Filibusters and Fissures

Passingly mentioned in a political analysis of the Great Filibuster Deal of 2005 were two very exciting possibilities concerning the 2008 presidential election. The first was the idea that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's reputation as a capable leader took a heavy blow when he couldn't prevent the seven centrist Republicans from compromising (OH NO!) on a deal to avoid that cliched-out "nuclear option." The second, and less likely but much more enticing thing was the mention that John McCain's leadership in the compromise talks may have virtually destroyed his chances of running as a Republican in 2008.

I'll explain why I think that could be a wonderful thing in a moment, but let's deal with Frist first. All I can say is, if his inability to prevent what the (not-so-) great Dr. Dobson called "a betrayal by a cabal of Republicans" hampers Frist's chances in 2008, GOOD!

Frist is even more pig-headed and stubbornly extreme right-wing than Bush ever could hope to be, and he has intelligence to boot. I can't think of many less desirable Republican candidates in 2008, short of the evil Sith lord Dobson himself. So anything that hurts his chances of appealing to any faction of Republicans can only help his enemies (i.e., us.)

Speaking of factions of the GOP, that's what could be so exciting about McCain. Many Christian conservatives have never liked McCain much to begin with because he's a "maverick" (read: guy who thinks for himself and doesn't always follow the party line), and this "betrayal" could make those people finally sever all ties, which is why McCain might only be able to run as an independent in 2008.

Which could end up being a very exciting and beautiful thing. Because as much as GOP leadership like to harp on the disunity and dissonance in the Democratic Party, many Republicans right now are feeling like their party has deserted them. A majority of Americans are frustrated with Iraq and our foreign policy in general, 82 percent of Americans thought Bush and Frist went way over the line with Terri Schiavo, and economic conservatives have long known that this administration is not economically conservative.

Now, this may or may not be realistic (I am not exactly a political scholar), but I could see a rebellion by "real" conservatives against the dark side of the Neocons (sorry, that's two Star Wars references, I'll try to avoid any more) where they overwhelmingly vote for independent McCain, resulting eventually in a new conservative party, but also resulting in a split of the Republican vote that hands the Democrats a victory in 2008, even if our candidate is (gasp!) female. The final result? Hillary (or Kerry or ?): 49%; Frist (or Condi or ?): 31%; McCain: 20%. I am not about to try to predict the Electoral College result at this point, for reasons I just mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph.

Oh, and the ultra-conservatives may also be shooting themselves in the foot over the stem-cell issue. Most Americans and a large majority of both houses of Congress support lifting Dubya's ban on most federal stem-cell research funding, but that majority may not be quite enough to override a promised veto from the White House. But the objections of Dubya and Tommy Boy DeLay are pathetic attempts at scrambling for moral high ground and appeasing the Christian right at any cost. (DeLay called stem cell research "the dismemberment of living, distinct human beings." He has no clue what he's talking about. In vitro fertilization, which bloggers note is not opposed by anyone, creates and destroys human embryos all the time. No one ever called those embryos "living, distinct human beings," Tom.) Continuing to pander to the Christian Coalition will only further alienate "real " conservatives.

Here is a real-life case study on the stem cell debate, courtesy of an Altercation reader:

Name: Earl Britt
Hometown: Wayne, Ohio
One of my siblings wasn't able to have children. They attempted in vitro fertilization. Ultimately, medical problems forced a complete hysterectomy. In the meantime, I am an insulin dependent diabetic and have suffered a series of near-fatal, disabling heart attacks. Once heart muscle has been destroyed, medical science has no way to restore it. My sibling or spouse could donate a kidney to me, if that was what I needed, but they could not donate those fertilized egg cells. No one is proposing the elimination of in vitro fertilization. No one. And those procedures will always produce fertilized egg cells that will NEVER, EVER be implanted. This is despite the fact that stem cell research offers hope for reversing both diabetes and cardiac dysfunction, along with other destructive and fatal diseases, including Alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries. Despite this hope, in a cynical and calculated effort to exploit "cultural conservatives" the Shrub has banned [most federal funding for] such research. In the name of a "culture of life" many lives are being lost to a ploy for political gain. Some day soon, one of them will be mine.

Oh, and one last little reading assignment for today, class. We recently discussed "economic liberalism." Well today, we have another dissection of the word liberal, as it applies to the American press, courtesy of Jon Carroll.

On Newsweek

OK, so I was gonna write about my immediate reaction to the whole Newsweek mess, but this editorial cartoon, courtesy of Cagle, sums up my reaction.



But I think even worse than feigned outrage is the real truth, as liberal bloggers everywhere realize, but which seems to elude the "mainstream" dialogue and Newsweek's editors, is that no one can say with any certainty exactly how "responsible" the article was for the riots, whether or not the allegations contained in the article are true. And it's hilarious how every arm of the administration is hammering home the talking point: Do you know that people have died because of you?

A couple of juicy blog tidbits on the subject:

From Democracy Arsenal:

But there are a couple of other facts worth noting here. First, the Newsweek story was run by two Pentagon officials prior to publication, neither of whom disputed the Koran charge. Also, at a press conference last Thursday Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers minimized the link between the Newsweek story and the Afghan riots, saying that the violence stemmed from other sources.

Two conclusions emerge: one, that Pentagon officials did not think the Koran allegations so far-fetched as to question them; two, that there's enough anti-American sentiment and unrest in Afghanistan that Myers didn't think the Koran provocation mattered all that much as part of the mix.

From Washington Monthly:

Newsweek's source blew it. But it was a source they had used before and they had no reason not to trust him.

Hundreds of items similar to Newsweek's story have been published in the past year, all of them true. The torture at Abu Ghraib was far worse than this, and other reports of Koran desecration have been published in the past year as well. They inspired no riots, and there was no special reason for Newsweek to think their report would inspire any riots either.

The Taliban stages a resurgence every spring, anti-Americanism has been on the rise for some time, and the rioters in Afghanistan are responsible for the riots in Afghanistan. The Newsweek story is clearly just a pretext, and another story would have done just as well given their obvious animosity toward America.

Under any other circumstances, conservatives would heartily agree. The phony outrage over this is just a cynical excuse for the usual press bashing. Newsweek should buck up.

Economic liberalism in a nutshell

The following is a nice synopsis of economic (not moral, as seemingly defined in today's political culture) liberalism, written by Eric Rauchway, a regular contributor to Altercation. I particularly think the "Original Observation" is quite well-put. Unforntunately for us and the world, Karl Rove managed to frame the 2004 presidential election around "moral values." What we should have done is focus on economic liberalism, because all the corporate scandals during W's first term should have been plenty to drive home the "Original Observation" and propel Kerry to victory. Except, of course, that he's rather moderate and wasn't screaming for regulation. Oh well, we shoulda picked Dean. But again, Rove & Co. managed to turn one passionate speech into "The Howard Dean Yell." Damn, they're good, in a bad way

1. Where did American liberalism come from?
American liberalism, as we knew it in the twentieth century, developed from the wide acceptance of an observation that capitalism, while wonderfully creative, does not regulate itself satisfactorily. Neat theories notwithstanding, capitalist economies, left to themselves, quite often idle at equilibria that a substantial minority, if not a majority, of citizens find unpleasant or even unendurable. (People afflicted with scruples often find such equilibria unjust.) Let's call this the Original Observation.

2. What did American liberals recommend?
Lots of things. The hodge-podge that was twentieth-century liberalism failed to cohere because the Original Observation can sustain any number of policies, ranging from government subsidy of economic development through regulation to welfare. The nearest thing to a coherent recommendation -- the New Deal -- comprised three major measures apart from emergency relief:

a) subsidies for economic development (things like the Tennessee Valley Authority);

b) a commercial and financial regulatory apparatus (things like Glass-Steagall, the enhanced Federal Reserve Board, and the SEC);

c) a social insurance program (Social Security).

Later, American liberalism extended to efforts to include groups excluded, for extrinsic reasons, from general economic progress: e.g., measures like Civil Rights and the War on Poverty.

3. What happened to American liberalism?
Well, item 2a), subsidies to economic development, became defense spending, so that almost all spending on economic development was justified or originated from defense priorities (in fairness, this was the reason the Supreme Court let the TVA stand in the first place). Item 2b), regulation, began to go in the 1970s and has almost all gone, with obvious exceptions like the Federal Reserve Board, which remains acceptable except to conspiracy theorists and gold-standard fans (not mutually exclusive sets). Item 2c), a social insurance program, is now possibly to become an investment program. More on this below.

4. Why did these things happen?
For the same kind of reason that liberalism arose in the first place -- much as liberalism arose on the observation that unregulated capitalism made messes, opposition to liberalism arose on widely accepted observation that, in particular, the Great Society didn't make things better. Obviously some opposition came from plain-vanilla racism, some came from people who always hated FDR, but the critical, marginal opposition came from people who observed that bad economic things still happened under the current regime. Do I think this was a fair observation? No; most of the things people objected to were not results implicated in the original New Deal synthesis of American liberalism. But partisan politics and Cold Warriorism ensured that the New Deal would get blamed anyway.

As a result, we've apparently decided that Everything Liberals Ever Thought Was Wrong, and that includes, especially, the Original Observation.

5. What comes next?
Because the Original Observation is now understood to have been incorrect, we're about to replace an insurance program with an investment policy. This is of course a simple category mistake that nobody should make. Under insurance, you pay premiums so that if a bad outcome occurs you get a set payout. Under investment, you set aside capital which may or may not yield a return of indeterminate proportion whether or not a bad outcome occurs. They perform very different functions, and in particular, they allocate risk differently. Under insurance, the insurer takes the risk. Under investment, you do.

But if we believe that capitalism polices itself, we don't need insurance and there's no risk from investment.

6. What to do?
Oh boy, I don't know. But any answer to that question should take into account some version of the foregoing, or else of some better history, because I suspect that the laws of human behavior that yielded the Original Observation haven't been repealed and won't be, even if the New Deal is.