Beck and King, pt.2: The Company you Keep

If you recall, we're taking a look at Glenn Beck's 'Restoring Honor' rally that was held on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech.  I'm sorting through things because I'm interested to find out just how unintentional the selection of the date really was.

Before we dive in to Beck himself, I thought that it was quite interesting to note that he chose Sarah Palin to be one of the speakers at the rally.  A bit of background, beginning with a bit of history:

The phrase "states' rights" is a dog-whistle for people who are upset that the Federal Government makes them live out the principles of human equality laid out in the Constitution.  It has been so at least as far back as Calhoun in the early nineteenth century: when he talked about "states' rights", he meant slavery*.  "States' rights" was also used as a sort of casus belli for the American Civil War, and a revisionist justification to evade the obvious truth: it was about slavery.  To those who believe this, we ask a simple question: if the war was about a state's right to self-determination regarding slavery, then why did the CSA constitution expressly forbid any state from banning it?

"States' rights" also has a proud history in the twentieth century, being used as a rallying cry for those opposing civil rights, and then again by Reagan near where civil rights workers had been murdered as a part of the GOP's "Southern Strategy."

The phrase has a two-century long history that is inextricably entwined with discrimination.  Now add the fact that her husband belonged to a secessionist** party.  Then consider her epic defense of Dr. Laura post a rant in which the latter said, "If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race,” after a caller had taken offense to her spouting "nigger nigger nigger."

So, that's Sarah Palin, and that's "states' rights."  Now, what are we to make of the fact that, a few months after the first black president took office, she signed a non-binding bill "claim[ing] sovereignty for the state [of Alaska] under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States" which also provided "Notice and Demand to the federal government to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers"?

Nothing good, and the inference becomes even more damning once we realize that Sarah Palin doesn't really believe in "states' rights" at all.  One of the rights that the tenth amendment implicitly reserved to the states is the right to set their own marriage laws, yet, Palin supports a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage which would effectively usurp that right from the states***.  I guess "states' rights" are all well and good when defending ... what, exactly?  But when it comes to constitutionally enshrining discrimination, then "states' rights" can suck it, just like they did in the CSA.

Understand, there may really be people who honestly believe in decentralization/federalism  But if you're going to throw around the notion of "states' rights" a few months into the presidency of the first black man elected to that office, you have first to do some work disinfecting said notion from its two hundred year history of racism--especially if your belief in actual "states' rights" is haphazard at best.  This work has strangely been left undone, which makes Sarah Palin a poor choice at best to speak at a rally on the site and anniversary of Dr. King's famous speech.

This entry is getting long, however, so we'll look at what she actually said in the next.

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*He would occasionally complain about tariffs as well, but mostly because they undermined the economic system which slavery propped up.

**The Alaskan Independence Party "makes great effort to emphasize that its primary goal is merely a vote on secession".  Here's the thing: the question of secession has already been decided.  So they don't actually want to commit treason.  They just want to have a vote on whether or not treason should be committed.

***It's a fair question whether the opposite position--that of supporting a federal establishment of gay marriage--is also a usurpation of states' rights.  I hold the situation to be different, because the question of gay marriage as framed by its proponents is a question of equal protection under law, which the 14th amendment says applies to the states as well.  That position is self-consistent, but complaining about "states' rights" and then advocating a federal amendment abrogating them when they are exercised in a way you disapprove of is not.

Beck and King, pt.1

So now there's been a Teabagger rally on the site of and anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech.

Now, Glenn Beck has stated that the coincidence was just that: an innocuous (or providential) coincidence.  Right.  Sure it was.  You were going to have a big rally at the exact same place and it just happened to be on the exact same day.  Accepting that requires us to believe that Glenn Beck and company were totally, blissfully, and completely ignorant of one of the most important dates in African American history, and I personally find that ... very ... um ... very ...

Okay, so it was a coincidence.  Some people just don't have a head for dates--I'm one of them, and so, apparently, is Glenn Beck.

Now, his response when he found out, and what he said there, and where he stood, and what he wore ... that I'm still sorting through.  That someone should have figured it out before he started getting called out for it goes without saying, but it's Glenn Beck we're talking about here.  If his excuse for co-opting a sacred date is ignorance and incompetence then we're going to have to find some pretty overwhelming evidence for disputing that.  Now, that evidence may or may not exist, and I may or may not eventually decide that I find it persuasive.  I really don't know yet, but I'm going to be taking a look.  I'll let you know what I find.

McCain and the Tea Party

So!  McCain won his primary, and now Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, issues a press release.

 The John McCain of 2009-10 was a McCain we had not seen since the mid-1990s. The Senator owes his victory to the pressure he received from conservatives and Tea Partiers.

To receive that support, he had to give up his maverick positions that have sometimes given aid and comfort to the liberals. I'm sure Senator McCain knows very well that he would not have won if he had continued his reputation as the Democrats' favorite Republican.

McCain ran an aggressive, hard-hitting campaign against former Congressman J. D. Hayworth. If he had taken this same kind of principled conservative and 'take no prisoners' campaign against Barack Obama in 2008, he'd now be in the second year of his presidency.

The strength of the Tea Party cause is being felt in various ways: sometimes by pressuring incumbents into retirement; other times by beating an establishment Republican in a convention or primary; or, in Senator McCain's case, by applying so much heat, they see the virtue of small government, constitutional conservatism.

Conservatives and Tea Party activists look forward to welcoming Senator McCain and other lost conservatives back from their flirtations with big government.

First off, I really wouldn't say that he owes his victory to pressure from the Tea Party: it would probably be more accurate to say that he owes his near-defeat to their support for the other guy.  Still, if your ultimate goal is to swing government to the right rather than get your guy elected, and if you're willing to settle for 'the incumbent ramped up the crazy in order to win the primary', then I guess I understand why they're calling it a victory.

There's so much wrong here: McCain being the Democrats' favorite Republican?  Give me a break--if the left ever liked McCain it wasn't because of his policies so much as the fact that he seemed to be operating on principle rather than political calculation.  Whatever of that good feeling that he didn't piss away during the Bush years he dragged out into the street, set on fire, and ran over the dog of during his most recent presidential bid.  I can't speak for the rest of the Left, but my favorite Republican is Michael Steele, a hilariously incompetent leader who was hired solely on the basis of being black and now can't be fired for that very reason.  I don't actually like him, but the Schadenfreude just tickles.

What I really want to talk about is that last line: flirtations with big government.  Now over.  End.  No more.  Now, credit where it's due: Viguerie isn't one of those newly-minted 'conservatives' who cheered on Bush the Lesser and then suddenly developed a deep concern for America's financial well-being the minute a Democrat stepped into power.  He developed a deep concern for America's financial well-being back in 2006 when it only looked like the Democrats were about to take power.  Even the dust jacket of his 2004 book America's Right Turn still calls the GOP 'an avowedly conservative party'.  Quite the turnaround.

What Viguerie fails to grasp about the Tea Party is that--just like Bush the Lesser, just like Bush Sr., just like Reagan whom he still quotes in reverential tones, just like every single Republican president since Coolidge and Hoover--the Tea Party are not conservatives.  They're split between being angry that government money should go to other people and being bad at math:

BAAAAWWWWW!  Big government and the deficit!
Okay, the biggest single items are military spending and social security--want to cut them?  No.
Well, perhaps you would like to raise taxes then?  No.
Okay, so what do you want to cut?  Entitlements!
You mean the military-industrial complex?  No.
You mean Medicare?  Get your government hands off my Medicare!
So what do you--  Other people's entitlements!
And where were you when Bush wrecked the largest surplus in history, rolled back civil rights, and started a trillion dollars worth of wars?

Oh, right--cheering him on.  And pining for his memory cf the "Miss me?" signs.  To be sure, they are against TARP, but if national averages hold, then about half of them think that it was passed under Obama.

Tell ya' what: when you're serious about raising taxes, chopping the military, chopping entitlements that benefit you, and preserving even those inconvenient bits of the Constitution that say brown people get civil rights (Guantanamo and Arizona, for starters), then let me know, because then you'll actually be conservatives.  Until such time, you're nothing but hypocritical sore losers who believe in nothing but getting back into power.

freedom of speech and its discontents

By now we're all familiar with Dr. Laura's little "n*gger" rant, in which she famously spouted the N-word while whining about how black privilege, "black-think", and how inter-racial couples need to suck it up.*

The exchange was execrable.  However, I'm not here to execrate what was said so much as to react to the reaction.  Dr. Laura said she was quitting; she wasn't even fired (though she might have been had she not announced that she was leaving), she just couldn't take the criticism and decided to bail.

This provoked a rather interesting response; I present Palin's tweets as representative:

First of all: seriously?  'Shackles'?  A batshit crazy former nude model quitting her radio show because people said mean things about her on the Internet really isn't the best analogy for chattel slavery.

But aside from that sort of irritating idiocy, there's a more interesting misconception: Constitutional obstructionists?  First Amendment rights?

Let's refresh our memory:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The 14th amendment then applied that prohibition to the several states; in other words, the government can't tell you what to say--or, more importantly, what not to say.  Certain exceptions apply--'Fire!' in a crowded theater type things, incitements to violence which result in violence (in other words, if I say, 'Go kill the crazy cracker lady!" and one of my readers does so, then I could conceivably be held responsible if I were shown to have influenced his crime), and Janet Jackson's boob--but other than that it's pretty much carte blanche.

So we have a Constitutional guarantee that the government will not engage in censorship.  Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the government hasn't engaged in censorship.  No law has been passed in this case restricting Dr. Laura's free speech.  What happened was that people called her a racist and wanted her off the air.

Now here's the funny thing about free speech.  It means that the government can't restrain or punish your speech.  It does NOT mean that other people are obligated to give you a forum in which to practice it, or that no one gets to come back at you afterward.  You have the right to say whatever you want free of government interference.  You do NOT have the inalienable right to use millions of dollars worth of other people's recording and broadcasting equipment at will (and in any case, she wasn't fired--she quit).  You do NOT have the inalienable right to the money of people who advertise on your program even if they decide that they no longer wish to support what you have to say.  You do NOT have the inalienable right not to be criticized--that is OTHER PEOPLE'S freedom of speech, and it is as sacrosanct as your own.

So, let's recap:

Crazy lady says the N-word on her radio show: free speech.

Other people call her a racist idiot and call for cancellation of her show: also free speech.

If the government had done something to her for her outburst, then I would have a serious issue with that, just as I had serious issues about the mindbogglingly retarded overreaction to Janet Jackson's boob**.

However, if Sarah Palin honestly believes that people saying mean things about someone on the Internet is a violation of that person's free speech (rather than the critics exercising their own free speech), then Sarah Palin is an idiot.  And if she doesn't honestly believe it, then she's a liar.  Take your pick.
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*The exchange also contained egregious factual errors: for example, white voters did not vote Obama into power.  Obama won the popular election by an overwhelming 53% to 46%, but lost among white voters by a jaw-dropping 55% to 43%.  And his election didn't soothe racial tensions or prove the post-racial nature of society so much as bring out the bigots.

**I here mean the government reaction, not the popular reaction.  I thought that the people were idiots; I thought that the increased regulations were unconstitutional.  There's a difference.

dear fellow christians

We really need to have a chat about this mosque thing.

The gut reaction here is understandable.  9/11 is still a psychological scar, and when you hear that a mosque is being built at Ground Zero ... well, emotions can run high.  It seems in poor taste at best.

The thing is though, that 'do as ye would be done by' still applies even if we're really, really mad.  Yes, the men who attacked us on 9/11 were Muslims, but they were representatives not of all Muslims everywhere but rather of a small group of extremists.  It is not right to condemn the many because of the actions of the few: rather, the Bible in several places states that the actions of the few can redeem the many.  God promised to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if He could find five righteous men.  Surely so many can be found among the world's billion plus Muslims--surely so many can be found among those who will make use of the proposed center.

"For in the same way you judge others," Jesus said, "you will be judged."  Yes, Islamic extremists attacked us, and many immoral acts have been justified by its dogmas.  But the same is true of Christianity: the Inquisition, anti-Semitism (look up Martin Luther's "On the Jews and their Lies"), slavery (specifically the justification from Noah's curse: "For 'cursed be Canaan' as the Bible once said / And since Canaan was gone, curse you guys instead"), abortion clinic bombings, the Crusades, etc.

Should Muslim construction projects be banned near the site of crimes justified by Muslim dogma or some perversion thereof?   "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you": should Christian construction projects be banned near the site of crimes justified by Christian dogma or some perversion thereof?  Between defense of slavery and justification for native genocide, that would exclude most of the Western Hemisphere.

I know you feel that it's different.  That those things happened in the past, that they weren't done by real Christians, or at least by your group of Christians.  That you've never seen the victims.  The crucial difference, though is that on 9/11, you were attacked (at least by proxy), and the emotions still run high.

How can I make this real?  Well, the Crusades marched through Bulgaria, where I live.  They didn't come to conquer, they just marched through.  The memory and resentment of that event are still strong enough that Campus Crusade for Christ was not allowed to establish operations here--they had to resort to the subterfuge of creating a sub-organization called something else.

It's an analogous question, then, whether or not adherents to the western strains of Christianity should have the right to build churches here, on the sites of country-wide crimes that made 9/11 pale in comparison.  There are those in Bulgaria who think they should not--and not for this reason only, but for the same sort of tribal/territorial impulse also at work in the mosque opposition.  (America is ours not theirs, isn't it?  Those who attack the Church here say the same thing about Bulgaria.)  Modern Protestants are not Medieval Catholics any more than Al Qaeda is Cordoba; it is irrelevant to the persecutors.  In them, I see unthinking opposition, hatred towards those they perceive as insidious outsiders, violence, retribution, and deep-seated anger and unreason.  I have myself been on the receiving end of such things, and how much more so the other believers here--your brothers and sisters.

I oppose this sort of thinking all the more for having seen its consequences firsthand.  Imagine then my dismay at discovering in my fellow American Christians attitudes indistinguishable from those of the despicable persecutors and demagogues to whom we have grown accustomed here.  I've heard the sort of rhetoric that you're using, and I've seen the sort of outrage that you're professing--I've read about them in history, too, but till now I've only really experienced them in the persons of the communist holdouts and orthodox theofascists.

Now that's a disturbing thought, but that's why (among all other reasons: rule of law, freedom of religion, property rights, and the fact that enlisting the cooperation of reasonable Muslims against the extremists is the only way to beat them) I have to defend the Cordoba folks: because failing to stand up against the same tribalism and lump-them-all-together-ism that I've been the victim of diminishes me.

Prop 8 court case: a tempered response

I've been avoiding writing about the recent prop 8 victory because I wasn't really sure what to say about it other than to repeat what everyone else was saying:

Yes, I think that gays should get equal protection under law, which in this case means full marriage equality.

Yes, I think that prop 8 was a deliberate attempt to deprive a minority of its rights based solely on animus.

Yes, the fact that it was shot down in court makes me quite happy.

Yes, I agree absolutely that no one should have to wait for their rights.

But the sad truth is that they do have to wait for their rights, and we all have to fight for their rights. In that fight, as in any fight, there are tactics involved. So while I agree with the spirit and rightness of the litigation, and while I'm thrilled with the initial decision in our favor, I have rather serious doubts as to whether or not this particular tactic will ultimately advance our cause or set it back.

The historical precedent for this particular struggle is the fight against miscegenation laws. In that struggle, the battle was mostly won on the ground before the case went to the Supreme Court—most of the States that had such laws had actually repealed them by the time that SCOTUS struck down the few holdouts. It's a long struggle, and a slow one, but it works—the Supreme Court merely affirmed what the majority of Americans had already decided, namely, that the right to marry whomever one pleases extends even to mixed-race couples. The appeal to human rights and the Constitution in gay marriage is analogous, but the situation on the ground is not: the states with some form of amendment banning gay marriage far outnumber those allowing it. The consensus among blogs that I read is that the Supreme Court does not like to take the lead on these kinds of issues. That's unfortunate—right is right no matter who agrees with you—but that's the way it is. In an ideal world, it wouldn't be, but then again in an ideal world we wouldn't have had to fight in the first place.

If the Supreme Court finds for the proponents—in other words, if they decide that 'equal protection under law' doesn't actually mean what I think it means—then it will be a serious blow for the cause. It wouldn't invalidate gay marriage in states which have such laws, and we could still fight it out state-by-state as we have been doing up till now. However, a decision against will undermine the efforts to win those battles.

The big issue as I see it, however, is the holdout states. Lots of states had already repealed their own miscegenation laws before the SCOTUS decision, but that decision was necessary to settle with the holdouts. With so many states passing laws or even amending their constitutions to ban gay marriage, and so many groups and individuals lining up to oppose it, the state-by-state battles will get ugly, and there will be a lot of holdouts. Just like with miscegenation, we're going to need that eventual Supreme Court decision to wipe away the last entrenchments of those determined to be more equal than others.

The justices of the Supreme Court—like any other group of people—really don't like changing their minds. Yes, SCOTUS has reversed itself before, but once they have officially declared that X is not covered by the constitution, they are understandably reticent to go back and say, no, sorry, actually X is covered by the constitution, and their decision on the matter is of course binding on the lower courts where any future litigation would begin. That's why the current litigation makes me nervous. Nothing would make me happier than a SCOTUS decision declaring gay marriage constitutionally protected. But a decision against us now will postpone—by years or perhaps decades—the judicial finalization of the process of accepting gays as equals.

It's a gamble, and one that many are understandably leery of. Don't get me wrong: I'm happy the initial decision went our way, and I fervently hope that we win overall. But I'm not breaking out the champagne just yet.

a handy flowchart

Liberal Socialists

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine in which he used the term "liberal socialist". But he used it not to refer to the sworn enemies of the hardline, old-school, conservative socialists, but as a way of implying that the ideas of 'liberal' and 'socialist' are inextricably linked.

Though there is some overlap in goals (both want everyone to receive health care, both oppose militarism and the security state, both support civil rights), the conflation of the two is the result of demagogues like Rush, Beck, and Rove playing on residual populist hatred for all things Marxist as a convenient opportunity to score points by violating the ninth commandment vis-a-vis the political left.  I am a liberal, and frankly Americans have no idea what socialism actually is or looks like apart from the half-remembered bugbears of the Cold War.

For example, when Obama proposed a health care plan that essentially subsidized the purchase of private insurance, hundreds of pundits who wouldn't know Eugene V. Debs if he rose from the grave to eat their brains* went on Faux news and called it 'socialist.'  The actual Socialist Party USA (yes, there is such a thing) mentioned that Obama "scored many popularity points for promising 'universal healthcare coverage'" as a preface to condemning him for the fact that "[o]nce in office, after taking millions from the healthcare lobby, his rhetoric shifted to the neoliberal promise of 'choice and competition' in healthcare.  The primary problem ...  is that all of the changes [the bills] propose are made within a for-profit system."  Note the scorn with which they typed "neoliberal."  Socialists didn't want to funnel money to private insurers through Obamacare, they wanted nationalization:

The Socialist Party USA therefore encourages its members and supporters to continue their work in the single-payer movement and to pressure elected representatives to vote “No” on the Senate proposal and, eventually, on the merged bill.  All non-violent forms of protest should be employed to prevent the passage of this legislation. The protests should clearly oppose the legislation. We do not want a stronger public option, we want what is rightfully ours–-unfettered access to healthcare services.

There was debate among liberals whether a public option would have been better or worse than the bill that ended up passing, but no one suggested: "remov[ing] the profit-motive from the system."  But that's precisely what socialism is: nationalization.  Just read George Orwell's call for socialist revolution, "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius":

Socialism is usually defined as ‘common ownership of the means of production’. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State.

...

However, it has become clear in the last few years that ‘common ownership of the means of production’ is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education.

You don't have to believe in any of that except the necessity of political democracy and presentation of equal opportunity through education to be a liberal.  In fact, the vast majority of liberals do not desire or advocate such things, all the contrary squawking of the demagogues be damned.  In general, liberalism reflects a dissatisfaction with the state of things and desire to change society for the better (not that every proposed change actually improves society, but this is a practical problem rather than an ideological one).  Contrast conservatism which, broadly and charitably defined, is satisfaction with the status quo and desire to protect it against potentially destructive changes.

Since liberalism in effect means forward movement, the definition will change quite a bit place to place and time to time.  Speaking as an American liberal in 2010, if I had to pick three defining features of my liberalism, they would be these:

1) Support for civil rights coupled with the realization that the rights of out-groups are as sacrosanct as the rights of in-groups: the practical application of 'whatever you have done to the least of these.'  This has far-reaching repercussions in both domestic and foreign policy.

2) Care for the environment.

3) Using government to curb the inherent excesses of capitalism, whether through regulation of abusive and destructive practices or through caring for those who get shafted by the system.

It pains me to disappoint, but nationalization of all means of production just doesn't make the list.

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 *Of course, Faux studios are the last place on Earth where you would go looking for brains.