and wipe himself, as one of those genteel steel magnolias did? My own Caribbean-Canadian upbringing has left me scrupulously deferential to my elders and guests; yet I doubt I would have been that polite. Anyone else? A show of hands, perhaps?

This is the lesson Borat teaches Americans about themselves: that, far from being hopelessly bigoted, they are an at times idiotically courteous and hospitable people.

“Watch how the camera focuses on nodding children when a preacher calls America ‘a Christian nation’,” my Nass friend writes. He seems to reflexively take this as a sign of religious prejudice, which itself strikes me as rash at best and prejudicial at worst. And to implicitly smear all who believe America to be a Christian nation as Bible-thumping bigots is less than fair in a country whose currency bears the words “In God We Trust” and two of whose greatest social justice movements—for the abolition of slavery and for civil rights—were heavily influenced and driven by Christian altruism and idealism. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not called “Reverend” for nothing. And let’s not forget the Battle Hymn of the Republic, arguably America's greatest patriotic anthem—written by a Christian abolitionist during the Civil War. If ridding America of the scourge of human bondage is what Julia Ward Howe meant by “the coming of the Lord”, I don’t know you all, but mine eyes have seen the glory.

I come from a family of mostly evangelical Christians. Their churches are attended by people of all backgrounds, their services characterized by the very same talking in tongues, “flailing about”, and general religious rapture that my friend so tellingly slips into quotation marks. I can name countless anecdotes showing that such faithful folk are far from the execrable haters so many left-wing pundits suspect they are—enough to outdo Sacha Baron Cohen himself. In the South, mind you, it may be a different story…maybe. But am I going to assume that, based on Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America? I could dig up better primary sources for this thesis. Fear not your God-fearing countrymen, liberal brethren: they are not all out to get you.

Ultimately, Borat teaches Americans little more about themselves than that there are many bigots in their midst—other than that they take their politeness to jokey extents. The latter lesson hardly warrants outraged condemnation. The former is meaningless, not only because it’s scarcely news to anyone not living under a rock, but more importantly because it says nothing about America that couldn’t be said about just about any other country. From the slurring of dark-skinned European soccer players in recent years, to riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities, to a Palestinian cartoonist’s recent depiction of Condoleeza Rice as being pregnant with a monkey, I suspect that any country’s hateful underbelly could be exposed just as shockingly by Baron Cohen’s pop culture “investigative journalism”. America is simply the country he chose to take potshots at in this case. Ah, well. Don’t let it turn you around, my Yankee friends. It’s always lonely at the top.

2008-05-11T00:29:00.000-04:00

Race and The Sopranos:

Is the show racist?

April 27, 2006

I was watching an episode of The Sopranos in the TV room in Terrace last week, when a friend of mine made a comment that never fails to make me groan: “Dude, this show treats Italian-Americans so bad…”

I doubt this is the first time you have heard that The Sopranos, in its depiction of poorly educated, foul-mouthed, larcenous, murderous, gun-toting, sexually promiscuous and otherwise degenerate New Jersey Mafiosi, portrays Italian-Americans as being similarly degenerate and criminal. This is the same charge that has been slung at every Mafia-related production from The Godfather to Donnie Brasco, and its progenitors never tire of repeating it whenever a new such production hits the cinema, or in this case, the television. And as a black man living in North America, I am no stranger to the media’s tendency to stereotype entire ethnic groups in the deadliest ways. So what, then, is my take on this critique of my favorite TV show ever? In a word: Bullshit.

For starters, I don’t believe any major mob production has ever been guilty of that charge. No, I don’t believe that Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs or Casino stereotyped Italian-Americans as mobsters. The reason for this is remarkably simple. The US Mafia is an ethnocentric organization: its membership is composed exclusively of Italian-Americans of working-class origins. Therefore, in any production about the Mafia, the main characters will invariably be Italian-American. And the detestable personality traits attributed to them are always realistic to a fault. Look at The Godfather: many of the characters and plotlines of the novel and the first two films were in fact loosely based on real figures and events in Mafia history. Don Vito Corleone was inspired by the dreaded 1940s and ‘50s New York City mob boss, Vito Genovese. Don Corleone’s godson Johnny Fontane was based on Frank Sinatra. Or look at Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino, both of them true stories, adapted from Nicholas Pileggi books that were not the least bit fictional.

The same goes for the exploits of Tony Soprano and his motley crew. I recently read a New York Times article in which a Mafia specialist credited the show for its gritty realism. The best example of this was the Mafiosi’s propensity for profanity: in real life, these guys really do include at least three or four foul cuss words in every sentence they utter. Moreover, real-life Mafiosi really do have mistresses (“goomars”), do regularly sleep with prostitutes, do have hair-trigger tempers that get them into brutal brawls at the drop of a hat, do eat copious quantities of Italian food, and so on. Reviews of the show regularly tap real-life FBI agents, crime reporters and even living, breathing mobsters for their take on The Sopranos. These experts consistently praise the show.

In all, there is no way to portray a Mafioso realistically without depicting him and his compadres as working-class Italian-Americans – poorly educated, violent, profane, and just generally despicable menaces to society. To do otherwise would be a ridiculous distortion of reality.

Actually, The Sopranos, far from perpetuating the stereotypes of Italian-Americans, goes to at times ludicrous lengths to avoid stereotyping them. Watch the show closely and you’ll see that it actually portrays many Italian-American characters who stick to the straight and narrow. The best example is Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. She is polite, classy, educated, hard-working, law-abiding and successful – a model American citizen. The same goes for the team of FBI agents who have bedeviled the Soprano family since the very beginning of the show’s seven-year run; almost every single one of them is Italian-American. Tony’s neighbor, Dr. Bruce Cusamano, is a suburban, all-American white guy – as Tony scornfully puts it, he “eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.” In high school, Tony’s kids, Anthony Jr. and Meadow, both seemed to have exclusively Italian-American friends (Blundetto, Piacosta, Capobianco, and Scangarelo). Freddy Capuano was the owner of the retirement home where Tony placed his infanticidal mother. The Soprano family’s parish priest is named Father Phil Intintola. Tony’s best non-mob friend – a hapless restaurateur whose wife Charmaine constantly nags him for entertaining Tony and his brood in their establishment – is Arthur Bucco. And the divine Ms. Meadow Soprano is currently engaged to a self-effacing youngster by the name of Finn DeTrolio.

In fact, in taking aim at the show’s treatment of ethnic minorities, Sopranos critics miss the mark entirely. Want to know which ethnic minority groups’ reputations the show does horribly deface? Jewish and African-Americans, that’s who.

Don’t believe me? The show is actually breathtaking in the audacity with which it portrays Jews as shifty, mercenary hucksters and blacks as simple-minded, petty criminals. The main Jewish character on the show is Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, who plays a loan shark in league with the Sopranos. Tony and his uncle Corrado both have Jewish lawyers who embody to a "T" the stereotype of Jews as money-grubbing shysters. And the Sopranos constantly do business with archetypal “niggers” – ignorant, deadbeat and usually incompetent thieves, murderers and “street pharmacists” from the ghettoes of Trenton, Newark and Jersey City. When Tony and his fellows come into contact with blacks, it’s usually with carjackers and stick-up artists, muggers and cocaine addicts, not to mention the occasional gangsta rapper—racial caricatures as deeply offensive as any World War II propaganda cartoon and clownish minstrels that would turn Al Jolson green with envy.

Mafia movies, of course, have shat on racial minorities – mainly African-Americans – for decades now. Remember the Mafia Don convention in The Godfather, when one boss argued that the heroin trade should be restricted to “the dark peoples, the coloreds…they’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls?” Or Sonny Corleone’s casual comment that “Niggers are having a good time with our policy banks up in Harlem, drivin’ them big new Cadillacs?” Or in Goodfellas, when Henry Hill told his wife, “Jail is for nigger stick-up men who don’t have their shit organized?” The Sopranos simply continues in this tradition. Witness Tony’s apoplexy upon seeing his daughter dating a half-Jewish, half-black fellow student – “Jamaal Ginsberg, the Hasidic homeboy,” as Tony called him – or his blaming an injury caused by a panic attack on a mugging by a gang of black men – or as he calls them, “fuckin’ jigaboo cocksuckin’ motherfuckers.” And crucially, this uniform hatred for the eternal nigger is not only shared by the actual mobsters in the show, but also frequently echoed by the legitimate Italian-American characters who share the screen with them.

Those who have seen any Mafia movie more than once have likely noticed this. Yet I have yet to hear any Italian-American advocacy group protest this portrayal of their people as hideous racists. Whether this is because they happen to share these prejudices, or because they simply haven’t ever noticed them or thought of them as particularly important (which is more likely), I have no idea. But to depict Italian-Americans as detestable xenophobes is, I think, every bit as odious as it would be to allegedly depict them as members or associates of an obsolescent crime syndicate. A more holistic perspective would do these aspiring censors a world of good. Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom.