Stephane Dion's proposed 'Green Shift' in tax policy may prove both a masterstroke of political strategy as well as a desperate gamble to save the credibility of a faltering leader. But it poses significant risks for M. Dion as well as the Prime Minister.
The merits of the underlying approach Dion proposes are, as public policy, beyond reasonable dispute. As any tyro of an economist can explain, when you tax something you ensure you have less of it, which is why you should tax those things of which you want less. Greenhouse gas emissions, in this instance. Extending the 10-cents-a-litre fuel tax to all emissions via a carbon tax, as Dion suggests, is a more efficient, market-reliant policy than the cap-and-trade system the Harper government is devising for the major industrial emitters who amount for roughly half of total emissions, not least because it puts a clear price on emissions, and thus ensures a greater predictability of cost in making the transition to a more energy-efficient economy.
The initial collective response of the punditocracy as Dion began to unveil his plan was to the effect that the Liberal leader had managed to outdo himself in his capacity for the self-infliction of political injuries. To put it mildly, this is at best premature and something of an overstatement. I have yet to see a credible poll that puts public support for a carbon tax, if revenue-neutral (ie., accompanied by compensatory reductions in other taxes) at less than a majority of the Canadian public, or very near. And in B.C., where the Campbell government has brought in a Provincial levy, the howls of outrage anticipated in some quarters have been conspicuously slow to arise.
Dion has even garnered (in some cases, very grudging) praise for his recent effort to sell Alberta audiences on the virtues of his plan, and to refute comparisons to the Trudeau government's abominated National Energy Program. David Herle, one of the architects of the Liberal debacles of 2004 and 2006, has praised Dion in the pages of the Globe and Mail not only for going to Alberta to make his case, but for avoiding rhetoric that would demonize either the Province or the oil and gas industry largely based there. Perceptions elsewhere that Alberta is reaping a fiscal windfall from high energy prices and the (environmentally obnoxious) oil sands project might give Dion an incentive, Herle writes, to espouse the redistribution of oil wealth to the rest of Canada as a good in itself, albeit at the cost of provoking "a full-fledged national unity crisis." That he does not do so shows he "won't play with fire in order to win votes."
Herle shows a remarkable talent here for falling upon his backside after tripping over the central point, all without quite managing to see it. True, the Liberals had, and indeed have, precious little chance of winning any Alberta seats; that is not say they have nothing to lose by painting Alberta as the ogre of Confederation. The principal audience for Dion's remarks in Alberta actually consisted of swing voters, particularly in Ontario, who see aggressive government action to deal with climate change as desirable, but are reluctant to incur a re-run of the early 1980s federal-provincial energy wars in the process. Dion is more likely to win their votes by ostentatious sensitivity to the regional dynamics of the issue than by overwrought denunciations of big oil.
By the same token, Stephen Harper, who not only leads one western-based party, but has ideological roots in another, and an inconvenient history of apologizing for Alberta parochialism to boot(recall the notorious "firewall" letter), risks alienating centrist opinion if he plays the lackey of Alberta-based energy firms. If bullying Alberta has political costs, so does acting as a political subsidiary of its energy industry; even the provincial government of Ed Stelmach has tacitly conceded the need to improve the Province's image elsewhere by "rebranding" Alberta as something more than home to tar sands and oil wells. The party leader who seems most eager to place narrow regional and partisan considerations above the national interest on this issue is the one who will suffer. So far, Harper's vehemence in denouncing Dion's plan as a tax grab in the mold of the NEP shows insufficient care to avoid Dion's trap. And as long as Dion declines to pit region against region, he has a good chance to profit from the politics of the question.
Yet his position is not without vulnerabilities of its own, some of them rooted in the circumstances behind its adoption. Dion's last year has been a patchy one at best, and he has failed to strengthen his position with the public despite a notable string of Conservative embarrassments. The embattled Dion has been forced to climb down from what few previous convictions he seemed to have established in the electorate's mind, and resort to various amusing contrivances to avoid defeating the government and precipitating an election he obviously doubted he could win. Nailing his colours to the Green Shift created an opportunity for him to reassure voters that he indeed retains convictions which he will not betray in the crunch, draw a stark contrast with the government on an issue where it is still distrusted by much of the public, and to reestablish his bona fides as an environmentallly minded politician in the face of both public doubts and the increased popularity of the Green Party.
It is true, as Dion has said before, and as he took pains to say in Alberta recently, that the Green Shift is not only sound environmental policy but sensible economics and even wise geopolitics. Retooling Canada's economy for greater energy-efficiency would be a welcome tonic to our lagging competitiveness, and even a nation well-positioned in hydrocarbons has cause to reduce its vulnerability to price shocks caused by regional instability in the Middle East. And he was right to add that while a carbon tax will redirect revenues out of Alberta (even after offsetting reductions in other taxes are factored in) over the short term, the Province and the energy industry will prosper from the investments in cleaner technologies that he would encourage.
Regrettably, Dion is not the ideal advocate for this position. He has never held an economic portfolio or identified himself with compelling proposals for improving Canada's competitive position or achieving greater energy independence. His shrill and somewhat uncritical regurgitation of environmentalist nostrums during his leadership campaign can reasonably be taken as proof that, for him, economic and geopolitical arguments are merely rationalizations for doing what, out of environmentalist zeal, he would like to do in any event. And to the extent that he has outlined the program for a Dion government, it seems heavy on new social spending commitments, and relatively light on measures to augment our collective prosperity.
As a result, it is easier than it should be to give credence to Stephen Harper's claim that the Green Shift is not part of a coherent blueprint for restructuring the national economy along more energy-efficient and competitive lines, but part exercise in environmentalist dogmatism, part tax grab, and that its principal result will be to funnel money from wealthy Alberta (and Albertans) to the less advantaged in other Provinces. As for the other tax and economic policies that would complement the carbon tax (such as dramatic reductions in corporate taxes and marginal personal rates) and make it part of a coherent whole, Dion has yet to say much. His willingness to do so in the next few months may determine whether the Green Shift marks his political resurrection or a shovelful of earth on his political grave.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
On Honouring Dr. Morgentaler
That the controversy surrounding Dr. Henry Morgentaler's nomination to the Order of Canada is purely symbolic does not mean it is trivial. Symbolic battles matter because, as Anne Applebaum observed in another context, they show who won the real ones.
The most common criticism made of Morgentaler's nomination, that he is a divisive honoree, is not only something of a red herring but holds less water than it first seems. Previous inductees have included onetime participants in partisan politics, who almost by definition are hard choices for citizens of other political persuasions to swallow. Others have been devoted to causes that, while not partisan in a formal sense, are rejected by many (such as Aboriginal self-government, for example). Even seemingly safe choices from the worlds of letters or entertainment can prove dodgy. Your favourite novelist is my talentless hack, and if you think the Order is ennobled in a given case I may find it cheapened. By the same token, one can argue against inducting onetime professional or Olympic athletes as trivializing the honour, where the activities at which they excel are, in the final analysis, nothing more than jumped-up versions of children's games.
Adherents of the pro-life cause who object to honouring Morgentaler (in a few cases, to the the point of renouncing their own membership in the Order), however misguided one may consider them on the question of abortion itself, are right in seeing his nomination as a blow, and not merely an insult, to their cause. It makes public and explicit what many of us long ago concluded: that the legal and political, as opposed to the theological and philosophical, debates over Abortion in Canada are well and truly concluded. The current Federal Government is the most socially conservative one in fifty years, and its leader has ruled out revisiting Canadian abortion law. Indeed, making it plain that his party would, whatever the personal sentiments of its activists, treat the question of abortion as definitively settled, was a precondition of Stephen Harper's becoming Prime Minister in the first instance. Leaving the electorate open to the impression that he would, in power, reopen it, was a risk he rightly concluded he could not afford to take, regardless of the vehement opposition to abortion of much of his political base. If Stephen Harper's government won't come within a bargepole's length of bringing abortion before the House of Commons, no conceivable future government will do so.
There is a modus vivendi in Canada regarding abortion, and it holds. The practice is not regulated by criminal law, but is treated by physicians and their regulatory bodies as one to be undertaken within limits, and generally for the most serious of reasons. True, the lack of an abortion law of any sort is unusual, and pro-life commentators have argued it puts Canada at the furthest end of the spectrum of regimes governing the practice. But it is doubtful how much of a difference the lack of a law has made.
Since 1988, when the Supreme Court concluded that the current law (and almost any subsequent one) entailed unjustifiable violations of Chapter Seven of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the direst predictions of the pro-life movement have not come to pass. The raw number of abortions did not suddenly skyrocket; more to the point, the composition of the incidence of abortions during pregnancy remained much the same. Now, as then, some 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester. Far fewer than 5% are performed after 16 weeks.
Most physicians, and apparently Morgentaler himself has long been in their number, remain reluctant in the extreme to perform third-trimester abortions, and will do so only in the gravest of situations (serious danger to the mother's health or a significant genetic disorder). Even without an abortion law, it is difficult to get an abortion in Canada for frivolous reasons, and becomes harder still as the pregnancy continues. The prevailing custom follows the majority sentiment; that the fetus is neither an inert piece of tissue nor a rights-bearing person; that its moral status becomes more consequential as it approaches birth, and the onus on the mother who would abort correspondingly greater.
To the extent that abortion figures in Canadian high politics, it does so mainly in the form of Private Members' Bills, and primarily deals with questions at the margins. (For example, the rights and duties of relevant professionals who are personally opposed to surgical abortion or the provision of abortifacient medicines. It seems to me that a prudent resolution would allow full liberty of conscience to the independent practitioner, while acknowledging that the state functionary must check his purely private convictions at the door when he accepts public employment. This is so for the nurse who dislikes abortion no less than for the town clerk who objects to solemnizing same-sex marriage.)
A country in which Henry Morgentaler can be awarded the highest civilian honour is a country that has made its peace with abortion, at least as a matter of law. The fight against his nomination is being waged in the last ditch of public opinion, and constitutes a desperate attempt to mask the fact that Canada's abortion wars are over.
The most common criticism made of Morgentaler's nomination, that he is a divisive honoree, is not only something of a red herring but holds less water than it first seems. Previous inductees have included onetime participants in partisan politics, who almost by definition are hard choices for citizens of other political persuasions to swallow. Others have been devoted to causes that, while not partisan in a formal sense, are rejected by many (such as Aboriginal self-government, for example). Even seemingly safe choices from the worlds of letters or entertainment can prove dodgy. Your favourite novelist is my talentless hack, and if you think the Order is ennobled in a given case I may find it cheapened. By the same token, one can argue against inducting onetime professional or Olympic athletes as trivializing the honour, where the activities at which they excel are, in the final analysis, nothing more than jumped-up versions of children's games.
Adherents of the pro-life cause who object to honouring Morgentaler (in a few cases, to the the point of renouncing their own membership in the Order), however misguided one may consider them on the question of abortion itself, are right in seeing his nomination as a blow, and not merely an insult, to their cause. It makes public and explicit what many of us long ago concluded: that the legal and political, as opposed to the theological and philosophical, debates over Abortion in Canada are well and truly concluded. The current Federal Government is the most socially conservative one in fifty years, and its leader has ruled out revisiting Canadian abortion law. Indeed, making it plain that his party would, whatever the personal sentiments of its activists, treat the question of abortion as definitively settled, was a precondition of Stephen Harper's becoming Prime Minister in the first instance. Leaving the electorate open to the impression that he would, in power, reopen it, was a risk he rightly concluded he could not afford to take, regardless of the vehement opposition to abortion of much of his political base. If Stephen Harper's government won't come within a bargepole's length of bringing abortion before the House of Commons, no conceivable future government will do so.
There is a modus vivendi in Canada regarding abortion, and it holds. The practice is not regulated by criminal law, but is treated by physicians and their regulatory bodies as one to be undertaken within limits, and generally for the most serious of reasons. True, the lack of an abortion law of any sort is unusual, and pro-life commentators have argued it puts Canada at the furthest end of the spectrum of regimes governing the practice. But it is doubtful how much of a difference the lack of a law has made.
Since 1988, when the Supreme Court concluded that the current law (and almost any subsequent one) entailed unjustifiable violations of Chapter Seven of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the direst predictions of the pro-life movement have not come to pass. The raw number of abortions did not suddenly skyrocket; more to the point, the composition of the incidence of abortions during pregnancy remained much the same. Now, as then, some 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester. Far fewer than 5% are performed after 16 weeks.
Most physicians, and apparently Morgentaler himself has long been in their number, remain reluctant in the extreme to perform third-trimester abortions, and will do so only in the gravest of situations (serious danger to the mother's health or a significant genetic disorder). Even without an abortion law, it is difficult to get an abortion in Canada for frivolous reasons, and becomes harder still as the pregnancy continues. The prevailing custom follows the majority sentiment; that the fetus is neither an inert piece of tissue nor a rights-bearing person; that its moral status becomes more consequential as it approaches birth, and the onus on the mother who would abort correspondingly greater.
To the extent that abortion figures in Canadian high politics, it does so mainly in the form of Private Members' Bills, and primarily deals with questions at the margins. (For example, the rights and duties of relevant professionals who are personally opposed to surgical abortion or the provision of abortifacient medicines. It seems to me that a prudent resolution would allow full liberty of conscience to the independent practitioner, while acknowledging that the state functionary must check his purely private convictions at the door when he accepts public employment. This is so for the nurse who dislikes abortion no less than for the town clerk who objects to solemnizing same-sex marriage.)
A country in which Henry Morgentaler can be awarded the highest civilian honour is a country that has made its peace with abortion, at least as a matter of law. The fight against his nomination is being waged in the last ditch of public opinion, and constitutes a desperate attempt to mask the fact that Canada's abortion wars are over.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
The Passing of Jesse Helms
Former Senator Jesse Helms (Republican of North Carolina), who died at 86 early last Friday, lived long enough to witness the partial eclipse of the conservative electoral majority of which he was a major architect. Helms's brand of conservatism was Southern in more than accent, deeply rooted in the racial views he imbibed growing up in the backwater of Monro, where segregation was widely accepted as reflective of a natural hierarchy.
In his early adulthood, Helms established himself as an on-air editorialist for WRAL radio and television of Raleigh, reaching local and regional prominence as a particularly scurrilous critic of the civil rights movement. While he presented the movement as the result of troublemaking, by blacks who did not know their place and meddling outsiders, he also developed a knack, as David Greenberg of Rutgers has observed, for framing racial issues so as to tap the resentments of those who were in many cases not personally bigoted, but open to the argument that liberal support for black rights was at the expense of struggling whites. He also found (and exaggerated the influence of) a perennial foil in the liberals who populated academic and media circles and could be represented as ignorantly hostile to the values of downscale, often rural, socially conservative Americans.
In his later years, Helms denied that he was personally racist, and occasionally found useful ammunition in intellectually respectable criticisms of affirmative action. Yet the consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and secondarily sexual morality, speaks for itself in distinctly unappetizing ways. In 1972 he was elected to the Senate, largely on the strength of his opposition to forced busing, and led the Senatorial resistance to almost every civil rights bill, flawed or sound, of the three decades he spent in that chamber. He was unusual in the ferocity of his antipathy to a national holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and often engaged in obtuse and silly crusades on behalf of sexual puritanism. In 1973 he introduced legislation banning official aid to international family planning organizations that so much as discussed abortion, and later he blocked federal funding to school districts that barred the Boy Scouts from access to their facilities in protest of the organization's ban on homosexual members. He confirmed his standing as a buffoon in the eyes of the cognoscenti when he sought to deny NEA funding to exhibitions of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, not out of a principled conviction that the state is unqualified to make aesthetic judgments, but from blinkered prudery and philistinism.
Oddly enough, his roots in the GOP were shallow; as late as 1972 he helped George Wallace win the North Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary. And in his political style he was the antithesis of the 'big-tent' Republicanism through which party panjandrums had traditionally sought to construct durable coalitions. After his election, he tried to retire his campaign debt by forming what was perhaps the first Political Action Committee (PAC), the Congressional Club. Helms and his ally, direct mail guru Richard Viguerie, cultivated a national list of small donors willing to fund Helms's campaigns and those of like-minded right-wingers directly, not through the mediating structures of the Republican Party. If his brand of social conservatism was strongest in the deep south and the culturally "southern" parts of adjoining states, he was an innovator, as Rick Perlstein has written, in creating an unusually ideological and national base of support. Since direct mail mobilizes the most ardent adherents of either side, it tends to be extravagant in its discrete claims and belligerent in tone. It feeds on stark divisions, and its displacement of traditional party hierarchies with their moderating functions has given us politics with serrated edges.
Helms's efforts to flip the "solid South" into the Republican column hinged on appeals to the social conservatism of downscale whites whose economic interests might incline them to the Democrats. Yet the achievement rested on shakier ground than it seemed. The impact of social conservatism was severely limited until it was combined with the late 1970s tax revolts (inflation was pushing many into higher tax brackets) and a more assertively nationalistic foreign policy. In 1976, Helms managed to help Ronald Reagan win the North Carolina Primary against incumbent President Gerald Ford, but the triumph was rooted in Reagan's rejection of Ford's detentist policies and espousal of a harder line against the Communist world. And, as Adam Clymer's recent book Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch demonstrates, the New Right was unable to mobilize a nationally effective constituency until Jimmy Carter's bungled attempts to pass the Panama Canal Treaty ran afoul of rising public skepticism about the self-abnegation of American policy after the Vietnam debacle. The combination of a more self-confident anti-Communism and liberal economics did more to elect Ronald Reagan than social conservatism, and he showed his grasp of this reality by declining to invest political capital in the New Right's pet causes.
Helms, of course, was content to abandon Republican verities on the merits of free markets. Former Senator Bob Dole, reminiscing about Helm's stint as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, praised him for scrupulous nonpartisanship in ensuring all agricultural interests (and not just North Carolina's own Tobacco growers) received government largesse. In other words, he was happy to run a welfare state for the benefit of American farmers, so that growers of any commodity, in any state, could nuzzle on the federal teat at the expense of the taxpayer and the consumer.
On questions of foreign policy, Helms had an intermittent utility as a critic of the UN's wasteful spending and undermining of American interests, but his role as scourge of international organizations and agreements was indiscriminate, and redolent of an old-style isolationist's absolutist conception of American sovereignty. As staunch a cold warrior as Ronald Reagan found Helms irritatingly and impractically dogmatic, and Reagan's Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, could not persuade him to drop his blinkered objections to American ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide. Ever the defender of the Old Confederacy, Helms feared the document would license foreign denunciations of America's slave-owning past. As an early biography by Ernest Furgurson showed, by instinct Helms was no friend to Israel. Early broadcasts and speeches contained troubling attacks on the "Zionist Entity." Like a number of "paleoconservatives," Helms had something of a "Jewish problem", and it is an open question as to whether his subsequent conversion was opportunistic. In one of his most notorious lapses of judgment, he followed his dislike of Pierre Trudeau's policies to the extreme of shepherding Premier Rene Levesque around Capitol Hill, evidently convinced that s sovereign Quebec would prove a hardier ally than a Trudeauite Canada.
For a time, it seemed that the coalition Helms envisaged would dominate American politics for decades to come. But its peak came in the 1980s and early 1990s, with its last victory the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. The number of socially conservative downscale whites is, after all, finite and by 1994 what realignment was in the cards had taken place. Yet if Helms's constituency was national, too many of his core convictions were minority views outside the most conservative circles of America's most conservative region. Even in his native North Carolina, he never won more than 55% in a two-way race, and when he declined to seek a sixth term in 2002, his successor as the Republican standard-bearer, Elizabeth Dole, felt obliged to position herself as markedly more liberal than Helms on social issues. The economic growth of the "New South" had attracted migrants from elsewhere, who changed the region politically more than they were changed by it, and for them Helms-style conservatism was at best an embarrassing holdover from a discredited past.
Outside the South, Helms's consistently insensitive and often unscrupulous approach to racial issues alienated more than it won over. The turning point may have come in his 1990 reelection bid, against Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American. A Helms commercial showed a pair of white hands crumpling up a rejection letter from a prospective employer, while a narrator lamented that the needed job had gone to a "minority." Insofar as Helms was one of the more visible faces of the GOP, it was a party from which many suburban moderates were prepared to flee, ancestral Republicanism notwithstanding.
The realignment of the South provided a one-time boost to Republican fortunes, at the price of damage to them elsewhere, from the Northeast and Midwest (where more pragmatic political creeds have long held sway) to the far West (where libertarianism in the mold of Barry Goldwater has a stronger purchase). The "New Majority" of which Helms and his compatriots spoke was transient, and in the act of cementing it they placed sharp constraints on its later growth. And if the Democrats' weakness in the South means they are "a national party no more", as former Georgia Senator Zell Miller has claimed, then the same can be said for Republican weakness on the two coasts.
That Helms exerted an influence on the tides of American politics is self-evident. But what is most distinctive in his contribution amounted to a malign influence, and it is a mark of the underlying health of the American polity that his party has had to distance itself from his legacy to remain competitive nationally. It is a trifle piquant that he would die at a moment when it is even money, if not better, that the next President will be a black man. One can be forgiven for thinking he was happy to die first.
In his early adulthood, Helms established himself as an on-air editorialist for WRAL radio and television of Raleigh, reaching local and regional prominence as a particularly scurrilous critic of the civil rights movement. While he presented the movement as the result of troublemaking, by blacks who did not know their place and meddling outsiders, he also developed a knack, as David Greenberg of Rutgers has observed, for framing racial issues so as to tap the resentments of those who were in many cases not personally bigoted, but open to the argument that liberal support for black rights was at the expense of struggling whites. He also found (and exaggerated the influence of) a perennial foil in the liberals who populated academic and media circles and could be represented as ignorantly hostile to the values of downscale, often rural, socially conservative Americans.
In his later years, Helms denied that he was personally racist, and occasionally found useful ammunition in intellectually respectable criticisms of affirmative action. Yet the consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and secondarily sexual morality, speaks for itself in distinctly unappetizing ways. In 1972 he was elected to the Senate, largely on the strength of his opposition to forced busing, and led the Senatorial resistance to almost every civil rights bill, flawed or sound, of the three decades he spent in that chamber. He was unusual in the ferocity of his antipathy to a national holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and often engaged in obtuse and silly crusades on behalf of sexual puritanism. In 1973 he introduced legislation banning official aid to international family planning organizations that so much as discussed abortion, and later he blocked federal funding to school districts that barred the Boy Scouts from access to their facilities in protest of the organization's ban on homosexual members. He confirmed his standing as a buffoon in the eyes of the cognoscenti when he sought to deny NEA funding to exhibitions of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, not out of a principled conviction that the state is unqualified to make aesthetic judgments, but from blinkered prudery and philistinism.
Oddly enough, his roots in the GOP were shallow; as late as 1972 he helped George Wallace win the North Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary. And in his political style he was the antithesis of the 'big-tent' Republicanism through which party panjandrums had traditionally sought to construct durable coalitions. After his election, he tried to retire his campaign debt by forming what was perhaps the first Political Action Committee (PAC), the Congressional Club. Helms and his ally, direct mail guru Richard Viguerie, cultivated a national list of small donors willing to fund Helms's campaigns and those of like-minded right-wingers directly, not through the mediating structures of the Republican Party. If his brand of social conservatism was strongest in the deep south and the culturally "southern" parts of adjoining states, he was an innovator, as Rick Perlstein has written, in creating an unusually ideological and national base of support. Since direct mail mobilizes the most ardent adherents of either side, it tends to be extravagant in its discrete claims and belligerent in tone. It feeds on stark divisions, and its displacement of traditional party hierarchies with their moderating functions has given us politics with serrated edges.
Helms's efforts to flip the "solid South" into the Republican column hinged on appeals to the social conservatism of downscale whites whose economic interests might incline them to the Democrats. Yet the achievement rested on shakier ground than it seemed. The impact of social conservatism was severely limited until it was combined with the late 1970s tax revolts (inflation was pushing many into higher tax brackets) and a more assertively nationalistic foreign policy. In 1976, Helms managed to help Ronald Reagan win the North Carolina Primary against incumbent President Gerald Ford, but the triumph was rooted in Reagan's rejection of Ford's detentist policies and espousal of a harder line against the Communist world. And, as Adam Clymer's recent book Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch demonstrates, the New Right was unable to mobilize a nationally effective constituency until Jimmy Carter's bungled attempts to pass the Panama Canal Treaty ran afoul of rising public skepticism about the self-abnegation of American policy after the Vietnam debacle. The combination of a more self-confident anti-Communism and liberal economics did more to elect Ronald Reagan than social conservatism, and he showed his grasp of this reality by declining to invest political capital in the New Right's pet causes.
Helms, of course, was content to abandon Republican verities on the merits of free markets. Former Senator Bob Dole, reminiscing about Helm's stint as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, praised him for scrupulous nonpartisanship in ensuring all agricultural interests (and not just North Carolina's own Tobacco growers) received government largesse. In other words, he was happy to run a welfare state for the benefit of American farmers, so that growers of any commodity, in any state, could nuzzle on the federal teat at the expense of the taxpayer and the consumer.
On questions of foreign policy, Helms had an intermittent utility as a critic of the UN's wasteful spending and undermining of American interests, but his role as scourge of international organizations and agreements was indiscriminate, and redolent of an old-style isolationist's absolutist conception of American sovereignty. As staunch a cold warrior as Ronald Reagan found Helms irritatingly and impractically dogmatic, and Reagan's Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, could not persuade him to drop his blinkered objections to American ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide. Ever the defender of the Old Confederacy, Helms feared the document would license foreign denunciations of America's slave-owning past. As an early biography by Ernest Furgurson showed, by instinct Helms was no friend to Israel. Early broadcasts and speeches contained troubling attacks on the "Zionist Entity." Like a number of "paleoconservatives," Helms had something of a "Jewish problem", and it is an open question as to whether his subsequent conversion was opportunistic. In one of his most notorious lapses of judgment, he followed his dislike of Pierre Trudeau's policies to the extreme of shepherding Premier Rene Levesque around Capitol Hill, evidently convinced that s sovereign Quebec would prove a hardier ally than a Trudeauite Canada.
For a time, it seemed that the coalition Helms envisaged would dominate American politics for decades to come. But its peak came in the 1980s and early 1990s, with its last victory the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. The number of socially conservative downscale whites is, after all, finite and by 1994 what realignment was in the cards had taken place. Yet if Helms's constituency was national, too many of his core convictions were minority views outside the most conservative circles of America's most conservative region. Even in his native North Carolina, he never won more than 55% in a two-way race, and when he declined to seek a sixth term in 2002, his successor as the Republican standard-bearer, Elizabeth Dole, felt obliged to position herself as markedly more liberal than Helms on social issues. The economic growth of the "New South" had attracted migrants from elsewhere, who changed the region politically more than they were changed by it, and for them Helms-style conservatism was at best an embarrassing holdover from a discredited past.
Outside the South, Helms's consistently insensitive and often unscrupulous approach to racial issues alienated more than it won over. The turning point may have come in his 1990 reelection bid, against Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American. A Helms commercial showed a pair of white hands crumpling up a rejection letter from a prospective employer, while a narrator lamented that the needed job had gone to a "minority." Insofar as Helms was one of the more visible faces of the GOP, it was a party from which many suburban moderates were prepared to flee, ancestral Republicanism notwithstanding.
The realignment of the South provided a one-time boost to Republican fortunes, at the price of damage to them elsewhere, from the Northeast and Midwest (where more pragmatic political creeds have long held sway) to the far West (where libertarianism in the mold of Barry Goldwater has a stronger purchase). The "New Majority" of which Helms and his compatriots spoke was transient, and in the act of cementing it they placed sharp constraints on its later growth. And if the Democrats' weakness in the South means they are "a national party no more", as former Georgia Senator Zell Miller has claimed, then the same can be said for Republican weakness on the two coasts.
That Helms exerted an influence on the tides of American politics is self-evident. But what is most distinctive in his contribution amounted to a malign influence, and it is a mark of the underlying health of the American polity that his party has had to distance itself from his legacy to remain competitive nationally. It is a trifle piquant that he would die at a moment when it is even money, if not better, that the next President will be a black man. One can be forgiven for thinking he was happy to die first.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Of Well-Regulated Militias
The clearest consequences of the US Supreme Court's decision last week in District of Columbia v. Heller are the immediate ones. Clearest of all, the District's blanket ban on private handgun ownership, possibly the most stringent gun-control measure in America, has been deemed unconstitutional. The Court's 5-4 decision embraced a once marginal interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution ("A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."), that it confers an individual right to gun ownership, and not merely a collective right on the part of each State to maintain the National Guard.
This decision will constrain future legislative efforts to curtail gun ownership, although it would be chancy to predict just how much. The Court's majority opinion, even as it unambiguously articulated an individual right of gun ownership, observed that limitations such as reasonable background checks, and denial of ownership to particularly dangerous groups (convicted felons, the mentally impaired) could pass constitutional muster.
Less widely remarked, the case points up peculiar difficulties in finding a reading of the Second Amendment that is unambiguous, practical, and historically well-grounded. It also highlights infirmities in the American right's preferred school of constitutional interpretation (of which Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the most noted exponents), "originalism." This holds that in striking down laws as unconstitutional, the jurist should be guided by the Framers' "original intent" rather than reinterpret general constitutional principles to fit eternally evolving social arrangements.
A quarter of a century ago, the "collective right" of gun ownership was the dominant view of the Second Amendment in most law schools, but it was challenged most notably in a 1989 article by a University of Texas legal scholar, Sanford Levinson. Levinson, though normally what one might term a liberal pragmatist in his approach to jurisprudence, concluded that the Framers had thought in terms of individuals owning and carrying weapons, even if their primary utility was in the collective defence. In the nearly two decades since, Levinson's analysis has won influential converts, including the doyen of legal liberalism, Harvard Law School's Lawrence Tribe. It has now been endorsed by the Court.
But unless one uses the terms with substantial caveats, the debate between proponents of the "individual right" and those of the collective one is fundamentally misconceived. The Framers meant neither, or perhaps both. A "well-regulated militia" was, in late Eighteenth Century America, an armed citizenry, as against a standing, professional military. Permanent military establishments not only raised the spectre of a hereditary military caste, a profound affront to Revolutionary egalitarianism, they were seen as instruments of tyranny. Colonial grievances against George III included the quartering of British soldiers in private residences and in public buildings at the colonists' expense. The point was sore enough that when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the Second Amendment was followed by a Third devoted solely to proscribing the quartering of soldiers in private homes.
A "well-regulated militia" was one in which in which everyman was a soldier, with a musket hanging above his fireplace, used mainly for drilling on the village green, and the wide dispersal of arms and proficiency in their use would safeguard civic freedoms against the overmighty state. But that conception of civil-military relations and the world that gave it birth are gone. Indeed it is arguable that neither survived the founding of West Point by Thomas Jefferson in 1802. Even in modern democracies where military service is a rite of passage, and a condition of exercising some of the prerogatives of citizenship (Israel, for example), the existence of a substantial professional military establishment is accepted as an inevitable appurtenance of the nation-state.
This sociopolitical (and legal) world, in which individual and collective rights of gun ownership can be regarded as opposed, is one the Framers could not have anticipated in 1791, and one to which their writ, unless construed loosely and with an eye to broader principle, cannot serve as a guide. The Founding Fathers, wise as they were in discerning the core liberties underpinning a free society, can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate the dilemmas two centuries of changes in technology and social organization would create.
It would not have occurred to them either that America would develop a collective entity, separate from the citizenry as a whole, that might legitimately bear arms, or that individiduals, in no way connected with a militia, might possess them. That does not mean the Court necessarily erred in concluding that individuals retain a right to own firearms; that they do is at least as defensible a point of constitutional interpretation as that they do not. But jurists should exercise an appropriate scepticism towards the notion that such a right is hallowed in its every contemporary application by the ``Original Intent`` of Jefferson and his comrades.
This decision will constrain future legislative efforts to curtail gun ownership, although it would be chancy to predict just how much. The Court's majority opinion, even as it unambiguously articulated an individual right of gun ownership, observed that limitations such as reasonable background checks, and denial of ownership to particularly dangerous groups (convicted felons, the mentally impaired) could pass constitutional muster.
Less widely remarked, the case points up peculiar difficulties in finding a reading of the Second Amendment that is unambiguous, practical, and historically well-grounded. It also highlights infirmities in the American right's preferred school of constitutional interpretation (of which Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the most noted exponents), "originalism." This holds that in striking down laws as unconstitutional, the jurist should be guided by the Framers' "original intent" rather than reinterpret general constitutional principles to fit eternally evolving social arrangements.
A quarter of a century ago, the "collective right" of gun ownership was the dominant view of the Second Amendment in most law schools, but it was challenged most notably in a 1989 article by a University of Texas legal scholar, Sanford Levinson. Levinson, though normally what one might term a liberal pragmatist in his approach to jurisprudence, concluded that the Framers had thought in terms of individuals owning and carrying weapons, even if their primary utility was in the collective defence. In the nearly two decades since, Levinson's analysis has won influential converts, including the doyen of legal liberalism, Harvard Law School's Lawrence Tribe. It has now been endorsed by the Court.
But unless one uses the terms with substantial caveats, the debate between proponents of the "individual right" and those of the collective one is fundamentally misconceived. The Framers meant neither, or perhaps both. A "well-regulated militia" was, in late Eighteenth Century America, an armed citizenry, as against a standing, professional military. Permanent military establishments not only raised the spectre of a hereditary military caste, a profound affront to Revolutionary egalitarianism, they were seen as instruments of tyranny. Colonial grievances against George III included the quartering of British soldiers in private residences and in public buildings at the colonists' expense. The point was sore enough that when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the Second Amendment was followed by a Third devoted solely to proscribing the quartering of soldiers in private homes.
A "well-regulated militia" was one in which in which everyman was a soldier, with a musket hanging above his fireplace, used mainly for drilling on the village green, and the wide dispersal of arms and proficiency in their use would safeguard civic freedoms against the overmighty state. But that conception of civil-military relations and the world that gave it birth are gone. Indeed it is arguable that neither survived the founding of West Point by Thomas Jefferson in 1802. Even in modern democracies where military service is a rite of passage, and a condition of exercising some of the prerogatives of citizenship (Israel, for example), the existence of a substantial professional military establishment is accepted as an inevitable appurtenance of the nation-state.
This sociopolitical (and legal) world, in which individual and collective rights of gun ownership can be regarded as opposed, is one the Framers could not have anticipated in 1791, and one to which their writ, unless construed loosely and with an eye to broader principle, cannot serve as a guide. The Founding Fathers, wise as they were in discerning the core liberties underpinning a free society, can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate the dilemmas two centuries of changes in technology and social organization would create.
It would not have occurred to them either that America would develop a collective entity, separate from the citizenry as a whole, that might legitimately bear arms, or that individiduals, in no way connected with a militia, might possess them. That does not mean the Court necessarily erred in concluding that individuals retain a right to own firearms; that they do is at least as defensible a point of constitutional interpretation as that they do not. But jurists should exercise an appropriate scepticism towards the notion that such a right is hallowed in its every contemporary application by the ``Original Intent`` of Jefferson and his comrades.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
RFK after Forty Years
Ongoing interest in the life of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated forty years ago this month, is rooted, at least in part, in considerations narrowly biographical. There is obvious drama in the ascent and sudden fall of a figure of glittering gifts, sprung from a family of wealth and prominence but haunted by the successive premature deaths of its anointed heirs. As well, there is the unusual evolution in early midlife of the onetime quasi-McCarthyite political axe-wielder into the plangent tribune of America's dispossessed. More problematically, there is nostalgia for a man who seemed to embody the political potentialities of the late 1960s, a period that looms large in the collective memory of the American political class. Suddenly taken as he was, before the hopes of which he was the vessel could be either vindicated or dashed, for many liberals he epitomizes the political road sadly abandoned.
This is the received version of RFK's political odyssey, set down most effectively in Arthur Schlesinger's semi-official biography, and reinforced by the filiopietistic utterances of surviving Kennedys. It holds that the New York Senator, had he gone on to secure the Democratic Presidential nomination and then the White House, would have reversed the alleged rightward drift of the Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson, and gone on to extricate Amerian forces from Vietnam and construct a redistributionist welfare state more ambitious than LBJ's "Great Society." A more nuanced assessment is on offer, one which sheds light of its own on the history of American liberalism, and the Kennedy family's relationship to it. It is suggested most provocatively in a slim, somewhat quirky volume of a decade ago by a lawyer and amateur historian, Michael Knox Beran.
The family's patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, served Franklin Roosevelt as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the archetypal New Deal institution that midwifed the emergence of a heavily managed capitalism, overseen by Washington bureaucracies staffed by lawyers, economists, and statisticians. The administration of John F. Kennedy was the apogee of postwar technocratic liberalism, seeking non-ideological, managerial solutions to the problems of accelerating the growth of America's economy and easing the projection of its power abroad, while putting relations with the Soviets on a more rational, businesslike footing.
That liberalism fell out of favour after the late 1960s is acknowledged by most historians, ideological predilections notwithstanding, though not all would concede that Robert Kennedy represented its last, best hope before America's great rightward shift began. That he did is an article of faith to many on the left of the Democratic Party, not least Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 1980 rebelled against Jimmy Carter's fumbling attempts to pull the party to the center, casting the incumbent President as an apostate from the verities RFK had embodied.
Yet what emerges from Beran's account is the unease of Robert Kennedy's relationship with both the programs and policies of the big-government liberalism that originated in the New Deal and central elements of the electoral coalition that underpinned it. He had little love for the barons of organized labour, nor they for him. And in 1967-68, he sought to regenerate America's inner cities not through greater social spending or government investment, but by incentives for private-sector job creation. He disdained state hand-outs, preferring the provision of meaningful opportunities coupled with the demand that they be taken. Beran cites a campaign speech in which Kennedy noted "that which is begged can be refused, and that which is given can be taken back, but that which is freely earned is unalienable."
Some of this, no doubt, reflected the fashionable social criticism of the time, fiercely hostile to the centralized power and distant bureaucracies of the modern state. (Hostility often cast in lurid, conspiratorial tones, the right seeing the welfare state as almost totalitarian in its exactions, the left portraying it as a Machiavellian tool for reconciling the poor to their deprivation; not for nothing was this decade of ideological fevers described by Richard Hofstadter as "an age of rubbish.") Yet Beran plausibly presents it in the context of RFK's growing awareness, catalyzed by the death of the brother whose indispensable counselor he was, reinforced by his subsequent reading of the Greeks, of the tragic dimension of life. This awareness shaped his approach to questions of public policy, where he came to realize how readily noble aspirations can go awry and the most reasonable of blueprints produce the most disastrous unintended consequences.
Many of the social scientists around JFK assumed the problem of creating economic abundance had been essentially solved, with the alleviation of residual poverty a modest matter of redistributing resources and opportunities. RFK appears to have understood the extent to which poverty, at least protracted, inter-generational poverty, was a social and cultural as much as an economic phenomenon, with behavioural pathologies that were as much cause as result. He grasped the seeming paradox that we truly empower the deprived only to the degree we ask something of them.
This paradox is one too many self-styled progressives reject as a rationale for passivity or a form of "blaming the victim." Yet most of the wider public understands it, which is why parties of the left prosper in their efforts to obtain popular backing for increasing opportunity only to the extent they recognize it and link more generous benefits to responsible conduct and acceptance of the obligation to work. (Think of Bill Clinton's welfare reform program or Tony Blair's "welfare to work" initiatives.) Those who acknowledge this paradox have a stronger claim than those who reject it to be RFK's political heirs.
This is the received version of RFK's political odyssey, set down most effectively in Arthur Schlesinger's semi-official biography, and reinforced by the filiopietistic utterances of surviving Kennedys. It holds that the New York Senator, had he gone on to secure the Democratic Presidential nomination and then the White House, would have reversed the alleged rightward drift of the Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson, and gone on to extricate Amerian forces from Vietnam and construct a redistributionist welfare state more ambitious than LBJ's "Great Society." A more nuanced assessment is on offer, one which sheds light of its own on the history of American liberalism, and the Kennedy family's relationship to it. It is suggested most provocatively in a slim, somewhat quirky volume of a decade ago by a lawyer and amateur historian, Michael Knox Beran.
The family's patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, served Franklin Roosevelt as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the archetypal New Deal institution that midwifed the emergence of a heavily managed capitalism, overseen by Washington bureaucracies staffed by lawyers, economists, and statisticians. The administration of John F. Kennedy was the apogee of postwar technocratic liberalism, seeking non-ideological, managerial solutions to the problems of accelerating the growth of America's economy and easing the projection of its power abroad, while putting relations with the Soviets on a more rational, businesslike footing.
That liberalism fell out of favour after the late 1960s is acknowledged by most historians, ideological predilections notwithstanding, though not all would concede that Robert Kennedy represented its last, best hope before America's great rightward shift began. That he did is an article of faith to many on the left of the Democratic Party, not least Senator Edward Kennedy, who in 1980 rebelled against Jimmy Carter's fumbling attempts to pull the party to the center, casting the incumbent President as an apostate from the verities RFK had embodied.
Yet what emerges from Beran's account is the unease of Robert Kennedy's relationship with both the programs and policies of the big-government liberalism that originated in the New Deal and central elements of the electoral coalition that underpinned it. He had little love for the barons of organized labour, nor they for him. And in 1967-68, he sought to regenerate America's inner cities not through greater social spending or government investment, but by incentives for private-sector job creation. He disdained state hand-outs, preferring the provision of meaningful opportunities coupled with the demand that they be taken. Beran cites a campaign speech in which Kennedy noted "that which is begged can be refused, and that which is given can be taken back, but that which is freely earned is unalienable."
Some of this, no doubt, reflected the fashionable social criticism of the time, fiercely hostile to the centralized power and distant bureaucracies of the modern state. (Hostility often cast in lurid, conspiratorial tones, the right seeing the welfare state as almost totalitarian in its exactions, the left portraying it as a Machiavellian tool for reconciling the poor to their deprivation; not for nothing was this decade of ideological fevers described by Richard Hofstadter as "an age of rubbish.") Yet Beran plausibly presents it in the context of RFK's growing awareness, catalyzed by the death of the brother whose indispensable counselor he was, reinforced by his subsequent reading of the Greeks, of the tragic dimension of life. This awareness shaped his approach to questions of public policy, where he came to realize how readily noble aspirations can go awry and the most reasonable of blueprints produce the most disastrous unintended consequences.
Many of the social scientists around JFK assumed the problem of creating economic abundance had been essentially solved, with the alleviation of residual poverty a modest matter of redistributing resources and opportunities. RFK appears to have understood the extent to which poverty, at least protracted, inter-generational poverty, was a social and cultural as much as an economic phenomenon, with behavioural pathologies that were as much cause as result. He grasped the seeming paradox that we truly empower the deprived only to the degree we ask something of them.
This paradox is one too many self-styled progressives reject as a rationale for passivity or a form of "blaming the victim." Yet most of the wider public understands it, which is why parties of the left prosper in their efforts to obtain popular backing for increasing opportunity only to the extent they recognize it and link more generous benefits to responsible conduct and acceptance of the obligation to work. (Think of Bill Clinton's welfare reform program or Tony Blair's "welfare to work" initiatives.) Those who acknowledge this paradox have a stronger claim than those who reject it to be RFK's political heirs.
Monday, April 28, 2008
After Pennsylvania
Arguably, the results of the Pennsylvania primary could hardly have been worse for Democratic hopes. Hillary Clinton's ten-point margin of victory suffices to justify the continuation of her candidacy without giving her a realistic chance at securing the nomination, barring the sort of utter implosion of Barack Obama's campaign that his associations with the egregious Revd. Wright and Bill Ayers conspicuously failed to precipitate. But she will inflict further damage on him. Sen. Obama remains the likely, if not quite the inevitable, nominee, but he will be a much weaker one than he might have been.
To be sure, a bit of historical perspective is in order. Compared to past Democratic primary donnybrooks (Humphrey vs. McCarthy, much less Mondale vs. Hart or Dukakis vs. Jackson)this is not a uniquely bitter or impassioned one, and does not derive nourishment from any underlying philosophical divide; the ideological gap between the two Senators is comparatively narrow. But the timing is problematic, with the identity of the eventual nominee unlikely to be sealed until early summer. This leaves less time than usual for the ritualistic palliation of intraparty injuries, before the Democratic standard-bearer can direct most of his fire against John McCain.
In part, the problem is that less time will remain for Obama (assuming he prevails) to shift to the center, after months of wooing left-inclining primary activists. Equally significant, the Clinton campaign has been, while hardly edifying, skillful at identifying and exploiting the weaknesses in Obama's electoral armour. The ferocity with which Clinton loyalists have attacked ertswhile allies who had the temerity to endorse Obama guarantees that the ultimate rallying of Democrats to their standard-bearer will require the expenditure of time and effort. Most egregious has been James Carville's attack on New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as a 'Judas'; as a non-Christian, I take no personal offense at the blasphemy, but the victim of Richardson's betrayal, if betrayal indeed it was, is hardly comparable to the victim of Judas's. Of course Carville is no more of a serious pundit than he was a serious strategist, and Bill Clinton did better politically when he spurned the gormless populism in which the Cajun media hound traffics. Nonetheless, the bitterness he and his ilk inject into the contest will not quickly dissipate.
More damaging yet is the litany of charges Clinton and her surrogates have leveled against Obama. True to the family history of a 'bark-off' approach to politics, Sen. Clinton has been happy enough to tiptoe around the most inflammatory inuendo, coyly observing that 'as far as I know' there is no truth to the rumours Obama is a onetime Muslim. It is obvious enough that the various accusations and hints that the Illinois Senator is out of touch with the concerns of ordinary folk, unreliable in a crisis, and not quite what he claims to be will be trotted out by Republicans in the general election. Not necessarily by Sen. McCain, one of the most honourable figures in his party, but by less scrupulous GOP sympathizers, and inevitably to McCain's benefit, however vehemently and sincerely he may dissociate himself from the least honest assaults.
It is not merely that Clinton's campaign has road-tested the various lines of attack, but that their employment by a fellow Democrat tends to legitimize them with the wider electorate, even among those who would not necessarily ever vote for Sen. Clinton, were she the nominee. After all, George H.W. Bush's campaign was happy enough in 1988 to point out that it was Al Gore who first hung the iniquities of Willy Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis.
And Obama, for all his impressive political gifts, has his vulnerabilities. As a fresh figure with a short record in elective office, whose candidacy has been freighted with such symbolic value, he has been something of an electoral Rorschach diagram, with voters of varying inclinations seeing in him the fulfillment of their mutually exclusive desires. His early levels of support were unsustainable and, as his ideological profile filled out, some was bound to drift away. But the protracted and nasty primary fight has telescoped that process; he will begin the general election fight from a weaker position than if he had secured his party's nomination in March or April.
The recent Democratic advantage in generic party identification was always somewhat misleading, insofar as the GOP was seen as an extension of the deeply unpopular George W. Bush. It was never a reliable predictor of how a particular Republican nominee and a particular Democrat would match up. To the extent that John McCain has been able in recent weeks to impress his own stamp upon his party, and to distance it from the incumbent President who waged such a ferocious campaign against McCain in 2000, he has been able to restore the rough parity between the two parties that has been the underlying dynamic of American politics for most of the last decade. McCain was fortunate in ensuring the nomination early on, leaving him ample time to reconcile with all but the most hostile elements of the Republican base (not least through insincere obeisances to its least plausible nostrums), and for the tempers of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk to cool, and for them to gingerly retreat from their prophecies of political apocalypse should McCain be nominated. McCain has always done well with independents and moderate Democrats, and has time to edge back to the center in pursuit of their votes. As it is, he is running virtually even with Obama.
Unfortunately for his own chances, Obama's responses to Clinton's attacks have been uneven and revealed his inexperience; he has occasionally been tone-deaf in his choice of words, not least in his sociological reflections on the predilections of rural voters. Worse yet, the prolonged competition for the loyalties of Democratic core voters has led him to pander to their worst instincts. As a young man, he was clearly well to the left of center, with the more moderate views of recent years suggesting the usual maturation. But where he took pains early on to surround himself with reformist and market-oriented advisers, now he campaigns as a born-again protectionist. Where he once argued that the extrication of American forces from Iraq had to be as cautious as the initial invasion was thoughtless, he now speaks of a rapid (and, he must know, unrealistic and irresponsible) withdrawal. Increasingly, his cadences are those of a drearily orthodox liberal Democrat, and voters may well conclude it is the doctrinaire left-winger who is the real Obama, not the inspiring figure who looked as if he might transcend partisan divisions and inaugurate a fresh alignment in American political life.
Of course, Obama may yet right his course, and public antipathy to the Bush administration leaves the Democratic contender the favourite to win in November. But the race will be a tighter one than many had forecast, and his margin for error far less.
To be sure, a bit of historical perspective is in order. Compared to past Democratic primary donnybrooks (Humphrey vs. McCarthy, much less Mondale vs. Hart or Dukakis vs. Jackson)this is not a uniquely bitter or impassioned one, and does not derive nourishment from any underlying philosophical divide; the ideological gap between the two Senators is comparatively narrow. But the timing is problematic, with the identity of the eventual nominee unlikely to be sealed until early summer. This leaves less time than usual for the ritualistic palliation of intraparty injuries, before the Democratic standard-bearer can direct most of his fire against John McCain.
In part, the problem is that less time will remain for Obama (assuming he prevails) to shift to the center, after months of wooing left-inclining primary activists. Equally significant, the Clinton campaign has been, while hardly edifying, skillful at identifying and exploiting the weaknesses in Obama's electoral armour. The ferocity with which Clinton loyalists have attacked ertswhile allies who had the temerity to endorse Obama guarantees that the ultimate rallying of Democrats to their standard-bearer will require the expenditure of time and effort. Most egregious has been James Carville's attack on New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as a 'Judas'; as a non-Christian, I take no personal offense at the blasphemy, but the victim of Richardson's betrayal, if betrayal indeed it was, is hardly comparable to the victim of Judas's. Of course Carville is no more of a serious pundit than he was a serious strategist, and Bill Clinton did better politically when he spurned the gormless populism in which the Cajun media hound traffics. Nonetheless, the bitterness he and his ilk inject into the contest will not quickly dissipate.
More damaging yet is the litany of charges Clinton and her surrogates have leveled against Obama. True to the family history of a 'bark-off' approach to politics, Sen. Clinton has been happy enough to tiptoe around the most inflammatory inuendo, coyly observing that 'as far as I know' there is no truth to the rumours Obama is a onetime Muslim. It is obvious enough that the various accusations and hints that the Illinois Senator is out of touch with the concerns of ordinary folk, unreliable in a crisis, and not quite what he claims to be will be trotted out by Republicans in the general election. Not necessarily by Sen. McCain, one of the most honourable figures in his party, but by less scrupulous GOP sympathizers, and inevitably to McCain's benefit, however vehemently and sincerely he may dissociate himself from the least honest assaults.
It is not merely that Clinton's campaign has road-tested the various lines of attack, but that their employment by a fellow Democrat tends to legitimize them with the wider electorate, even among those who would not necessarily ever vote for Sen. Clinton, were she the nominee. After all, George H.W. Bush's campaign was happy enough in 1988 to point out that it was Al Gore who first hung the iniquities of Willy Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis.
And Obama, for all his impressive political gifts, has his vulnerabilities. As a fresh figure with a short record in elective office, whose candidacy has been freighted with such symbolic value, he has been something of an electoral Rorschach diagram, with voters of varying inclinations seeing in him the fulfillment of their mutually exclusive desires. His early levels of support were unsustainable and, as his ideological profile filled out, some was bound to drift away. But the protracted and nasty primary fight has telescoped that process; he will begin the general election fight from a weaker position than if he had secured his party's nomination in March or April.
The recent Democratic advantage in generic party identification was always somewhat misleading, insofar as the GOP was seen as an extension of the deeply unpopular George W. Bush. It was never a reliable predictor of how a particular Republican nominee and a particular Democrat would match up. To the extent that John McCain has been able in recent weeks to impress his own stamp upon his party, and to distance it from the incumbent President who waged such a ferocious campaign against McCain in 2000, he has been able to restore the rough parity between the two parties that has been the underlying dynamic of American politics for most of the last decade. McCain was fortunate in ensuring the nomination early on, leaving him ample time to reconcile with all but the most hostile elements of the Republican base (not least through insincere obeisances to its least plausible nostrums), and for the tempers of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk to cool, and for them to gingerly retreat from their prophecies of political apocalypse should McCain be nominated. McCain has always done well with independents and moderate Democrats, and has time to edge back to the center in pursuit of their votes. As it is, he is running virtually even with Obama.
Unfortunately for his own chances, Obama's responses to Clinton's attacks have been uneven and revealed his inexperience; he has occasionally been tone-deaf in his choice of words, not least in his sociological reflections on the predilections of rural voters. Worse yet, the prolonged competition for the loyalties of Democratic core voters has led him to pander to their worst instincts. As a young man, he was clearly well to the left of center, with the more moderate views of recent years suggesting the usual maturation. But where he took pains early on to surround himself with reformist and market-oriented advisers, now he campaigns as a born-again protectionist. Where he once argued that the extrication of American forces from Iraq had to be as cautious as the initial invasion was thoughtless, he now speaks of a rapid (and, he must know, unrealistic and irresponsible) withdrawal. Increasingly, his cadences are those of a drearily orthodox liberal Democrat, and voters may well conclude it is the doctrinaire left-winger who is the real Obama, not the inspiring figure who looked as if he might transcend partisan divisions and inaugurate a fresh alignment in American political life.
Of course, Obama may yet right his course, and public antipathy to the Bush administration leaves the Democratic contender the favourite to win in November. But the race will be a tighter one than many had forecast, and his margin for error far less.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Obama and "Liberal elitism"
In recent days, Senator Barack Obama has been subjected to a shellacking from divers quarters over his unguarded remark to a gathering of well-heeled supporters in San Francisco. As a result of their economic woes, and the failure of politicians of either party to alleviate them, the Senator famously said, many small-town voters become "bitter" and "cling" to their religion, such accoutrements of regional tradition as gun use, and xenophobic antipathy to goods and workers from abroad. He has been widely chastised for his "elitism" (a quality that is as rarely defined with precision as it is taken to be other than reprehensible) and alleged condescension towards those whom it is apparently obligatory to describe as "regular" or "ordinary Americans." Obama's words do reveal a potential flaw in his cast of mind, but not the one his critics have in mind, intent as they are on presenting a less persuasive indictment.
The assumption behind Obama's observation, (as Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, among others, has pointed out) is one popularized in recent years by Thomas Frank, in his What's The Matter with Kansas? Frank's argument is that Republicans, traditionally the party of the affluent, have successfully wooed lower-middle- and working-class voters in recent decades by appealing to their patriotism and social conservatism, in the process painting Democrats and liberals as insufficiently respectful of heartland traditions. This is, Frank goes on to claim, something of a con job, with the electorate is tricked into voting against its own economic interests by the political allies of the business class. The model of political behaviour is a variant of the Marxist notion of "false consciousness", and assumes that the social and cultural issues that lead blue-collar voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates, in some objective sense, matter less than questions of class and wealth. The right road for Democrats, Frank concludes, is to offset Republican populism on sociocultural matters with a full-throated economic populism.
Obama errs not only in assuming that attachment to God and guns is a function of economic hard times (I doubt that the voters of rural Pennsylvania were markedly more secular when factory jobs were much thicker on the ground), but in thinking that his task and that of his party is to show these voters where their real interests lie. Understandably enough, those who hunt on Saturdays and go to Church on Sundays don't take kindly to the notion that they do so because Democratic candidates have failed to enlighten them as to which issues matter and which ones do not.
There is a deeper problem at work here as well. Like every other politician, Obama has the defects of his virtues. Much of his appeal to voters who are independent in substance if not necessarily in party label rests in his eloquent critique of a political scene dominated by the high-decibel iteration of stale partisan orthodoxies that speak to a decreasing number of Americans. The public as a whole, Obama understands, is less polarized than the institutionalized pandering to the activist cores of the two parties would suggest. The question that arises is whether he overestimates the degree to which America's political divisions exist independently of the manifest failings of the political system, resistant to being conjured away or transcended even by a leader of his inarguable eloquence. And it is reasonable to suspect that a blindness to such differences would impede his ability, as President, to manage and accommodate them.
In the closing days of the primary campaign in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton's campaign has echoed the charges of Obama's conservative critics that he is damaged goods politically because of his alleged disdain for the values of rural and conservative Americans. To some extent, this reflects the demographic strengths of the candidates, with Senator Clinton running well among older, religious, rural and relatively conservative Democrats, Senator Obama doing better with upscale reformers and blacks. Yet for all her ostentatious swigging of Crown Royal whiskey and reminiscences about football-playing ancestors from Scranton, the onetime editor of the Harvard Law Review and erstwhile supporter of the silk-stocking Republican John Lindsay makes an unconvincing populist tribune.
In his unjustly neglected 1994 essay, In Defense of Elitism, William A. Henry III wrote perceptively of Clinton's husband:"his family background is the stuff of liberal sob stories about those who never had a square chance. His roving father seems to have left illegitimate children scattered across the landscape. His multiply-married mother was a sometime victim of wife beating. His boozy stepfather set a pattern of substance abuse to which Clinton's drug-taking younger brother also succumbed. The household income afforded blue-collar privation, short of outright poverty but not always by much. The rest of the clan are no-accounts and no-accounts they will likely remain."
Yet it was not only Bill Clinton's charm and knack for forging convenient connections that enabled him to rise from his unpromising roots to the White House. "Surely", Henry writes, "he felt something of the same urgent need, and the same confidence in an orderly and meritocratic world, that impelled Harry Truman and Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter to grow beyond humble origins. Clinton may presume to speak for the common man, but he knows he is an uncommon man." To put it plainly, his ascent was possible only because he practiced indisputably elitist qualities of study and discipline, within the hierarchical institutions of advanced education, even if it proved particularly convenient for him to disown them. (Not least in the process of depicting his high-born 1992 opponent, George H.W. Bush, as out of touch with the economic anxieties of voters during what turned out to be an exceptionally mild recession.)
For all the political pressures to present oneself as a "regular guy", Henry concludes, "by definition anyone who secures the presidential nomination of a major political party belongs to some sort of elite. Usually it is an elite of high office-holding and consequent power; frequently there is an ancillary elite connected with the politician's education; more often than not there is a further elite of birth or wealth or both." Or, in Senator Clinton's case, marriage; can we seriously believe anyone outside of certain legal circles would have heard of her but for who she chose to wed?
One can certainly present Senator Obama as part of a tradition of aloof, bookish reformist Democrats who proved more popular in faculty clubs than union halls, and fared poorly as a result: Adlai Stevenson; Eugene McCarthy; Gary Hart; Paul Tsongas; Bill Bradley. On closer examination, however, it turns out that each faltered for reasons specific to his historical moment, and it is likely that Stevenson, the echt-candidate of the "eggheads" would have won in 1952 against any Republican other than Dwight Eisenhower. (Michael Barone, one of the most formidable journalistic critics of "liberal elitism", conceded this in his history of modern American politics.)
Moreover, it is unclear just how political damage a candidate inflicts on himself by displaying educational attainments or cultural tastes incompatible with a genial folksiness, and how much by trying to conceal them. My own suspicion is that John Kerry harmed himself less in 2004 by being photographed engaged in the exotic sport of windsurfing than by posing uncomfortably in hunters' camos. Seeking reelection in 1996, Bill Clinton notoriously spent part of his summer vacation camping in the Tetons rather than enjoying the pleasures of the Hamptons. That he looked ill-at-ease and out-of-place did him no discernible harm, for his political fortunes hinged upon other things, such as his policies. Much of the electorate disliked and distrusted him as a personality, but was prepared to elect and then reelect him anyway. And the Democratic Party is not only the party of Truman, Johnson, and Carter, but that of FDR and JFK, to neither of whom a patrician demeanour or the trappings of exclusive education proved politically fatal.
Two years ago, a clever essay in The New Republic by Peter Beinart noted how gatherings of educated, affluent, secular Democrats behaved whenever someone talked about the need to get the votes of what Beinart called "Nascar man." Nascar man, he wrote, was "the guy liberals need to win, but usually don't." He goes to church, watches sports on TV, and doesn't much care for some of the social changes of the 1960s. Once he has entered the conversation, Beinart continues, Democratic ideas that might prove a hard sell with him are not even raised because "no one wants to incite Nascar man's wrath. Nascar man inhibits intellectual inquiry. He's the bully everyone wants to appease."
As Beinart understands, "Nascar man " is a composite figure, no more reflective of the messy reality of American politics than any other bit of psephological shorthand. Some Nascar men are open to a Democratic, indeed a liberal Democratic, appeal. Others aren't. Some can even discriminate between those elements of the right-populist critique of contemporary liberalism that hold water and those that don't. But it is hard to think of a more inherently condescending , and counterproductive, approach to winning Nascar man's vote than assuming that he'll vote for the candidate if he bowls well (something Obama conspicuously failed to do some days back) where he won't if he doesn't.
As William Henry wrote, "the ability of a man from [Bill] Clinton's background to rise, in the systematic way he has, ought to be the best possible testimony about what's right with America." Barack Obama's rise has been equally implausible and equally rooted in the same virtues, which can be seen as elitist but are also profoundly conservative and resonate with many voters who have never enjoyed economic or social privilege. And for him to speak to voters of the need to make the same opportunities available to their children, and to demand that they display the same virtues, pays them the compliment of treating them as adults in a way that playing the working stiff in a bowling alley does not. More to the point, leadership is an inherently elitist undertaking, particularly leadership that summons the citizenry to great endeavours. Such leadership demands that people do, and to some extent strive to be, better, a demand you cannot make when desperate emulation of the average man as he already is suggests you think he is worthy not only of respect but of insincere idolatry. No Democrat of the postwar era did more to inspire the young with the possibilities of public service than the man who insisted that they ask what they could do for their country, not what it could do for them. Who remembers if he could bowl or not?
The assumption behind Obama's observation, (as Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, among others, has pointed out) is one popularized in recent years by Thomas Frank, in his What's The Matter with Kansas? Frank's argument is that Republicans, traditionally the party of the affluent, have successfully wooed lower-middle- and working-class voters in recent decades by appealing to their patriotism and social conservatism, in the process painting Democrats and liberals as insufficiently respectful of heartland traditions. This is, Frank goes on to claim, something of a con job, with the electorate is tricked into voting against its own economic interests by the political allies of the business class. The model of political behaviour is a variant of the Marxist notion of "false consciousness", and assumes that the social and cultural issues that lead blue-collar voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates, in some objective sense, matter less than questions of class and wealth. The right road for Democrats, Frank concludes, is to offset Republican populism on sociocultural matters with a full-throated economic populism.
Obama errs not only in assuming that attachment to God and guns is a function of economic hard times (I doubt that the voters of rural Pennsylvania were markedly more secular when factory jobs were much thicker on the ground), but in thinking that his task and that of his party is to show these voters where their real interests lie. Understandably enough, those who hunt on Saturdays and go to Church on Sundays don't take kindly to the notion that they do so because Democratic candidates have failed to enlighten them as to which issues matter and which ones do not.
There is a deeper problem at work here as well. Like every other politician, Obama has the defects of his virtues. Much of his appeal to voters who are independent in substance if not necessarily in party label rests in his eloquent critique of a political scene dominated by the high-decibel iteration of stale partisan orthodoxies that speak to a decreasing number of Americans. The public as a whole, Obama understands, is less polarized than the institutionalized pandering to the activist cores of the two parties would suggest. The question that arises is whether he overestimates the degree to which America's political divisions exist independently of the manifest failings of the political system, resistant to being conjured away or transcended even by a leader of his inarguable eloquence. And it is reasonable to suspect that a blindness to such differences would impede his ability, as President, to manage and accommodate them.
In the closing days of the primary campaign in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton's campaign has echoed the charges of Obama's conservative critics that he is damaged goods politically because of his alleged disdain for the values of rural and conservative Americans. To some extent, this reflects the demographic strengths of the candidates, with Senator Clinton running well among older, religious, rural and relatively conservative Democrats, Senator Obama doing better with upscale reformers and blacks. Yet for all her ostentatious swigging of Crown Royal whiskey and reminiscences about football-playing ancestors from Scranton, the onetime editor of the Harvard Law Review and erstwhile supporter of the silk-stocking Republican John Lindsay makes an unconvincing populist tribune.
In his unjustly neglected 1994 essay, In Defense of Elitism, William A. Henry III wrote perceptively of Clinton's husband:"his family background is the stuff of liberal sob stories about those who never had a square chance. His roving father seems to have left illegitimate children scattered across the landscape. His multiply-married mother was a sometime victim of wife beating. His boozy stepfather set a pattern of substance abuse to which Clinton's drug-taking younger brother also succumbed. The household income afforded blue-collar privation, short of outright poverty but not always by much. The rest of the clan are no-accounts and no-accounts they will likely remain."
Yet it was not only Bill Clinton's charm and knack for forging convenient connections that enabled him to rise from his unpromising roots to the White House. "Surely", Henry writes, "he felt something of the same urgent need, and the same confidence in an orderly and meritocratic world, that impelled Harry Truman and Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter to grow beyond humble origins. Clinton may presume to speak for the common man, but he knows he is an uncommon man." To put it plainly, his ascent was possible only because he practiced indisputably elitist qualities of study and discipline, within the hierarchical institutions of advanced education, even if it proved particularly convenient for him to disown them. (Not least in the process of depicting his high-born 1992 opponent, George H.W. Bush, as out of touch with the economic anxieties of voters during what turned out to be an exceptionally mild recession.)
For all the political pressures to present oneself as a "regular guy", Henry concludes, "by definition anyone who secures the presidential nomination of a major political party belongs to some sort of elite. Usually it is an elite of high office-holding and consequent power; frequently there is an ancillary elite connected with the politician's education; more often than not there is a further elite of birth or wealth or both." Or, in Senator Clinton's case, marriage; can we seriously believe anyone outside of certain legal circles would have heard of her but for who she chose to wed?
One can certainly present Senator Obama as part of a tradition of aloof, bookish reformist Democrats who proved more popular in faculty clubs than union halls, and fared poorly as a result: Adlai Stevenson; Eugene McCarthy; Gary Hart; Paul Tsongas; Bill Bradley. On closer examination, however, it turns out that each faltered for reasons specific to his historical moment, and it is likely that Stevenson, the echt-candidate of the "eggheads" would have won in 1952 against any Republican other than Dwight Eisenhower. (Michael Barone, one of the most formidable journalistic critics of "liberal elitism", conceded this in his history of modern American politics.)
Moreover, it is unclear just how political damage a candidate inflicts on himself by displaying educational attainments or cultural tastes incompatible with a genial folksiness, and how much by trying to conceal them. My own suspicion is that John Kerry harmed himself less in 2004 by being photographed engaged in the exotic sport of windsurfing than by posing uncomfortably in hunters' camos. Seeking reelection in 1996, Bill Clinton notoriously spent part of his summer vacation camping in the Tetons rather than enjoying the pleasures of the Hamptons. That he looked ill-at-ease and out-of-place did him no discernible harm, for his political fortunes hinged upon other things, such as his policies. Much of the electorate disliked and distrusted him as a personality, but was prepared to elect and then reelect him anyway. And the Democratic Party is not only the party of Truman, Johnson, and Carter, but that of FDR and JFK, to neither of whom a patrician demeanour or the trappings of exclusive education proved politically fatal.
Two years ago, a clever essay in The New Republic by Peter Beinart noted how gatherings of educated, affluent, secular Democrats behaved whenever someone talked about the need to get the votes of what Beinart called "Nascar man." Nascar man, he wrote, was "the guy liberals need to win, but usually don't." He goes to church, watches sports on TV, and doesn't much care for some of the social changes of the 1960s. Once he has entered the conversation, Beinart continues, Democratic ideas that might prove a hard sell with him are not even raised because "no one wants to incite Nascar man's wrath. Nascar man inhibits intellectual inquiry. He's the bully everyone wants to appease."
As Beinart understands, "Nascar man " is a composite figure, no more reflective of the messy reality of American politics than any other bit of psephological shorthand. Some Nascar men are open to a Democratic, indeed a liberal Democratic, appeal. Others aren't. Some can even discriminate between those elements of the right-populist critique of contemporary liberalism that hold water and those that don't. But it is hard to think of a more inherently condescending , and counterproductive, approach to winning Nascar man's vote than assuming that he'll vote for the candidate if he bowls well (something Obama conspicuously failed to do some days back) where he won't if he doesn't.
As William Henry wrote, "the ability of a man from [Bill] Clinton's background to rise, in the systematic way he has, ought to be the best possible testimony about what's right with America." Barack Obama's rise has been equally implausible and equally rooted in the same virtues, which can be seen as elitist but are also profoundly conservative and resonate with many voters who have never enjoyed economic or social privilege. And for him to speak to voters of the need to make the same opportunities available to their children, and to demand that they display the same virtues, pays them the compliment of treating them as adults in a way that playing the working stiff in a bowling alley does not. More to the point, leadership is an inherently elitist undertaking, particularly leadership that summons the citizenry to great endeavours. Such leadership demands that people do, and to some extent strive to be, better, a demand you cannot make when desperate emulation of the average man as he already is suggests you think he is worthy not only of respect but of insincere idolatry. No Democrat of the postwar era did more to inspire the young with the possibilities of public service than the man who insisted that they ask what they could do for their country, not what it could do for them. Who remembers if he could bowl or not?
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