defining the fundamental character of Israel

News out of Israel that, I imagine, will be seen as scary or mundane depending on your larger perspective on Israel and the occupation:

Forty lawmakers from both the coalition and opposition Wednesday submitted a proposal to the Knesset for a new Basic Law that would change the accepted definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state."

The bill, initiated by MKs Avi Dichter (Kadima ), Zeev Elkin (Likud ) and David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ), and supported by 20 of the 28 Kadima MKs, would make democratic rule subservient to the state's definition as "the national home for the Jewish people."

The legislation, a private member's bill, won support from Labor, Atzamaut, Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union lawmakers.

Sources at the Knesset say the law currently has broad support, and they believe it will be passed during the Knesset's winter session.

According to Elkin, the law is intended to give the courts reasoning that supports "the state as the Jewish nation state in ruling in situations in which the Jewish character of the state clashes with its democratic character."

For as long as I've debated the larger issue of Israel's occupation of Palestine, the degree to which Israel's stance as a Jewish state and a democratic state are in conflict has been a sore point, and I've clashed with people for being too hard on Israel and for being too easy on Israel. Some claim that there is no more conflict between Israel's Jewish character and its democratic nature than there is between an American ethos and democracy. I find this far too pat, and I think a tremendous amount of the anger and confusion regarding Israel stem from fundamental tensions between the classical liberal values of egalitarianism under nation states and Israel's Jewish religious and ethnic character. I personally believe, due to a rather ordinary conviction that nation states must recognize all people within their borders with perfect equity, that many of Israel's policies are unjust.

On the other side, I have long disagreed with people who think that Israel cannot exist as Israel and be a righteous state. There are some who find the very formulation of a homeland for Jews racist in its character. But I believe, perhaps incoherently, that there can exist a prosperous and free state of Israel that recognizes no differences between its citizens based on religion or ethnicity or race but that nevertheless stands as a homeland where Jews can always come and be safe. I understand that immigration procedure becomes quite sticky, and I don't pretend that there isn't considerable tension there. Then again, I believe in totally open immigration as a matter of ideal theory, so perhaps that isn't my issue.

In any event, Israeli politicians seem set on making this discussion moot. For while Americans might find room for debate in whether there is a conflict between Israeli democracy and Israeli Jewishness, these politicians seem to think that the conflict is quite clear. And they are hoping to enshrine in law a clear and unmistakeable preference: that Israel is Jewish first and democratic second.

That this will have profound consequences for non-Jewish residents and citizens of Israel seems clear enough to me. Less clear is how the American political machine or the international community will react to an Israel that seems ready to throw off its long-celebrated position as the Middle East's premiere democracy. The Knesset appears to be on the verge of making a bold statement. I wonder who will listen.

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the contempt gap

Will Wilkinson does as he does and mocks the American left for thinking that we should try to advance our moral and ideological interests politically. He points out that our positions aren't super popular. Meanwhile, his cosmopolitan globalist liberaltarianism platform is sure to take off in the heartland. I expect it any day now.

It may be that the media's tendency to take any conservative populist movement seriously and to treat any liberal populist movement as a gang of crazies is too much to overcome now. I hear it constantly: "well, what liberals need to do is to start a tea party of the left." But the left wouldn't receive the fawning, credulous media coverage that the tea parties did. Look, from 2002 to 2005, I organized in the antiwar movement constantly. I knocked on doors and went to Departments of Licensing and Inspection and spoke to alternative media and attended meeting after pointless meeting. I still have the permits. You'd be surprised, if you live in the bubble of mainstream cable and Internet media, at how receptive and friendly most of the people I'd meet-- the mythical "average Americans"-- were to a dedicated and avowedly left-wing antiwar movement.

But that sympathy could never survive an incredibly hostile media environment, and both cable news and the establishment blogosphere-- even the liberal blogosphere-- took pains to paint the antiwar movement as a batch of Stalinist crazies. That this was perpetrated by corporate media is no surprise, but that progressive bloggers never learn that the extremes define the center is baffling. The Tea Parties don't get exactly what they want, usually. But they steadily and consistently push the conservative movement to the right, and in doing so drag the center with them. That's the salient lesson of the last several years: extremes define the center. Yet liberal bloggers delight in kneecapping the man to their left, while conservatives race to be the man to the right. How could anyone wonder why this results in a steady march rightward? What bothers me is never that liberal bloggers fail to adopt the ideas of the left but always that they don't understand that true left wing voices give them cover and help to establish a middle ground that is conducive to their interests.

Wilkinson's corpus is very odd to me, but it's odd in a way that's keeping with many other bohemian, culturally liberal libertarian writers. They have profound policy and political disagreements with American liberals and leftists, but on fundamental cultural and philosophical levels, they are far closer to the average American liberal than the average American conservative. The fundamental architecture of American cosmopolitanism-- the assumption of equal dignity across difference, the celebration of individuality over social constructs of religion or rank, the preeminence of the right to be yourself, the things that many of us truly value in the commission of personal freedom-- these have been built by the left. If you are more interested in specific legislative victories, I would remind you of who was the vanguard of civil rights for black Americans, women, and gay and lesbian men and women. But ultimately my concern here is social and  cultural, and I don't know how anyone can fail to give pride of place to the left for advancing the right to be your own weird self. We've always been the home of freaks and weirdos and out theres, and I couldn't be prouder.

Cosmopolitan libertarians live in liberal urban enclaves, surrounded by liberals, taking advantage of the kind of governmental cultural and transportation infrastructure that liberals created. They consume movies, novels, music, and theater crafted in overwhelming majorities by leftists. They operate in environments where the liberal spirit of tolerance and freedom from conformity underpins everything, yet they will identify again and again the liberal hand as the one of villainy. 

As is the case always on blogs, people will mistake the political for the personal. The point is not about the social ugliness of libertarian hatred for liberals. (Well, liberals they don't know personally.) The point is that rhetoric influences politics and politics defines policy. I don't understand why these people believe that they can express such disdain for cultural liberalism while maintaining the benefits of it. There's a bizarre faith among this country's rarefied political class that they can cede every major political battle to the the reactionary fringe and yet maintain their arty bohemian privileged lifestyles. I assure you: the average libertarian who disagrees with both sides but saves his invective for only the left does not want to live in Tea Party America. When ground has been given completely to the people who are bringing you this debt deal, they will find the consequences of their contempt gap to be quite non-theoretical.

I don't know what to take from the insistence like that of Wilkinson or the liberals he quotes that the public is not with us. Shall we give up? When I graduated high school the notion of gay marriage was a joke. We worked. History tells us that crazy commitments become less crazy. The Goldwater campaign happened. The idea that libertarianism would ever be as influential as it is was once a pipe dream. You are compelled by conscience, and so you work. Why that deserves mockery, whatever your ideological persuasion, will forever be a mystery to me.

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do you really want what you say you want and are you really getting it

There are quite a few things one could say to Andrew Sullivan for his dogged support of Obama; "of no party or clique" is of little use if your commitment to an individual person replicates the typical failings of party (or clique) loyalty. But the main thing, from my outsider's perspective, is that he seems to think that the deal is satisfying many of his commitments when in fact it does the opposite.

Now, me, my resistance to this deal is that I support Medicare and Social Security, which are absolutely threatened by the bizarre Super Committee contrivance, I support public education, I support healthy transportation infrastructure, I support subsidies for college and graduate school education, I support research and development funding for essential medical and scientific needs, I support a robust safety net for poor people and the elderly, I support the protection of the environment, and I support the enforcement of basic workplace health and safety requirements. I also understand that the United States enjoys a fiat currency, an unprecedented international dependence on that currency and our economic strength, and the printing press, vastly mitigating the danger of budget deficits and making the logic of countercyclical economics even more clear. But I'm crazy like that.

But Sullivan, according to his own posts yesterday and today, supports (to a rather crazy degree) his President appearing "reasonable," reducing the deficit, opposing the Tea Party, and the reelection of Barack Obama. The first is a matter of debate. There is nothing reasonable, in my mind, about supporting bad policy. There's also nothing reasonable about conceding to immensely unreasonable people. (People Andrew has been calling unreasonable for years!) I'll concede, though, that what is reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. The rest of these commitments are all hurt, not helped, by this deal.

This deal will not secure the long term fiscal future of the United States. Only robust growth will finally make the United States government fiscally solvent, and this deal will hurt growth, as averred by not just liberals like Paul Krugman but business journalists at Bloomberg and the Economist and analysts at Merrill Lynch and many many more. The deal doesn't put us in the black; it doesn't come close. Slowing the economy through austerity measures is going to lower tax revenue and make things worse.

This deal hands victory to the Tea Party and emboldens them. It both gives them what they want substantively and it demonstrates that thuggish tactics work. I will repeat: when you reward bad behavior, you ensure that you get more bad behavior. We don't negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers not to show how big our dicks are but because if you give hostage takers what they want then people will never stop taking hostages. What on earth will prevent this kind of behavior again? The President and Congressional Democrats just sent an unmistakeable message to the Tea Party Representatives and their constituents: if you are dangerously intransigent, we will fold.

Making Obama supporters zeal for this deal most inexplicable is the fact that this deal hurts his chances in 2012. There is a vast literature demonstrating that American presidential elections are determined primarily by economics. People vote for incumbent parties when the economy is doing well and against them when the economy is doing poorly. This bill does nothing to help the 14 million unemployed Americans. It does nothing to address the double dip recession we appear to be marching towards. And, again, in the eyes of many very smart people, it actually hurts. If this deal, which will slash thousands of jobs from the federal rolls and do nothing to stimulate the private economy, sends unemployment back to double digits, Obama is a one term president. (And lest anyone try to turn that into some grand narrative about Obama bravely doing the right thing and sacrificing his political future for the good of the country, I'll remind you that there are always other options. If you have no other options in a scenario so fluid and complex, it is a result of incompetence, not principle.)

I plum don't get it.

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first principles

Let's suppose that, contrary to what some of my detractors say, I am actually someone who is inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. You don't have to believe that I do. Let's just work from that assumption as a thought experiment.

I'd like to lay out some of my broad stances on contemporary American politics, and for the sake of fairness, I'll try to restrict myself to what I think is at least plausible within our system and leave out my crazy socialist preferences. Now, you read this list, and tell me where I'm supposed to draw comfort from the Obama administration. (And I'll insist that you do it based on the Obama administration that actually exists, rather than the wishful thinking Obama that I read about all the time or the eleventh dimensional chess playing Obama that is supposedly working all of these crazy angles.)

1. I believe that both the practical and moral interests of the United States are served by providing for the least well off and through building a robust social safety net which ameliorates the negative effects of chance, providing all Americans with a minimal level of material security and opportunity. I further think that Social Security and Medicare are two of the most vital parts of that safety net, and that any liberal or Democrat should take defending these institutions as an absolute non-negotiable duty.

2. I believe that civil liberties are at the core of democracy, and that we must protect them forcefully against incursion by government. This includes keeping rights of the accused sacrosanct, trying suspected criminals in an open and fair court system, not permitting a national domestic surveillance state, and maintaining a principled objection to cruel and unusual punishments or interrogation techniques such as torture. I also believe that, human nature being what it is, democratic structures require internal watchdogs and whistle blowers who can shed light on abuses or illegalities in powerful bureaucracies, and that any society interested in the rule of law will protect such people when they come forward.

3. I believe that it is not in the best interest of our country or the world to engage in armed conflict except when absolutely necessary for the immediate protection of our country or allies that we are obliged to protect through treaty. I believe that expansive military operations damage our democratic credibility, drain our resources, undermine our legitimacy in the eyes of the world, and threaten our ability to engage in truly necessary conflict, such as in times of self-defense. I believe that armed conflict, whether called a war or not, should require the approval of both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and that the ability to continue to wage these conflicts must continually pass review from autonomous parts of government. I believe that playing policeman to the world is neither within self-interest nor the moral authority of the United States.

4. I believe that a counter-cyclical, Keynesian macroeconomic philosophy is in the best interests of the United States. I believe that governments can and should spend more than their current revenues when faced with economic downturns in order to stimulate the economy, especially when those governments enjoy a powerful fiat currency and access to the printing press. I believe that the best economic evidence demonstrates that austerity measures slow the growth that is the only reliable engine of fiscal security and is thus counterproductive. I believe that surpluses can be generated in economic boom times which can pay down national debt and provide for the fiscal solvency of the nation when times are lean again. I believe the federal government is nothing at all like a typical household and that making major economic decisions based on faulty analogies comparing the two is demonstrably bad policy.

5. I believe that widespread employment in healthy and safe conditions for decent wages is an absolutely elementary part of the basic American social compact, and that in times of high unemployment the federal government should make every available effort to create jobs, up to and including directly hiring more government employees. I believe that providing opportunity for all Americans is a far more important priority for the country than protecting the ability of the already rich to grow richer.

6. I believe that efforts to maintain fiscal responsibility must be pursued first through fair and progressive taxation. I believe that there is no injustice in those who already enjoy great material wealth having some higher portion of that wealth taxed away. I believe that it has been amply demonstrated that this country enjoys top-end incomes that are so robust that high marginal tax rates can be levied against those incomes without demonstrably hurting those at the top. I believe that it is absolutely just, practical, and sensible to expect those who have enjoyed the great fruits of our democracy to contribute a disproportionate share of the money that ensures our democracy remain solvent.

7. I finally believe, on a purely tactical level, that rewarding bad behavior inevitably reinforces that behavior and ensures that it will continue. I don't open the door when my dog whines to come in; I wouldn't give a child throwing a tantrum the toy he is asking for. Capitulation to terrible behavior sends the unmistakable message that terrible behavior is rewarded and should be repeated.

Look, I get it: I'm a crazy socialist asshole who no one likes. Cool. I've just described what I have to think is a perfectly anodyne, totally conventional and essentially moderate liberal vision for the presidency. Can anyone claim that the Obama administration has done anything whatsoever to advance my interests? Not a day goes by where I argue politics online without some Obama supporter hurling invective at me and insisting that I have no choice, that if I refuse to vote for Obama I am in essence voting for Michelle Bachmann, that it's a two party system and I should just take it and like it, or, most absurdly, that he secretly is pursuing my agenda and I'm just too stupid to read the tea leaves and SEE. (Andrew Sullivan's "meep meep" thing has become the rallying cry of daydream believin' Kool-Aid drinkers everywhere.)


I am a citizen in a democracy. It's my duty to support politicians that advance my interests and that I believe work for the betterment of our country. I am asking sincerely and openly: given that I have the commitments I've laid out above, how can I possibly support Barack Obama? He bragged-- bragged-- yesterday that this deal would be lowering non-defense discretionary spending to its lowest levels since the Eisenhower administration. That is, he bragged about his role in ending essential government programs that defend our environment, educate our children, provide crucial scientific and medical research, and in a myriad of ways contribute to the flourishing of our country and our people. At some point, the charade can't continue. This is not merely a person who doesn't deserve my support. This is a person who is unequivocally and demonstrably not an American liberal, and someone who has no interest in defending the historical constituencies or commitments of the Democratic party.


Oh, and during the election next year, will they still call him a crazy Kenyan Marxist socialist, and will it still work? You betcha.

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my broken record keeps on spinning

I mean, sometimes, it's like the world wants to show us as carefully as it can that we lack the wisdom and ability to remake it in our image.

I've said this again and again: even if you don't hold my moral conviction that democratic states have no business dictating the futures of foreign countries, you should oppose interventions such as that in Libya because we lack the knowledge necessary to achieve our stated ends. I don't know anything about the Obeidi tribesmen of Libya, or the larger context of tribal, sectarian, and political divisions within that country. Neither, I feel confident in asserting, do the vast majority of the American people. Events of the last decade further make me skeptical about the knowledge of most self-styled experts in our media. But even if I was confident that there was an informed, nonpartisan expert base that could provide credible and current information to our leadership and our citizenry, I would be extremely skeptical about the ability of our policy apparatus to make sound choices about the future of a sovereign people. Particularly one that is so different from ours in language, culture, religion, and history.

I don't know. If you've read me for awhile you've read this all before. The beat just keeps going on: we fall in love with our righteousness, power, and knowledge, and hold our belief in them so dearly that we refuse to alter that belief in the face of events and evidence.

It will get worse in Libya.

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education reform and the neoliberal-leftist divide

I stayed away from the recent neoliberal/leftist contretemps for the primary reason that I have been happily distracted by personal and academic concerns, and for the secondary reason that the discussion has been a little too on the nose, a little too directly in my wheelhouse for me to want to weigh in. But I found while reading a piece on Florida's charter schools today that inspired me to write, and I think in education reform we have a set of issues where there is a clear divide and where even the most narrow view on what constitutes policy difference has to recognize argument.

Before I get to it, can I just say that I find the endless posturing about the term "neoliberal" tiring and a dodge? The various poses that the term is meaningless, that the people called it don't know what it means, or that it is a uniquely unhelpful word for making distinctions are just that, poses. Yes, the term is imperfect. Yes, it is imprecise. It shares that quality with absolutely every other term for broad political movements and ideologies that's used in conventional discourse. Yes, we all imagine that we are unique political snowflakes who cannot be pinned down to reductive terms, most certainly including me. And, indeed we are, after a fashion. These terms persist because we need them. To say that neoliberal is any less demonstrative than, say, conservative, a term that somehow applies to Daniel Larison, Pamela Geller, Andrew Sullivan, and Maggie Gallagher, seems to me to be absurd on its face. But look, if the various bloggers involved in this discussion will agree to abandon progressive, a weasel word if I ever heard one, or even worse, "classical liberal," a self-imposed title of nobility, I'll drop neoliberal.

So as not to bore anyone, here's the lens I'd like to consider these issues through: compare this story with this one, from only about a week earlier.

One of the things that makes me scratch my head about the whole debate-- and I mean this in a genuinely "this is odd" sense rather than an explicitly judgmental sense-- is how immensely self-aggrandizing the neoliberal technocratic line has been. To read all of the various actors towing the neoliberal line in the debate, those who are on their side are interested in real and meaningful policy decisions, those on the other side in vague pieties; those on their side are sober-minded technocrats, those on the other side in the trap of wooly nostalgia; those on their side are serious and dedicated to the slow pursuit of progress, the others merely interested in self-righteousness. It's kind of silly.

Not only silly, but I would argue, demonstrably untrue. And I look to the topic of education reform for my proof. Because here is an issue where it is largely inarguable that neoliberal dedication to technocracy runs aground. Here is the current condition of the education reform debate: education reformers, made up almost exclusively of neoliberals and conventional economic conservatives, endorse market-based (to use their term) reforms that seem at least superficially deductively compelling; empirical research is done that demonstrates, at least in a qualified and conditional way, that these reforms in fact don't work; education reformers blame the empiricists, the teacher unions, or those of us opposed to conservative educational reform for the failure of their preferred policies.

So in Florida, where charter schools principles have again demonstrated that they are no panacea and may in fact harm more than they help, the outcome is vastly more relative funding for charter schools than for conventional public schools. This is politically possible in Florida largely because the conservative establishment hates Democratic and liberal constituencies like teachers, hates unions and unionism, and hates government ventures like public education. That they are given political cover by ostensibly left-wing policy wonks is likely trivial in the narrow perspective of Florida's electoral politics but on a broader scale serves to shape national dialogues. In any case, policy advocated is unwavering in the face of evidence, or if you prefer, reality.

There are other examples. The culture of high stakes testing and the endless assertion, free of evidence, that harsh penalties on teachers and "no excuses" rhetoric will lead to educational output gains led directly to widespread cheating in Atlanta and Washington DC-- exactly as those critical of educational reform have argued would happen for years. Yet these results have had no demonstrable impact on the rhetoric of school reformers. You can also look at an education reform edifice that continues to refuse to adopt very basic tenets of understanding educational outcomes, such as the essential role of network effects and selection bias. You can see this at work in the regard for the Harlem Children's Zone schools, which have an attrition rate so high (they once dismissed an entire grade) that they are effectively meaningless as a data point for broader reforms.

Forgive me if this is an aggressive question, but what kind of technocracy is this? Surely technocracy requires a dedication to acknowledging the outcomes of empirical study. I have said before, and I will certainly say now, that more study is needed in the major planks of neoliberal education reform policies. But surely this is not a binary situation, where you must pursue these anti-union reforms zealously until such a time as the preponderance of evidence forces you to switch entirely to the other side. The extant empirical evidence for school vouchers is quite discouraging. The extant empirical evidence for charter schools is somewhat better, but still largely negative and haunted by confounding variables and impediments to generalizability. If rhetoric does not follow reality than those voicing it cannot be meaningfully be said to be technocratic.

This probably sounds like I'm dropping some major criticism, but I'm actually merely saying that neoliberal wonks are as human as all of us. There are many reasons why, through all of my political evolution, I have never been able to be an orthodox Marxist, but one of the most powerful is orthodox Marxism's insistence that its policy preferences transcend politics or ideology. Surely many school reformers would take the same evidence that I have read regarding reform efforts and see them in a more favorable, or at least more conditional, light. This is not a matter of duplicity on either of our parts. It is an acknowledgement that all policy preferences are political, that there is no line where policy ends and politics starts, and that none of us, actually, have pierced the veil of ideology and seen through to real reality. The Marxists are not wrong to imagine that we see through the lens of ideology, but they are wrong to imagine that they have cast the lens aside or ever could. So too with technocrats of every stripe. Life is too complicated and messy for that.

Perhaps the truth is not that we have not yet found the market based education reforms that work but that there are no market based education reforms that work, that it is nowhere written in the sky that attaching the word "markets" to something or privatizing it is a cure all, that capitalism and markets are not handed down by God but are instead human instruments developed fitfully and in starts and ones which have certain uses for which they are great and certain uses for which they simply don't work. My most consistent criticism of both neoliberal and libertarian teleology is that their dedication to markets, which approaches literal religiosity, transcends their dedication to the rational or the empirical. If you want to take my ten cent gloss on how neoliberals differ from their left-wing critics , it's that they have been seduced into favoring the process above the people-- they are more attached to the mechanisms of markets and privatization and deregulation than they are to the positive effects for real people that those mechanisms are meant to engender. I believe in using mechanisms like markets exactly and only to the point that they have proven to work for the betterment of mankind, and the instant they don't, abandoning them fully and without apology. In fields where they seem not to work, such as education and environmentalism, different mechanisms such as government must be applied, and in doing so privilege the people before the process, the outcome over the means.

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note

I am a huge fan of Andrew Sullivan and the Daily Dish. Andrew is everything the blogosphere could want in an experienced and compassionate elder statesmen, sort of a father figure. It happens that he and the Dish have been very good to me personally; whatever limited exposure I've had owes a great deal to the kindness and interest of the Dish.

However, Bruce Bawer's daily invective against Arabs and Islam is to me a great stain on the reputation of the Daily Dish. Andrew is of course not responsible for the opinions of a guest blogger, nor are his dedicated support staff. But as an entity, I think the Dish has been harmed by Bawer's consistent bigotry, and I'm very disappointed. That's all.

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