Obama: Fear of a Black Messiah

Another GOP meme I find intriguing is that of "Obama as black Messiah". It was, after all, J. Edgar Hoover's fear of a "black Messiah" that drove the FBI's covert campaign against Martin Luther King.

The implication now as then seems to be that only those in the grip of religious mania or delusion could follow the leadership of a African American.

Obama and Experience

It’s amusing, when presented with the GOP meme of Obama’s lack of “experience”, to reflect that Abraham Lincoln had even less experience in elective office prior to becoming President. Of course, I suspect that many present day “Republicans” wouldn’t have voted for Lincoln either

GLenn Greenwald: Fight fire with Fire

Glen Greenwald is absolutely right on this. Of course the devil is, as always, in the details.

Protesting Democrats: The Radical Option

There has been a continuing tension on the Democratic side of the political divide over the efficacy of mass protest. Many have expressed the view that such activities are a waste of time and resources, even counter productive. Recent events in Jena, LA have led some to reconsider this position. Some now, rather grudgingly, admit that national mobilizations may make sense in certain cases but only as a media tool rather than as part of an overall political strategy. I believe this revised view shares with its predecessor a fundamentally flawed political perception at odds with democratic values.

Frankly, I think the attitude that one takes toward mass protest is a significant dividing line between progressive political activists and those who imagine themselves to be such but who are actually a variety of political technocrat.

You can see this in the thrust of their complaints. Mass protest are indicted because they can't be shown to have an immediate impact on policy. They are scorned because their results cannot be tabulated and quantified. They are events that take place outside of the formal political structures and serve no institutional purpose. Indeed, mass protests are by nature anti-institutional.

Of course such criticism can only be definitive if one takes the position that institutional means are complete and sufficient in themselves to effect necessary political change. An effective progressive political activism cannot be limited to such a narrow field of activity. At least not if such "progressivism" embraces a democratic character.

Democratic politics, like democracy itself, cannot be reduced to electoral activity alone. Elections do not define democracy nor do institutions define a democratic society. Rather, elections and political institutions are defined by the democratic character of the society that produces them. Those who imagine that one can have a Democratic society without the inconvenience of an aroused and mobilized citizenry, willing to operate outside of existing structures, don't grasp the essential principles of democracy: the empowering of the otherwise powerless and the negation of accumulated privilege and power in the hands of a favored few.

Mass protest is at least as much about its effect on those who participate as it is about the impact on institutions or elected officials. Perhaps moreso. When such protests are broad and inclusive, they have an energizing and emancipatory effect on those participating, if for no other reason than that they break through the sense of isolation and irrelevance inculcated by the dominant institutional narratives.

Such a sense of empowerment, where present, is infectious. It is carried by participants back into their communities and transmitted to their friends and neighbors. In short, mass protest is a necessary building block toward the creation of a mass movement.

It's worth recalling that there has never been a fundamental reordering of political or social relations in US history that was not accompanied by such a movement. Nor did such movements evaporate with the election of candidates nominally committed to their goals. They remained active and watchful to insure that such commitment amounted to more than electoral rhetoric.

It's also worthwhile to recognize that longstanding institutions, whatever their presumed democratic impulse, are always biased towards maintaining the status quo. Institutions always favor established modes, forms and relationships of power. This being the case, they cannot, by themselves, be effective tools for challenging the ruling narrative or consensus.

This brings us to the grittier side of mass protest. The implicit threat of mass defection by the citizenry from the cramped norms of established politics. The repudiation of the legitimacy such norms and the resort to a politics at war with established institutions of power both political and social.

No doubt stating the possibility of such a radicalization so baldly will upset and discomfit a significant number of people. However, the radical possibility is intrinsic to any meaningful notion of democracy. Even today, there is nothing more radical than the notion that individuals, lacking wealth, privilege or influence, nevertheless have a right to a say in the political, social and economic decisions that govern their lives. Particularly so when we consider that in the United States today, there are those occupying the public pulpits who argue openly and without apology that the wealthy should have the dominant voice in our affairs while the non-wealthy should have little or none.

There is a reason that the right to public protest was written into our Constitution and it wasn't because the framers thought that such protest should substitute for elections or would serve an institutional purpose. To the contrary. The right to protest was so enshrined specifically because it stood separate from and was antagonistic to institutional power.

The framers weren't starry eyed idealists when it came to political institutions anymore than they were on social and economic questions. They understood that even the best designed of such institutions were prone to ossification and decay. They were equally aware of the dangers posed by the accumulation of concentrated power and privilege within such structures. The only effective counterbalance they saw to these dynamics was an active citizenry capable of mobilizing itself independent from the established political order. Neither were they ignorant of the threat to the established order implicit in such activism. While they may not have been eager to embrace such an overturn, they certainly didn't shrink from it.

<>When the few succeed in dominating the many by reducing democratic processes to sterile exercises in Kabuki or empty ceremony, it is time to raise the prospect of re-writing the social contract. This cannot be done without a mass movement engaged in mass action. To reject this is to condemn oneself to the role of sycophant or bit player on the political stage.

Right Wing Amerika Haters and Patriotism

When Dinesh D'Souza came out with his attack on contemporary "Liberal" US culture awhile back, the Conservative triage got to work to distance themselves from his backhanded apologia for "anti-americanism." Nevertheless, those familiar with the turbid undercurrents of American reaction were well aware that he was simply giving vent to a submerged hostility for modern American life unremarkable on the Right. Now, as if to re-emphasize the point comes Kathleen Parker to pick up the torch dropped from D'Souza's faltering hands.

Again,. this antipathy for the United States as it actually exists is neither a new or particularly remarkable phenomenon on the Right. Despite their penchant for pseudo-patriotic boiler plate, it's clear that many on the Right actively despise much of US culture, both political and social.

This poses an interesting question. Exactly what is this "America" of which the Right Wing speaks so loquaciously? Should the Left be engaged in a bidding war over who can wave the flag most often or shout "patriotic" cliches the loudest?

Before you praise or condemn something, you first need an accurate perception of what it is. Given this, the real criteria isn't the frequency of "praise" but its content.

It's easy to say "I love the flag!" repeatedly but occaisionally, it's necessary to note that the flag has been flying 24/7 for more than a year and looks like a tattered, washed out rag. Perhaps it ought to be replaced?

Likewise, its easy for some to aggressively assert their love for "America", without really articulating what this "America" that they love so much actually is. Not rarely, it turns out that the image of "America" they love is one that excludes large swathes of their fellow Americans whom they detest.

On the other hand, there are those whose love for America is bound up with the realization that America is nothing if it isn't the myriad and diverse peoples who occupy its territory. This conception of America doesn't lend itself to the hypnotic mantra of USA, USA, USA, or to a monochromatic narrative of American history as a preordained, linear, triumphal progress. This because a nation so diverse in substance must, of necessity, possess a history no less diverse. Such diversity entails conflict and contradiction.

Those in the former category do not love "America" as it actually exists. They love a mythic conception of America that suits their prejudices. Such a love requires no investigation into the actual realities of American life and history. Rather, it actively militates against such inquiry, since it would challenge the the cherished image worshipped by its adherents. A worship which is, in the final analysis, self worship.

Those inhabiting the latter category are certainly not saints. They don't possess any fewer vices, flaws or human failings. However, what they do possess is a fundamentally different outlook and frame of reference. Their America is, by definition, external to themselves and composed as much by those differing from them as those like them. Its dynamic drives them away from simpleminded sloganeering towards investigation of and consultation with, the actualities of American life and history.

As everyone ought to know, that life and history is as filled with failed promise and tragedy as it is with promises redeemed and triumph. For those whose affection for America is an affection for its people, this presents no more of an obstacle than loving one's family despite their flaws.

For those whose love for America amounts to nothing more than a love for their self image, such candor is unbearable and therefore treasonous.

Marty hath murdered sleep.

Eric Alterman has a fine dissection of Marty Peretz's role in the destruction of The New Republic and the reasons for it posted up at The American Prospect. Prepare for the inevitable cries of "self-hating Jew" and "anti-Semitism", yadda-yadda-yadda.

Andrew Sullivan's "Gay Agenda"

I happened across a post over at Ezra Klein's site that linked to this post by Sully who continues to flog the theory that the movement for Gay rights is essentially conservative. matt had some thoughts on it and so do I.

I think Ezra's discription of Sullivan's conservatism as a sort of platonic ideal is apropos. It's always seemed to me that Sullivan was a political hybrid produced when quasi Randian notions of libertarianism filtered across the Atlantic to pollinate with the traditional tory politics of the UK. Thatcherism was a side product, with all its blather about creating an opportunity society while it got about the serious business of breaking the trade unions.

Sullivan is what you get when a typical conservative, middle class Brit discovers that his sexuality simply can't be fitted into the dominate frame of social respectability. In times past he would have remained cautiously closeted, his personal pecadillos treated as a private eccentricity so long as he paid tribute to popular prejudice through hypocrisy and avoided being arrested in public toilets.

It's Sullivan's fortune that he came of political age at a time when the modern Gay Rights movement had exploded on the scene. A rebellion that was fundamentally anti-conservative from its inception. It was this movement that provided the material and political conditions that allowed Sullivan the option to live an openly Gay life. The irony of a conservative liberated in his sexuality by the very forces that he despises is thick and one that Sullivan seems incapable of digesting.

This may be the central contradiction in Sullivan's thought. He wants to reconcile the irreconciliable. He believes in an idealized traditionalism in social, institutional and political life even as he desires the repudiation of such sentiments in a crucial area effecting his personal life. He attempts to paper this over with his transparent and anachronistic evocation of an "integrationist" agenda.

This is yet another thick irony. As others have suggested, this standard for "conservatism" would embrace everything from the civil rights movement to women's suffrage to abolitionism. There are many ways to describe such movements but "conservative" is not among them. To use conservatism in this way is to empty it of all practical meaning, as anyone with a basic grasp of US political history would know.

Here, I think, one can locate the fundamental incapacity of Sullivan as pundit and theorist in the environment of US politics. He really doesn't understand much about the US politically, historically or culturally. Despite his attempts at "americanizing" himself, he remains what he began as: a worshipful, British accolyte of an imagined and idolized US. Not so different from those of the post WWII generation in the UK who, intoxicated by the flash and noise US pop culture in the form of rock and roll, repackage it in an idiosycratically British sensibility and shipped it back to us via the "British Invasion". In that instance, the US audience embraced the offering, not for its American roots but as an authentic expression of contemporary British pop culture.

In Sullivan's case, his target audience didn't really buy his brand. The US Right has neither the need of, or interest in, any perspective the beyond the self referential. That Sullivan failed to recognize this from the beginning illustrates how much he confuses his wishes with reality.

After all, the social and political current that he sought to identify with reacted to rock and roll by urging it be banned and making bonfires of Beatles records.

Fragging the Troops

Continuing to review the role of the American Legion as worker bees for the right wing, Rick Perlstein has an informative post detailing who actually was "spitting on" Vietnam Vets back in the day. Recent attacks on Iraq veterans who have begun criticizing the Iraq slaughter are just the latest installment in an established, despicable tradition.

Perlstein also raises a very cogent point. For all the hagiography about the greatest generation, little recognition is given to the fact that WWII was a generational trauma. The boys who went off to defeat fascism on the battlefield, in the air and on the seas, came back as indelibly scarred men. For good or ill, they've lived the balance of their lives viewing the world through the lens of that experience. For many, every military conflict since then has simply been an extension of their own war. I remember one such vet being quoted in the aftermath of 9/11 saying that he'd seen it all before but this time he knew what the outcome would be: "We win."

North Korean invasion of South Korea=Pearl Harbor, Korean War=WWII
Tonkin gulf incident = Pearl Harbor, Vietnam = WWII
9/11=Pearl Harbor, War on Terror/Iraq=WWII

It's really no surprise that the US has allowed itself to be misled into one bloody morass after another.