What To Love About The Republican Presidential Debates
“I disagree in some respects with Congressman Paul, who says the country is founded on the individual. The basic building block of a society is not an individual. It’s the family. That’s the basic unit of society.” —Former Sen. Rick Santorum, at Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas.
“Well, I would like to explain that rights don’t come in bunches. Rights come as individuals, they come from a God, and they come as each individual has a right to life and liberty.” —Rep. Ron Paul, in reply to Santorum.
Many observers of these primary debates find them pointlessly repetitive; they can’t wait until the field is winnowed to one or two viable contenders.
For my money, I’m glad for this period of wide-open, freewheeling, occasionally ridiculous discourse. Sure, you have to wade through the vacuous nonsense of Rep. Michele Bachmann (“Hold on, moms out there!”); the vainglorious opportunism of former Rep. Newt Gingrich (yeah, I supported an individual mandate—but it was in opposition to Hillarycare!); the charming ignorance of Herman Cain; the slimy evasiveness of former Gov. Mitt Romney; the deer-in-headlights ineptitude of Gov. Rick Perry.
But then you get a gem such as the above exchange between Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.
It gets right to the heart of the matter—to the eternally unresolved tensions within conservatism.
In many ways, Representative Paul has been an indispensable voice in these debates. As Ross Douthat notes, he’s the only candidate who answers each question with “perfect unblinking honesty.”
I love it when he skewers bedrock Republican assumptions about terror suspects (“You haven’t convicted them of anything!”), the bloated Pentagon budget (“You can’t cut a penny?”), and even the lately dominant and tiresome “class warfare” trope (“A lot of people aren’t paying any taxes, and I like that.”).
As refreshingly iconoclastic as he can be, though, Paul is the archetype of the kind of rightist I like least—the arid rationalist. He’s what poet-historian Peter Viereck called “the unadjusted man” or an “apriorist.” He’s filled with tidy abstractions about how the world works. He’s perfectly secure in his convictions and, like every ideologue, he will backfill every hole that the real world presents to those convictions.
Viereck identified this mentality precisely for what it is—radical:
Old Guard doctrinaires of Adam Smith apriorism, though dressed up in their Sunday best (like any Jacobin gone smug and successful), are applying the same arbitrary, violent wrench, the same discontinuity with the living past, the same spirit of rootless abstractions that characterized the French Revolution.
Santorum, virtually alone in the Republican field, gives full-throated voice to the notion of a “living past”—of individuals situated in and nourished by families and communities, by Burke’s “little platoons.” But then Santorum engages in some apriorism of his own. Glimpsing the possible disquiet within his own worldview, he rejects the idea that the United States was founded on individual rights (clearly it was) and says “the family” is the “basic unit of society” (clearly it is). It’s “the courts” and “government” that are burdening the family—no one or nothing else. He brushes his hands and continues merrily on his way.
The guy seems intrinsically incapable of even entertaining notions outside of the box of stale fusionist conservatism. The late Burkean conservative Robert Nisbet, who, in The Quest for Community, saw the “centralized territorial state” and industrial capitalism working in tandem to create “atomized masses of insecure individuals,” is there waiting for someone with Santorum’s sound and humane instincts:
In the history of modern capitalism we can see essentially the same diminution of communal conceptions of effort and the same tendency toward the release of increasing numbers of individuals from the confinements of guild and village community. As Protestantism sought to reassimilate men in the invisible community of God, capitalism sought to reassimilate them in the impersonal and rational framework of the free market. As in Protestantism, the individual, rather than the group, becomes the central unit. But instead of pure faith, individual profit becomes the mainspring of activity. In both spheres there is a manifest decline of custom and tradition and a general disengagement of purpose from the contexts of community.
Santorum’s mind just won’t go there.
And neither, it seems, will his party.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, October 20, 2011
Women, Watch Your Back: Anti-Choicers Are Gambling With Your Life
In a medical emergency, the last thing we should be worried about is whether a hospital is going to put ideology ahead of the care we need to protect our lives and health. But if anti-choice lawmakers get their way, women and their loved ones will have to watch their backs.
Yesterday the House passed an unprecedented bill that would allow hospitals to let women die at their doorsteps. It sounds almost unbelievable — but utter disregard for the well-being of women who need abortion care has tragically reached new levels in the House.
The bill, the so-called “Protect Life Act” does anything but. Indeed, it gambles with women’s lives. It could allow hospitals to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) which requires that patients in medical emergencies receive appropriate medical treatment, including abortion care if that’s what’s medically indicated.
The bill’s proponents will first tell you that this is necessary to protect religiously affiliated hospitals, and then claim that there’s no such thing as emergency abortion care (which begs the question of why they’re so intent on overriding it). They’re wrong on both fronts.
First, the denial of appropriate medical care to a woman suffering from emergency pregnancy complications can be devastating. The following story recorded in the American Journal of Public Health is just one example:
A woman with a condition that prevented her blood from clotting was in the process of miscarrying at a Catholic-owned hospital. According to her doctor, she was dying before his eyes, her eyes filling with blood. But even though her life was in danger, and the fetus had no chance of survival, the hospital wouldn’t let the doctor treat her by terminating the pregnancy until the fetal heartbeat ceased of its own accord. She ended up in the I.C.U.
Second, even the Catholic Health Association, the leadership organization for Catholic hospitals — hardly an anti-religious or pro-choice lobby — has told Congress that they don’t “believe that there is a need for the [refusal] section to apply to EMTALA.” The very institutions on whose behalf this heinous provision has been proposed are saying “don’t do this.” But so far, the bill’s sponsors remain unmoved.
Every representative who voted for this bill should hear from you and be made to think about the woman, mid-miscarriage, bleeding and scared out of her wits, who rushes to the nearest hospital only to be told by her doctor that he’s not allowed to treat her. Think about that woman, and then tell us — what are you going to do?
By: Sarah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel, ACLU Legislative Office, Published in RH Reality Check, October 14, 2011
The Occupy Protests: A Timely Call For Justice
Occupy Wall Street and its kindred protests around the country are inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic. God, I love ’em.
I love every little thing about these gloriously amateurish sit-ins. I love that they are spontaneous, leaderless and open-ended. I love that the protesters refuse to issue specific demands beyond a forceful call for economic justice. I also love that in Chicago — uniquely, thus far — demonstrators have ignored the rule about vagueness and are being ultra-specific about their goals. I love that there are no rules, just tendencies.
I love that when Occupy Wall Street was denied permission to use bullhorns, demonstrators came up with an alternative straight out of Monty Python, or maybe “The Flintstones”: Have everyone within earshot repeat a speaker’s words, verbatim and in unison, so the whole crowd can hear. It works — and sounds tremendously silly. Protest movements that grow into something important tend to have a sense of humor.
I can’t help but love that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called the protests “growing mobs” and complained about fellow travelers who “have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.” This would be the same Eric Cantor who praised the Tea Party movement in its raucous, confrontational, foaming-at-the-mouth infancy as “an organic movement” that was “about the people.” The man’s hypocrisy belongs in the Smithsonian.
Most of all, I love that the Occupy protests arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target. This could be the start of something big and important.
“Economic justice” may mean different things to different people, but it’s not an empty phrase. It captures the sense that somehow, when we weren’t looking, the concept of fairness was deleted from our economic system — and our political lexicon. Economic injustice became the norm.
Revolutionary advances in technology and globalization are the forces most responsible for the hollowing-out of the American economy. But our policymakers responded in ways that tended to accentuate, rather than ameliorate, the most damaging effects of these worldwide trends.
The result is clear: a nation where the rich have become the mega-rich while the middle class has steadily lost ground, where unemployment is stuck at levels once considered unbearable, and where our political system is too dysfunctional to take the kind of bold action that would make a real difference. Eventually, the economy will limp out of this slump, and things will seem better. Fundamentally, however, nothing will have changed.
Does that sound broad and unfocused? Yes, but it’s true.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters saw this broad, unfocused truth — and also understood that the place to begin this movement was at the epicenter of the financial system.
For most of our history, it was understood that the financial sector was supposed to perform a vital service for the economy: channeling capital to the companies where it could be most effectively used. But the rapid technological, economic and political change the world has witnessed in recent decades created myriad opportunities for Wall Street to channel capital to itself, often by inventing exotic new securities whose underpinnings may not exist. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the urgent need for reform.
It’s not that investment bankers should be held responsible for all the ills of the world. It’s that Wall Street is emblematic of an entire economic and political system that no longer seems to have the best interests of most Americans at heart.
So a ragtag group — not huge, but idealistic and determined — camps out in Lower Manhattan. A similar thing happens in two dozen other cities. And maybe a movement is born.
Already, after less than a month, commentators are asking whether the Occupy protests can be transformed into a coherent political force. For now, at least, I hope not.
We have no shortage of politicians in this country. What we need is more passion and energy in the service of justice. We need to be forced to answer questions that sound simplistic or naive — questions about ethics and values. Detailed policy positions can wait.
At some point, these protest encampments will disappear — and, since the nation and the world will not have changed, they’ll be judged a failure. But I’ve got a hunch that this likely judgment will be wrong. I think the seed of progressive activism in the Occupy protests may grow into something very big indeed.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 10, 2011
From Wisconsin To Wall Street, An Economic Reckoning
The comparisons were inevitable. As Occupy Wall Street gathers momentum and new allies, progressives have quickly connected it with the other headline-grabbing uprising this year: The mass protests in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on labor unions. A statement from leaders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union, which endorsed Occupy Wall Street this week, was typical: “Just as a message was sent to politicians in Wisconsin, a clear message is now being sent to Wall Street: Priority number one should be rebuilding Main Street, not fueling the power of corporate CEOs and their marionette politicians.”
The essential theme connecting events in Madison and New York City is unmistakable. Both represent an economic reckoning at a time of grim unemployment rates and stagnant wages for middle-class Americans. “Both the defense of unions [in Wisconsin] and Occupy Wall Street, which is broader in its definition of the problem, are responding to two or three decades of increasing economic inequality and, until fairly recently, the inability of progressives to address those things,” says Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.
But the Wisconsin-Occupy Wall Street comparison is a more complicated one in its specifics. The two don’t fit neatly side by side and, in some ways, bear no resemblance at all. Here is a look at how two of the biggest populist protests of the year stack up:
The Organizers
As I reported from Madison in March, labor unions and community activist groups were, from the very beginning, the driving force in the Wisconsin protests. On November 3, 2010, the day after Republicans reclaimed the state Legislature and the governor’s mansion, union leaders began plotting how to respond to the looming assault on organized labor. And when Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his anti-union budget repair bill, and later threatened to sic the National Guard on those protesting his bill, unions marshaled their resources and called every member in their ranks. From their command center in Madison’s only unionized hotel, labor turned out more than a 100,000 supporters in a span of weeks.
Occupy Wall Street is not union-made. It was the anti-capitalist Adbusters magazine that put out the initial call for protesters to flood downtown Manhattan on September 17. Since then the protests have grown almost entirely without institutional support, an organic groundswell without leaders or executive boards or much structure at all. In recent days, unions have endorsed Occupy Wall Street, marched with them, and provided food, drinks, clothing, and more. But the protests remain a loosely organized, essentially leaderless effort.
Goals of the Movement
“Kill the bill! Kill the bill!” Wading among the crowd in Madison in February, you couldn’t go more than 10 minutes without that chant breaking out. It captured exactly what the protesters wanted: the death of Scott Walker’s anti-union bill. (They didn’t get it.) Later, those demands broadened to include fewer cuts to funding for education and social services by Walker and Wisconsin Republicans, but for much of the protests, it was perfectly clear what the angry cheeseheads wanted.
Occupy Wall Street so far has had no clear set of demands—and intentionally so, it seems. A post at OccupyWallSt.org demanded that supporters stop listing demands for fear of making protesters “look like extremist nut jobs.” The post went on, “You don’t speak for everyone in this.” The vague intentions have raised eyebrows, but they also have had the effect of welcoming a diverse group of supporters without alienating them. “The protesters have been eloquent in rejecting the idea that they produce ‘one demand’ and also in articulating in broad terms what they want,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
Spreading the Word
Like the protesters in Iran’s “Green Revolution” and Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising, Wisconsin and Occupy Wall Street have made savvy use of social media for everything from rallying supporters and organizing marches to asking for food. Take Twitter: Both uprisings have built lively, if contentious, forums for debate with the hash tags #wiunion and #occupywallstreet. So many tweets poured in during Wednesday’s Occupy Wall Street march that it was impossible to keep up.
Other forms of online organizing have been pivotal. There are more than 230 Facebook pages promoting Occupy events from Tacoma, Washington, to Marfa, Texas, to Milwaukee, just as Facebook helped energize protesters in Wisconsin. And for those who couldn’t make it in person, livestreaming has brought supporters from around the country and the world closer to the action on the ground.
Laying Down the Law
Scott Walker’s bill exempted police officers from the most draconian crackdowns on workers’ rights. That put cops in a tight spot, because it was the job of the police to contain and, when necessary, crack down on the crowds of public workers who occupied the state Capitol rotunda and protested in the surrounding streets. But throughout the months-long protests, police arrested very few, allowed the occupiers to remain inside the Capitol for weeks, and generally treated angry demonstrators as best as could be hoped. Off-duty cops from around the state even joined the protesters in Madison.
Actions by law enforcement in Manhattan against Occupy Wall Street have at some turns been a very different story, with police crackdowns stealing the spotlight. This video of an NYPD deputy inspector using pepper spray on a handful of female protesters sparked outrage, added a streak of sensationalism to the story, and was picked up by mainstream news outlets. The arrest of more than 700 people who marched on the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend similarly made national headlines, leading to heaps of criticism and a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD.
Pizza for Protesters
Supporters called in pizza orders from around the world for the hearty crew of Capitol occupiers in Wisconsin. The same is happening for those camped out in Zuccotti Park, blocks from Wall Street. Pizza: It’s the nosh of choice for American uprisings in 2011.
By: Andy Kroll, Mother Jones, October 6, 2011
Government Spending Is Just What Our Economy Needs
Our nation’s economy is approaching a precipice. The continuing housing market crisis has stripped about $10 trillion from families’ assets, and nearly 1 in 10 workers are unemployed. Nearly 1 in 10 others are either working less than they want or have given up their job search. Family income is now back where it was in 1996, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
This all means there is less money flowing through our economy. That’s just math.
The lingering consequences of the Great Recession—the housing crisis, the jobs crisis, the fear among businesses to invest their earnings despite record profits—continue to pull against faster economic growth and job creation. Because customers have less money to spend due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing high unemployment, businesses have little incentive to hire and invest.
Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says there is a role for fiscal policy. Monetary authorities have already pushed interest rates down to zero. And they have few levers left to spur growth, although there are some steps that would continue to help on the margin.
In short, the economy continues to suffer from a lack of demand.
The federal government can help with this. We know that government spending can help restart an economy. Over the past two years, increased investments in infrastructure have saved or created 1.1 million jobs in the construction industry and 400,000 jobs in manufacturing by March 2011. Almost all of these jobs were in the private sector.
Money targeted toward the long-term unemployed helped not only those individual families hardest hit by the Great Recession but also kept dollars flowing into their local communities, keeping an average of 1.6 million American workers in jobs every quarter during the recession. But now, the threat of jobs again disappearing looms large.
Unless Congress acts, the private sector will continue to generate insufficient demand. A sweeping consensus of economists and forecasters across the political divide now calls for the government to forcefully intervene in precisely this way, to create demand for goods and services, which will in turn boost hiring and business growth. Goldman Sachs, for example, said the positive effect of the president’s American Jobs Act would increase U.S. gross domestic product by 1.5 percent in 2012.
Conservatives want us to believe that America’s broke, that we cannot afford to address our most pressing issue—mass unemployment and stagnating incomes. The reality is that there are clear steps that we can take to pave the way for economic growth. Congress just needs to act.
By: Heather Boushey, Economist-Center for American Progress, Published in U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2011
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