“So Much For The Nation’s Falling Stature”: Unfortunately For Conservatives And Mitt Romney, Reality Keeps Getting In The Way
A few weeks ago, as part of a larger condemnation of the Obama presidency, Mitt Romney insisted the last five years have been awful for the United States’ stature around the world. “It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office,” the failed candidate said, adding, “Our esteem around the world has fallen.”
For the right, this is a common line of attack. Tea Party favorite Ben Carson recently argued, “Russians seem to be gaining prestige and influence throughout the world as we are losing ours.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on “Face the Nation” a month ago that America’s willingness to keep our commitments has been “in doubt for some time now” around the globe “because of the policies of the Obama administration.”
Unfortunately for conservatives, reality keeps getting in the way. Zack Beauchamp reported this morning:
American foreign policy may look like it’s in shambles sometimes, but the world doesn’t seem to think so. According to Gallup’s US Global Leadership Project, a gigantic survey of over 130,000 people in 130 countries, approval of the United States’ leadership bounced up five percentage points in 2013. That’s a lot.
Gallup used its survey data to estimate the percentage of people in each of these 130 countries who say they approve or disapprove of “the leadership of the United States” – basically, of President Obama.
Though there are, not surprisingly, broad regional differences, I found it interesting that in Asia, support for U.S. leadership is stronger now than at any time during either the Obama or the Bush administrations.
The only continent in which U.S. stature has seen a decline is in Africa, but even here, approval of the United States is higher than anywhere else.
What’s more, Gallup also found, “The world felt a little better about U.S. leadership last year, giving it the highest global approval ratings out of five global powers, including Germany, China, the European Union, and Russia.”
Sorry, Mitt.
The political world can, of course, have a debate over why U.S. stature appears to be improving abroad. Beauchamp makes a persuasive case that it’s the result of several factors, including improved European economies, a declining U.S. drone war, and improved relations with Central America.
We can also have a discussion about where the nation’s reputation would be now were it not for the hit we took during the Bush/Cheney era, when the United States’ reputation suffered an actual, not an imaginary, blow.
Regardless, it seems hard to take seriously the assertion that “our esteem around the world has fallen.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 11, 2014
“Fetal Personhood Ploy”: Anti-Choice Lawmakers In South Carolina Want Pregnant Women To Arm Themselves To “Protect The Unborn”
A state Senate panel in South Carolina advanced legislation Thursday that states a pregnant person has a right to use deadly force to protect the “unborn … from conception until birth.” The measure is called the “Pregnant Women’s Protection Act,” and it is model legislation written and disseminated by Americans United for Life.
As usual, the words “pregnancy” and “protection” are red herrings.
First, South Carolina’s “stand your ground” law already allows for the use of deadly force anywhere a person claims to fear for their lives or the life of someone around them. (It is a terrible and dangerous law.) So opponents of the “Pregnant Women’s Protection Act” have rightly pointed out that this measure is entirely redundant.
But the bill does serve a serious purpose for anti-choice policymakers and activists working to endow fertilized eggs with personhood status and legal rights, a move that would suppress the rights of pregnant people and likely ban abortion and most forms of contraception. The measure tries to accomplish this — or at least open the door to these possibilities — by defining life as beginning at conception.
Here’s the language from the bill:
(1) ‘Pregnant’ means the female reproductive condition of having an unborn child in the female’s body.
(2) ‘Unborn child’ means the offspring of human beings from conception until birth.
The measure also pays considerable lip service to the very real threat of violence faced by women and pregnant people, but does nothing to strengthen existing anti-violence laws, create additional funding for domestic violence service providers or increase actual resources to aid people in violent situations.
None of this was lost on the opponents of the measure. “No one disputes that violence against pregnant women is a concern in our state and few would deny the need for swift action to stop any instances of further violence,” Emma Davidson, spokeswoman for South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families, told the Aiken Standard. “But it is hypocritical to introduce legislation claiming to protect victims of domestic abuse, rape and violence while simultaneously outlawing emergency contraception, a key treatment option for those victims.”
And for those looking for further proof that the “Pregnant Women’s Protection Act” is just a fetal personhood ploy, the committee also debated a fetal personhood measure during the same session.
The “Personhood Act” would outlaw abortion outright by granting legal rights to fertilized eggs and fetuses.
By defining life as starting at conception, Davidson explained, the measure could also outlaw birth control and emergency contraception. And as University of South Carolina family law professor Marcia Zug told the Aiken Standard, the bill could ban abortions without exception. “A fetal personhood bill which would outlaw abortions in even the most life-threatening of circumstances has never been an option with the Supreme Court. It is clearly unconstitutional,” Zug said.
And if lawmakers are really interested in reducing rates of domestic violence in the state, they may instead want to focus their efforts on funding domestic violence service providers who have had to reduce services in the face of budget cuts. According to a nationwide survey on domestic violence service providers, in a single day in South Carolina, 16 requests from domestic violence victims were turned down because programs did not have the resources to provide them emergency shelter, housing, transportation, childcare or legal representation
More women are killed by men in South Carolina than any other state in the nation; the rate of women killed by men in South Carolina is more than double the national average.
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, April 11, 2014
“A Theological-Political Vision Lies In Tatters”: Catholicism, George W. Bush, And The Cluelessness Of The Religious Right
Once upon a time, the religious right’s leading intellectuals told themselves an inspiring story. It went something like this: From the time of the Puritans all the way down to the early 1970s, American public life was decisively shaped by the moral and spiritual witness of the Protestant Mainline’s leading churches: The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians.
But then the Great Collapse began, as these venerable churches sold their souls to the counterculture, abandoned the moral and religious tenets of historical Christianity, embraced a series of increasingly left-wing and anti-American causes, and saw their numbers (and then their cultural influence) plummet. Today these churches are an intellectual and demographic shell of their former selves.
This was a potentially disastrous development, depriving America of the theologically grounded public philosophy that it needs in order to thrive. But as luck — or providence — would have it, the decline of the Mainline churches set in at the precise moment when two other monumental cultural and religious developments unfolded: The rise of a politicized form of Protestant evangelicalism and a revival of intellectual and spiritual energy in the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. The time was ripe for evangelicals and Catholics to come together to form a successor to the Mainline churches.
The public philosophy promulgated by this new-fangled amalgam of evangelicalism and Catholicism (with the former supplying the foot soldiers and the latter providing the ideas) would be staunchly opposed to abortion and euthanasia. It would be strongly anti-communist. It would be passionately pro-capitalist. It would favor using military force to promote democracy. And it would re-describe the United States, its history, and its form of government in providential-theological terms, with the rights espoused in the nation’s founding documents declared to derive directly from medieval concepts of natural law.
Once the country (or at least a sizable majority) embraced this public philosophy — turning it into a governing philosophy — the United States would supposedly flourish as never before, protecting the unborn, unleashing economic liberty at home, defending democracy and fighting tyranny abroad, and most of all bringing the nation back to its properly Christian roots after the silly season of the 1960s.
It is exceedingly odd that Joseph Bottum has written a book — An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America — devoted to elaborating this story as if it were original to him, when in fact it is derived almost entirely from the writings of the man for whom both of us once worked: The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
You see, I once edited Neuhaus’ monthly magazine First Things. When I quit to write a book denouncing the ideological project outlined above, Neuhaus brought on Bottum (then the literary editor of The Weekly Standard) as my successor. When Neuhaus died in January 2009, Bottum became editor-in-chief of the magazine. (Twenty-one months later he was summarily dismissed by its governing board for reasons that have never been publicly explained.)
Bottum, a published poet, is a gifted prose stylist. That gives a distinctive flair to his version of the story. But the story itself, in every detail, comes straight from the writings of Neuhaus and his small circle of ideological compatriots: Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Robert P. George foremost among them.
In Bottum’s hands, no less than in the essays and books in which it was originally formulated, the story has some explanatory power. The decline of the Mainline churches is indeed a significant event in recent American cultural and political history — and one that has received insufficient attention from both scholars and intellectuals. (My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty’s thoughtful reflections on Bottum’s treatment of the topic can be read here.)
But the story also obscures far more than it clarifies. For one thing, Bottum can’t seem to figure out if the problems he identifies with post-Mainline America (including the absence of a unifying, overarching moral consensus and the subsequent rise in acrimonious conflict in our political culture) are a result of Protestant Christianity’s inability to defend itself against an aggressive form of secularism, or if, instead, what we call secularism is actually just a desiccated form of Protestantism (hence the reference to a “post-Protestant ethic” in his subtitle). Either way, Protestant Christianity is to blame for America’s problems.
Which is why Bottum (following Neuhaus and the others) turns to Catholicism for a solution.
The closest we’ve come to seeing this theological-political vision in action was in George W. Bush’s second inaugural address. You remember: It was a speech that consisted of a series of sweeping assertions about America’s God-appointed task to end “tyranny in our world.” (Bush made more than 50 references to “freedom” and “liberty” in a speech of 2,000 words.)
For Bottum, this was “the most purely philosophical address in the history of America’s inaugurations,” one that deployed “a Catholic philosophical vocabulary” rooted in natural law theory to “express a moral seriousness the nation needs.”
That’s one way to look at it.
Here’s another: The speech was a crude expression of American parochialism and pious self-congratulation — the kind of address you’d expect from someone who believed toppling Saddam Hussein was a sufficient condition for creating a functioning democracy in Iraq, and who thinks that presidential rhetoric can rise no higher than paraphrasing the lyrics to “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the speech of a simple-minded man leading a simple-minded administration.
The most interesting and original thing in Bottum’s book is a new-found pessimism about the practical prospects for the theological-political engagement he still favors. But I would be more impressed with this darkening mood if it grew out of a realization that great political leadership involves far more than moralistic sermonizing — and that something as partisan and sectarian as a Catholicized version of the Republican Party platform could never serve as the unifying, overarching moral vision of a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Instead, we’re left with vague, evasive statements about how “Catholicism as a system of thought proved too foreign” to play its appointed role as cheerleader for American exceptionalism.
Poor Joseph Bottum. Poor religious right.
They’re down for the count, splayed out on the mat. And they haven’t got a clue about what the hell happened.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 11, 2014
“As Dumb As It Is Predictable”: The Dumbest Thing The Right Is Saying About Sebelius’ Replacement
President Obama may have had troubles with the Healthcare.gov rollout, but he’s rolling out a replacement for departing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nicely. Appointing Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was confirmed last year to head the Office of Management and Budget 96-0, virtually insures he’ll get someone into Sebelius’ seat before midterm politics heat up.
That doesn’t mean the right won’t try to throw garbage at the centrist and well-respected Burwell. On PJ Tatler today they’re calling her “the person who shut down the veterans’ memorials,” because as OMB chief, she signed the memo telling agencies “to execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations” when Sen. Ted Cruz and the GOP shut down the government last year.
You’ll recall that Cruz and the right had the audacity to blame Obama and the Democrats for the shutdown, which backfired on them spectacularly. But not before Cruz, Sarah Palin and a Confederate-flag-waving moron challenged the closure of the World War II veterans’ memorial with a protest that moved to the White House, where Larry Klayman told President Obama “to put the Quran down … and come out figuratively with your hands up.” Good times.
So yeah, they’re going to try that whole thing again, but it’s not going to work. (An aside: this NBC News story calls Burwell “the woman who ordered the government shutdown,” which at the time probably seemed like a feature writer’s flourish to pull people into a dull story about the OMB director, but in hindsight didn’t accurately describe the way the mess unfolded.) Sen. John McCain immediately tweeted, “Sylvia Burwell is an excellent choice to be the next #HHS Secretary.” While righties are hoping that red state Democrats will turn on the woman who supposedly ordered the shutdown of veterans’ memorials, Sen. Joe Manchin praised Burwell’s appointment, too. (It probably helps that she’s from West Virginia.)
On the larger question of Sebelius’ legacy, we can only say that millions of people got health insurance, and millions more still need it. Ezra Klein trolled the right by declaring that it means “Obamacare has won,” which is pretty funny given that he helped lead the national freak-out over Healthcare.gov’s troubles back in October. Jonathan Cohn has a more balanced take in the New Republic. He acknowledges Sebelius’ management mistake in letting the federal exchange website’s troubles mount without letting the president know – there’s evidence she herself didn’t know – but he appropriately notes she’ll be remembered for the millions newly insured, particularly because she worked hard with Republican governors who bucked conservative constituencies to expand Medicaid.
Of course, confirming Burwell won’t mean the GOP stops trying to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. They had mostly stopped blaming Sebelius, because the new talking points say nobody could have made the law work, because by definition it can’t work. Having done everything in their power to insure it can’t work, which is literally costing American lives, they blame Obama for its shortcomings. However brilliant an HHS pick she may be, Sylvia Burwell can’t change that.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 11, 2014
“The True Architects And Gatekeepers”: The ‘Real Racists’ Have Always Worn Suits
This week we’ve commemorated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the monumental piece of legislation aimed at outlawing discrimination based on race. A three-day-long “civil rights summit” was organized at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where many past and present activists and politicians spoke on the legacy of the Civil Rights Act.
With the commemoration has come further discussion about the contemporary face of American racism (Chris Hayes hosted a great segment on the topic last night with Salon’s Brittney Cooper and New York‘s Jonathan Chait). Over at BET, Keith Boykin wrote:
Despite the progress of the past half century, the struggle continues. “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.” So said baseball hall of famer Hank Aaron in an interview with USA Today this week, in which he seemed to compare the racist klansmen of the 1960s with the supposedly post-racial cynics of our current generation.
You see, today’s racists don’t wear white hoods and scream the N-word. They wear dark suits and scream about government handouts. They don’t set up racist poll taxes to deter Blacks from voting. They set up voter ID laws to do the same thing. And they certainly don’t defend lynch mobs, which legitimize vigilante justice. Instead, they defend Stand Your Ground laws, which achieve the same purpose.
But I have trouble with this framing. It’s neat and easily digestible for anyone with only a cursory understanding of American history and racism, and therefore popular as a means of telling that history. It has broad appeal, but it’s not accurate. It flattens history and does the work of placing the onus for past bad deeds on a select few. It reinforces the image of “the real racist” as one who expressed their hatred in demonstrably violent ways. It suggests that racists have simply become more sophisticated, changing the tactics of their hatred from burning crosses to writing legislation, from white hoods to business suits, as that Hank Aaron quote contends.
Here’s the problem with that narrative: the architects and gatekeepers of American racism have always worn neckties. They have always been a part of the American political system.
I understand the impulse in wanting to find some way to convey that what we’re dealing with currently is a system of racism that is less overt than it once was. Saying things like “we’ve gone from white hoods to business suits” is one way to seem to speak to contemporary racism’s less vocal, yet still insidious nature. But it does a disservice to the public understanding of racism, and in the process undercuts the mission of drawing attention to contemporary racism’s severity.
It wasn’t the KKK that wrote the slave codes. It wasn’t the armed vigilantes who conceived of convict leasing, postemancipation. It wasn’t hooded men who purposefully left black people out of New Deal legislation. Redlining wasn’t conceived at a Klan meeting in rural Georgia. It wasn’t “the real racists” who bulldozed black communities in order to build America’s highway system. The Grand Wizard didn’t run COINTELPRO in order to dismantle the Black Panthers. The men who raped black women hired to clean their homes and care for their children didn’t hide their faces.
The ones in the hoods did commit violent acts of racist terrorism that shouldn’t be overlooked, but they weren’t alone. Everyday citizens participated in and attended lynchings as if they were state fairs, bringing their children and leaving with souvenirs. These spectacles, if not outright endorsed, were silently sanctioned by elected officials and respected members of the community.
It’s easy to focus on the most vicious and dramatic forms of racist violence faced by past generations as the site of “real” racism. If we do, we can also point out the perpetrators of that violence and rightly condemn them for their actions. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that those individuals alone didn’t write America’s racial codes. It’s much harder to talk about how that violence was only reinforcing the system of political, economic and cultural racism that made America possible. That history indicts far more people, both past and present.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, April11, 2014
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