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Less than a day from now, President Obama's health care reform plan--The Health Care and Education Affordability Act--will be law, or at least very nearly so. Obviously, at the time of my writing this, the votes haven't been taken, and there are still ways in which Pelosi'scarefully finagled vote-counting and timing process in the House of Representatives could collapse. And despite numerous assurances, it's still possible for Reid and the Democrats in the Senate to renege on their promises, or otherwise fumble the ball, and not put the negotiated reconciliation fixes over the finish line. But things are looking good for the Democrats--tight, but good.
Things are looking good for America too, I believe. This final version of the numerous plans hammered out in committees and through difficult votes in both the House and the Senate does some of the essential things most advocates of health insurance reform have always wanted to see done: puts firm regulations on insurance providers, so as to minimize their ability to exclude certain high-risk populations; provides the means (and the subsidies) for over 30 million uninsured Americans to purchase coverage; establishes individual mandates so to bring far more Americans into the same insurance market, thereby undercutting the affect which the aforementioned pooling had on the basic guarantees which characterized the various plans offered. And on top of that, it seems likely to exercise at least some control over medical costs, and introduce further controls as the years go by. All of which, policy-wise, are positive things.
But what do I know--I'm not a policy wonk, am I? Of course not; I can figure a few things out for myself, and there are a few numbers that I can add up in my own head, but when it comes to something as complex as this--the single largest expansion of America's welfare state in close to a half-century--there's just people I trust, because I can figure ways to see their statements and actions align with my own beliefs and preferences, and people I don't.
For example, I trust Dennis Kucinich. I'm not crazy about him by any means, at least partly because he occasionally seems borderline crazy himself. Also, I liked him better when he was willing to speak out against abortion. But as far as someone trying his best to push social democratic aims in a political environment that provides no real partisan location for advocates of social democracy, his record is second to few, if not none. So if he's comes to accept that the passage of this flawed-but-still-important bit of legislation has become crucial to the government's ability to further other social democratic and progressive causes, I take that as a heartening sign.
I mentioned abortion above; what about that? His relatively uncomplicated support for abortion rights was the one thing which really, truly bothered me about supporting Obama in 2008; does this legislation confirm all my fears? No, it does not. The argument about whether this bill would enable or increase federal funding for abortion was, I think anyway, always an artificial discussion, just a way of playing out ideological animosities and frustrations in the midst of a red-hot policy debate. The Stupak amendment in the original House bill included anti-abortion restrictions beyond the long-invoked Hyde Amendment to prevent the federal government from directly or indirectly funding abortion; Senate Democrats couldn't go along with that, and cut it back to the status quo. It's possible that conservative, anti-abortion House Democrats may get some specific executive language guaranteeing that status quo, but even if they don't get it, then all we have is what...well, what we already have. If that's good enough for an increasing majority of Catholic hospitals, health-workers, and activists, that's good enough for me.
What about my deep, theoretical concerns with it all? That it is, in the end, another entitlement, however well-meant, and not true reform: not anything that moves us towards greater solidarity, greater community empowerment, greater appreciation of the common good?
Well, those concerns are still there--indeed, reading the text of President Obama's final pep-talk to the House Democrats, just deepens those concerns, with the President insisting "this piece of historic legislation is built on the private insurance system that we have now and runs straight down the center of American political thought." Great--making our "private insurance system" central to a program designed to create a common foundation amongst all the members of our polity, not being subject to the divisions and competition which that same private insurance industry contributes to! It's frustrating, to be sure. It's frustrating because I'm convinced those same corporate entities are primarily responsible (most indirectly, but sometimes directly) in so isolating us and individualizing us, as consumers and citizens, as to make it almost inconceivable that real democratic government, real populist action, real community sovereignty and sufficiencv, is ever to be recovered. But with all that, I take solace from something Matt Stannard (a much more hard-core doomsayer than myself) recently observed:
Engaging institutions, even dying ones (perhaps especially dying ones), is unavoidable for virtually everyone in society. Our material positions put us there....On the other hand, we have to understand how the system is collapsing...to understand both the limits of reformism and the necessity to engage it precisely because it is crossing various economic and historical thresholds....Having listened to Democrats who actually favor the current legislation, to Democrats and other progressives who say it's better than nothing, to socialists who say it will make things worse...I agree with everyone. It isn't enough. It's a start. It's a distraction. It's a payoff. It will help some people. It will inspire some people. It will make some people complacent. It's a step forward and a step backward.
I wouldn't use all the language he uses, but I like his conclusion, because it fits, I suspect, pretty much any "reform" action taken in our present socio-economic context. The Health Care and Education Affordability Act is just that: something that will help many, make many more complacent ("That goodness that tiresome debate is finally over!" they will say), open up many new opportunities for greater social concern, as well as mollify us into thinking that we didn't need radical change after all. All at once.
Jonathan Cohn, who has followed this long legislative debate as well as anyone, thinks we have come to the "Closing Arguments," and he's hopeful; to his mind, the passage of health care reform in the House twelve or twenty hours from now could signal a crucial shift away from "conservative ideas about responsibility and vulnerability [which] have dominated political discussion for most of the last four decades," and back towards the animating principles of Social Security and Medicare: "We all give, in the form of financial contributions; and we all get, in the form of financial security...we are stronger [together] than when we are apart." I admire his communitarian sentiment, and I like the elements of it I see in America's welfare state, though I'm doubtful that someone who celebrates the end-result and downplays some of the corporate-friendly principles that were embraced at the beginning of the process fully appreciates what the communitarian point truly involves. James Poulos, though, has the opposite problem; he looks at health care reform as sees nothing but an overriding, self-righteous, legislation-by-fiat vision, a vision that posits "something is better than nothing" as a moral principle, which he rejects entirely: "unless you think this is true because insuring uninsured Americans is so important as to be worth doing even through a bill as wretched, misbegotten, and irresponsible as this, it is not true." But Poulos's ridiculous, Tea-Partier rhetoric about a bill that has been sent back and forth through the legislative wringer more times over the past year that the great majority of bills ever experience (how does ten months of constant debate and scrutiny add up to governing by "fiat"?) simply reveals him, beneath his philosophy, to be Mansfieldian at heart: someone so disbelieving that any kind of collective action or positive reforms can contribute to political liberty as to lead him to assume that anything which smacks of "reform" is by definition the undemocratic work of a Lawgiver, and therefore sees the "process" behind such as invalidating any and all claims that might be made on behalf of, for instance, insuring people, and regulating insurers, and maybe even lowering costs. I'm more sympathetic to Cohn than Poulos, obviously, but both of them miss this dialectical reality here: the end results don't justify or forgive every flawed principle behind the process, but the process itself is too much a part of the many admirable results to be reduced to a single, misbegotten mistake. Ends do not justify means, but neither are all ends subject to approval solely on the basis of one, absolute means-test. Reform isn't that bad a word...not yet, anyway.
Well, there you go: some (probably) final thoughts, as national health care reform enters what will very likely be it's very final act. Now watch everything go to hell ten hours from now, and this whole post gets rendered moot.
Someone e-mailed me, and rebuked me: you've been doing this for more than a year, and still nothing from Roxy Music? Shame, shame, shame! To which I could only reply: you're right. How could they have slipped my mind? I don't know. Well, I can make up for that right here.
I hearby announce that the coming weeks will feature videos from the big-but-not-mainstream stars of the 80s video era. Should be fun.
Matthew Yglesias has put up a list of ten books that have been important influences in how he thinks about things. I can do that, too. Except, one problem: when it comes to my thinking--particularly stuff relevant to the political, philosophical, or otherwise intellectual thinking that I went to school for eleven years for--the reading that has influenced me most has usually come in the form of a journal or magazine article (or lately, a blog post). I'm not particularly proud of that, but that's the truth (and I suspect it's true for most academics as well).
So herewith, an attempt to be rigorous, and focus only on the books (though more than a few of them are collections of essays or articles). That means I'm leaving out some essays that profoundly influenced me, but you've got to put your boundaries somewhere. Also, I'm sticking with stuff that I read and which influenced me while I was forming my intellectual academic foundation, meaning the years from 1987 to 2001, with a two-year break in there while I was gallivanting around South Korea. (That means Tolkien is out!) And also, I'm going to have to go to fifteen, because I'm just verbose that way. In alphabetical order:
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. Essays like "What is Freedom?" and "What is Authority?" gave me an entirely different way of thinking about democracy and liberty--or, at least, gave me a language for expressing what I had already been thinking about for a while.
F.M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism. The first--and, as yet, the only--complete and published study of Herder's political ideas that I ever read, and, as much as I in time came to disagree with some elements of Barnard's interpretations of his subject, his account Herder's romantic contribution to a historicized but still morally truthful account of culture and language still draws me in--much more than Herder's own actual writings do.
Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought. Came at a time in my education when my studies of Herder had convinced me that the struggle between the Aufklärer and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment told the only philosophical story really worth knowing. I grew out of that obsession eventually, but this book and others like it gave me a historical context for understanding my own nascent romantic and/or hermeneutic approaches to political life, cultural identity, and religious truth.
Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. A slim book, but packed with provocative ideas. By treating Confucian ritual teachings as religious and "magical," Fingarette helped my anthropological and ideological interest in East Asian philosophy become a moral one as well.
David C. Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucius. The first in a series of books which Hall and Ames wrote together, exploring--sometimes in a phenomenological, sometimes in a Deweyesque manner--the application of Confucius's Analects to essential philosophical questions from the Western tradition: the nature of truth, the purpose of society, the cultivation of the self. Helped give me a basic orientation as to how I wanted to make use of all these notions I'd brought back with me from East Asia.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Like much of Heidegger's writings (yes, I did try to read Being and Time; I got about a third of the way through) some of the essays are opaque and overwrought. But some of them--"The Letter on Humanism," "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Way to Language," for example--had a transformative impact on how I understood our way as human beings of perceiving and constructing both reality and society.
Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View. I think I must have underlined every sentence in this book. It was the first book I'd read that made me think both critically and practically about all the stuff I'd been reading about "republicanism" for years.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. Nowadays, I would probably put Marx's "On the Jewish Question" as the most important bit of Marxist thought in my own thinking. But at the time, actually reading, carefully and thoughtfully, through the Manifesto was a bit of a revelation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau's Political Writings. I don't use this edition in my own work or my teaching any more, but it's the collection that kicked-started my own engagement with communitarian thought, though I didn't call it that at the time. Much of what I still believe about equality and modernity can be traced back to The Second Discourse, the first work of political philosophy I ever took seriously.
Nicholas H. Smith, Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity. Helped me put Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, and many others together and draw out the fundamentals of their insights; and by so doing, it helped focus my interest in developing a kind of "conservative" approach to culture and identity which did not fall into a literalist or natural law trap.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. The single heaviest, sustained philosophical argument I have ever taken myself through, and far and away the most influential in how I think about the relationship between truth claims and the historical and cultural narratives they are invariably embedded in.
Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation. A book about political theory, but it had a huge impact on how I, as a religious believer, took the hermeneutical arguments I'd come to accept and constructed them as part of the moral engagement I wanted to have with the world.
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Presented a way of thinking about "liberalism" and "conservatism" in the American context that I don't think anyone has yet been able to refute. More than that, it's also a tour de force, linking the history of America, the nature of rhetoric, and the meaning of democracy and constitutionalism together into a single, succinct argument.
Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Like a deeply planted time bomb, this book's various observations and arguments (mostly about Tocqueville and the Federalists and Anti-Federalists) kept coming to me, suddenly making sense, while thinking about community or politics or government or religion or philosophy or just about anything else, years and years after my advisor first recommended it to me.
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Helped me see why republican ideas and language mattered, why those ideas gave rise modern democracy, and why the rise of democracy would mean means republicanism's inevitable fall. I don't fully agree, but it's an argument I can't shake, and which I make use of in my classes to this day.
On a different day, I'd probably come up with a slightly different list, but I think this hits all the big, influential books in my intellectual genealogy. Obviously, it reveals my graduate school interests: communitarianism, pluralism, comparative and American and the history of political thought. Nothing much there hinting at my later interests in socialism, populism, or localism. Even on it's own terms, I'm not terribly proud of the list: not enough original sources, and too much commentary on what others have said. Also, for someone who got a PhD in political philosophy in the 1990s, it's kind of sad to admit that big books by Rawls, Sandel, Young, Kymlicka, Rorty, Walzer, Okin, Rosenblum, Cohen, etc., just didn't move me as much as the (mostly more specialized) books above did, or as much as the smaller articles and secondary literature these thinkers produced did. But that's the way in happened, for better or worse.
I picked up this book at professional conference in Toronto last year, and read it on the plane ride home. It was a quick read, and a striking one: here was the last book by the late G.A. Cohen--who was by all accounts about as learned and witty a Marxist as you're ever likely to find--laying out a clear, concise, and (I thought, anyway) persuasive case for socialism which didn't appeal to Marx in any serious way at all. Since that time, there has been some fine discussions of the book, and Cohen's legacy overall, on the blogs (particularly over at Crooked Timber; see here and here), and deservedly so. In moving away from a materialist and Marxist justification for socialism, and turning instead to the question of what the development of a socialist ethos might involve, Cohen did something important: he implicitly called attention to the communitarian, democratic, anarchist, and localist aspects of the socialist egalitarian argument, aspects which are often forgotten by sympathizers and critics alike.
I'm using the book this year in an upper-level theory class on capitalism, socialism, and localism. A couple of months ago I gave a lecture to the local chapter of the DSA with the above title, using Cohen's book as a centerpiece; I did much the same thing a few weeks later, when I discussed the book with some folks at a local coffee house. Several people have asked me to put the basics of the lecture and discussion down in written form; well, here it is.
*****
G.A. Cohen was born in 1941 in Montreal, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and grew up in an environment characterized most thoroughly by two things: secular Judaism, and orthodox Marxism. Cohen attended communist day camps, learned communist songs, and looked forward to the inevitable revolution the way sincere evangelical children are raised to look forward to the second coming of Christ. As he grew older, and became more aware of and wise regarding the world around him, he codified his beliefs, beginning most centrally with his passionate commitment to equality. He recognized that there were others besides convinced communists--namely, Christians--who also believed in equality, but he could not take their beliefs seriously: partly because he observed that believing all humankind were brothers and sisters and children of God didn't seem to necessarily translate into much actual change in the living conditions of those human beings here on earth, but mostly because he was convinced that concerning oneself with people's beliefs--talking about equality as the product of an ethos, in other words--was a waste of time; after all, Marxist historical determinism made it clear that the collapse of capitalism and a socialist revolution were inevitable.
That conviction of his eventually fell by the wayside. Cohen, by the last couple of decades of his life, no longer accepted Marx's historical materialist account of capitalist development, and no longer assumed that the immiseration of the proletariat and the subsequent revolution that would culminate in communism was inevitable. But he remained fiercely committed to equality--and moreover, professionally found himself engaged in extensive arguments with various liberals and egalitarians over just what kind of equality is possible in the modern world of markets. In the context of this argument, Cohen found himself, sometimes surprising, essentially affirming the Christian line which he had dismissed as a child: that the beliefs and behavior of people along egalitarian lines--the development of an egalitarian ethos, in other words--was essential to the realization of any kind of equality, socialist or otherwise.
In staking out this claim, Cohen was--at least as I read him--taking sides within the split that emerged amongst those socialists who rejected the course which Lenin and others took Marxist thought in at the beginning of the 20th century. While Cohen may have been raised in an environment which supported various Stalinists and other apologists for the Soviet Union, by the time he was a mature scholar his socialist convictions were strongly democratic. This meant, however, he was faced with an historical choice, one which Sheri Berman expressed this way:
One democratic faction believed that Marx may have been wrong about the imminence of capitalism’s collapse, but was basically right in arguing that capitalism could not persist indefinitely. Its internal contradictions and human costs, they felt, were so great that it would ultimately give way to something fundamentally different and better—hence the purpose of the left was to hasten this transition. Another faction rejected the view that capitalism was bound to collapse in the foreseeable future and believed that in the meantime it was both possible and desirable to take advantage of its upsides while addressing its downsides. Rather than working to transcend capitalism, therefore, they favored a strategy built on encouraging its immense productive capacities, reaping the benefits, and deploying them for progressive ends.
Cohen, to the end, was simply unwilling to countenance greater capitalist inequality in the name of "tak[ing] advantage of its upsides." Hence his long and critical engagement with the arguments of John Rawls, which, among other things, posit the justice of an arrangement whereby the most talented and the hardest working among us enjoy the bulk of the fruits of their labors--thereby encouraging them to be ever more productive--but are subject to some level of redistributive taxation...which, because of the large amount of taxes so generated, not to mention the many jobs which those talented, hard-working individuals created, would enable the least well-off to experience real improvement in their lives. Cohen--who, it should be noted, had immense respect for Rawls and his liberal-egalitarian/social-democratic arguments, comparing his philosophical work at one time to both Plato and Hobbes in importance--was only willing to call such an arrangement, perhaps, "sensible"; it could never be considered just. And this reveals another important element to Cohen's thinking about equality: that community--a community which, following the ideals contained in Marx's "On The Jewish Question," is only enabled when "individual man...has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is not longer separated from him" (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 21)--is crucial to equality: a state of affairs where things are made more equal by the (perhaps coerced) generosity of the rich towards the poor does little or nothing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; it creates no solidarity between them. And, contrary to the social democratic or liberal egalitarian argument, Cohen, at least, was convinced that equality without solidarity, without something felt between people, was barely worth the name "equality" at all.
Which brings us around to Why Not Socialism?, which itself begins, not with Marx, but with a camping trip. Cohen, it is manifestly clear from the text, was probably never much of a camper. Still, his basic observations--about how fishing, cooking, and cleaning up duties are distributed during such a trip, for example--ring true: the activity of a camping trip is profoundly socialist, in the sense that there is little or no bargaining for position, little or no renting out of one's property or talents, that "norms of equality and reciprocity" are taken from granted...and that, indeed, to the extent that any of the above do not hold, it "contradict[s] the spirit of the trip" (p. 5). Cohen then proceeds to codify the "spirit of the trip," which he does through two principles: that of equality, and that of community. The former leads into, and becomes part of, the latter. Cohen rejects absolute communism, and recognizes that individual liberty and the vagaries of democracy will, of course, result in certain inequalities; however, of the sorts of inequality which a socialist arrangement, which he defines as "radical equality of opportunity" (p. 12), admits to, only a few will be tolerable. First, "variety of preference and choice across lifestyle options means that some people will have more goods of a certain sort than others do" (p. 25)--but that is unproblematic, because such individual choice (one camper awakes earlier than another to go enjoy a sunrise, while another gets to sleep in), in following individual preference, conveys no real social power. But then comes the possibility of regrettable or unlucky preferences (the camper who slept in missed a once-in-a-lifetime, worldview-transforming sunrise); such inequalities are problematic because they can accumulate, and in the aggregate can generate ever deeper divisions between individuals (the campers who caught the worldview-transforming sunrise have an increased capacity for work and increased wisdom, meaning they are able to more efficiently bring their own children those remote, difficult to access spots where they also can see world-transforming sunrises, etc.). Obviously, what Cohen is talking about here is how economic and social advantages can be passed down along individual lines, opening up new opportunities for select individuals, bypassing society as a whole entirely. And this is not acceptable--even if not, strictly speaking, "in-egalitarian," since none of it arose from necessarily unequal social designs, but might well have resulted simply from option luck--because it makes impossible socialist community:
"Community" can mean many things, but the requirements of community that is central here is that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another. There are two modes of communal caring that I want to discuss here. The first is the mode that curbs some of the inequalities that may result from socialist equality of opportunity. The second mode of communal caring is not strictly required for equality, but it is nevertheless of supreme importance in the socialist conception. We cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make, and keep, say, ten times as much money as I do, because my life will then labor under challenges that you will never face, challenges that you could help me cope with, but do not, because you keep your money....So, to return to the camping trip, suppose that we eat pretty meagerly, but you have your special high-grade fish pond, which you got neither by inheritance nor by chicanery nor as a result of the brute (that is, nonoption) luck of your superior exploratory talent, but as a result of an absolutely innocent option luck that no one can impugn from the point of view of justice: you got it through a lottery that we all entered. Then, even so, even though there is no injustice here, your luck cuts you off from our common life, and the ideal of community condemns that, and therefore also condemns any such lottery (pp. 34-35, 37-38).
Cohen's argument thus focuses our attention on the need for communal solidarity, for a common life, as a concomitant to equality. But this brings up some at least two crucial questions, which Cohen, to his credit, forthrightly acknowledges: is such community in fact desirable, and is it in fact feasible? As for desire, Cohen--appealing, to my mind, anyway--falls back on the pure ethos he was instructed in as a child, though he didn't recognize it as such at the time: "I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a left-wing song that I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: 'If we should consider each other, a neighbor, a friend, or a brother, it could be a wonderful, wonderful world, it could be a wonderful world'" (p. 51). As for feasibility, the responses multiply and become more difficult--because, of course, modern states are not voluntary groups of campers, and thus differ in both nature and telos. Absent Marx's historical materialist justification for the emergence of socialism, what kind of argument or arrangement could be made which would assert the feasibility of socialism on a the scale of the nation-state? Cohen runs through several possibilities, insisting all the while that "the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run...our problem is a problem of design," rather than selfishness (pp. 57-58). He does also allow that the design problem may be insoluble, but that doesn't stop him for trying.
For many people, this seems simply utopian...and a consideration of utopianism, interestingly, is where we should turn to move Cohen's argument beyond the point where he was able to bring it. Socialist movements have been associated, both positively and negatively, with utopian thought ever since the mid-19th-century...and of course, in the pre-Marxian history of socialist thinking, you find it being advocated for religious and "utopian"--that is, explicitly ethos-based--reasons for centuries; socialist practice and different kinds of collectivist and/or intentional communities were, for most of Western history, almost invariably connected. However, around the beginning of that split amongst democratic (non-Leninist) socialist thinkers mentioned earlier, you also saw a strong push by different socialist parties and organizations against any taint of the utopian or the communal. Democratic socialism, in the hands of such early advocates as Sidney Webb, "included a determined lack of sympathy for proposals which sought the 'regeneration of mankind' by means of establishing 'little Utopias'," as David Leopold has argued. He went on:
[Webb] drew an interesting distinction between two strategies for the growth of socialism--one "horizontal," the other "vertical"....The communal strategy is characterized as a "horizontal" one, where by the "whole faith" is adopted by "a partial community" in the hope and expectation that individual communal success will lead to replication, and the eventual incorporation of the wider society. For Webb, the empirical record of intentional communities confirmed that the "horizontal" strategy was doomed to failure. He observed that the majority of communities failed, and, in the case of the rare few that might prosper, there was no subsequent evidence of the promised growth and expansion of socialism throughout society. However, in Webb's view, the communal strategy was not only unsuccessful, it was also undesirable....By turning their backs on "machine industry" in order to engage in "spade husbandry"--the allusion is to Robert Owen's stubborn and longstanding belief in the superiority of spade cultivation over that of the plough--communitarians should be seen as abandoning both the modern world and the majority who live in it....[By contrast,] the Fabians embraced a "vertical" gradualism initially involving "the partial adoption of their faith by the whole community." The resulting evidence of success would lead society as a whole to adopt ever more socialistic institutions....No country, he explained, having "nationalized or municipalized any industry has ever retraced its steps or reversed its action" (Leopold, "Socialism and (the Rejection of) Utopia," Journal of Political Ideologies, October 2007, pp. 224-5).
Of course, the Fabian Society is not the whole history and destiny of democratic socialism--but still, it is worth pondering the fact that Cohen, in beginning his defense of socialism by talking about a camping trip, never thinks to consider that his own approach to considering the feasibility of socialism--especially a socialism whose justice is affirmed through an appeal to ethical considerations of equality and community, rather than a historical, Marxist foundation--might be limited to the same sort of parameters Webb insisted upon. For that matter, the great majority of liberal egalitarians and social democrats are similarly so limited: witness the intra-left discourse which has taken place over the past year over the health care debate, in which slowly but surely the great majority of those who pushed and agitated for single-payer, for a public option, for anything more aggressively socialist, have nonetheless come around, however reluctantly, to supporting the president's plan, because it is better than nothing and because it is a foot in the door. Introduce something socialist, however minimal, to the public at large, and watch the people come recognize its worth and embrace it, is the argument. The evidence from the history of Social Security or Medicare seems to support Webb's "partial faith-whole community" approach, as opposed to the "whole faith-partial community" approach which he dismissed.
Obviously, it's not as though all socialist eggs are to be placed in the same basket; one can pursue, or at least accept as legitimate, both approaches simultaneously, especially given that they will almost certainly operate on different cultural and socio-economic levels at different times. And it is just as obvious that Webb's exhortation of continued, inexorable nationalization is a difficult one to take seriously in this day. So, perhaps, what we have in the end is the sense that the socialist project, to be feasible, cannot simply look at what minimal ways it can effectively extend its principles, as valuable as they are, to the whole community--meaning the whole state, the state being, for at least the time being, the central operating component and primary locus of any and all recognition of (and sometimes, even, organization of) socio-economic power. Despite the undeniable successes of that approach, the socialist project must also look at Webb's derided "whole faith-partial community" approach--the instantiation of equality and community in its fullest in camping trips and devotional communities and small-scale businesses and neighborhood organizations and anywhere else where a belief in a particular ethos can, itself, have real world results. More than a few democratic socialists (and fellow travelers) have recognized this; The Nation recently ran a whole series on "Reimagining Socialism," and one of the consistent themes expressed throughout was that unions, co-ops, farmers markets, and the like are where the real, practical future of socialist ideals lay: that socialism, in other words, must go democratic and ecological and, above all, local. Yes, it must address the issues of unregulated finance and industry and the dominance of corporations and commidification in the way in which citizens pursue their health and preferred lives, and it must insist and pursue as best as possible ways of design which can promote the public ownership and distribution of goods...but it must also go to those arenas of association--camping trips, where all is governed, quite sensibly, by assumptions of reciprocity and equality--where social power is truly not a dividing presence between persons. (Yes, even if that does mean associating occasionally with those bothersome, Robert Owen-type Luddites and farmers.) Because it is there, rather than in the purely economic, transactional, national sphere of the modern state, where the real point of a socialist ethos is most clear.
E.F Schumacher, long ago, said it best, as well or, perhaps, even better than G.A. Cohen did:
There are no ‘final solutions’ to this kind of problem. There is only a living solution achieved day by day on a basis of a clear recognition that both opposites are valid. Ownership, whether public or private, is merely an element of framework. It does not by itself settle the kind of objectives to be pursued within the framework....What is at stake is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life, van now only be debased by such a system. Socialists should insist on using the nationalized industries [or, I would, any kind of "partial faith-whole communtiy" scheme of public regulation or ownership] not simply to out-capitalize the capitalists--an attempt in which they may or may not succeed--but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do that, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men.
Some would argue, it should be noted, that Cohen's egalitarian and communitarian beliefs--his whole ethical approach to socialism--is no more respecting of "free-born men" than the orthodox, revolution-awaiting communism he used to embrace was; Andrew Sabl, years ago, famously attacked Cohen's determination to articulate a "project of social unity" as failing to "appreciate how a real liberal thinks." That kerfluffle was one of the earliest blog debates I ever involved myself in, and I wouldn't make the comments I made then in the same way today, but my basic concern is the same: that Cohen is right to see equality and community as necessarily linked, and he needs to be able to appreciate community as something other than a necessity for justice--something that also emerges, organically, from historically and locally practiced relationships and reciprocation. Cohen's camping trip goes along way towards that appreciation...as well as perhaps proving, if one wants to incorporate Sabl's terms into Cohen's argument, why liberals never go camping. My conservative father, who taught his kids well the borderline-socialist principles of Scouting on many a fondly remembered family camping trip, would be pleased to hear that. I hope Cohen, in his ethical and arguably illiberal way, would be as well.
Could our daughters' musical appreciation age backwards, and one of them end up embracing Derek and the Dominoes, or the Beatles? The 80s I can handle, but Hanson? Seriously? And here I thought God was both merciful and just.
I really thought I could stay away from the whole Glenn Beck thing. I mean, I've laughed at him before, like most of the people who share my political beliefs and/or my professional class have probably laughed at him, but I never got upset or outraged by any of his conspiratorial mud-slinging, because I just dismissed it. It was out there, on the corner of my consciousness, but not much more than that. I mean, he's just an entertainer, right? I don't pay attention to Rush Limbaugh either. Yes, I realize that entertainers like Limbaugh and Beck have become hugely important to the ideological structuring of what passes for "conservatism" in the United States, but honestly, I just thought I could spend whatever awareness I bother to devote to the mass media on something more worthwhile.
And, of course, that's still true. But over the past week, Beck's stupid comments about "social justice" exploded all across the internet--and, perhaps inevitably, elicited comments from numerous of my fellowMormonbloggers, since Beck is himself a member of the Mormon church...and for him to, however unintentionally, distinguish himself, with his emotionally overwrought patriotic Mormon Christianity, from the rest of the Christian world which foolishly talks about "social justice" was just a little too much. But I didn't blog about it. It's not as though I don't understand what he presumably thinks he's saying, trying to strike back against the "collectivism" which he apparently thinks has somehow sneaked its way into Christian thought; and it's not as though I like Beck being served up as a fat, easy target for much of the religious left, who for the most part really need to do some serious soul-searching themselves. I just didn't know what I could add to the flood of commentary.
Then my old friend Matt Stannard pointed out another bit of Beckian weirdness: he has this convoluted, confused argument which equates state and federal affirmative action programs with the enslavement of human beings, and as a consequence is urging his listeners not to fill out the U.S. Census, which the Constitution requires be conducted every ten years. And all of sudden it came to me: Bo Gritz!
For those of you who don't know, or don't care, James Gordon "Bo" Gritz (rhymes with "rights") as a US Army Special Forces officer who, sometime in the 1980s, discovered countless drug-money-fueled, internationally-coordinated conspiracies working to undermine America's strength and security, its Christian heritage, its moral values, etc., etc. Your typical right-wing extremist, right? Well, actually, Gritz managed a tad more than most of them have ever dreamed. By the 1990s he'd written multiple books, successfully inserted himself into the FBI's (often, it must be admitted, incompetent) engagements with various Freemen and Christian Patriot militias and survivalist groups which proliferated during the glory years of the "New World Order" (and, not coincidentally, became a hero to many of them; he probably saved Randy Weaver's life during the botched stand-off at Ruby Ridge), and had run for president under the slogan, "God, Guns, and Gritz." And here's where it gets interesting: just about everywhere else in America, Gritz was down at the bottom of the ballot, with various other marginalized candidates...but in my Mormon homeland of Utah and Idaho, he was big news. You see, Gritz himself was, for a time anyway, a member of the Mormon church, and thus was able to plug into a lot of deeply subterranean, arch-conservative, anti-government, John-Bircher, "the Constitution-hanging-by-a-thread-and-the-elders-of-Zion-must-save-it" stuff (for contrasting approaches to that venerable bit of Mormon folklore, see here and here) which has echoed around western American Mormon culture for more than a half-century. The result was, perhaps, predictable.
I was an undergraduate at BYU at the time, working for the campus newspaper, and when the election season of 1992 rolled around we student journalists found ourselves surrounded by sometimes-amusing, sometimes-intimidating, zealous, slightly paranoid, deeply moralistic, Christian Mormon patriots. (I can remember a couple of earnest old fellows who visited the newsroom, insisted on speaking to me, and took up an hour of my time explaining how the Federal Reserve had been complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) Such folks weren't in the majority, not by any means; the great bulk of Utah voters were solid, respectable, socially conservative Republicans, and rolled their eyes at talk about the Illuminati along with the rest of us. But still: there were huge banners and billboard for Bo Gritz to be found all over the countryside. I attended a political rally/religious revival with Gritz which filled an arena up in Salt Lake City; there were thousands of people there, from all over the Intermountain West. Gritz came to a stage set with empty chairs, representing the spirits of the founding fathers, was introduced as another "Captain Moroni" (a widely admired--amongst some Mormons, anyway--military hero from the Book of Mormon), and proceeded to lecture and fulminate to great acclaim about the threats posed to America by Godless Others, the rally concluding with a frankly ritualistic burning of the United Nation's flag.
Well, Gritz earned a respectable 4% of Utah's total votes in 1992 (hey, four percent is more than Ralph Nader ever managed), and in some counties won up to 10%. Then he went off to Idaho to form his own survivalist training compound, and the Mormon church leadership eventually got around to inveighing heavily against that particular style of fundamentalist Mormon who rejects the U.S. court system as apostate and stockpiles eight years worth of wheat in their basement in preparation for Armageddon, and life went on? What does this all this have to do with Glenn Beck? I'm not suggesting there's any direct connection between the two; I'm only observing a pattern. A man finds a faith that includes elements, should he choose to look for them, of patriotic extremism, of warnings about "secret combinations" and historical conspiracies, all in the midst of a broader church culture that is strongly "conservative" (in the Republican sense, mostly) but otherwise, except in the eyes of assorted anti-cult zealots, basically a thoroughly Americanized, modernized, ordinary Christian church. (Which, not surprisingly, has reminded all its American members to be responsible citizens and fill out their census forms completely.) This means, of course, that the community must be enlightened. They must be warned. Glenn Beck, telling his listeners to beware the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing that is "social justice"? Makes perfect sense. He's proselyting, doing missionary work amongst the deluded, sharing the important information that he has discovered (or has been revealed to him? perhaps he thinks so...) with an America that has had the wool pulled over its eyes. Twenty years ago, it was the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bill Clinton who had put the wool there; today, it's Barack Obama, health care reform, and, apparently, the U.S. Census. Any paranoid fantasy will do, because any one of them can be connected to the larger moral struggle which, for reasons both good and bad, much of my own Mormon culture and many of the Mormon teachings I accept make not just theoretically possible, but on some readings, downright credible.
I don't feel too bad about this--most of American Christianity makes possible its own fringes as well, so in a way I suppose it's comforting to know what we Mormons, just like the rest of you, have our clowns and kooks too. And hey, given that the line between fringe kookiness and thoughtful criticism is sometimes thin, I'm actually kind of grateful that we can call a nut like Beck our own: after all, someone has to keep outlandish arguments alive, just in case they someday turn out to be true. But I do feel bad for Beck himself. My friend Matt, in a different post, suggests that he's already almost entirely burned through his 15 minutes of fame--and that, in having invested so heavily in a fearful, suspicious mindset that has so little to do with the heart of the faith he has chosen, may find that after his star has been eclipsed that he won't have enough ordinary connection and commitment to the unfortunately mostly ordinary folks who fill Mormon congregations to get the kind of support from his ward that he may need. Which would be a loss--and I say that not just as a believer myself, but also as someone who, in watching clips of the show, keeps feeling that Beck himself, probably like Gritz, seriously needs a hug.
I have no memory of ever seeing this video, on Friday Night Videos or anywhere else, and it seems to me like I didn't miss much. The lead singer of this one-hit wonder band, David & David, occasionally appears bored out of his skull. Still, when I heard the song on a local radio station the other day, all sorts of late 80s memories came flooding back, mostly involving Miami Vice. There was a harsh, glamorous, cynical drug chic to that era. I would guess that before members of the mainstream suburban audience like myself--and, more importantly, the corporations that marketed our entertainment to us--woke up to just how devastating an effect crack was having on America's cities, drugs were portrayed, so far as I remember anyway, as mostly a cool-bad accoutrement of the white upper classes. Which I suppose they in part still are, and always have been, but in the 80s we had Nancy Reagan teaching us all to "Just Say No," and so of course the folks in Hollywood had to present their temptations to us in neon lights and pastel colors. This video couldn't be more perfectly aligned with that aesthetic, right down to the grainy footage and the streaking street lights. Killer guitar work, though.
Some years Melissa and I do well; this year, despite the expansion of the Best Picture category to 10 films, we did rather poorly. I guess I've been spending all my movie-watching time catchingup. But that's okay, because now I've seen every Oscar-bait film Hollywood will ever produce:
How many Oscar winners did you see parodied in those three and a half minutes? I caught about ten.
Once again, some flicks I've been taking in on my own lately, mostly from four days I spent keeping half an eye on a bunch of students at a Model United Nations conference in St. Louis the week before last, but some just when I stayed up late after my wife crashed early with a headache.
48 Hrs.: how could I have missed this one for so many years? Not quite as fun as some of the buddy-cop films which followed in its wake, but better than more than a few others. Walter Hill's penchant for abrupt violence that really doesn't square with the film built around those set pieces is on good display (I'm thinking of the pointlessly long fist fight between Murphy and Nolte in particular), but overall, a hell of a fun flick. I'd seen Murphy's infamous "I'm a nigger with a badge!" scene before, but it was good to see the whole thing in context.
The Barbarian Invasions: an engaging drama, but most of its time was spent on the film's least engaging characters. Rémy is a fun character to watch, especially for academics like me, but the real intelligence, drama, and humor of the film is to be found in his son Dominique's manipulation of, and comments upon, issues of life and health and death in Quebec. I would have happily traded twenty minutes of tired, irony-drenched ruminations by Rémy's friends about their sex lives for just five more minutes with the hospital administrator who indignantly insists--just before accepting a bribe--that Canada is "not a third world country."
Barbarians at the Gate: an HBO film from the early 90s, long before the success of The Sopranos and all the rest raised their aspirations. Basically just a smart, well-made, tv movie, but it's certainly a much better filmed tale of Wall Street greed than the atrocious adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities (which, in a nice touch, Laurie Johnson, RJ Nabisco bigwig F. Ross Johnson's wife, is seen reading in several scenes). And, of course, watching James Garner chewing the scenery is always a pleasure.
Bon Cop, Bad Cop: another film based, in part, in Quebec, this one strongly recommended by Jacob Levy. And I agree; a good buddy-cop flick, better than 48 Hrs., in fact. But even given buddy-cop conventions, I found myself very curious about how the film's strange mix of in-some-ways-predictable, in-some-ways-surprising, stereotypes played out for home audiences. I mean, the genre is hardly an enlightened one, but I didn't expect a film out of Canada to portray every single woman on screen as either a helpless incompetent, a whiner and a screamer, or as desperately desiring to sleep with one of the two main characters. Maybe Canadians really are Americans after all.
Brokeback Mountain: a very good film; I'm glad I finally saw it. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, and everything that was said about Heath Ledger's terrific portrayal of the emotionally stunted, deeply confused Ennis Del Mar is correct. As I seem to recall several people observing at the time, it's not actually that much of a gay movie; there were only a few scenes where the fact that the two star-crossed lovers were men took on truly serious narrative significance. Frustrating that so much hand-wringing was elicited for such a basically straightforward drama.
I'm Not There: I'm sorry, but I call this one a failure. I suppose I can understand what Todd Haynes was trying to do, but I simply couldn't relate to any of the different characters which they come up with as...what do you want to call them? Avatars of Bob Dylan? Whatever. I don't need an ordinary biopic, and I don't mind using his music itself as a frame for the story, but for heaven's sake, put a story on screen...and if you're not, make it stylized and self-referential enough to be interesting in how it tells itself. But this film was neither. I hope Bob Dylan himself doesn't approve of these kind of misbegotten hagiographies; I'll think less of him if he does.
Klute: it's a crime that I've not seen this before: a first-rate thriller and a wonderful study of two finely written and performed characters. Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels isn't particularly sexy, but is rather compelling in her charisma and self-confidence, which works perfectly, making her struggle against falling in love with Donald Sutherland's John Klute that much more believable and forceful. And as for Klute himself--man, what a creation. The perfect smart, loyal, 1971 middle-aged buttoned-down straight man; you can imagine his whole life one of patiently, wisely, watching and waiting, perfectly capable of dealing any situation that came his way. I'd love to image Klutemeeting Harry Caul from The Conversation.
Nobody's Fool: a very slight story, really, without nearly enough narrative oomph to make me care all that much about the fate of any of the characters. But the characters themselves...man, what a well-acted bunch. There's not a false note in the whole film. The way that Paul Newman's Sully gets distracted at his old house, has to be reminded that he's supposed to be watching his grandson Will by his miserable boss, takes his grandson home to his estranged son Peter and tries to make it up to him: the whole thing is quiet, and may not add up to much, but every note of it rings tragically true.
The Rookie: not my usual sort of film, but I'm more than willing to check out feel-good films on occasion, the same way I sometimes like movies about animals and little kids. In this case, every step in this inspirational Disney flick was predictable, but some of the steps were worth a look. Long ago, I interviewed for a job in that part of Texas, and drove out there with a friend from Dallas; the scenes with Dennis Quaid practicing his pitch over and over again in an empty field captures the lonely, plain beauty of those stretches of country pretty well.
An Unreasonable Man: hey, I make no apologies (partly because I've made them before)--I like Ralph Nader (more evidence here and here). I recognize that he's often self-righteousness, frequently narrow-minded, that he holds grudges, seems to lack much appreciation for any of the context of the work he and his staffers have done for decades, and that he's probably mainly operating off spite and pride these days. Meaning...what? That his enormous legislation accomplishments should be dismissed? That he isn't fundamentally correct about the relationships between corporations and democratic citizenship? I don't think so. And this film puts all that into balance. Of course, I doubt that most of those who pulled their hair out over Nader back in 2000 would consider the movie to be a "fair" treatment of Nader's impact, but as I saw it, it didn't shy at all away from his monomania, and it gave plenty of air time to those who are convinced that Nader stole the 2000 election from Gore (despite conclusive data to the contrary). The movie's controlling thesis was that Nader is an admirable, "unreasonable," man, and it proves its case well.
Herewith, some thoughts about the arguments taking place over at the Front Porch Republic, on the occasion of its first birthday.
About a month ago, Harvey Mansfield--one of the very few living scholars of political theory whose ideas and arguments have had a real-word impact--wrote a thoughtful essay for The Weekly Standard, alleging that the central problem with President Obama's and the Democratic party's determination to reform our nations health insurance systems was that it betrayed a love for "progress" over a love for "liberty." Mansfield writes: "[Obama's] politics is apolitical; it wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible. Only through this conception can one recognize, and understand, the pretentiousness of wanting to be the last president to take up health care."
The idea of putting an end to politics would--and should--of course inflame anyone who subscribes to at least some of the principles avowed by FPR, as I do; after all, while localism certainly does involve a purely aesthetic or historical affection for one's own community, it also involves the political recognition that it is within one's own community that genuine democracy, and real self-government, is possible. To attempt to "put an end to politics," in the name of moving the whole conversation forward to some progressive end, would thus appear to be an attack on one of the central purposes of localism, and there something that anyone who writes for Front Porch Republic ought to oppose.
Well, William Galston--himself no slouch when it comes to scholars of political theory influencing real-world debates--provides a bit of an answer. In a strong rebuttal to Mansfield's accusations, Galston brushes aside Mansfield's specific characterization of Obama's and the Democrats' proposals as tendentious, and hones in on his basic presumption: that there is an "inherent contradiction between progress and liberty." This he simply rejects: "Simply put," Galston asserts, "removing issues from the political agenda--placing them beyond dispute--often promotes liberty."
I think Galston is correct. I think that the push against a government reform in how insurance companies offer coverage and how costs are to be controlled--about which there are, to be sure, innumerable and important political disputes--too often, and wrongly, seems to partake of an attitude which presents "liberty" primary in terms of a private contest between interests, and "progress" primary in terms of government agencies intervening (presumably in an authoritarian manner) into those private contests to "resolve" issues, and thereby take them out of the people's hands entirely. Galston summarizes this stance succinctly:
If government doesn't have the right [to intervene], then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
I say that I think this conception of the argument between liberty and progress is wrong--and wrong in such a way that has implications for the kind of debates which keep me interested in what goes on at FPR--because I think it fails to respect the deep logic (and not just the euphonious quality!) behind the particular arrangement of terms at the top of FPR's masthead: "Place. Limits. Liberty." I think this conception (which I've yammeredabout before, and which in perhaps unavoidable in a country whose bone-deep individualism was diagnosed and fretted over by Tocqueville close to two centuries ago) fails to appreciate that liberty is often, necessarily, a positive and empowering concept, which flows from being able to (politically!) establish and "resolve" ones place, accept and work within the community limits which any such place would entail, and find greater liberty of real opportunity, action and accomplishment accordingly. Galston elaborates upon this distinction at length:
In the real world, there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There are only specific freedoms, which differ in their conditions and consequences. FDR famously enumerated four such freedoms, dividing them into two pairs: freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear. The first pair had long been recognized and enshrined in the Constitution. The second were a new formulation, and Roosevelt made them concrete when he signed Social Security into law, justifying it as a way of promoting freedom from want....The conservatives of his day dismissed the second pair as "New Deal freedoms" rather than "American freedoms." But those who have experienced the freedoms made possible by the New Deal are not so dismissive. It is often observed, rightly, that Social Security has virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly. But this noble achievement has an equally profound flip side. Throughout human history, those who reached the age where they could no longer work have typically depended on their children or on charity for their basic subsistence. Social Security broke this age-old dependency by giving the elderly a minimum degree of economic self-sufficiency, expanding their range of effective control over the conditions of their post-retirement years....
"Freedom of" points toward spheres of action in which individuals make choices--for example, which faith to embrace, or whether to endorse any faith at all. The task of government is in part to secure those spheres against interference by individuals, groups, or government itself....The other face of freedom--"freedom from"--points toward circumstances that (it is presumed) we all wish to avoid. In such instances, the task of government is, so far as possible, to immunize individuals against undesired circumstances. Here, government acts to protect not individual agency and choice, but rather an individual's life circumstances against outcomes that no one would choose, or willingly endure. It follows that the "right to choose" is but a part of freedom in the fuller sense. As a motorist, I am rightly free to choose my own route and destination. But government correctly infers that I also wish to be protected from smashing into other cars, and so restricts which side of the road I and others can drive on. My desire to avoid an accident is no less real than my desire to drive where I please....
The point is that any society that takes freedom from want and fear seriously has made collective decisions: Certain conditions are objectively bad; its citizens should not have to endure them if the means of their abatement are in hand; and individual choice is not a necessary component of, and may be a hindrance to attaining, these freedoms. The current debate over health care only underscores these truths.
It is worth noting that while Galston's formulation of this debate might strike some readers as accommodating a degree of collective action and communitarian "intervention" and "resolution" that might seem a poor fit for the United States of America (which, if true, doesn't necessary speak well for our political culture, I suspect), Galston himself has insisted that he does not believe positive liberty should be, and would not want to see it, carried too far. In an old debate with Michael Lind, in fact, Galston insisted that "freedom" was the central value for the great majority of Americans, meaning that we are all individualists of one fashion or another, and hence have to think carefully about how we want to speak of providing collective goods so that communities, families, and individuals can enjoy the liberty which a secure and supportive and fair environment can provide. He agrees with many of Lind's civic republican ideas, particularly Lind's observation that a more explicitly communitarian or "public interest" language "permits republican liberals to justify public education, policies promoting widespread economic independence, taxation, military or militia service, jury duty and voting, along with public health policies and environmental protection, without needing to show that these programs and institutions could be derived from separate, individual goods or that each individual citizen is likely to benefit"...but he concludes that, as valuable as the concept of public liberty may be, "the language of republicanism inherently looks backward to a system of economic provision and social class structure that is gone for good and that applying it to the economic and social problems of the present will often lead to damaging results." In other words, as I would say it (putting my own preferred spin on Galston's words), the revolutions of mobility, technology, and individual choice--all diagnosed long ago by Marx so very well--have so disrupted the permanence of our socio-economic ties and traditional relations that all we can do is to empower people in their chosen publics and places, rather than work to instantiate a public liberty that truly belongs to us all. There can be, of course, egalitarian provision and protection on a broad, general, even national scale, for the sake of promoting the aforementioned positive liberties...though the particulars and extent of such are and should be subject to continuous political debate (it is pretty settled that the United States will have a national defense, for example, while the debate about health insurance regulation remains unsettled). But to to really go deep into the ability and the right of a people to democratically govern themselves, to truly create a "beloved community" and truly exercise sovereignty over public things--to go, in other words, fully republican (or socialist, if you prefer)--requires, in today's world, a turn to local places, and their limits. That is where all the more general collective actions will enable the greatest, and most valued, liberty of all.
So the arguments--and they are political arguments--over what it means to value and wish to preserve one's front porch are going to continue, and they will, I think rightly, include arguments that can incorporate possibilities of action that range from the most personal and individual of decisions to some (not many, but some) that will properly involve the highest and broadest levels of government. To argue that there is something illegitimate, something by definition apolitical, and thus opposed to liberty, in an attempt to respond to a particular political issue through the national government, is no more inherently sensible, I think, than claiming it is apolitical to allow a neighborhood council to make a decision about the maintenance of the sidewalks on your street, or to allow a county election to determine policies about the sale of alcohol in your town, or to allow a state legislature to make a decision about gambling in your county. Any of those decisions could be bad, of course, and any might deserve to be protested. But to deny the value of the kind of positive, collective liberty they demonstrate (though, as I said above, I would suggest that you arguably need to see the more interventionary of those demonstrations limited to communities where the relevant scale allows the residents to express themselves more directly and democratically) is to fall, intentionally or not, into a more privatized and negative notion of liberty, one that sees it as an individual possession, and not something that also obtains in places themselves.
About a month ago, Caleb Stegall pointed to a particular taxonomy that he found to be particularly relevant to figuring out where different folks stand at the Front Porch Republic. Suggesting that while some on the left side of FPR might "make common cause against certain Classic Liberal centrists" along with localists like himself, the fact remains that folks like him and me may be "miles apart on a more fundamental level." I'm not entirely in agreement with his taxonomy (I've thought about some of my own), or his conclusion, but he's probably more right than wrong. The Jeffersonian-individualist strain in American localism (and populism too, for that matter) will probably always be far distant from (and far more common than, as well) my own preferred Laschian-communitarian strain. But we go along. And it makes for good discussions--and good politics too--all the same.
From slick, smooth, late-80s rich, African-American R&B to angry, rough, mid-80s poor, blue-eyed R&B: there's a transition for you! All hail Simply Red, the greatest British soul band of them all.
For a thirdtime, I find myself turning to the Plain People of the Internet (I believe John Holbo trademarked that phrase) to answer a dilemma I have relating to movies and politics in the classroom. This time, though, I'm going international.
In two week's time, I'll start teaching a short evening class at Newman University, almost literally next door to Friends, on "World Government Systems." As I read the course description, it really should be called "Government Systems of the World," to avoid any confusion; in any case, I'm going to be teaching it as a comparative politics course, starting with laying down some general groundwork for comparing different forms of government around the world, and then examining in depth seven or eight (I haven't quite finished the syllabus yet) different countries over the next seven weeks. The selection will be pretty standard (that is, Euro-centric) for this kind of course: Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, India, possibly Nigeria, possibly Russia, etc. What is different is that I want to require the students to experience a bit of cinematic culture along with their required readings. And so, I'm going to assign them to find and watch (and perhaps I will obtain and show a clip of, in each class) a film that comes from and/or focuses on the particular country which were are studying that day. The question is, which one?
The only selection I'm absolutely certain of is showing/requiring The Queen for Great Britain. Not only is an absolutely terrific movie, but it looks directly at the nature and limits of the constitutional monarchy in a time of popular crisis. But what should I do for any of the others? Ideally, all the other movies will be like The Queen, in that they will have something to say about the country's governing system, but I'm not sure that will be an absolute requirement; I want the films to be entertaining and to have something to connect to the students with as well. (If I didn't care about the latter, then I could just so some educational documentary.) I'm thinking about The Nasty Girl for Germany (or possibly The Lives of Others), and Ikiru for Japan. What else? Dare I require Au Revoir, Les Enfants for France? (Or maybe Indochine or The Battle of Algiers--though those are both really about the French interacting with the world beyond France, not touching on France itself.) Can I avoid showing Gandhi for India? (I really liked Slumdog Millionaire--talking about the new, post-globalization India? Or perhaps I should ask my wife for Bollywood recommendations...)
Who can resist the crazystuff which OK Go comes up with? I can't. They were saying only yesterday that this video would be everywhere within a day or two, and they're right.
Someone who is better that this (mean, I guess, both digital filmmaking and booby-trap construction) tell me: how many different shots constitute this video? Because I just can't believe it was all done in one.
I've never been much into the smooth R&B musical scene (give me funkier stuff by Earth, Wind & Fire or Stevie Wonder any day), but sometimes the whole "quiet storm" groove really grabs me. Anyway, this song did. I heard it only once or twice, when I saw the video in the summer of 1988 on MTV (my parents briefly flirted with cable when I came home from my freshman year). And then I was off on a church mission for two years to South Korea...and weirdly, this song--or whatever I could remember of it, which became less and less as the months went by--just kept gliding around the back of my consciousness. I came back to the U.S., and would occasionally embark on grand efforts to track down the song, but I couldn't remember who sang it, or its title, or hardly any of the lyrics...and besides, I was in Provo, UT, attending Brigham Young University, not exactly a place where folks familiar with Babyface Edmonds's early work were thick on the ground. It was years before I finally stumbled on to this video again. Glad I did.
I grew up in a family of boys, all of whom were five-year-olds at one point or another--indeed, I was a five-year-old myself, once. But these days I'm surrounded by girls (and emerging teen-agers), and the consciousness of little boys, and really boys in general, seems to be slipping away from me. Thankfully, AXE COP--a comic book written entirely by a five-year-old boy (though drawn by his older brother)--sets me completely straight.
"We should put these heads on a stick, and hide bombs in them." Yes, that's a smart five-year-old boy thinking, right there. It's all coming back to me now....
There are nine episodes in all, so far; do read them all. The one with the "half vampire man, half vampire baby, and half vampire kid in the middle" is our favorite.
You know, I was actually disappointed when the rapper's flunky started talking at 1:45; I found the video far more effective and persuasive when he was just doing the whole thing in pantomime.
So last week I turned to Dead or Alive, presenting it as one of the greatest examples of true flaming goodness. My friend Scott, however, sent me to this website, which suggests that I'd really only just started to scratch the surface. And I guess have to agree. I mean, among other things, how could I have ignored the original?
The aforementioned website claims Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" wins the outrageousness contest hands-down. I can't vouch for that, though, because I ran from the room screaming in horror the last time I saw it.
I've said before, that I think Obama's approach to political economy just isn't quite populist enough, or socialist enough, or radical enough--that is, perverse as it may seem, just not humble enough (in the sense of being willing to ask the American people to humble themselves enough to profoundly rethink how we build, how we finance, and how we consume in our economy)--to do justice to the situation we find ourselves in. More often, he seemed, on the contrary, quite content to work the corprorate institutions and financial establishments that be, in the hopes to turning them towards more egalitarian ends. Which is hardly a bad thing, of course: as I've also said manytimes in connection with health care reform, while I'm frustrated with how Obama and the Democrats have moved their reform proposals along, I'd still like to see them turned into law, because bankruptcies could be prevented and lives saved. But that doesn't stop me from continuing to hope that the populist Obama, the class-conscious Obama, the civic republican Obama, will re-appear.
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.
As Paul Krugman and John Judis both essentially observe, so much for sympathy for the little guy, struggling against corporate power in the marketplace. Or, as Judis summed up, "this interview shows that, in the choice between Main Street and Wall Street, [Obama's] natural inclinations lie more toward one side--and it ain’t Main Street." Depressing. Doesn't Obama know the liberaltarian moment is over? Progressive causes and libertarian/corporate causes don't go hand-in-hand anymore. Oh well; you take what you can get. And at least Ralph Nader is still out there...
Sexual ambiguity and general outrageousness abounded on the American dance-pop scene in the mid- to late-80s, of which this video is my favorite. True, it doesn't feature any kind of terribly outre dress or behavior...but it does feature Peter Burns on a horse, for heaven's sake.
If you can think of a big video hit that can beat this, I'm open to rival nominations.
Too cold for the snow and ice to melt, so I'm not riding my bike to work, which means I'm not getting my exercise. I feel slow and sluggish. Forms and committee meetings are piling up. The whole blogosphere feels the same way to me, this week: weighed down and grumpy. Perhaps the snow in Washington and New York and everywhere else the hip bloggers live is getting us all down. Perhaps we just need another good laugh--something smart, and stupid, and time-wasting, all at once. Like this:
A long time ago I forwarded this to a bunch of friends of mine for a laugh. Glen, who builds killer robots for the U.S. Navy, commented that whole thing makes perfect sense. "The corn starch is the key, of course."
That was some rough Beatles-related stuff that last couple of weeks. Now, how about a video of the single best Beatles pop song which was neither written nor recorded by the Beatles themselves? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
The magic of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup didn't outlast Orbison's death, but it did make for one sweet album while it lasted.
My plea for help in understanding Lost, which resulted in some commenters making strong cases for the show, has put me in mind of my own occasional experiences with television program fandom. And, of course, because I can't ever just ask myself a simple question, but rather have to turn it into a ponderous, life-examining, navel-gazing blog post, I did so. And here it is. As best I can figure, these are the ten television programs I've watched in my life that I not only enjoyed the most, but which changed my viewing--and thinking--habits most. Enjoy. (List in mostly chronological order, as I encountered them.)
Sesame Street. I've talked about my fond memories of old school Sesame Street before; according to family legend, I would watch it two or three times a day (morning, afternoon, and sometimes at lunch) on a couple of different public television station back when I was three and four years old (say 1972 to 1974, or thereabouts). I can still fondly--though vaguely--remember great stories and gags from those years (didn't they once load up the whole gang on a truck and drive to Mexico to help one of Luis's cousins build a house?). As for what I learned from the basic cognitive boot-camp which Sesame Street provided, I have no idea; it's too fundamental, buried too deep. But really, wasn't that the point?
Star Trek. The original series, of course; my older brother Daniel and I would watch the reruns of TOS obsessively, on Saturday afternoons. The station in our hometown which broadcast them must not have had a license for the whole set of episodes; either that, or they played favorites. Either way, we saw some of them over and over and over again, until we practically had them memorized. Why did we love the show? Because we were kids, and here was a show we could watch (it's 4pm on a Saturday, Mom, what else should we do?) that showed us adults fighting, dying, loving, solving problems, confronting the void, etc., etc. And then we would run off, play Kirk and Spock and McCoy, and create our own worlds. Science fiction, before I knew what the terms meant, before I'd read anything by that label, gave me a language of story-telling (not to mention of geekery) which I still usetoday.
M*A*S*H. In particular, seasons 6 and 7, after the arrival of Winchester and before the departure of Radar. The fact the I even knew that without having to look anything up on Wikipedia is itself the best case I can make for this show: it was he first time I found myself taking a television show seriously as a television show. I read stuff in TV Guide and Reader's Digest about the cast; I would buy copies of People magazine or Newsweek when there were articles about the show or interviews with the stars. Lots of great writing, some awesome laughs, some really affecting (but also sometimes terribly overwrought and melodramatic) drama, but really, overall, the show that gave me an awareness of the mechanics of television drama.
SCTV. When I was a junior in high school, I got my own television set in my bedroom. Why? Because my Commodore 64 needed a monitor, that's why. I would retreat to my room sometime around 9pm, and then do homework or read for the next two hours. Sometimes I suppose I might have watched something on prime time, but I don't remember what. What I do remember is that, at 11pm, one of the local PBS stations would show an episode of Second City Television, and it wasn't long before I was completely hooked. Stupid--yet smart--nutty comedy, from Canada. Much more than Saturday Night Live, which I watched only occasionally during the 1980s, SCTV taught me something which I'd never really known about before: satire. I was already a sarcastic kid (you couldn't read Peanuts obsessively and not become one); SCTV helped me sharpen and refine it, making more pointed and surreal at the same time. And speaking of surreal...
Monty Python's Flying Circus. After SCTV was over, the PBS station would start showing an episode of Flying Circus, and that really blew me away. Dark, lunatic, impossibly intelligent farce, mixed with crude, pointless, cheap slapstick. In dresses, of course. Monty Python has become one of the essential soundtracks to my life, shaping my whole sense of humor and the entire way I mix piety with tactlessness (though not nearly as successfully as they did, through I try). It's a regular feature in my classes; I can't say that about any other television program.
Late Night with David Letterman. So by then, after SCTV and Flying Circus, it was 12:30am, and there I was, tired from laughing but not ready to go to bed. What to watch, then, except Late Night (Monday through Thursday, anyway; on Fridays there was no Late Night, but there was Friday Night Videos instead)? My parents had never been fans of the evening talk shows, and so I didn't know what to expect. What I got was yet another kind of irreverence, a silly and thoroughly American kind, one that mixed pop culture and politics together on a daily basis, schooling me--though I didn't realize at the time--in viewing the news of the day as fodder for the mind, something to chew over and crack wise about. I haven't followed and really haven't cared much about the Letterman vs. Leno (vs. Conan and everyone else) battles, but for a couple of years, Letterman framed my imaginary approach to political life as much as the McLaughlin Group or any news show. What some folks get from John Stewart today, I got from Letterman, as the Reagan years came to a close.
(Plus, as might be apparent from all this, because we lived on a farm and I had to be up milking cows at 5:30am, I didn't sleep much for a couple of years there.)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I watched The Next Generation as a student at BYU, and at first I didn't like it--but then, almost no one liked its first couple of seasons. Eventually, though, it began to put out some pretty good episodes, and I, of course, watched regularly. But I didn't obsess over; it didn't dig into me, the way DS9. It's one of the very, very few television programs--maybe the only one, actually--that I watched from it's premier, all the way through to the end, rarely missing even one episode. It's also the first television program I became part of a wider community for; sure, as a Star Trek geek, I partook in that fandom universe, but only minimally: mostly, it was all in my head. But for DS9 I was talking to others, reading reviews (posted on the "internet," can you believe it?), and basically going beyond my interest in the show as a show: I was viewing it as property, something that I was part-owner of, something that I well, cared about. Seems silly to put it so plainly, but it's true: the show completely fell apart in its last two seasons, especially the final one, and it pissed me off. We were living in Germany the summer of 1999, after DS9 had wrapped up its final episodes, and as I'd missed them (I went over to Germany in early May), Melissa had taped them all for me, and brought them with her. I stayed up late one night, watching the final episodes back to back, and I found myself getting angry, actually stomping around our apartment, arguing with the television set. I'd never done that with a tv show before, and I haven't since.
Northern Exposure. Melissa and I were married and living cheap the year after we'd graduate from BYU, waiting to find which--if any--graduate school I'd go to. All we had for entertainment was our television set, with no cable, and a limited number of stations. So we watched a lot of TV--and we discovered Northern Exposure. It was already winding down by then, to a not particularly enjoyable conclusion, but we watched it together, and faithfully recorded late-night reruns, delighting in the show's whimsical mix of music, character, scenery, mood, and story. We ate it up, and still sometimes share moments of the show with each other in jokes or memories. It was show for us.
Homicide: Life on the Street. The other, much less romantic and funny, much more dark and disturbing, tv show we watched together was Homicide. I'd read a couple of iffy reviews at some time in the past, and avoided it for a few years. But then something--I remember; it was the episode where Robin Williams guest-starred--made me tune it in, and I was hooked. Slowly, but surely, I dragged Melissa in, and it became a show that we argued about. It was the first show either of us had ever followed which provided such detailed, sometimes convoluted, sprawling story-lines; I'd become invested in characters and the world they inhabit before, but never so much in the writing, in the twists and turns of plot and the rotating in and out of characters new and old. It introduced me to a knew way of relating to television story-telling. The fact that Melissa and I became, for a few years, passionate Law and Order--during the years with the classic Jerry Orbach/Chris Noth line-up, years during which L&O and Homicide crossed-over a few times--only made it more complicated, and more worth watching.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Since the kids started arriving, I've watched less and less television. That goes for both of us; I think we've actually been without television reception for most of the past decade or so, and we don't miss it much. The tv set sits there, used for movies, and that's about it. Except, of course, that over the past several years, we've discovered television on dvd. The first real breakthrough here came with getting the superb, Jeremy Brett-starring, BBC-produced Sherlock Holmes stories: all six series of them (though the final one, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, when Brett was very ill, is unfortunately of poor quality). The programs themselves are excellent, but what was most changing is that it made me realize what I'd been missing through the 90s and the decade since, as complicated, long-form, interconnected television shows were made and broadcast, simply begging for dvd treatment. Through Sherlock Holmes my eyes were opened to so much good television; Rome stands out in particular, but also Monk and, lately, Life on Mars. Given our aforementioned affection for Homicide, I suppose one of these days we'll make our way through The Wire, and Melissa is right now delighting our girls with Robin Hood (I watched the first season, but took a pass on the rest.) But Sherlock Holmes will stand out as my real introduction to this format...and, of course, also because it was, as everyone agrees, one of the finest examples of television casting and acting in history.
Ok, so there you go: the ten most important television shows in my personal history. What are yours?
This morning I heard a report on NPR, talking about the final season of Lost, which begins tonight. The show has, apparently, long since stopped being a television program, and become a mythos:
ABC and its owner, Disney, sort of see Lost as a much bigger property. I think they see it as a long-term franchise--not unlike, say, Star Wars or Star Trek--that can live on for 20 or 30 years.
Now, I've never been much of an enthusiast for the Star Wars universe; saw the original film lots when I was a kid, but even by Return of the Jedi I was sitting in the theater, thinking the movie wasn't very good. Star Trek, of course, is a different issue; that's a franchise I can get at least somewhat passionateabout. So I can appreciate how television shows can expand, both from their original premises and within the imagination of their fans, so as to go on seemingly forever, following their characters and foibles and adventures for as long as there is someone to write them (and a corporate entity willing to license such). But still...Lost?
I suppose I could hang out on Wikipedia and try to dope out the whole mythos, but I'd rather turn to knowledgeable others to just give me the essentials. And the key essential is...um, how? Granted, I've seen exactly one episode of Lost in my life (everybody was talking about the first season, so I tuned into the first episode of the second, back in 2005, and watched a couple of guys go down into some deep bunker where they discovered this lunatic watching them with camera and hitting a button to prevent the island from blowing up, and then there was this old film they watched which talked about crazy experiments from the 1970s...am I making any sense here?), so what do I know? But still...aren't they on, like, an island? Doesn't that kind of limit the whole "strange new worlds" element of any possible franchise? How would they get new characters? Would random planes just keep crashing on the island every few years, or what?
I wasn't thrilled by some of the ways J.J. Abrams reconfigured the Star Trek universe, but it made for a fun movie, and I've no doubt Lost is fun for its fans. I'm just not one of them. Is it worth trying to help a Lost innocent like myself understand why some people are talking about a Lost theme park, or at this point, am I better off just continuing to ignore the whole thing? (Hey, it worked with The Sopranos...)
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