maxxin

Sometimes this blog is a big drag but lately it's been fun. Between the Bloggingheads and the internecine warfare I've been getting the best emails and comments. I appreciate it!

actually, let's not censor opinions we don't like

As if arising fully formed from the fever dreams of conservative Christian idiots, Nicholas Jackson betrays an incipient totalitarianism in calling for legal action against people like Chris Broussard who voice opinions that Nicolas Jackson doesn't like. It's a bold plan, this "let's ask Nicholas Jackson what rights people should have" scheme.

It's important to point out from the start just how lousy of an argument the piece is, as an argument. What exactly is the justification here? You've got a vague, deeply confused consideration of the "Fighting Words" legal doctrine, which does not mean nearly what Jackson (writing wholly outside of his expertise) thinks it means. He simultaneously invokes that quasi-legalistic reading and yet acknowledges that it doesn't do what he wants it to do. It's all very confused.

"But the blanket free speech argument is a weak one. Any journalist knows that."
Argument by assertion, check. Appeal to authority, check.

"After a basic media ethics class (the easy way) or a handful of frightening emails from a subject (the hard way), you’ll know a thing or two about libel and slander."
Any journalist can tell you that, in fact, it's extraordinarily hard to legally pursue a case of libel or slander in American courts, that those legal standards have nothing to do with comments like Broussard's but with intentionally misrepresenting facts in a way designed to harm an individual, that libel is a civil matter and not a criminal interdiction, and that the ease with which libel cases can be proven in places like the United Kingdom have a chilling effect on good journalism. That's what any journalist can tell you.

Jackson gives the game away when he says, "frankly, I don’t want to listen to your bullshit." That pretty much sums it up: Jackson doesn't like to hear certain things and wants to legal forbid them. Which is at once juvenile and authoritarian. Guess what, Nicholas: I don't particularly want to read censorious bullshit like yours. Those are the wages of living in a free and open society. There are a few places where you can be sure that people aren't free to go around saying whatever they like, willy nilly. North Korea springs to mind.

Jackson writes, "The problem with the doctrine as it currently stands is that it implies incitement of violence or hatred by the receiver against the giver. It doesn’t consider violence or hatred by the receiver against the receiver, violence or hatred against the self." Is Jackson even remotely aware of the consequences of this thinking? That we should ban any communication that might result in someone killing himself? What if hearing someone advocate for a flat tax makes me want to self-harm? I'm not joking: if the standard is the capacity for a statement to incite self-harm, then there is no protection over any opinion. Any utterance can be an incitement to violence. This is a country where people can get beaten into a coma for complimenting another person's car. People who self-harm are typically people suffering from mental illness. Holding our right to free expression hostage to the whims of the violent behaviors of individuals is perverse and unworkable.

Free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment because those protections come first, because they are the life blood of a free society. Free expression is a non-negotiable precondition of a functioning democracy. Without the power to offend, free expression loses all meaning. Besides: censorship never addresses the root causes of the sentiment that is expressed. Germany bans Nazism. Germany has a huge neo-Nazi problem. Censorship doesn't eliminate ugly sentiment. It pushes it underground, where it festers and multiplies. Censorship contributes to the sense of persecution and the conspiratorial attitudes that feed extremist groups. Bringing those attitudes into the light, to be exposed and debated, is the only way to combat the incorrect, the ugly, or the cruel.

Besides: what is Jackson afraid of, exactly? The expansion of gay rights and the communal recognition of gay dignity are winning, and they are winning precisely because of the right to free expression. It's incredible to me that someone like Jackson can fail to recognize that it was precisely the protection of unpopular ideas that has made it possible for us to evolve on gay rights. 50 years ago, had it been put to a vote, would this country have criminalized the expression of pro-gay sentiment? It's very possible. Thank god, then, that we have the First Amendment, or we would never be in a place where the rights and dignity of gay people are more and more a matter of conventional wisdom. Without the right to controversial speech, to speech considered offensive by some, no social progress would have occurred in this country. No civil rights movement, no gay rights movement, no growth in social justice.

The gay rights movement has been winning despite the opinions of people like Chris Broussard. Or maybe: because of the opinions of Chris Broussard. What, ultimately, was Broussard's argument? That he was opposed to open homosexuality because he finds it contrary to his religion. Which is not an argument, thankfully, that moves many rational adults. What does Nicholas Jackson think is going to happen because of that idea? To me, the backlash against Chris Broussard proves the point: free expression is powerful in part because it allows bigoted people to demonstrate their own irrelevance. Jason Collins made his declaration. Broussard made his. The people who are criticizing Broussard are making their own. That is how ideas work. It's how freedom works. To oppose it on vague grounds of incitement to violence and on a totally unconvincing legal argument is abject stupidity.

the point is to build a mass party you can live with

Though I have more trepidation than he does, given my stature as a grizzled old man, I thought that this piece by Bhaskar Sunkara about expanding the socialist movement was good.

I do worry. The problem with a "new" anything is that it necessarily lacks institutional memory, and I hope that they understand: liberals redbaiting and lending a hand to conservatives in trying to expel the left is not some rare event. It's endemic to American liberalism. The Sister Souljah moment is not a repudiation of liberalism but something of a liberal sacrament. It's crazy for me to think that there are people out there too young to remember the 2002-2005 days, when liberals had great enthusiasm for the opportunity to expel the left. Bhaskar and any other young Marxists must understand that liberal-left alliances can be useful and necessary, up until the point they try to push you out onto an ice floe. And when they come they come for the pinks as well as the reds. Whenever the forces of reaction are slitting throats, there's always liberals around to wipe the blood off the knife.

But given the boundaries of the possible, and the demographics of the country, and the desperate need for change, you've got to try to move them anyway. I don't see much alternative. I hold out hope that anti-militarist libertarians (note: no, not Rand Paul) can be a source of consistent solidarity against our violent government, but they are a small portion of libertarianism, which is itself a tiny ideology. So I don't see much alternative to trying to move leftist liberals, those who have a "both/and" attitude towards activism and partisan politics. The "vote for Obama and write to your Congressman!" crowd is beyond moving. (Writing to legislators is almost exactly like prayer in both its measurable effect and the pride it inspires in those who undertaking it.)

As far as the liberal urge to purge goes, I guess we burn that bridge again when we come to it.

That opinion, I'm afraid, is not very cool. Jacobin has been catching some of the expected flak lately, given their recent success. They are guilty of several of the Lefty Seven Deadly Sins, including Being Popular, Getting Positive Attention, and Convincing Others. This cannot be countenanced, and so they are being punished. Mostly by anarchist, by my lights, but by the general mass of the "however extreme you are, +1" crowd. Well, those people are better than the alternative. I'd rather have an anarchist calling me a fascist than listen to Jon Chait doing his thing. I just want to say: the point is to build a mass party you can live with. Me, I can't live with the party of Obama (a more passionate army than the Democrats) or the centrist libs or similar. But I also can't much stand the world we have, so I am willing to listen to a smart, committed guy like Sunkara trying to drag the kids to their left. Call me a squish.

I confess to a certain bias from experience; anarchists were always the rich kids at rallies who wanted to fuck up the neighborhoods of the exact people we were trying to rally to the cause, and they had a tendency, with age, to give up politics altogether. We worked for months to reach out to the people of a poor Hartford neighborhood, and some self-identified anarchist asshole smashed somebody's sideview mirror, somebody from that neighborhood's sideview mirror. (Sorry to disappoint: I'm not expressing a nascent desire to exercise coercive power on that guy. I'm identifying him, accurately, as an asshole, as I did 8 years ago when it happened.) You can find an awful lot of that sort of thing if you look around just a little bit. I'm not trying to rustle jimmies or paint with too broad a brush. I'm just trying to be honest with you. That said, there are anarchists I love deeply, and when the exigence is against aggression and violence, they can be great allies. They are only responsible for expressing their conscience. Only they can determine what their responsibility is. I would never suggest that they have to get into lockstep with anyone else, and I remain open to the possibility that looking to liberals for solidarity is foolish. For myself, the stakes are simple: if the number of people you consider sufficiently righteous to break bread with numbers in the dozens, and you have no credible narrative for how that changes in the near future, then I don't know how you get the world you want. But that's my standards. I'm not the movement police.

If they can't live with the mass party that some other people are building, they don't join it, and they keep working their work.

I feel absolutely no conflict or complication with my relationship to the left, or to the movement, or the struggle, or whatever the fuck. I understand why people get anxiety about those things. But I just don't have time for it, and it makes no fucking whatsoever to me if somebody calls me either an "emo lefty" from my right or a fascist sympathizer from my left. Remember: no enemies because they are to my left. I just don't have the energy for it, and I don't know why some people are so consistently susceptible to being thrown into an existential crisis by people who are calling them out as phonies or collaborators. I never asked anybody's permission to see myself in solidarity with them, and I don't need anybody to like me in order to see them as useful for the cause. Do you want to change the miserable condition that exists on this earth? Cool. The rest is noise.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that condemning anarchism through my anecdote and (real, but of course limited) personal experience was a shitty thing to do. I retract it, and I apologize for saying it in the first place. My broader point-- that the goal, to my lights, is to build a mass party without sacrificing the beliefs that are truly important to you-- stands. I suppose the details are everything.

Bloggingheads

I did another Bloggingheads with Conor Friedersdorf on Thursday. I had fun, although I fear I wasn't very articulate in the last section, which will likely be the one to cause controversy. I'll try to expand my thoughts on that soon, but I'm super busy right now. Until then, check it out.

swagger is self-defeating

I've made this essential point before. But it continues to amaze me how often people make exclamations of their own self-confidence all over the Internet. The most common vehicle of this is talk about "swagger," a term as juvenile as it is unconvincing. I find it plastered on every other Tumblr I read, it's on people's Twitter bios, people write Facebook statuses about it.... And I never, ever buy it. Indeed, I can't think of an easier way to announce one's own insecurity than to be talking about having swagger all the time.

I understand the value in "faking it until you make it," in trying to project certain mental strengths that you don't really have. That makes sense to me. But coming out and explicitly saying that you have them is paradoxical; the people who have them don't need to say that they do. And it's an especially weird fit with something like confidence, which is real exactly when it is not performative but rather inherent and unspoken. Since swagger is the projection of confidence, it's a liar's word, a fake's word. True confidence lies in those people who don't care if others believe them to be confident. I'm not one of them; I feel insecurity and self-doubt all the time. I admire those people, sometimes, although often it seems as though confidence comes with a lack of compassion or perspective. But either way, I don't mistake people saying they have it for those who actually do. I don't buy it, I don't believe you.

every word.

This post on ed reform by the Who formally known as IOZ is so good I want to build it a castle made of dreams.

The central proposition of so-called education reform is that it endeavors to make schooling more entrepreneurial. Now this is bogus on its face. The most salient fact about entrepreneurialism is that most ventures fail. Is that the proper model for the delivery of a universal service? Consider the question irrespective of your thoughts about the larger questions surrounding the provision of universal education. Ostensible reformers say they want to mimic the dynamism and innovation of the private sector. The first question is: to what end, exactly? The second is: do you know how dynamism and innovation work? 

Like most pro-market types, these people are ignorant of the actual workings of capitalism. They see Apple’s glittering headquarters, Google’s quarterly revenue numbers, and they think, Damn! I wish schools could be more like that! Strewn across the historic landscape behind all this success are hundreds of thousands of failed attempts, many of which don’t make it out of their first year. And you want school to look like this?

Read the whole thing, damn you.

bad behavior

Twitter tells me that Jeb Lund, General Gandhi, and Mark Brendle are in trouble, because they wrote this (wonderful and necessary) response to Matt Yglesias's justification of the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference. They are charged with being mean and trafficking in "ad hominem," which is a term that means "when someone accurately criticizes someone else in a way that others would prefer to not have to offer a defense against." Well, as far as the charges against them go, I suppose they're guilty. They did say mean things about Matt Yglesias, which I'm sure hurt his feelings as he paced the halls of his million dollar mansion. In contrast, Matt Yglesias justified the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference.

Now, I've been blogging for half a decade, and I've interacted with a lot of people online, and had many perfectly lovely conversations with some of them. Yet I maintain a profound lack of understanding and an inability to predict how people will react. Try as I might, I can't comprehend the human mind that says, "you know, Matt Yglesias justified the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference. But the guys at Mr. Destructo were mean to an affluent, connected guy who lives a life of ease in the halls of power in Washington DC. That's the real crime."

To me, what Yglesias said constitutes no-bullshit sociopathy, and in fact racist sociopathy, as "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's Okay" is the way that decent, Harvard-educated types say that some human lives are worth less than other human lives, based on their race and country of origin. To me, it's clear that if that was published on National Review's The Corner, there would be dozens of anguished blog posts and essays calling them out, Chris Hayes would lead with it on his show, The Atlantic would publish a piece asking if Republicans are beyond saving, etc. The fact that, instead, so many are defending him suggests that there literally is no line whatsoever once you're in, that Yglesias could dig up and re-murder Medgar Evers and if Jacob Bacharach criticized him, the Tweeters would complain about it being ad hominem. But, then, you've heard that argument from me before, and those self-same people make fun of me about it, and so I guess I'm a little silly. I write silly things, sometimes. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias sometimes writes pieces where he justifies the conditions that kill hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference.

Now some have clucked their tongues about the Mr. Destructo piece and said, hey, that's beyond the pale, making fun of Yglesias's looks! And indeed. Those guys made fun of Matt Yglesias's looks. Matt Yglesias, in contrast, justified the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference. Some people have claimed that there's no content there, that it's all just insults. I would argue that in fact it's a profoundly effective rhetorical analysis, one that lays Yglesias's assumptions bare, demonstrates why they are both wrong and morally indefensible, and shows how this kind of being wrong serves establishment power. I would argue that Mark Brendle's section, in particular, is a direct and fair response to the actual content of Yglesias's post, one proffered by someone who is interested in actually responding to it, rather than to some nebulous conception of "Matt Yglesias is a good guy." But hey, you could argue that they didn't do a good enough analysis, that they got it wrong. If so, that was a failing. In contrast, Matt Yglesias justified the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their national difference.

Of course, to the degree that a post like this gets any traction, it's likely to be "there Freddie goes again, grinding his ax!" And, indeed, I suppose I am. Nolo contendere. I am grinding an ax. Matt Yglesias, in contrast, justified the conditions that killed hundreds of people through explicit reference to their ethnic and national difference.

You'll have to forgive me. Sometimes I say the wrong things.

hate to say I told you so

 The Economic Policy Institute:

"Our examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education pipeline finds consistent and clear trends suggesting that the United States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations:

• The flow of U.S. students (citizens and permanent residents) into STEM fields has been strong over the past decade, and the number of U.S. graduates with STEM majors appears to be responsive to changes in employment levels and wages.
• For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.
• In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable, and 53 percent say they found better job opportunities outside of IT occupations. These responses suggest that the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry.

Analyzing new data, drawing on a number of our prior analyses, and reviewing other studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, we find that industry trends are strikingly consistent:

• Over the past decade IT employment has gradually increased, but it only recovered to its 2000–2001 peak level by the end of the decade.
• Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels."

somebody call a logician

Andrew Sullivan is making one of those stands of his. He has alleged that (of course) the Boston bombing "was jihad." It remains entirely unclear to me what people mean when they allege jihad, other than as a panicky signalling mechanism. But let's take the more direct issue at hand, whether the Tsarnaev brothers were motivated by extremist religion. As Glenn Greenwald points out, Sullivan has proved that a) the elder Tsarnaev brother had strong Islamic religious convictions and that b) the brothers are very likely guilty of committing violent crimes. There's a missing connection there.

Sullivan (who is, as always, being very good about highlighting and addressing criticism of his own work), has essentially doubled down. Here he responds to Kevin Drum, and again, Sully seems to believe that all that is required to prove that the impetus was Islamic radicalism is to prove that the perpetrators were Muslim and that they committed violence. There's something missing, there.

To me, though, the question isn't whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev believed he was waging jihad. The question is, what's the difference for our next step? How and why would a religious motivation matter? Where the question of Islamic extremism is made relevant is in our perception that there is a larger network of extremists who are eager and able to launch violent attacks against this country. As you know, I'm a skeptic about the size and destructive ability of that network. But it is ancillary to the conversation, because all of our current best evidence suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers worked alone, and had no connection to Al Qaeda or any other anti-American group. The analogy for the Tsarnaev brothers shouldn't be to the 9/11 hijackers but to the Fort Hood shooter or the DC snipers. Sure: individuals or small groups have the ability to be inspired (in whole or in part) by Islam, along with personal anger and feelings of inadequacy and grievance against American foreign policy and plain old sociopathy. And because of the reality of modern technology, these people have the ability to kill other people. What they do not have, and should not be mistaken for having, is the ability to represent a serious threat to the basic security and prosperity of this or any other country.

Today, Sullivan quoted Norman Geras:

The supposed ‘overreaction’ to terrorist attacks isn’t primarily about the extent of risk relative to accidental death, or about fear for one’s own safety. It’s about people taking quite proper exception when, finding it morally outrageous indeed that, individuals moved by some grievance or other and/or the tenets of a murderous ideology, freely choose to put the innocent in peril by random acts of violence.

Well, first: this attitude is perfectly indicative of the American chauvinism that so many in the rest of the world find enraging, the notion that our moral outrage is somehow more important or more acute than those of non-Americans. And I would not be myself if I didn't point out that the United States, motivated by some grievance or other and/or the tenets of our murderous ideology, has freely chosen to put the innocent in peril by random acts of violence for much of our history, and attacks like 9/11 are directly related to that. The response to commit violence against Americans is most certainly not proper; in fact it's inexcusable. But please: let's talk like adults.

Talking like adults compels me to read the opinions of Geras and people like him and say, so what? What does the reason behind the panicked, enraged reaction have to do with the best public policy moving forward? Even if hatred and panic are natural reactions, they are not a rational, self-interested response to these types of events. I simply do not understand why adults, 12 years after 9/11, can't separate the moral and emotional revulsion to acts of terrorism from a rational, pragmatic response to those acts. I'm sorry that emotions are so inflamed, but grown ups have to learn to put self-destructive emotions aside for their own good. We've responded with panic and violent overreaction for too long. Time to change.

"What class."

Ron Fournier:

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer walked into the media cabin of Air Force One on May 24, 2002, and dropped identical envelopes in the laps of two reporters, myself and Steve Holland of Reuters. Inside each was a manila card – marked by a small presidential seal and, in a simple font, “THE PRESIDENT.”

Handwritten in the tight script of President George W. Bush, both notes said essentially the same thing: “Thank you for the respect you showed for the office of the President, and, therefore, the respect you showed for our country.”

What had we done? Not much, really. An hour earlier, at a rare outdoor news conference in Germany, Steve and I decided to abide by the U.S. media tradition of rising from our seats when the president entered our presence. The snickering German press corps remained seated. “What a contrast!” Bush wrote. “What class.”

I dug out Bush’s thank-you note this week while contemplating the opening of his presidential library Thursday, a milestone that most journalists will use to assess the 43rd president’s legacy. The record includes Bush’s responses to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and bogus claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – all worth exploring skeptically.

But I’m going to take a few paragraphs to discuss something that gets less attention from the White House press corps – the essential humanity and decency of our presidents.

Bush’s note, a simple gesture, spoke volumes about his respect for the office of the presidency. He did not thank us for respecting him. He knew it wasn’t about George W. Bush. He was touched instead by the small measure of respect we showed “for our country.”

The same sense of dignity compelled Bush to forbid his staff to wear blue jeans in the White House. Male aides were required to wear jackets and ties in the Oval Office.

He was a stickler for punctuality. Long-time adviser Karen Hughes asked him years ago why he was always early for appointments. “Late is rude,” Bush replied. He thought that if people were going to take the time to see him, he shouldn’t keep them waiting.

He remembered names of the spouses and children of his staff, and insisted that hard work at the White House not be an excuse to let family life suffer. One steamy summer day in 1999, then-Gov. George W. Bush called me with an exclusive interview and interrupted my first question. “What's all that noise in the background, Fournier?” he asked.

“I’m at the pool with my kids, governor.”

Bush replied, “Then what the hell are you doing answering your phone?”

Damn good question, sir. We quickly ended the interview.

His record as commander-in-chief will be long debated, as it should be. But for this story, at least, let’s remember that Bush insisted upon meeting U.S. troops and their families in private and after his public events, so that he could give them undivided attention.

He told his staff, “I never want to look at my watch and say, ‘I’ve got to go.’”

Presidents Clinton and Obama also visited troops, in private and for hours at a time. I could tell you many stories about their basic decency, too – of then-Gov. Bill Clinton quietly helping the family of an ailing state employee or of Obama reading 10 letters each night from ordinary Americans.

For as much time we spend understanding our presidents’ policies and politics, relatively little effort is spent trying to understand them as people. We mythologize them as candidates and demonize them as presidents, denying our leaders the balm that soothes mere mortals: Benefit of the doubt.

Disclosure: I am the worst offender. I get paid to hold leaders accountable, not to walk in their shoes. Conversely, I am also a bit biased. Presidents Bush and Clinton agreed last year to meet privately with my autistic son for a project on the presidency. But that is the point: Neither man had anything to gain by agreeing to meet Tyler. They’re not running for office. I don’t cover them anymore.

Fact is that both Bush and Clinton do small acts of kindness every day, with little or no public notice.

Why? Because, like past presidents, they realize the office is bigger than they are. Because they are deeply grateful for the job we gave them, and they feel obliged to return the favor.

Our presidents and ex-presidents are not perfect. You won’t always agree with them. You might not even think they’re worthy of the office. But try to remember what Clinton told me a few days before he left Arkansas for Washington (and a few years before the Lewinsky affair made it sadly ironic): “You don’t check your humanity at the Oval Office door.”

Remembering that is to respect the office. And it’s the decent thing to do.

existential threats

Conor Friedersdorf takes John Tobin at Commentary to task for (of course) inflaming fear of Muslims and beating the drum of panic. Conor does a good job of taking apart Tobin's dismissal of post-9/11 anti-Muslim animus. I want to focus on something a little different. Tobin writes, "The reason why 9/11 was treated as an existential threat to America is that it was."

All these years later, I find that sentiment to be quite common. And it's absolutely nutty. I mean just bizarre. Words have meanings, and to call something an existential threat means that it threatens the continued existence of what is being threatened. The deaths of nearly 3,000 people was an unconscionable crime. But it was nothing resembling an existential threat. The territorial integrity of the United States was never threatened. There was no chance for occupation or the dissolution of our democracy. The day-to-day functioning of the government endured. The average citizen's security, freedom, and prosperity was not in any way compromised. There was literally no chance that Al Qaeda (or terrorism writ large, whatever that means) was going to seriously undermine the American way of life.

The Confederacy was an existential threat to the United States. It represented a future in which the bonds of federalism might have broken at any time, leading to a geographically connected but politically disparate collection of antagonistic fiefdoms that could not work together for economic or military benefit. (To say nothing of the moral case that compelled the war.) The Cold War was an existential threat to the United States. Outside of Red Dawn-style fantasies, the USSR never had the ability to invade the United States. But the power of the militaries, the size of the blocs, and most importantly the destructive potential of the nuclear arsenals meant that the cold conflict represented a genuine threat to the basic existence of the United States. The Axis powers? Yeah. That's an existential threat. Osama bin Laden and his small band of relatively untrained and resource-poor extremists never represented anything resembling a threat to the territorial or practical integrity of the United States.

Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, "I was marinated in the knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s unique evil. At TNR in the 1990s, the consensus was that this dictator truly was another Hitler type (and in many ways, he was)." Sullivan, of course, wrote this in the commission of apologizing for that attitude, and it's good that he's evolved. But it's important to point out here: analogizing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler is deeply unhelpful, because Hussein had nothing resembling the destructive power of Hitler at his disposal. Hussein was guilty of many horrific crimes. He certainly represented a profound immorality, as Hitler did. But what matters when assessing foreign leaders is their potential for destruction, not their moral character. This slippage, between the moral and the practical, has occurred again and again since 9/11, and to our great detriment. It happens whenever someone confuses the moral and emotional toll of the marathon bombing with its practical effects. Not only is it possible to feel profound anger and sadness about the people killed there while recognizing the insignificance of this attack to our basic security, it is necessary to do both, if you want to be a responsible citizen.

September 11th must be seen as an attack that exploited a particularly egregious vulnerability to greatly increase the destructive potential of a ragged group of violent extremists. By the fourth plane, that very same morning, citizen recognition of what was happening and resistance to it prevented a similar attack. For all of the security kabuki we experience at the airport, the simple act of fortifying cockpit doors has done far more to ensure that similar events don't happen in the future. Immediately after 9/11, this country decided on some facts that it had no credible reason to believe. The most damaging was the belief that terrorism controlled a massive, coordinated, well-armed, focused, and uniquely destructive force. Well over a decade later, it's time to drop our emotionally defensive posture and start reacting based on rationality and facts.

PERL bleg

If anybody knows something about PERL and would like to give me a little advice with an academic project, can you please email me? I need help installing and running a PERL program in Windows, not with programming anything myself. freddie7 AT gmail DOT com. Thanks.

Update: You guys are fast, and generous. Problem worked out. Thanks.

just a little reminder

The United States has dealt with American citizens who had commit acts of terrorism before. We Mirandized them, we charged them, we ensured that they had competent legal counsel, and we tried them in civilian courts where they received the typical rights and protections guaranteed to the accused. In none of those cases did this decision endanger more lives, prevent adequate prosecution, or otherwise present any threat to the country or its people.

Timothy McVeigh: killed 168 people. Injured over 800 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and tried in a civilian court. Ted Kaczynski: killed three people. Injured 23 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and processed through a civilian court. Eric Rudolph: killed two people. Injured at least 150 more. Was motivated by political convictions. He was arrested, Mirandized, charged, appointed with legal counsel, and processed through a civilian court.

If you recognize that the results of these legal cases were consonant with our system of jurisprudence and with justice, you cannot ask for a separate status for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev without supporting legal discrimination based on ethnicity and religion. To deny Tsarnaev the legal status conferred on prior domestic terrorists, or to support such a denial, is to abandon the most elementary commitment of modern jurisprudence, which is the equality of all people under the law. It's to stand for legal bigotry.

good news everyone

All our problems are solved.

Gawker is on fire

For a little while now, I've felt that Gawker has become consistently the best website that I regularly read. That's been a bit of an odd feeling for me. Traditionally, I have been a skeptic. I care about compassion and about basic human kindness, and there was a time when Gawker really had descended into being the indiscriminately bitchy gossip house it had long been accused of being. But it's gotten better, even as it's centrality (in terms of media attention if not pageviews) has ebbed. They're consistently putting out excellent stuff. More importantly, they're consistently putting out necessary stuff.

This past week, this terrible and wearying and soul-destroying week, has demonstrated just how thoroughly broken American media is. I use media there in an expansive sense, and I can't help but be disgusted not merely by the obvious targets of the New York Post and cable news but also a lot of the websites that are having fun at their expense. (Twitter is undergoing one of its cyclical spasms of self-congratulation for being a "truth machine" at the same time as totally unfounded speculation gets pumped out through it every minute.) Media criticism is cheap, but good media criticism is rare and difficult. And it's here I think that Gawker has really distinguished itself.

I'm on record as saying that Tom Scocca is a national treasure. And John Cook, whose work at times fit uncomfortably with what else was going on at the blog, has really come into his own as its head. I think he's assume a kind of grand old man status there, while maintaining a deeply black anger at all of the repugnant stupidity in our professional media. The guest posts they run, while a target for the (increasingly deranged) commenters, are often well-curated and moving. And I do dig a lot of their reporting. I still worry about the proud disrespect for traditional journalistic ethics; Nick Denton has always publicly espoused a kind of mannered amoralism that seems to deny any responsibility for the actual impact of Gawker's work on actual lives. That's a mistake, I think, and one that clashes with their power and precision in tearing into the failures of traditional big media. That contrast is one that I still don't think Gawker Media, as an entity, has a particularly coherent attitude towards. But there's no question that the bad old days when Gawker became enamored of its own power to harm are gone, and that what is being published there now is far more sharp and far more useful. I confess to not having much positive to say about the weekend crew, but you can't win 'em all, and I believe that there's an internal commitment to improvement and to accessibility now that makes me happy.

(I've always suspected that Denton's much-professed lack of any morals was something he advanced himself for show, and that there's actually a lot of conscience in there, but I've been assured by someone that this is not the case, and she would know.)

A separate question to quality is profitability. I've always heard that Gawker Media is, in the context of "content generation," quite profitable. In a superficial sense, it's clear that they've got a Steven Soderbergh model of web publishing: subsidizing the deeper, unique-to-Gawker stuff with linkbait curation stuff, mostly posted by Neetzan Zimmerman and Caity Weaver. Lots of places are attempting to pull of that balance. Gawker's is just particularly shameless, and because of that, particularly honest. (I have often wondered if Zimmerman's explicit direction is to cruise Reddit and Tumblr and similar to find clicky content.) I admit that a lot of what gets put out in the revenue-mining posts is garbage, but it's the kind of garbage that suffuses the Internet, and if it subsidizes Scocca and Adrian Chen and your occasional Rich Juzwiak "pulling back the curtain to reveal Gaytown to all you secretly turned-on straights" piece, I'm all for it. I mean, Buzzfeed's "16 Sluttiest Cat Gifs" mostly goes to subsidize Ben Smith taking lunches with Reince Priebus, and Business Insider's "12 Times Business Insider Literally Just Copy and Pasted Somebody Else's Work" subsidizes Henry Blodget. I know where I'm happier to generate ad revenue. The reality is that if you don't have a paywall or subscription service or similar, you have to be publishing all the time to make the money work, and that means that even the best aren't going to have a great percentage.

Worth saying, by the way, that really good investigative and media criticism stuff can drive ad revenue, too. If I remember correctly, Chen's Silk Road piece, for example, did huge numbers.

Then there's the format. I think it's there that Denton's particular genius for this biz has been, if anything, underdiscussed. It appears that the Kinja rollout at Gawker is imminent. You can check out most of the other Gawker Media blogs to get a taste. I'll say right off the bat: I deeply dislike the new format, which seems to take the new fetish for space-wasting and lack of navigability to the furthest extent possible. But in the web writ large, the "clean" look and tablet optimization looks to be here to stay, at this point, and I'm fighting a losing battle. More interesting to me is the way in which Kinja is a participatory model. You can start a blog at any of the Gawker sites. It's not functionally any different from starting your own Wordpress or Tumblr, I guess, but it's a clear attempt to make people feel like they have a personal stake in the websites. Commenters can also annotate images and, I believe, sometimes the text of posts themselves. The goal seems to be to generate loyalty through personal investment.

What's so interesting about that, to me, is that it's almost the opposite of an old Gawker model. Back when Gawker was at its most zeitgeisty and prominent, they had a system designed to make commenting (and by extension, reading) feel like being part of an elite. The gating that was employed to distribute commenting privileges, and featured commenter status, gave the website a way to dole out rewards, and in so doing condition people to keep coming back. Denton was like a new media BF Skinner. I found it all kind of obvious and crass. I mean, they literally gave out gold stars. But I couldn't deny that it was effective. Despite my lack of conscious attachment to such a cheap and meaningless symbol, I admit, when Cook destarred me, I felt a twinge of real unhappiness. (In his defense, I think I called one of his posts a piece of shit.) When I realized that I cared, I laughed out loud. Denton, you motherfucker! You got me!

The thing about velvet ropes, though, is that they keep people out. The elitist model works well for getting a smaller number of people to feel an attachment to your enterprise, but for a model that runs on pure weight of numbers, like the online ad revenue model does, it's ultimately self-defeating. So that version of Gawker evolved. Kinja, I suppose, is a matter of taking the new openness to its logical ends. I'm not a fan thus far, but we'll see.

Excellence has many parents. One of the easier ways to misunderstand the world is to look at what's being produced and assume that it's the product of somebody's plan. We understand that failure often arises without anybody's intent, but in my experience, excellence too is unplanned. Will they keep it up? Who knows? I'm enjoying it for now, and more, I'm happy that there are people out there who are writing intelligently about all the reasons we have to feel bad.

consent is an instrument of freedom

I have a lot of thoughts about this Twitter conversation, archived at Alyssa Rosenberg's blog, about media depictions of sex. Some of it, I agreed with. Some of it, I disagreed with. And some of it left me concerned about its rhetorical and political success, about how well this sort of conversation actually functions to reach beyond the group of like-minded people who have them. My particular fear, though, is my perception that in some venues, any disagreement about sex is often conflated with a lack of conviction when it comes to the need for consent, which is unfair and ultimately self-defeating.

So to start with the obvious: I believe that there is one rule about sex that must be followed at all times and by all people, the rule of consent-- that informed consent be given by all parties, that all parties be mentally and emotionally cognizant of the act and its consequences and in a state of mental and physical health sufficient to grant consent, and that all parties choose entirely free of coercion, explicit or implied. Without constant consent, there is no sexual behavior that is not a crime. With constant consent, there is no sexual behavior that is morally impermissible. There is certainly unsatisfactory sex with consent. There is no immoral sex with consent. I do not believe in perversion.

I also believe that, beyond the rule of consent, there is a world of freedom and choice to be had, one which that conversation seems to constrain in ways that produce no more justice, or safety, to me. If those are being expressed merely as the personal proclivities of those involved, fair enough. But I think you'll find that there's a constant slippage in the conversation between what constitutes sexual preference and what constitutes appropriately consensual sexual conduct.

I think (I hope!) that everyone in that conversation would agree that sex can be fully consensual and mutually enjoyable for both parties without being, for example, silly and filled with laughter. (I simultaneously recognize the point that they're making, that sex is almost exclusively a very serious affair in the movies.) That seems like straightforward preference. But what about the discussion of "how many love scenes start wordlessly, with man grabbing woman and kissing her passionately"? Certainly, grabbing someone and kissing them can be an impermissible act of sexual aggression. But I'm going to stake out a controversial space here and say that one person wordlessly approaching another and embracing them in a passionate kiss is a behavior that has very, very often been fully consensual and an act of utter human joy. For men and women, gay and straight alike. I'm gonna really go out on a limb and say that in fact lots of people derive deep pleasure from spontaneous passionate kissing, and not only would consent to same but would very much like it to happen more often.

I am also disturbed by Rosenberg's implication that either consent is explicitly voiced or it is merely intuited. I agree: intuiting consent is deeply problematic. But consent can be communicated without being explicitly voiced. Many, many people (gay and straight, men and women) engage in fully consensual and mutually pleasurable sexual behavior every day without anyone giving explicit voiced consent. The use of nonverbal communication to assent to sexual activity, when paired with the ability of each participant to verbally or nonverbally indicate the desire to stop and the firm commitment of the other participant(s) to stop in that case, is not somehow untoward or on a spectrum of rape. It's the way many people undergo their sexual lives. In my own life, consensual and mutually enjoyable sex has happened without explicitly vocalized consent, and that has led to future sex and long-term romantic relationships. I believe I join many, many people in that regard. I also have had sex where explicit consent was proffered and received, and that was great too. The very meaning of sexual freedom is that sex will not always be the same.

Now for those who always want explicit, voiced consent to be the expectation in their own lives and their own sexual activity, great. That's a stance I understand and value. If the complaint is merely that pop culture does not depict that kind of activity, it's a valid criticism. But the slide into acting as though consent that is not vocalized is somehow inherently problematic worries me. Not out of the feeling of being personally judged, but because I think that stance is the kind of casually politically self-defeating attitude I encounter in social liberalism all the time. I have to tell you: concern trolling passionate kissing does not strike me as a way to build a bigger coalition. The sex positive turn in feminism occurred because feminist women argued for their right to the enjoyment of consensual sex while maintaining their status as feminists. It also emerged from an understanding that a movement that was unfairly depicted as anti-sex was not going to enjoy long-lasting or broad political success.

If I have misread this conversation (constrained, as it is, by an unnatural limitation in characters-per-expression), then I apologize. If the point is simply to open up our cultural definition of what good sex entails and looks like, then that is a purpose I applaud. If I have assumed otherwise, it's because of a constant effort on the part of some strains of social liberalism to define all disagreement on a spectrum of the worst possible behaviors. Take the necessary and principle effort against anti-Semitism. The tendency to make accusations of anti-Semitism more and more common has not made the effort more successful. Just the opposite: the constancy of the accusations has threatened to undermine the effort against anti-Semitism by making the accusation meaningless. In a similar fashion, the failure to adequately differentiate between what we see as sexual practice that is most conducive to enjoyment, and the specific and immensely important discussion about what constitutes consent, threatens to make the pursuit of zero sexual violence harder, not easier.

As I've said: the first commitment must be to continue to insist on the absolute and non-negotiable necessity of informed, non-coercive, adult consent between all parties. Given the way in which sexual violence is still a deep and widespread problem in our society, and given the culture that excuses it, I will work with anyone who is committed to that effort. Beyond consent, there is a world of difference and personal preference, one in which mutually consenting adults can find pleasure and fulfillment in a myriad of ways that might not appeal to the rest of us. Part of what social liberalism has fought for, over the past decades, is the right for consenting adults to engage in sexual behaviors in their own beds that others would not want to undertake in theirs. The fight for consent and against sexual violence is among the most pressing moral requirements of all people. But we should not allow that effort to become the sole lens through which we view sexual activity, which produces human flourishing as surely and as deeply as any other aspect of human life. And discussing sex in a way that at once insists on consent and yet sees beyond defining sex only in relation to sexual violence is a key political strategy for engaging the world beyond our followers on Tumblr or Twitter.

To the degree to which that conversation is a part of such a broadening of the conversation, I applaud it. To the degree to which it obscures the difference between issues of personal preference and issues of consent, I am concerned. In either case, the way forward is the same, which is to the continued effort for sexual justice, against sexual violence, towards the end of rape culture, and to the celebration of a world of sexual pleasure and sexual freedom.

keep radio silence

So when all this went down on Monday, I said to myself, I'm not saying shit for awhile. That has proved to be a wise choice.

And now back to it. Peace.

same old same, really

I've been thinking about all this, and more and more I think that the problem is the same old one. I just don't think that the market economy can deliver results that are compatible with what we see as justice.

Someone I respect a lot asked me whether I really thought that a lack of character or fortitude was the reason a lot of social liberals to focus on emoting about injustice rather than addressing injustice structurally. And it's a fair point. Problems this big and this pronounced don't stem from failures of personality but from structural issues. This particular issue is the big issue with American liberalism: not so much a failure of analysis but a refusal to take that analysis to its logical endpoints. This will drive some of my readers crazy, but I think that a lot of liberals actually have a fairly sophisticated critique of current American society, and one that gets pretty radical in its understanding of class warfare, and in its identification of the way that money has undermined democracy. Read liberal media after the financial crisis; they aren't afraid to say that the antagonism that matters is an antagonism between social classes and that the good of the moneyed is directly at odds with the good of the poor. The trouble is that they never make the next step and advocate for equally radical change to match that radicalism in analysis.

So look at issues of race, like we've been talking about. I think the reason that there's so much focus on people saying shitty things is that the material change is essentially impossible under our current system. Wealth and income disparities are self-replicating. Changing the massive black-white wealth gap, for example, would take an enormous redistributive effort, one that will never happen under our current political system. What's more, it is not an accident that conditions like the Drug War exist. The Drug War is essentially a way to derive profit from racism. The money that flows from anti-drug programs to corporate entities like private prison companies, and to police departments, is staggering. Now I happen to believe that there are reforms that are possible within the system that could help alleviate the effects of this situation, and that the human benefits are substantial. But there's nothing to stop corporate power from simply finding a new way to immiserate the lower classes in order to find profit.

The reality is that our economy will be in a permanent, ever-more-violent cycle of booms and busts as long as finance remains beyond societal control. And as long as currency holds as much power as it does, no political entity will discipline finance. It's not going to happen. Within this system, social justice cannot be achieved. There is too much power in the hands of money, and money's interests and society's interests are not the same.

I will continue to dismay my radical friends in seeing much to praise in the critiques and analysis of liberalism. (I will also continue to dismay my liberal friends in calling them part of the problem, leaving me, as per usual, without a large bloc.) But ultimately I can't be someone who can be put in the liberal camp, because I simply do not believe that a market economy can or will deliver results compatible with minimal human justice. Revolution or evolution, only structural change in ownership of the means of production and a dramatic leveling of economic and political power can get us the world liberals say they want.

All Up In Your Grill with Chris Hayes

I'm told that Chris Hayes responded to my post on his show tonight. I'll update this post with the video when it's available, and let him have the last word.

And there's this.

Update: Here's the video.

the thing is that we're losing

As is typical when I criticize social liberal efforts, I'm getting a lot of pushback in emails and comments when it comes to Rand Paul at Howard. Some of these are asserting that I have a regard for Paul that I have explicitly denied. But more take a form that I find far more pernicious, which is the chronic overestimation of social liberalism's current strength and success.

Here's three things that many social liberals seem to believe.

1. The United States has historically been and remains a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society, not merely in emotional terms but in systematic and material ways that impact on matters of economics, material security, and individual freedom. (They're right.)
2. Progress has occurred far too slowly, and in some ways appear to have stopped. (They're right.)
3. Social liberalism is proceeding more or less as it should. Critiques from either the left or the right are not motivated by good faith. Reform is unnecessary.

How can all of these things be true? Here, let's take the most communal activity in social liberalism today, the ritual mockery of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. It's like a secular sacrament. Everybody jeers and laughs, everybody emerges convinced of their superiority, nothing happens. Yes, it's true: a lot of Stewart's points are spot on. Yes, it's true: lots of conservative racial discourse is incredibly tone-deaf or out-and-out unhelpful. No, I don't think that most of Rand Paul's preferences would be good for black people or the country writ large. But those aren't the questions that matter. What is the theory of change, here? Jon Stewart has been mocking Republicans for over a decade. Do you think that this is somehow expanding the coalition? We have tried this. It is not working.

The overwhelming impression I get from social liberals is of annoyance at ever being asked to assess whether their efforts are working. Liberals complain about conservative epistemic closure constantly, but every time the Twitter outrage cycle gets going again-- pretty much a weekly occurrence, at this point-- I say to myself, this is epistemtic closure in its purest form. It's a small group of like-minded people who substantially agree on almost everything and who have systematically excluded contrary or critical opinion by immediately and vituperatively denouncing anyone who questions the dominant narrative. I asked whether the Onion-Quevenzhane Wallis controversy had created any genuinely positive effects, and everybody flipped the fuck out. It happens that it's easier to forbid that question than to answer it.

My earliest memories of really being aware of how deeply unequal our society was, outside of the limited confines of my own life and my own neighborhood, was when Jess Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign held a rally at my elementary school. It was the first time my 7 year old self really got how big the effort had to be. Well, go back in time and bring somebody from that Jesse Jackson rally to now, 25 years in the future. How could they possibly be anything but deeply saddened and disturbed that we haven't come any farther? Consider the recent research on the black-white wealth gap. Or pick any number of metrics that reflect on the actual, material conditions of black people in this country, related to economics, to education, to health care, to quality of life. On far too many, if they've advanced, they've advanced at a crawl. The Civil Rights Acts are coming up on their 50th birthdays. Do you feel good about where we are?

If you believe that we have a profound duty to end systematic inequality, and if you believe that we are not moving nearly fast enough in those efforts, then you cannot shield your own movement from reform. I can only honestly relay my impression of social liberalism as it exists now: a collection of people who have a very narrow view of this society and people within it, who are disproportionately collected in liberal enclaves, who consume certain types of media and have certain types of conversation, and who treat politics as a sorting mechanism for dividing the righteous from the wicked, rather than as a tool to make the latter into the former. Social liberalism as it currently exists strikes me as a movement more interested with being right than with doing right. You are free to disagree with that evaluation. But to look at the metrics of actual material success and conclude that the current movement does not need reform is to be a part of the problem.

In order to constitute a part of the solution, you've got to give up the tired stance of snarky superiority that often seems to be the sole idiom of social liberalism. You've got to stop mistaking scoring cheap points with cheap jokes for actually contributing to anything resembling progress. And you've got to force yourself to stop believing that your RSS reader is an accurate reflection of country-wide sentiment, or that everybody more or less believes as the people in your Brooklyn neighborhood do, and that solving these problems is merely a matter of righteously mocking some small, sad rump of racism that lives somewhere far away. If you want to make progress, you have to change, rather than constantly telling other people they have to change. But to do that, you've got to give up the jokey imperviousness that so many social liberals treat like a birthright.

If you're Chris Hayes, meanwhile, I think the message is simpler: late night cable television doesn't need any more programming based on the notion that problems go away when we laugh at them, as profitable a model as that can be. Those bases are covered.

Update: 


Drug war, nonviolent offenders, jails full of black and Hispanic people convicted of drug crimes, hardy har har

links and such

• Tom Scocca is simply indispensable. He picks his topics judiciously, pulls off the tricky balance of power-through-restraint, and unlike so many so many other writers of a left-wing bent, is able to express his views without a hint of self-hatred or embarrassment.
• Sometimes people I like ask me why I'm so hard on The Atlantic. Here's the perfect example of why I can't and won't take the magazine seriously. If you want to not be treated as a peddler of vulgar, factually inaccurate propaganda, don't peddle vulgar, factually inaccurate propaganda.  Incidentally, if you'd like to see some facts about the remarkably free and fair elections in Venezuela, you can find evidence and links here.
• On the other side of the ledger of Gawker media, here's more in Gizmodo's bizarre, constant pro-American hegemony propaganda, by a deeply uninformed techie named Andrew Tarantola. Neither Mossad nor the CIA believe that Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb.
• This Margaret Thatcher obit in Jacobin is a good palate cleanser for the previous one that I liked so little.
• This piece is quite long, but it's a really entertaining account of academic and historical detective work.
• I subscribed to The Slurve, and if you like baseball (or sports media not owned by Disney), you should too. (That said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if MBD started next season as an employee of ESPN, himself.)
• I've gotten a few more gifts from readers in the last couple of days. It means more than I can say.

I will repeat myself

Here on this ol' planet of Earth, there are a lot of people, a lot of issues, and a lot of stances on a lot of issues. You are going to disagree with most people on most issues most of the time. You are going to agree with some people on some of the issues some of the time. Some of these people you will form broad coalitions with; some of them you will form intimate associations of solidarity with; some of them you will say, hey, when that guy says X, I agree. Sadly, there will likely be many more of the last than of the former two. As someone who has voted but never ever felt good about the people he voted for, that feeling is familiar.

For anyone to read what I wrote today and say, "Hey, that Freddie loves Rand Paul and is a libertarian," there are three and only three possibilities. They are:

1. You are such a partisan that you can't see beyond the narrowest interests of your political party and its electoral needs. I have nothing for you.
2. You are a deeply, deeply stupid person. I would be glad to set up Skype video lessons on the difference between agreeing with someone on a particular issue and choosing them as your personal messiah and political leader, for the low low price of $29.95 an hour.
3. You are motivated not by arriving at the true, the constructive, or the good, but on elevating your social station with a small group of connected media insiders who you constantly interact with through a steady drip of meaningless microcommunications that exist not to deliver propositional content or expand discourse but to endlessly signal your seriousness and your tribal affiliation. For you, too, I have nothing. Sorry.

That about sums it up.

how to prove conservative stereotypes about liberals and race

Link in case the embedding doesn't work.

I am, as you know, not a fan of Rand Paul. Being that I am a socialist and that Paul is (sort of) a libertarian, this will come as no surprise. And, I agree that there was much to shake my head at in Paul's remarks at Howard University, from both a policy perspective and on the level of aesthetics. There are many ways to criticize the stuff he said. Just about the worst way to do it is to snark around, giggling and hawing at the rube from Kentucky in a way that makes your disagreement seem cultural rather than substantive. And the really stupid way to do it is to simultaneously claim that we need to move past feelings and dialogue when it comes to race-- a point I've made dozens of times myself-- while ignoring the actual, substantive point a powerful legislator made about a matter of law. From Dave Weigel's far more honest take on Paul's remarks.

I am working with Democratic senators to make sure that kids who make bad decisions such as nonviolent possession of drugs are not imprisoned for lengthy sentences,” said Paul. “I am working to make sure that first time offenders are put into counseling and not imprisoned with hardened criminals.” Barack Obama and George Bush did drugs, after all, and they turned out okay because they got “lucky.”

The drug war, of course, is one of the most damaging weapons that is employed in this country's ongoing war on black people. It's also one of the few places where I ever feel genuine optimism about our coming to legislative progress on race and class injustice. I can actually imagine a Republican coalition working with progressive legislators to help gradually decelerate our ruinous, racist, cruel drug policy. I can't see that happening, though, if prominent liberal voices like that of Hayes are so busy chuckling and snarking on national television that they give up every opportunity to find common cause. 

Of course, because he's Rand Paul, and Rand Paul is a dumbass with generally bad politics, he couldn't help himself:

Paul was on to something, but it didn’t last. “Some argue with evidence that our drug laws are biased—that they are the new Jim Crow,” he said. “But to simply be against them for that reason misses a larger point. They are unfair to everyone.”

Look, we've got a system that is almost sadistically bent away from representing the interests of our cities. High population states are systematically underrepresented compared to their rural, low population counterparts. Our governmental structures emerged from a fetish for compromise, one that holds the whole country hostage to the most extreme conservative minority. No pragmatic political value can be wrung from those structures without occasionally finding common cause with people who generally believe stupid things. If Rand Paul is willing to throw his voice and his vote behind a long-term effort to end the drug war, I'm willing to listen to what he says, even if he turns around and demonstrates that he doesn't understand the full extent of the problem, where it comes from, or what it will take to actually end racial inequality in this country.

Weigel puts it aptly:

When he left the campus, past the students still holding the “White Supremacy” banner and conducting interviews, Paul remained the Republican most likely to reform mandatory minimums. He remained the most prominent Republican supporter of drug law reform. He wouldn’t apologize for the Republican Party, or for libertarianism, or for that 2010 interview about the Civil Rights Act. “Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent?” he said then. “Should we limit racists from speaking?” Now, he was offering African-Americans some accommodation, from time to time.

I wonder if Hayes has considered the possibility that part of the reason why we have such a problem with racial equality in this country-- why we have a hard time getting to those substantive, material changes that he is talking about-- is because people like himself are so busy sneering at the cultural differences of their political opponents that they can't produce common ground. What does Hayes imagine would happen if a conservative who is on the fence about drug law reform were to watch his show? How does this performance do anything but eject such a person from that conversation?

My fear is that Hayes didn't worry about that because he knows that no such person is watching his broadcast. To someone who would never in a million years vote for Rand Paul, who agrees on substance with probably 99% of the things Hayes believes on drug and crime policy, and who can think of a thousand things wrong with Paul's reported remarks, this clip looks like nothing more than pure red meat for Hayes's assumed audience. It's service journalism, reassuring Hayes's Democratic viewership of their superiority on this issue. I am, as you know, not someone who ever insists on compromise or political expediency. If Hayes thinks that Paul's legislative perspectives on the drug war is incorrect, and can't support them, he should say so and say why. I'd support that kind of principled resistance. But to claim to want to focus on the material aspects of our racial inequalities and then ignore the substance of a prominent Republican's take on just those aspects is dishonest and unhelpful. I would turn Hayes's question back on him: what, exactly, is your priority?

a brief, nasty case of Very Serious Syndrome

Boy, Jacobin's Margaret Thatcher obituary from today is hot fucking garbage. It's incredible to me that a magazine that has been founded on explicit class antagonism is laying wreaths on the grave of one of the most enthusiastic defenders of privilege and the upper class in recent memory. Margaret Thatcher was a woman who not only materially defended the needs of the upper classes (some of them literal nobility!) against the lower classes, she was a constant voice for the cultural and social superiority of the upper classes against the low. The obituary makes that plain enough. "Thatcher thought of herself as a product of this superior form of society." Indeed. And the way to respond to this class pride from above is not with anodyne neutrality.

But, okay. They wanted to publish something restrained. I think that's a mistake, but I guess I get it. I don't get writing an obituary of Margaret Thatcher for a left-wing publication that fails to mention her support for Pinochet of Chile, for Suharto in Indonesia, or for the explicitly racist white government of 1980s South Africa. (Pinochet, in particular, she supported for years and years after all of his crimes had become public knowledge.) If a magazine with that title doesn't see fit to point out a world leader's consistent and forceful opposition to resistance and liberation movements, something has gone badly wrong.

But it's on the subject of the Poll Tax that the piece is most infuriating.

With her Community Charge — better known as the Poll Tax — she planned to restore responsibility to local electorates. The tax burden would be basically equalised for each individual voter, encouraging a sense of responsibility and due regard for sober economy in the polling booth. 

Logical in theory, the Poll Tax demonstrated Thatcher’s departure from her previous sure touch for popular opinion.

I would make fun of this if it appeared in The New Republic, let alone a Marxist magazine. If it isn't abundantly clear: "equalizing the tax burden" in a system of great inequality is regressive. The essential logic of all flattening of tax burdens is inherently regressive. That's why a reactionary politician like Margaret Thatcher called for it. This logic was not lost on the people of the UK, who virulently opposed the Poll Tax. They identified it, correctly, as a massive transfer away from the lower classes and towards the rich. Because the focus was on number of persons instead of amount of resources or property, rich people with small families paid proportionally less than poor people with big families. As the Independent put it, "In practice, critics pointed out, that meant a millionaire living alone in a mansion would pay less than the average family."

Hey, you know who eventually admitted that the Poll Tax was anything but "logical in theory"? Margaret Fucking Thatcher:

Speculation that the tax would change was heightened after a report in The Economist in which the magazine quoted senior members of the Government as saying that at a private meeting Mrs. Thatcher ''agreed that the poll tax was unfair'' and that ''she cited, as an example, the amount she herself would have to pay and the saving she would make.''

To represent this baldly regressive tax scheme as a good idea that merely failed politically is conservative and wrong.

The left's pathologies are different from those of the right, but are no less disqualifying. This obituary epitomizes two of the worst of them: the refusal to fight with the same ferocity as the right wing does, and the learned helplessness that compels the left wing to say, hey, what can we do? For the former, there's this continued bizarre notion that restraining yourself artificially in a fight somehow improves your position, the fetish for seriousness that mistakes appeals to the David Broder in people for a winning political strategy. Badgers don't fight fair, Bubba, and she was a badger, an ornery and vicious warrior for her class and its interests. That's exactly why the right loves her, because of her willingness to get dirty. Nothing suits the Iron Lady better than having iron in your criticisms of her. For the latter, you've got the unsupported claims within the piece that Thatcherism was some sort of historical inevitability. "The social and economic consequences of de-industrialization... would have taken place in one form or other without her" is the kind of sentiment that excuses the left from having to achieve real change and that defensively protects against the possibility of failure. It's also ignores counterexamples, given the ability that countries like the Scandinavian social democracies demonstrated to transition into a new economy without gutting labor or undertaking ugly cultural war. It's a counterrevolutionary attitude and I have no patience for it.

I can't and don't hang the magazine on the weaknesses of one article. (I much preferred Bhaskar Sunkara's obit.) I instead present you with two texts. The first is this obituary. The second is the video that follows, which demonstrates how actual working class British people reacted to the Poll Tax. Which, do you suppose, better fits the ethos of a magazine that puts the guillotine on its cover?

we're still living in Thatcher's world

Andrew Sullivan, unsuprisingly, has published a full-throated defense and celebration of Margaret Thatcher. He calls Thatcher a liberator, which might be interesting to the Britons who were liberated of economic security or the Chileans liberated of their lives by her "staunch and true friend" Augusto Pinochet. But others will demonstrate the size of Sullivan's blinders better than I can.

What I do want to point out is that Sullivan is someone who has spoken out against income inequality recently, and that inequality-- the steep and terrible decline of workers-- is and will remain her most obvious and enduring legacy. Here's part of what Thatcher meant for the UK:

What Thatcher meant in material terms for the United Kingdom was fewer jobs and worse compensation for those who had them. And as she was such a warrior against social programs, she also ensured that governmental assistance to ease this pain was reduced. This was not some sad unintended consequence of her policies. It was her policy. The Reaganite-Thatcherite revolution was an unapologetic and purposeful attempt to hurt workers relative to capital. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. That project has not changed. The neoliberal policy regime that has thrown its weight against workers to the betterment of the rich has not left power in the United States or the UK since Reagan and Thatcher, and they are continuing the work, despite the system-wide crisis for workers. This is the legacy of the neoliberal turn here in America:

And that chart doesn't begin to encompass what a terrible time workers are having right now: underpaid, lacking benefits, lacking in job security, deprived of negotiating power, subject to the fickleness of short-term economic conditions in an economy dominated by riverboat gamblers, somehow both underemployed and overworked, and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. Conditions are worsening for workers all over, and everyone fears the next great crash.

Sullivan has a host of admirable qualities as a writer and a thinker, including a rare and valuable capacity for self-criticism and changing his mind. But I just think he's too much of an old Tory to ever think of politics in terms of simple class antagonism and power relations to really understand how our policy apparatus has set out to screw the common person at the behest of the wealthy, or how Thatcher was complicit in that effort.

I was born in 1981. The most significant story of America in my lifetime, the one that will do more to dictate America's future and the American character for the next century, is the decline of work and the immiseration of workers. That is the most important development in American history in 30 years. Not 9/11 or either Iraq war, not the presidencies of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, not the rise of the Internet, not our first black president or both political parties nominating  women for the vice presidential ticket, not urbanization or global warming. The decline of working life is most significant because it has done most to undermine our social contract. The American Dream was always something of a lie, a dream deferred for black people and women and those lacking in received privilege. But now the lie has gotten bigger and harder to ignore. Yet all of the macroeconomic effort to arrive at this position of a total winner-take-all economy, an inegalitarian world of a few thousand Elois and hundreds of millions of Morlocks, received the direct blessing of Margaret Thatcher. A world of many losers and a few lucky winners is the world Thatcher wanted.

Sullivan speaks in his piece of a backlash, of how the Britain of his youth became the Britain of Thatcher because people had enough. My only enduring hope is that a similar backlash is coming, that the insane pursuit of the immiseration of the worker that was begun by people like Thatcher and Reagan and their cronies has pushed common people to the edge. Perhaps when they finally explode, they will do so in a way that leads us to the next great evolution of human economy, towards socialism, and the total repudiation of the individualist ethic of greed and selfishness that Margaret Thatcher epitomized.

Update: And the Gini coefficient, via Doug Henwood.