Fundamentalism

Allocating Blame Between a Willing President, and an Unwilling Law

Consider it a metonym for larger questions on the economy, the war on terror, and beyond: if we have a President who’s made his policy position clear, do we blame him, or others, when the law prevents him from making good on a promise?

Here’s the story. Two men married in Massachusetts, one an American, the other an Australian. They’ve lived together as a couple for almost a decade and their marriage, remember, is legal under both state and Australian law. On that basis, the American sought permanent residence for his husband. Earlier this week, the Obama administration denied permanent resident status, citing the Defense of Marriage Act, which establishes that a valid “marriage,” for the purposes of federal law, requires one man and one woman. Functionally, for the purposes of federal benefits (like immigration status, Social Security, etc.), the bigoted federal definition supersedes more enlightened state law.

Oh, to make matters just a billion times worse, the now-deportable Australian is dying of AIDS, and dependent on his husband’s care.

Now here’s the question. Whose “fault” is this undeniable tragedy? It’s true that USCIS may in some cases, as an act of discretion, override the law and grant resident status to this couple, but in so doing they would violate clearly applicable law.

I would hold that blame rests with the jailer, who’s tied the prisoner’s hands, rather than the prisoner, who’s either not creative or not brave enough to slip his bonds. Remember, federal power over domestic matters is an illusion absent a compliant or filibuster-proof Congress. For all intents and purposes, President Obama has never had either.

Disappointment

Saddled with an opposition that relentlessly avoids the appearance or actuality of substance, and which tries at every turn to push the country farther right than their thin mandate should support, even at the expense of the country’s fiscal integrity, this President has somehow continued to speak in substantive, positive, centrist terms.

After the hard-right tilt of the Bush years, and corresponding translation of all debates into culture war terms, that even-temperedness is at least a little of what I signed up for: a President for the country, not for an outspoken and increasingly violent political faction. Even where the price is, essentially, the loss of political effectiveness, it’s a little nice to occupy the high ground. So the following comes as a surprise:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee. [. . .]

A senior Obama adviser was even more cutting, suggesting that the Republican’s personal awkwardness will turn off voters.

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” said the adviser, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”

And a serious disappointment. If the Republican succeed at bringing Obama down to their level — where personal attacks and clever catchphrases substitute for leadership — they will have finally, and actually won. Centrism and statesmanship will be dead and buried, by both sides. And we’ll have nothing to show for that great loss, while the Republicans will have engineered a country convinced that “liberty” means nothing more than tax cuts and “freedom” from the social safety net.

If nothing else, though, this strategy leak signals a tone change, an awareness that the President’s current messaging strategy isn’t working. That’s good. But instead of embracing the lowest common denominator, the Administration should consider what’s actually working, what isn’t, and most importantly, what they actually have to lose. For example, the most frustrating element of the past three years has been the GOP’s remarkable ability to pin positions on the White House more extreme than those it actually advocates. By playing the centrist game in response, we get the worst of all worlds, suffering undeserved blows from the right, deserved blows from the left, and bewildered indifference from the center.

Well, “if we’re going to be walking into walls, I want us running into them.”

It’s long-past time the President attempted even-tempered and intellectual solutions to the world’s problems, and delivered them in a strident, confident tone, backed by the courage of our convictions. This IS the “tea party downgrade,” and it threatens to be the tea party double-recession — not because of Boehner’s caucus and its reckless disregard for the consequences of fiscal zealotry. But because we’ve allowed the right to define the terms of the debate for the better part of a half-century, on the mistaken premise that modern tax policy is some liberal lie at odds with a history of “freedom.” This while simultaneously giving a pass to the real enemy — supply-side economics — a disproven aberration that’s left the rich less taxed than ever in American history, shifted the burden to the middle, and left us too poor to fix the current crisis, itself a product of runaway deregulation. The last time so many Americans were out of a job, we put them to work reinventing the country. We electrified the Tennessee River Valley, rebuilt the interstate, and poured manpower into science and industry, to the point that we could fight (and win) the greatest war in human history. Instead, today, we view investing in ourselves as some sort of sin — and let Republicans use a deficit they built to somehow excuse themselves from their responsibility to fix the damn thing. Why?

President Obama should ask that question, rather than indulging in the kind of namecalling expected of our honorable friends opposite. The Republicans have left us to play the part of the prodigal son, coasting off our fathers’ victories. We need a paradigm shift: life will be hard again, but we can win through it if we give up the myths that’ve allowed the rich to get richer on the nation’s dime, and the preoccupations that’ve convinced some that it’s more important to worry about their God than our country.

If Obama won’t even try to accomplish that shift — but instead buys into the type of politics that have abetted this decline all along — then he truly does not deserve his second term. Although I suppose the Republicans will deserve it even less.

Let it never be said that I am unequal in criticism.

A Short Reading List…

…for a busy day. Don’t miss these two articles from The New Yorker. The first represents (yet another) alarming profile of Michele Bachmann; the second, a remarkable inside look at the operation that brought down Osama Bin Laden, and a fitting elegy for those members of the team who may (or may not) have been lost during the weekend’s tragic downing of a SEAL transport.

From the Bachmann article, note where Francis Schaeffer, apparently a strong influence on Bachmann’s life, explains that:

[t]he early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed and what gave them their whole strength was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute infallible word of God.

Well, yes but no. Early Christians may’ve viewed the Bible as the “absolute infallible word of God,” but this misses the more interesting question of what reading of the Bible, exactly, they imbued with this infallibility. Not the literal, plain-text reading relied on by today’s Christians to substantiate the more absurd claims of modern fundamentalisms.

The Realization That Wasn’t

Andrew Sullivan chronicles one Christian’s attempt to come to grips with the fallout from the past month’s shooting in Norway, where a self-styled Christian, right-wing extremist killed nearly 100 innocents as part of a quest to purge Europe of Islamic influences and culture.

Here, the subject of Sullivan’s story “had truly believed that Muslims were really bad and Christians were good, with some aberrations,” but took from the Breivik murders the lesson that extremism and radicalization are adequate explanations of evil. We don’t have to try to blame the underlying, abstracted, and usually blameless ideology. Islam, like Christianity, may generate extremists, but Islam, like Christianity, isn’t to blame for it.

And yet somehow, this conclusion continues to evade the larger conservative movement, which remains secure in its conviction that Muslims cannot be good, and Christians cannot be evil. Until the right can accept that conflict needn’t occur at the civilizational level, each tragedy will generate anew the useless debate about what abstracted “ideology” is to blame, and avoid the more productive conversation about the dangers of extremism and intolerance.

Backbenchers with Pretensions to the Front

The whole debt ceiling thing seems to be winding up, as we knew it would, at the eleventh hour. Apparently Republicans are quite content to push the financial system to the brink of ruin, and endure partial slides in all markets, just to make an idiotic point. Even as the crisis terminates, let’s investigate what we’ve learned. Turns out, very little.

Senator Rubio’s (R-FL) speech on the debt ceiling apparently marks him as a future Republican leader: impassioned, well-informed, and with a coherent vision. I don’t see it. I see a well-spoken ideologue, true. But also a junior Senator clearly outclassed by a senior.

Justifying his party’s extremism, Rubio apparently takes solace in the fact that then-Senators Biden and Obama made speeches to similar effect the last time the debt ceiling came up. Both pledged to — and did — vote against an increase. But the difference, which Kerry appreciates and Rubio ignores, is that neither Obama nor Biden were party leaders at that time, and neither ever had the chance to actually force the issue. Their votes were symbolic, with little to no actual effect on policy. To the contrary, Republicans have allowed themselves to be ruled by their doctrine, without regard to any supervening responsibility.

What Biden and Obama did is appropriate backbencher behavior; but not appropriate majority behavior. You see, when a party comes into power, we generally expect responsibility to humble and mediate each individual member’s partisan impulses. Like Jeff Toobin observed about conservatives on the Supreme Court, it’s easy to talk about big doctrinal changes when in dissent, but comparatively rarer for the same Justice to, when given a chance, actually pull the trigger and initiate a sweeping legal change.

Republicans display no such restraint. And, more worryingly, they don’t appear to appreciate that they should. In unbroken line, from Bush to Boehner, Republicans have displayed no squeamishness about taking a mandate, no matter how small, and running as far right with it as absolutely possible. It’s divisive, bad for the country, unpatriotic, and counterproductive. Our politics isn’t really designed to accommodate such willful disregard of the middle. Whether acted out on the large- and the small-scale, this type of behavior has a way of eroding decency and tearing communities apart.

And as long as it continues, no matter how well Rubio speaks — without pause, break, or “um,” which is actually quite impressive — he’ll still look like an ideologue, and the bumbling Kerry will still, comparatively, look like a statesman.

Internet Culture: Popularity, Conspiracies, and Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Last week, Conor Friedsdorf of The Atlantic wrote what I thought was a fairly charming vignette, of obviously limited factual value, about how he, along with two girls denied Harry Potter tickets, were the only attendees at the Orange County premiere of Sarah Palin’s comically titled new biopic, The Undefeated.

Seriously, she lost in 2008. We all remember that, right?

Anyways, this puff-piece, dashed off at 3 AM PST, has since become the most popular (and controversial) piece of Conor’s short career at The Atlantic. In a post yesterday, he chronicles his shock, responds to his detractors, and in the process, pens an abnormally all-encompassing story of life, culture, and writing in the internet age. Let’s investigate.

Popularity: as American magazines go, The Atlantic is fairly highbrow — exceedingly, even– and Conor’s writing is no exception. As he notes, he’s written a number of pieces sharply critical of the left, of the right, and several excruciatingly well-researched pieces, some of which took months, and one of which — on the best long-form journalism of 2010 — I will certainly now read. Yet he’s become “famous” for a hastily penned gag post that, while very clever, bears little relationship to the reason we value publications like The Atlantic, and writers like him. Why?

Because we read for sensationalism, not for substance, and the internet rewards writers who understand this.

My experience is similar (though on a lesser scale). As of this writing, this site’s most widely read post, at 28,1256 page views, questions whether Birther queen Orly Taitz is, or was likely to remain, a lawyer. And the premise of that post was ultimately disproved! She was properly admitted to the Supreme Court’s bar, though I still maintain that she fairly clearly committed several grave violations of the rules of professional conduct. My favorite post, on Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, actually took a long time to write, holds up well, but clocks in at the #3 slot, with a comparably dismal 12,158 views. (My second favorite, on science fiction’s moral authority, comes in at #12). If we construe exposure as a “payoff” in blogging, the effort-to-payoff model this sampling suggests discourages talent, insight, and substance, to instead reward well-timed hackery and snark.

Some blogs defy the odds. Andrew Sullivan supplies consistent quality content and, by all estimates, is widely read for it. But he’s the exception, and his stats probably admit of similarly disturbing trends. This is a serious Problem For The Internet, probably compelled by the breadth of available content, and the frequency/necessity of on-the-go reading. Both pressures combine to create the internet as a medium exclusively designed for rapid consumption.   I’m as guilty as the next man, but it’s something we need to confront, because the alternative, of an internet where information is sought only for entertainment, feels disastrous.

Conspiracies: call it a corollary of the last point. Any world where sensationalism rules becomes, naturally, a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Just so, Conor’s critics latched onto a provably false fact pattern where Conor didn’t just invent the whole story of the empty theater — no. He made it a reality by conspiring with theaters, newspapers… everyone… to bring about the downfall of Sarah Palin, by underreporting attendance at a fictitious theater. Naturally, the theory was picked up, and run into the ground, by Andrew Breitbart, who us did the favor of even reporting the lie incorrectly.

From “death panels” to birthers, here, too, is a poignant representation of political discourse in the internet age. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” and, because it sounds better, is more widely read, sits more prominently in the public consciousness, and controls the conversation moving forwards.

Numbers, numbers, numbers: Finally, Conor flags one of the stranger points about this entire exchange. How many people attended Palin’s little panegyric is, literally, irrelevant. He says:

But what is ultimately at stake? Say it earns billions. Is that going to shrink the federal government? Or reform entitlements? Or affect the foreign policy America adopts? Why would an ideological movement that insists the country is going down the tubes waste so much time and energy complaining about their perception that a movie is doing better than the MSM says?

A good question, which becomes better when you realize that this isn’t an isolated incident. Time and again the conservative media have instigated, or suborned, attempts to artificially inflate attendance numbers at rallies, and general caucus strength. The movement seems more obsessed with proving its relevance, rather than earning it with policy victories. The tea party has always been more heat than light, and based on the battles they pick — like this one — that’s how they like it.

*     *     *     *     *

Sensationalism, conspiracy, and an obsession with status. Such is the state of political discourse on the internet, and therefore, the go-to style of the conservative grassroots. It’s strange to see these three ills so close together, and in a situation where they’re so clearly problematic, but we have Conor, and the Palin camp’s reflexive need to overreact to damn everything, to thank for this rare opportunity. Now, what can be done about it?

Overwrought Analogy Of-The-Day: Did New York Kill Socrates?

Late last Friday, the New York Senate finally voted, by a margin that’s still surprisingly slim for those who know New York state, to permit gay couples to use the appellation “marriage.” Why did it take so long? Because the New York Senate is not a representative body, and when political reapportionment fails, I expect a federal court will say just that. But in the meantime, we on the left should celebrate, and those on the right should engage in absurd fearmongering. Cue the National Review, which responded to the news with an academic debate about whether the vote effects “tyranny.” Kathryn Jean Lopez:

We are witnessing tyranny today that is fostered by a false sense of freedom, a tyranny that faux tolerance ferments.

Charmingly alliterative, and shockingly inflammatory. We’ve heard the argument that gay marriage subordinates Christians, because everytime the state diverges from a fundamentalist theocracy, it abridges what fundamentalists apparently view as their basic right to live in a theocracy. But I’ve never heard it put just this way.

Neither, apparently, had Mrs. Lopez’s colleagues. After some called her on this bit of hyperbole, she doubled down, comparing the Senate’s (democratic and legitimate) recognition of same-sex unions to Athens’ (democratic and legitimate) decision to put the philosopher Socrates to death. For her, the two votes share the sin of unmooring democratic discretion from external moral limits. In New York’s case, that limit is the fundamentalist Christian definition on marriage. In Socrates’ case… well…

I’d actually like to hear her define it. Athens put Socrates to death for “not believing in the gods of the state,” or, teaching that the gods did not exist, or were capricious, amoral, and unworthy of reverence. This strikes me as a cautionary tale about the danger of letting fear, fed by fundamentalism, overwhelm our sense of community, and our basic moral duty to deal with dissent and difference respectfully. Athens’ error was putting faith above reason. To the extent that Athens’ experience with the dangers of direct democracy bears any relevance to an action taken by a constitutional republic consistent with its founding documents — especially when the action taken gives respect, rather than takes a life — it seems to cut the other way. No?

An actually analogous situation would be when Colorado used a ballot initiative to override a city-by-city initiative to extend the equal protection of the laws to gay citizens. Here, as in Socrates’ case, the state let fear overcome the basic, constitutional requirement of equal protection. Thankfully, in that case, the Supreme Court stepped in to rectify the error, and prove the superiority of constitutionalism over direct democracy.

We can acknowledge that this kind of hyperbole is ridiculous. But still, conservatives will persist in their remarkable ability to construe the equality of their fellow-citizens as a direct affront to their privately-held beliefs (Santorum calls the vote a “nullification” of marriage). Perhaps there’s no cure but time.

Speaking to Your Enemy

Matt Taibbi’s polemical piece on the self-anointed prophet of tea part evangelism, Michele Bachmann, is worth a read, but suffers for its tone. If half of the facts he’s dredged up about Bachmann are true — multiple, abortive attempts to turn the machinery of state into a proselytizing organization, for example — then the thing speaks for itself, and requires none of Taibbi’s invective to prove just how dangerous representative Bachmann truly is. He makes one exceptionally useful point, though, that deserves its own separate treatment:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies. [. . . .]

All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us.

The first paragraph feels like a conclusion; the second is. Views like Bachmann’s are objectively unreasonable. But we live in a country where more than a few of us reject inferential reasoning, and substitute belief, to define the boundaries of their reality. As hard as it is to admit, we can’t win battles like this by disputing first premises. Matt’s right; we’ll lose, and come off worse in the process. We need to understand these beliefs, and be able to articulate not why they’re bad, but why they’re not appropriate to govern a diverse nation.

We may not even be able to win that. It’s been painfully clear for a while now that, for the religious right, faith trumps constitutionalism. But we can try.

Traditional Marriage

Nota bene, for all “Bible-believing” opponents of gay marriage…

Click to enlarge.

The Trouble With Banning Foreign Law: It’s Anti-Business

A Slate article on the right’s new jihad against shar’ia law points to a weird device: a proposed uniform act, titled the American Law For American Courts Act, which purports to eliminate any court or arbitration panel’s ability to rely on law “that would not grant the parties affected by the ruling or decision the same fundamental liberties, rights, and privileges granted under the U.S. and [State] Constitutions.”

The goal, I imagine, is to cure the underinclusiveness problem in shar’ia bans: any ban that targets only shar’ia law clearly fails for Establishment Clause reasons. But from the perspective of commercial litigators, this Uniform Act is actually more problematic.

Choice of law — “private international law,” when litigated — is a serious issue in transnational commerce, and as a result, in transnational litigation. Contracting parties invest substantial time and effort into bargaining over which jurisdiction’s law will govern the relationship and, by design, such bargains do not always result in a selection of American law. To pick one among any thousand of examples, the high-profile Bank of New York/Lehman litigation over the Dante CDO spotlighted important differences between American and British bankruptcy law, compelling one result in Britain (for Perpetual Trustee Co., against Lehman) and another in the States (for Lehman, against BNY Trust Co.). At the end of the day, with some frequency, state and federal courts are encouraged and expected to apply foreign law when the parties have so contracted. It’s not culture; it’s just business.

In yet another example of how tea partiers, paleoconservatives, and Republicans — increasingly overlapping groups — fail to understand the larger world implicated by their absurd feuds-of-the-day, this frenetic effort to ban the “creeping menace” of shar’ia would add dangerous uncertainty to this element of the financial world, already in desperate need of predictability. Private international law already invalidates otherwise-chosen law if its selection would “violate some fundamental principle of justice, some prevalent conception of good morals, some deep-rooted tradition of the common weal,” Loucks v. Standard Oil Co., 224 NY 99, 111 (1918) (Cardozo, J.), but the exception is almost never used. Broadening it, just to serve some uninformed sense of moral outrage, would be anti-business, anti-competitive, and threaten the global standing of American courts and American law, critical determiners of our place in the international business community.

I’m sure conservatives don’t intend that result. This proposed Act isn’t about policy, it’s about whipping up an ignorant frenzy. Ah, the joys of drive-by legislating.