Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Binaries

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

In just a few weeks, I’ll be facing a cohort of new students who will be tasked to learn “writing the essay” from me. Here’s an early lesson for them: Tell me, future students, what’s wrong with the following statement: “And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” If you guessed that this Paul Ryan quote, which appears in two of yesterday’s opinion articles in the Times, is a meaningless and therefore useless binary, then you’ve got a step up on most of your fellow students. You also appear to have a step up on many of your fellow Americans—and, disturbingly, on one of our candidates for Vice President.

One of the problems with binaries is that words have a tendency not to stay put. (“They shuffle, they change,” says Virginia Woolf.) What do you mean by individualism? The Marlboro Man? Lady Gaga? Charles Lindbergh? Mussolini? Each a fair prototype of a different kind of individualism. By collectivism do you have in mind the Politburo? Or Chinese re-education camps? Or the public garden on Avenue B? Or the evangelical church on Avenue A? Or maybe, since individualism is often yoked to the pioneer spirit, the wagon train? Mormons? Here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose. You can (and probably should) mean all these things. But the fact that you don’t have to choose means you have to complicate your thinking.

You, future student, will try to slip this responsibility. When faced with complicating the individualism/collectivism binary you will say, “It’s both.” Or you will say, “You need to strike a balance.” And I will try to force you to describe what that balance might look like or, in the words of one of my colleagues, “what makes striking that balance hard.”

One of the things that can make Obama seem at times ill-suited to his job is that his mind seems instinctively to work that way. He’s interested in complexity. For this he gets accused of being professorial by those who, let’s say, prefer to keep it simple. In particular, he often gets himself in trouble when he tries to describe what the individual/collective balance might look like. In 2008 Joe the Plumber became fleetingly famous objecting to something Obama said about “spreading the wealth around,” though this was not an unreasonable way of addressing the fact that, for the last few decades, the upper percentiles of earners have been claiming a larger and larger share of the nation’s wealth. This year the “I built that” signs at Romney rallies are responding to Obama’s grammatically maladroit but factually correct assertion that no small business owner creates that business entirely on his or her own, without help from the collective. (The fact that Obama gave one of his more eloquent descriptions of the individual/collective dynamic while Paul Ryan sat in the audience looking bitch-slapped is adding some dramatic backstory to the race.)

Now, future student, you will bring your essay into conference with me, feeling very proud of it. And I’ll start raising objections: “You’ve said that this binary is meaningless and useless. But doesn’t that depend on what you mean by meaning and use?” Because of course Ryan’s statement is not actually meaningless. It may not have much meaning for policy prescription, but it has meaning as narrative. The very way it’s phrased, the sense of an epic battle fought for the highest of stakes, reveals its essentially narrative intent.

We’re all cynical handicappers of the horse race these days, and we think we know that word “narrative.” We know the importance of seizing the narrative, creating it, running it. But narratives are important for more than that. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously said. Stories create meaning, and that mysterious phrase—to create meaning—is the opposite of cynicism. It even hints at the basis of an ethical system, the task of creating meaning.

This is the reason, I think, that Ryan is often described as, and indeed appears to be, sincere, honorable, likeable, smart. It sets him apart from the Gingriches and the Bachmanns whose narratives ride (and often jump) the shark of opportunism. They don’t create meaning; they trash it. Ryan is, or appears to be, a true believer, and most of our narratives are in some way about belief.

I have a close relative who’s something of a star of the Pentecostal preaching circuit, and if you want to study the relationship between narrative and belief, you could do worse than bone up on Pentecostalism. I believe my relative to be a good man, with a good heart, but he’s also a dangerous man, at least to the extent that any man becomes dangerous at the moment his narrative stops being adequate to the world he encounters.

There’s been a great deal of cynicism and opportunism in the opposition to Obama, of the Mitch McConnell “our goal is to make him a one-term president” stripe. There’s been a lot of what may or may not be racism, but is certainly terror of the difference and change that a black man in the White House represents. But a large part of the problem is that we’re a nation of true believers. If the true believers at times seem to live in a zone that’s not so much information-free as information-impermeable, that has to do with the power of narrative, its oilskin toughness. In 2010, many of those true believers ended up in Congress, where they’ve spent two years failing to recognize that the world they’re encountering renders their narratives inadequate, with disastrous results.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Paul Ryan’s narrative. There are already signs that it’s being reshaped to meet either the reality of the world he’s encountering or the reality of a national campaign. But he actually doesn’t interest me all that much. I’m more interested in you, future student, and maybe I’m more interested in you as future citizen. If you take nothing else away from your four years at college, learn to recognize the moment when your narratives are no longer adequate to the world.

Reform-Minded

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Ross Douthat has a fascinating piece in the Sunday Times about the Troy Davis case.  Douthat, as you probably know, is the Times (most) conservative columnist and, according to Wikipedia, a convert first to Pentecostalism and then to Catholicism, making this morning’s column, for me, another example of the damage religious conversion can sometimes do to your moral sense.

This may misrepresent the column.  Douthat’s argument is not religious but civic.  To the extent that faith is invoked at all it’s as a call to waverers not to lose faith in the death penalty over this unfortunate affair.  If you’ve been following the case, you know that what made the affair unfortunate was the very high probability that the State of Georgia just put an innocent man to death.  On the plus side, according to Douthat, the case, which exhausted 20 years of appeals, “can focus the public’s attention on issues that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.”

In other words, if I’m understanding him properly, the execution of an innocent man can help us focus on the conditions that make it possible for us to execute innocent men.

Here’s where I hear the bat-squeak tone of a certain kind of religious mindset.  There’s a pleasing circularity to Douthat’s vision.  Davis’s execution will help us to reform abuses so that fewer Troy Davises will have to die and we can have faith in the fairness and justice of executions.  It’s the way a certain type of mind veers helplessly towards systems—self-enclosed, self-perpetuating systems from which a great deal of mess has been excluded.

In one sense the column startled me.  I’d been clumsily dividing the death penalty issue between opponents who pointed out the danger of executing innocent people and proponents who thought that innocent people were never executed.  For the latter, the fact that Davis exhausted all his appeals and was executed is sufficient proof that he was guilty.  The system worked.  (If Davis had been exonerated, the system would also have worked, despite the 20 years in prison.)  And yet I should have understood that there must be people like Douthat who believe both that Davis was essentially murdered and that the death penalty is necessary and valid.  It’s not an untenable position—we have many other systems in which we’re willing to countenance the deaths of innocents in the name of a larger good:  war, poverty, highways.  But the problems with the position lie in the mess that Douthat is excluding.

I should say that I don’t actually believe that opponents of the death penalty “prefer to ignore” the abuses of the justice and prison system.  My guess is that they’re only too well aware of them, and that they’re as troubled by the wrongfully imprisoned as they are by the wrongfully condemned-to-die and work as assiduously to free them.  Douthat’s most tangled paragraph opines that “a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity.”  (Recently I had a dinner conversation about this troublesome word “liberty” which we hear more and more from the right and which seems to be used like a little silver hammer to knock people between the eyes and stop them thinking.)

The problem is not just that Douthat is offering us a binary choice—protect life or protect rights and dignity—a choice which he is not extending to the actual prisoner, who might weigh those options differently.  The problem is that the more reformable aspects of the criminal justice system are the ones that revolve around making prisons safer and more humane places.  The less reformable aspects of the criminal justice system—the mess that Douthat is excluding—are the ones that led to Davis’s execution.

We can, of course, work to reform the ways that the criminal justice system seems to reward corruption and careerism—the way prosecutors are encouraged to construe their jobs as getting convictions not seeing that justice is done.  It will be a long uphill climb, but at least I can see it as a possibility.  I’m sure that these elements came into the Troy Davis case.  But something else operated as well.

I suppose it’s possible that, in the Davis case, corrupt officers, determined to get a conviction in the murder of a fellow officer, coerced false statements from scared witnesses in the full knowledge that they were railroading an innocent man.  But that seems like a level of conscious maleficence to which the average human being doesn’t often rise.  It seems more likely that, having had the killer named to them, they went to find witnesses who could confirm to them what they already knew.  The assumption was that these recalcitrant witnesses needed to be badgered and threatened into spilling what they knew, and the danger that the officers might, with their badgering and threats, actually produce false statements receded from awareness.  It’s the same dynamic that made the day care cases of the eighties and nineties such colossal disasters.

I was struck by the way that Officer McPhail’s widow insisted on Davis’s guilt.  There seemed to be plenty of room for doubt.  The case, from an objective point of view, had been shot full of holes, and the evidence now seemed to point to another man.  You can dismiss the prosecution’s resistance as corruption and careerism if you like, but why wasn’t his widow more interested in making sure that, if a man were going to pay for killing her husband, it was the right man?

It’s the same reaction that you heard when the West Memphis Three were freed last month.  There was the fervent belief that three child-killers had just been set free and a resentment, as in the Davis case, at interference from “outsiders” who didn’t understand.  The question is what were those outsiders outside of?  And what didn’t they understand?

Here’s what you will never reform:  the way that not just individuals but groups form narratives and how quickly those narratives become impermeable to outside information.  The outsiders stand outside the narrative, and the proven difficulty—in the Davis case, in the West Memphis Three case, in the day care cases—of getting those inside the narrative to step outside it should give Douthat pause.  We’re no longer talking about reforming a system.  We’re talking about basic human irrationality, and a great many Troy Davises would have to die before we reform that.

Campaign Mode

Friday, September 9th, 2011

Andrew Leonard in Salon on Obama’s speech last night:  “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was exactly right in his comment before the speech Thursday morning: ‘This isn’t a jobs plan; it’s a reelection plan.’”  According to Leonard, Obama was “being a little too cute” when “[h]e tried… to pretend otherwise.”  The reason we know it was a reelection speech is, apparently, because “there’s zero chance of anything like [his jobs plan] passing.”

Quite apart from a concern about whether Andrew Leonard, or anyone at Salon, should be carrying Mitch McConnell’s water for him, the analysis seems to offer no way for Obama actually to address the jobs crisis.  I’m having difficulty imagining what, in Leonard’s ears, a real jobs proposal would have sounded like.

Didn’t everyone agree that the Republicans would reject any proposal the president made?  Weren’t we also agreed that Obama should nevertheless come out swinging, with a strong proposal for solving the crisis, a proposal that would not pull punches based on the Republicans’ presumed intransigence?  Am I the only one who understood the rationale behind that as more than electorally strategic?  Aren’t Obama’s choices right now pretty much reduced to forcing the Republicans onto the defensive, not just so he can win reelection—though that would be nice—but because by keeping them on the defensive he can have some slim hope of breaking through the obstructionism that has prevented anyone from doing anything about the economy?  The president’s threat to take the argument to “every corner of this country” seemed to be as much about the opposition’s reelection campaigns as his.  He was saying, “I may not be able to keep you from blocking me, but if you insist on blocking me, I will do everything I can to make it cost you.”  You’re only allowed to reduce that to electioneering if you can come up with a better strategy for getting the opposition to yield.  If the test of the speech’s seriousness is whether any of its proposals are likely to pass, then perhaps thirty minutes of silence would have better pleased Leonard.

I don’t think I’m being naive.  I understand that reelection is and has to be part of Obama’s calculations right now.  The problem, though, with Leonard’s analysis, and analysis like it, is that it doesn’t leave room for strategies that are not merely electoral.  We wanted him to come out fighting and he did, and now we’re assuming that he was only fighting for his own ass.  Or is that what we wanted him to fight for?

It’s a version of the problem I have with the more Glenn Greenwaldian among my friends.  If you’re going to go on and on about how disappointed you are in Obama, how much of a sellout he is, then you’ve got to have a credible answer to one question:  who would be doing better?  And your answer to that question—the person you propose—has to satisfy two conditions:  that person has to have a reasonable chance of (a) getting elected and (b) being allowed to govern once elected.  There may, for all I know, be lots of people who fit those criteria, but only two occur to me off the top of my head:  Hillary and Bill.  And if the Glenn Greenwaldians don’t like Obama, they REALLY don’t like Hillary and Bill.

By all means push back on Obama when you feel that he’s reneged on his promises or principles—Guantanomo, the public option—but do it in the context of the circumstances the man is actually in.  If you don’t like the system, work to change it, but don’t accuse Obama of bad faith because he hasn’t managed to transcend it by dint of personal magnetism.

Moreover, Obama has been subjected to attacks whose vitriolic craziness makes Bill’s troubles look like a champagne brunch.  The question of whether those attacks have been racist obscures the way in which Obama’s mixed heritage—mixed not just in race, but in geography, in lived experience—stand for an America that many of us have felt coming into being for a long time.  Obama’s election seemed to ratify that America for us.  Which, for a huge segment of the country, was exactly the problem.

The level of obstructionism he’s faced has been unprecedented.  Could he have finessed that obstructionism more adroitly?  Maybe. He’s one limited person with his own set of failings, as Bill had his.  Given a choice, I’d take Obama’s failings over Bill’s.  And I’d take both of theirs over those of Obama’s predecessor.  But these seem to me real—or at least imaginable—choices.  Just as Obama/Perry or Obama/Romney is an imaginable choice.  The choice between Obama and some unnamed person who would somehow tame Wall Street, neuter the Republicans, and defeat the corrupting power of money and lobbyists does not seem like a real choice to me, and because it’s not real, it’s potentially dangerous.

If I have hope for Obama’s reelection and his chances of making headway against the Republicans, it’s not because of the eloquence and fire that everyone agrees he summoned again last night.  The eloquence wasn’t what won him the election, though it certainly helped.  It was his ability to take the long view, to see the separate skirmishes as part of an overarching narrative.  He managed to squeak by with this strategy on the health care bill.  Who knows?  He may squeak by again on his newest proposal.

But if he doesn’t we should not be standing on the sidelines, arms chummily linked with Mitch McConnell, dismissing the game as unwinnable from the start.  We should be worrying, deeply, over what happens when the game is lost.