Tea parties

In Praise of Professional Politicians

One of the Tea Party articles of faith holds that all politicians, but at least legislators, should hold their positions only as part time jobs, meet as few times as possible, and otherwise live normal lives, and hold normal jobs, so they understand the pressures of ordinary Americans and avoid falling prey to “Washington” sensibilities. But even though the idea’s gained some traction in California and elsewhere, it’s a theory endorsed by precisely zero good-government groups, and opposed by sensible libertarians. Why?

The notion of the legislator as a small-scale Cincinnatus, taking up the reins of power as needed but retiring thereafter to his farm, is an ideal realized by Texas, where it’s ingrained in the constitution, but approximated by many other states. (Only ten states have true, full-time legislatures, though at least in New York, the most effective legislators treat their positions as full-time.) And especially in Texas, it’s proved an unmitigated disaster. Ordinary men and women simply cannot be expected to both manage independent lives, and keep up with the realities of governing large-scale polities in the increasingly complex modern era.

Just so, it’s impractical to expect the legislator’s function to be discharged competently by laymen. That’s the theory of a recent lawsuit against the state of Colorado’s process of budgeting-by-referendum, where, plaintiffs contend, taxpayers seem unwilling to either vote the legislature the money it needs to do its job, or allow cutbacks on state obligations (like the PTA in that Simpsons episode). To no-one’s surprise, the motivating goal of modern Republicanism — to “starve the beast” — just doesn’t work, at least in Colorado.

These distinct problems are bound together by a common solution: better ethics rules, and renewed respect for the work of diligent, professional, educated politicians. Government corruption, and the disproportionate influence of lobbyists, are both true threats to American democracy. But ending the profession of civil service, or trading representative for direct government, are both extreme overreactions, akin to killing a patient to cure their cancer. I’ve had the pleasure to work for several politicians who modeled the values of true civil service, working twenty hour days, eschewing high-dollar contributions, and rigorously enforcing a true separation between the work of government and the work of politics. We need to encourage these kinds of servants, and put them in positions of power where they can make a difference, rather than relegating them to the role of the insurgent reformer.

That process starts with reversing Citizens United‘s narrow view of corruption — where only payments directly to the politician, rather than through intermediaries, evidence regulable misconduct — continues with genuine ethics reform, and ends with an electorate that recognizes and values talent in its elected officials, rather than condemning it as “elitism.”

The Public in the Service of the Private

Some months ago, President Obama asserted — somewhat timidly — a proposition that should’ve been self-evident: that public regulation, public expenditure, and “big government” are not always, or even sometimes, the enemies of private enterprise. As in the case of upgrading the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems, a healthy national infrastructure, created by public dollars, enables private profit.

Yesterday’s Times draws an even clearer example — New York City itself — and explains how the heavy-handed government planning that created Manhattan’s iconic grid enabled the city’s rise to preeminence as a global city, the heart of American culture and finance.

In fact, the story runs even deeper: Manhattan’s inexpensive public transit, the subway, is one of the greatest success stories of how eminent domain can be used to take a private creation, turn it back to the public good, and by doing so enable broader private development. The 1940′s squeeze-out by which New York City acquired the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company was justifiably controversial — and the Supreme Court’s eventual resolution of the fare-caps that made the acquisition feasible, tenuous at best — but produced a more affordable, interconnected, and user-friendly system, better capable of enabling urban growth and suburban life. (In fact, if you’ve transferred at Times Square between the 1/2/3 Seventh Avenue Line and the N/Q/R Broadway Line, or used the 7 Flushing Line, you’ve benefited directly from unified city control.) “Big government” creates the conditions for small business to prosper. Per Jed Bartlet (YouTube):

No matter what its failures in the past and in times to come for that matter, government can be a place where people come together and no-one gets left behind. An instrument of good.

This is in fact the foundational theory of government: that we do better together than we would apart. Somehow we’ve forgotten that lesson during our two-year long tea-induced stupor, but it’s time to remember it, and for Obama, to campaign on it. Unity and common purpose have always prevailed in America over selfishness, profit, and oligarchy. And that, fundamentally, is what the 2012 election should be about.

A New Birth of Freedom

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while (especially while taking a break from writing over the last few weeks), and as an important one, it seems an altogether fitting topic with which to close 2011. In brief, it’s time for us to reclaim one of the most important words in our political vocabulary.

A few years back, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) filed his bill proposing a “Liberty Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution. Call it a presumptuous title for a mundane bill, for despite its nod to grander first principles, Paul’s amendment speaks to nothing so noble as what we generally mean when we invoke  “freedom” or “liberty” — such as the more stirring guarantees of self-determination, won at such great cost over the previous 200 years. The amendment neither provides a textual home for the assumed constitutional right of privacy, nor gives shape to its amorphous contours; nor does it propose some necessary limit to the executive’s wartime powers over American citizens, foreign or domestic; it doesn’t even speak to equal protection of the laws, or “rights” in any classical sense. In short, the Amendment skips right over the many, serious affronts to personal “liberty” posed by the problems of twenty-first century life, and fails to consider “freedom” in any recognizable sense.

No, nothing so important. What the “Liberty Amendment” does do is end the income tax.

So in Ron Paul’s hands, the greatest watchword of American democracy reduces to a buzzword for radical, Norquist-style libertarianism, “liberty” of the pocketbook, the “freedom” from filling out forms. If this strange act of legerdemain were blissfully confined to the periphery — to a candidate so thoroughly sidelined by his party that he can’t win a caucus by winning it — it would merit a laugh, and a sad shake of the head, but not a post. Instead, Paul’s gimmick represents the clearest iteration of a growing Republican trope, that the defense of economic liberty — from government interference in personal and corporate finance, or from paying that sum of money necessary for the maintenance of an advanced society — is the highest, and not the lowest, calling of the patriot.

This is not to say that freedom doesn’t contain a monetary component; it does. The ability to dispose of one’s assets as one sees fit, and for one’s own benefit, is an indispensable part of the bundle of rights that together comprise “freedom,” in the American sense. And economic compulsion at the hands of a tyrant is, tautologically, tyranny. As a people, we have always said so. But there is a vital difference between the extraction of wealth from a nation in service of an unelected foreign king, and the extraction of wealth that occurs pursuant to a law, duly enacted by a legislature serving in the peoples’ interest and at the peoples’ pleasure, to sustain a free society. The former is tyranny; the latter simply a fact of life in any civil society, for no civilization has ever defended and enabled the property rights of its citizens and not asked a price for the service. This distinction should be obvious from history: the founding generation didn’t fight taxes. They passed taxes. What they fought was taxation without representation.

The prepositional phrase isn’t an afterthought; it’s the entire issue. Similarly, human society and the American people have always signed off on measures that, while restricting the few, inure to the benefit of the many. To the extent that there has ever been any dispute on the issue, it was resolved long ago in the favor of the people over the oligarchs. No private citizen possesses a “liberty” or “freedom” interest in any  activity that enriches him at the expense of the larger society. To say so is not “socialism,” or a denial of basic American freedoms. It’s a bedrock principle of our constitutional system, tracing (at least) to Justice Holmes’ ultimately triumphant dissent in Lochner v. New York:

The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.

We may differ as to the amount of regulation, or the amount of taxation, needed to strike a fair balance between the rights of the few and the needs of the many. But the resolution of those debates in the favor of regulation does not implicate the “freedom” of the regulated, or the “liberty” of the taxed. Reasonable economic policy speaks the pocketbook, not the spirit. “Freedom” and “liberty” demand that the people have a say in how we as a society (“we the people,” to deploy a previously stirring phrase whose appeal the Tea Party has all but killed by overuse) regulate each others’ economic activity. They emphatically do not prevent the government from taking up the vital work of compelling all economic players to adhere to basic rules against sophisticated theft, nor do they prevent the peoples’ representatives from asking that we all contribute in kind to the very government that such makes economic activity possible.

This is to say, assuming a society defined by laws, neither freedom nor liberty are about what we possess. They’re about who we are. This is a distinction we must draw in the coming year.

Reconciling Gingrich to His Tea Party

Allow me to surprise precisely no-one with the following: though bemused by his faux-intellectualism, something other sites are picking up on, too, we’re not big fans of Newt Gingrich here. In fact, I don’t think many people are. I once knew a director of his district office, who had nothing but bad to say about the disgraced Speaker (which he made clear with a killer impression of him, complete with whiny voice). But somehow Gingrich has run all the way to the front of the Republican pack as a Beltway-insider policy wonk, and even shown some signs of staying power, despite a Republican base that’s largely skeptical of both political experience, and, well, intelligence. How?

We might frame Gingrich’s rise as the result of two competing trends in the Republican Party. On the one hand, the classical conservatism that trusts the knowledge of the “common man” over that of the educated elite, as drawn from William F. Buckley and, well, Stephen Colbert (YouTube — 1:40-2:25). And on the other hand, the new vein of Tea Party thought that fetishizes any knowledge of the founding era, especially dimly understood, disconnected, and self-serving anecdotes. If the latter trend trumps the former, Gingrich’s success makes sense, and explains why moments like his braggy promise to teach a history course from the White House don’t sink him. (As a counterfactual, imagine the Republican reaction if President Obama promised to teach a constitutional law course from the White House: “Egotistical fascist pledges to indoctrinate children,” the National Review headline would read.)

But maybe it’s simpler than that. Gingrich’s “understanding” of history manages to validate each erroneous Tea Party hunch about American history and its relevance to the modern era, marshaling an impressive set of out-of-context quotes to justify each deeply flawed plank of their theoretical platform. As an example, the Supreme Court, Gingrich explains in one “white paper” (pdf), was always meant to be weak! It’s all there in the Federalist Papers:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. [. . .] It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

… So long as you imagine Hamilton was proposing rather than describing, trade the underlined “will” for a “must” or a “should,” and ignore context.

By this reading, all Gingrich has done is invent a new way to pander to the Tea Party demographic, a group already primed to accept shoddy history by pundits like Glenn Beck, and by a field equally ignorant of constitutional history. And so long as he uses his professorial persona to further their cause, he can walk the line between “constitutional scholar” and “elitist” without offending either side of the Republican coalition.

There’s a lesson here, too: if earned knowledge isn’t dangerous or “elitist,” except where it disagrees with Republican dogma, it seems to me that Republican anti-intellectualism isn’t a first principle, a deeply-held article of faith, or derived from any sort of respect for the common man. It’s just a coping mechanism, to ignore, stigmatize, or defeat a Democratic Party that’s, on the whole, better at the science of governing. Knowledge isn’t wrong; liberal knowledge is wrong. Good to know.

The 99% Movement Isn’t (or Shouldn’t Be) About Identity Politics

Earlier this week, Politico ran a header casting insurgent liberal leader Elizabeth Warren as “a well-off voice for the poor,” and musing about how “her financial well-being will likely hand conservatives a new line of attack,” and could potentially hurt her reformist credibility.

How? Why?

Wealthy advocates for the poor are not exactly a new phenomenon in American politics. From Jefferson to Jackson to Bryan to Edwards — the latter despite his flaws — grassroots, financial populism has always found its clearest expression in sympathetic elites. That’s the way it has to be, since the poor will, by definition, lack the kind of access necessary to make their case to the nation. What’s much stranger, and really should provoke confusion, is the new politics of wealth where the poor, as a function of social politics, somehow come to defend the very systems that perpetuate inequality of both opportunity and result. Absent such distortion, I suspect we’d see a unity of purpose between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street… but I digress.

The identity of advocates like Elizabeth Warren should be besides the point, because the 99% Movement isn’t (and shouldn’t be) about who you are, the luck you’ve had, and the wealth you want for yourself. Rather, it should be about the kind of world you would wish for anyone in America, regardless of your particular luck and the successes you’ve had. It’s not a movement defined by personal goals (“I should be rich”), but by a society-wide ambition (“We should all have a fair chance, and government has a role in that mission”). Consequentially, individual life stories — and especially those defined by exceptional talent, luck, or sacrifice — aren’t really probative of the movement or its goals, because nothing exceptional generalizes to a national solution. Individual success stories (like Andrew Carnegie, say) speak to the achievability of the American dream on a case-by-case basis, but they don’t offer a solution for poverty, or for rebuilding a sustainable middle class, because how many Andrew Carnegies can there really be in each generation?

It is not surprising, I suppose, that this distinction eludes so many. In a national dialogue defined by individual need and selfishness — who we don’t want to pay for, who doesn’t “deserve” what — a movement defined by mutual obligation and shared destiny strikes a dissonant note. But that’s precisely why it’s so important.

“There Is No Class Here”

There exist some battles in American politics such that to fight them is to lose them. The Republican Party seems to have stumbled squarely into one of them — unrepentant defense of the rich. More’s the pity.

Specifically, Politico spotlights not one but two examples of Republicans adopting the rhetoric, if not the solutions of the Occupy Wall Street movements. On an interview with Eric Cantor (R-Va):

[T]he majority leader said he’s interested in sparking a “policy discussion” about the gap between the rich and the poor because “that’s what’s really at the heart of trying to figure out how we’re going to solve these big challenges.”

“It is the empathy required for those who are down on their luck and making sure that we speak to them and that the middle class in this country understands that we’ve got the leadership that understands how to deal with that, and at the same time, go about fixing these major problems,” Cantor said in the interview. “And how do you go and demonstrate empathy and how best to do that — and that’s really what that speech was about.”

Call it the first real victory for whatever we’re going to call the occupiers, a major repudiation of the Tea Party position that equality of result is irrelevant in a system of assumed equal opportunity, and continued proof that reframing any discussion of the rich/poor gap as “class warfare,” or obfuscating the issue with culture war distractions, only goes so far. We are not a civilization that entertains defense of rank and privilege for its own sake, and a Republican Party that comes too close to resembling the Roman Optimates will fail.

A Note on “Anti-Semitism” at Occupy Wall Street

Because the sentiment is blissfully relegated so far to the fringes of free society, charging a group with antisemitism remains the surefire way to de-legitimize any ideological bloc, however new or old. But it’s a hard charge to pin on Occupy Wall Street, the right side of the internet (e.g.) notwithstanding.
Like any decentralized movement, and God knows like the tea party, our friends at Zucotti Park will have their share of deranged hangers-on. But it would be a mistake to confuse the peripheral attendees trying to usurp the movement’s momentum with the centrally sanctioned message, such as it is. If you look to Occupy Wall Street’s official events — and those do exist — you’ll see Sukkot services in portable sukkahs (above), prayer sessions over the High Holidays, and other indicators pointing to the absence of any real religious divide in the camp.

Confusing the fringe for the center: I thought that was the go-to trick of the “liberal” media in handling the tea party. Though their fringe has long since moved to the center.

“Robert Bork is Still Relevant,” Says Robert Bork

From a Newsweek interview:

Chris Christie Tries to Make My Point: More on Building Common Ground between OWS and the Tea Parties

My thanks, to the non-candidate:

I think if you look at the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Tea Party folks, that they come from the same perspective, they just have different solutions.

Especially because for this attempt to build some common ground, the Governor caught no small amount of flak. Per Beltway Confidential:

But in reality, the two movements offer different solutions precisely because they come from different philosophical perspectives.

The general thrust of the Tea Party movement is a belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility. Tea Partiers want government to take as little of their money as possible and provide as few handouts and subsidies as possible.

By contrast, Wall Street protesters are more focused on income inequality, and they believe that government should play an active role alleviating this problem by imposing a bigger burden on wealthier Americans and offering more services to the poor.

Yes, but no. This isn’t a debate between frontier independence and “gimme!” — though both are fundamentally economic movements. If one sets aside the Marxist minority (as we should), I suspect most individual protestors at Occupy Wall Street would agree with the tea party that capitalism works, and everyone can and should stand on their own, but for two caveats. First, Occupy Wall Street acknowledges (and the tea party ignores) that unrestrained capitalism can actually create impediments to individual wealth creation. Monopolies, securities fraud, reckless speculation, etcetera, are all externalities that can’t be fought by individuals, nor overcome by the individuals they victimize. Second, Occupy Wall Street acknowledges (and the tea party ignores) that in a complicated modern society, some may be left behind by no fault of their own. OWS would answer both problems with government action; the tea parties, with silence.

We should all agree that capitalism works. It’s worked, on the whole, for more than two hundred years. We simply disagree about whether laissez faire, unregulated capitalism adequately provides for the entirety of society, and especially for those on the margins.

Common Ground

Our two packs of extremists — the tea party, and Occupy Wall Street — might have more in common than they let on. Here, an attempted synthesis. If OWS stands for something (which remains debatable), they stand for the proposition that corporations exercise too much control over the American people and their government. And if the tea party knows anything (which is, again, debatable), they know that the American government exercises too much control over her people.

The groups share this notion between them: that due to some force beyond their control, America as a nation-state is less connected to her people today than in the past. This is a fairly general proposition, but both iterations of it are uniquely American concepts, each grounded in Jeffersonian thought.  For your unwashed hippie:

I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

And for your tea partier:

The government is best which governs least.

(Though, in classic tea party fashion, they actually have their history wrong: we merely attribute this last saying to Jefferson, because he would’ve probably agreed with the sentiment. It’s actually Thoreau.)

To build a consensus around these groups, we should start by acknowledging that they’re probably both right, to some extent. Modern America is bigger, more complicated, and more distant from her citizens than at any point in our past. Some of this is unavoidable: you can’t administer a modern nation the size of the United States without “big government,” and you can’t drive its economy without the kind of capitalism that results in some level of corporate excess. The trick is to roll the size of government, and the extent of corporate control, back to necessary levels. Both the tea parties and OWS substantially overshoot that mark, but provided one balances the other, mutually unrealistic demands serve the valuable function of anchoring the parties at matching extremes. Theoretically, any solution between the two polar opposites is up for debate.

The next step is to identify shared goals. Here, it’s arguably the case that big corporations create big government. We need an active SEC (and overwrought regulatory regimes, like Dodd-Frank) to properly address the problems created by corporate excess. Unfortunately, corporate excess isn’t something we can wish away, and it’s not something that’s really accounted for, at all, by “small government” solutions. So long as humanity remains human, the profit motive will exist, and make the kind of de-regulation demanded by tea partiers an impossibility. This fundamental disagreement forecloses a mutually acceptable solution, unless we redefine each side’s goals.

Let’s ask, then, whether the tea party wants less regulation, or transparent, controllable regulation. Modern financial controls presuppose that only the federal government can successfully implement federal legislation — which is to say, the SEC enforces the Securities and Exchange Acts, not the states. Although it would present some legal problems, that doesn’t have to be the case. To keep compliance costs manageable, corporate regulation should be the product of a federal statute, but its implementation could be devolved to the state level… although it would require a systemic overhaul, and the rewriting of most law books. Devolution, too, would have the benefit of keying enforcement to the particular problems of each state: we can imagine a New York Attorney General more aggressively pursuing investment banks, but an Alabama Attorney General leaving well enough alone.

This would be a complicated solution — and it’s not one that’s particularly likely to happen. But to bridge the divide between the two parties’ extremist camps, we need to stop talking past each other, and start thinking creatively.