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llachglin commented here on my political post from last week, entitled torture states love. He finds my analysis of the current situation reasonable, but my analysis of events moving forward overly pessimistic. As my reply was rather too long for a comment field, I'm posting it here instead.Some of the historical abuses that are similar to the current ones were not repudiated for decades after their institution. In terms of imprisoning Americans without trial, you need look no further than the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.
As above, I see these as a continuation of violent and racist acts long considered normal. Previous iterations included the mass slaughter and/or expulsion of Chinese immigrants, the decades of KKK violence and lynch mobs against blacks (and other minourities), and on and on. One of the memoirs I've read - by the daughter of an internment camp woman - talked about how glad her mother was that internment went down the way it did, instead of the way the Chinese immigrant wave got it. That doesn't make it good, the gods know, but it's a realistic position to take that the camps were an improvement over past cycles. And I'm halfway willing to believe that. And the eventual reaction to the camps was an improvement outright.
The power of the presidency has been increasing for a long time
Of course. But we are at a point when the Chief Executive and supporters are specifically and explicitly calling the President above the law, and getting away with it, with the effective co-operation of both major parties. That's a new low, and it crosses what I see as a critical, a crucial line. All sorts of things Nixon did, for example, were illegal. Some of his cronies made commentary about how the Presidency is the law, but got slapped down. Most of the real argument outside of the immediate Nixon circle was either that it wasn't actually illegal or - about as often - didn't actually happen, and not that the law didn't apply at all. The key failure is in the failure to repudiate this claim.
So I also have to reject the idea that the problem is the Baby Boom generation.
See above in the original post for my clarification, first. That said...
That generation is split and is not overwhelmingly in favor of these measures
But is perfectly willing to continue to allow them, which institutionalises them, whether they are in favour of them or not. The institutionalisation is critical. More to the point I was making, the dynamic between the sides of this split is fixed - or, as I said above, calcified. It will not resolve internally, but neither will they be forced to share power soon enough to prevent institutionalisation.
Ultimately, I think the problem is the rise of the current right-wing movement, which while at the height of its powers is beginning to exhaust itself.
That's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the failure to respond, a failure I have discussed - bitterly - here, often.
The real left in this country has been in decline since the end of WWII, providing no countervailing force to the authoritarians. Partly this is the result of McCarthyism. That broke the Popular Front alliance of liberals and socialists, leaving only a core of ultra-left ideologues who fell prey to Stalinism
i.e., authoritarianism
in one generation, Maoism
i.e., authoritarianism
in the next, and irrelevance ever since.
No argument there. However, I don't see where they have any kind of serious track record of helping, aside from the now-swept-away post-Nixon laws.
Demographics are changing. The country is becoming more urban, more diverse, more accepting of differing identities and ways of living.
I have a set of other thoughts on the long-term decay of the nation-state which interact with all of these questions. However, before that happens, the nation-state will reach out with all of its powers to prevent its own minimisation, and it will have significant capabilities of doing so. The new reality - or at least large components of it - will remain in place for a generation unless actively repudiated. The longer this repudiation takes, the less likely it becomes in a form other than systemic transformation.
All of this undermines the center-right majority, which is based on support by white males. Once that majority breaks apart, the social conservatives and authoritarians will both lose influence
Assumptions I do not find warranted, certainly not in the short term. These particular social conservatives and authoritarians might. Unless somehow there's a jump straight to a Grand Compromise of "we can't force what we want, so we agree not to fight about it" without the mess in between first, of course. I consider this unlikely.
While technology provides ways for governments to control the population, it also provides the means to counter government abuses. One could look at Burma and say that the people are going to lose
Yeah, the net went dark a few days ago; those bastards have learned a couple of things (said Napoleon).
but I'm with David Brin in believing that in the long run technology will make authoritarianism unsustainable, but with a loss in privacy that is unfortunately largely inevitable.
Yes, privacy in the traditional sense is pretty dead except as a social convention of politeness. The new (and critical) issue on this front is not privacy but secrecy, which, by no coincidence whatsoever, is reaching new heights with the current administration.
Faced with a multifaceted global crisis of resources, people will grab the power they need to survive at the expense of centralized executive power.
I actually consider this one of the optimistic attainable scenarios, and is why I like various regionalist institutions and co-operative agreements, particularly those which span nation-state borders, as they will be able to practice central-government avoidance more adroitly than single-country institutions.
This will transform existing social institutions, including moribund political parties.
Which is rather my point with the Democrats in particular; they are moribund. As is the national media. I further do not really believe they are reformable. Otherwise, I agree.
I am, by the way, praying that the fundamentalists make good on their threat. Pleasantly, the local theocrats in the Faith and Freedom Network have endorsed Dobson's position. A fractured GOP will make room for the shattering the Democratic Party needs.
The result will incorporate the best aspects of libertarianism and social democracy.
Could. Not will. And all this depends upon a surviving and ubiquitous communications infrastructure. One of the lessons from the Iraq resistance is that these can be developed in rather ad-hoc ways very effectively, so there is hope.
But we have to make this happen; we can't just wait around for someone to save us. The whole point is that we have to take our own lives into our own hands.
Well, what do you think I've been doing? Until people see the extent of the problem, people will not react. Hence, I scream from rooftops. Or Livejournal, which, funnily, is ... at least a little more effective.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 04:01 pm (UTC)What will happen, most probably, is outlined very well today here, in the London Review of Books, of all places. He even makes the tie back to the Cheney Energy Task Force, an idea I'd been toying with recently as well. I was telling people circa 2003 that this was fundamentally about oil; that became intensely clear after Sec. Rumsfeld said so in Korea when he didn't think any American reporters were listening. (And the stated rationales were always insane to anyone who had more than six months' worth of memory. Sadly, that apparently includes very few Americans, and almost none of the political class.)
But that ignores a variety of other ramifications. With this, the USA becomes a colonial power again. An important question will be whether the second American colonial era comes closer to the British model or the Dutch. Sadly, we need to hope for the British, despite its long series of tragic farces; the Dutch, on the other hand, were much more directly into extermination campaigns throughout. Colonial powers are always repressive abroad and are generally fairly repressive - though usually less so - at home. (Particularly towards those opposed to the Empire.) Mr. Holt's analysis also underestimates the inevitable Chinese reaction, which will be to draw a western line in the sand to American adventurism, quite possibly in Iran, thus getting the Neoconservative movement their 1990s goal back again: a new cold war with China. Overall, I see the LRB case as overly rosy, tho' still basically accurate. And, of course, as with most colonial adventures, the companies running it will profit the most.
(Politically, fwiw, the US seems to be trying to follow the British model, but the backers of the current administration are not at all unlikely to end up with the Dutch model over time, following their social structures to a reasonable conclusion, and taking into account American colonial history in the Philippines.)
His analysis also assumes - and assumes that its backers placed a lot of money on the idea - that Iraq has massive, massive, massive oil reserves that nobody anywhere actually knows are there, and just as importantly, accepts the old Iraqi stated "proven reserves" number as real. This is a huge gamble. His noise about how Iraq has "a mere two thousand wells" drilled compared to Texas's "million" indicates a fundamental failure to understand oil extraction and technologies. Texas has hundreds of thousands of rigs because they're generally tiny, actively pumping out one or two barrels a day (literally) of oil from mostly-dead fields. They have huge water cuts and are incapable of large-scale production. By contrast, Saudi Arabia's world-leading oil production over the last couple of decades has come from literally as few as 20 very high production oil rigs. (Note here for a result.)
(I do want to note that I oversimplify, rigs != wells, etc. But the point remains. And I suspect I'm out of room here, so I'm going to see, and possibly continue in a separate comment.)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 04:45 pm (UTC)As to what to "watch for," well, I'm not sure what you mean. It's kind of all happening in front of you if you want to see it. Oh; this does imply that near-term peak-oil theory is not only accurate (as I think the numbers are starting to bear out, but I am not - specifically not - calling peak oil now, just near-term) but taken more seriously by upper-level oil and policy people than anyone will admit. So track oil production numbers. If I'm right, and I think I am, then the more they fall, the less the Democratic party will do to get American forces out of Iraq, even with the sizable majorities their supporters demand are necessary to actually, you know, do things. If we get another significant production - and export, that's separate and important! - bump, then that'll be a window of opportunity. But it will be temporary.
[Too damn long. See Reply 3, about to be posted.]
A better model, Part I (@#*$&(!! comment length limits!)
Date: 2007-10-11 04:57 pm (UTC)60% of American oil consumption is in personal transportation. That's not an accident. On all levels, a massive automobile-based transportation system was a governmental goal from the 1920s forward. It was the overarchingly dominant model following World War II, and it is still the goal for most of the USA, including the Federal government in particular, which, under the current administration, has gone so far as to try to order states to junk other approaches. (C.f. a post I made several months ago about the Feds telling Oregon that 'people have voted with their cars' and 'demand' a roads-only approach, so throw out all this transit crap and get building more highways.) Everything from Federal policy at the top to local zoning is about enabling automobile transit and discouraging everything else, outside of a few exception regions. (Cascadia, parts of the New England corridor... and that's about it.)
The United States is the third largest producer of oil in the world. With a different transportation focus and an efficiency drive in industry - one already ongoing even at $80/barrel - the US could be an oil exporter. Think about that: the US could be eligible to join OPEC. That is how much is energy is thrown away by this transportation model. And that six (or nine, depending upon how you count it) decades of emphasis on actively promoting and enforcing car-only transportation is also why the US is becoming a colonial power again.
So. The way out would be to stop the government's autos-uber-alles approach and build a better transportation network. I've talked about my experiences on Japan's rail system; it's superb. More importantly, it's more convenient than driving around here, and driving around the other places I've driven around. It takes less personal time, if you do it right, than the strip-mall-and-highway model the US has now. Both this and industry movement away from oil use could be prompted by a steady, and substantial over time increase in the gasoline tax, and a similar set of staging on industrial oil sales. Do that, and the markets will take care of most of it, as they should. This solves all kinds of problems - reducing international tensions, improving US security, reducing the trade and budget deficits, cutting pollution, and so on.
But this doesn't build empires, and it doesn't help consolidate governmental power in the executive the way both empires and war do. And it doesn't help grow the oil industry, and it's not real good for GM1. Decades of propaganda isn't easy to overcome, so almost certainly won't be; and as has been noted many times as of late, Presidential approval ratings and gasoline prices are almost perfect inversions of each other. So this will not happen - at least not on a national scale.
Re: A better model, Part I (@#*$&(!! comment length limits!)
Date: 2007-10-12 08:07 pm (UTC)I think the transitional stages are going to be unsatisfying to those of us who want a real train system right now. I suspect that we'll start by keeping our car-oriented culture, but shifting a lot of cars to plug-in hybrids. That alone could wean us off imported oil without changing our driving culture in any other significant way. But to maintain a reduction in CO2, that won't be enough. That's why we need to invest in rail transit and encourage dense urban development right now. (As an aside, this is why I'm supporting the very flawed ST2/RTID proposition.)
A better model, Part II
Date: 2007-10-11 04:58 pm (UTC)So my realistic "happy path out of all this" - really, the least unhappy realistic path - is to minimise the damage on the Federal and international levels, and a set of regional solutions that solve the problem here, so that if things indeed go badly south for the imperial solution - as I think they will - we don't fall over. But really, all that depends upon controlling the Federal behemoth. If damage can be reversed at the Federal level, so much the better. But when push comes to shove, I will not be part of a torture state. And that's all I have to say about that.
1: (Note: I would not, for a second, consider banning cars. Or taking apart the highway system. Every family should have a car. They're great for cargo and emergencies, just for example. It's fundamental car - and hence oil - dependence that's central to this problem. And no, nuclear+electrics aren't going to solve that any time soon. I've done that math. There's not enough uranium in the world.)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 04:30 pm (UTC)It seems to me that the US is becoming _less_ diverse, but more stratified.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 07:57 pm (UTC)Just a personal observation, a feeling. It seems as if social groups are concentrating, consolidating, leaving gaps where there used to be overlap. As if individuals were so upset with what people not completely congruent with them were doing that they were pulling back, socially.
Yes, it's an emotional statement. Just the gestalt sensation I have, based on personal observations locally and what I read and hear in the news. Over and over, it seems people today don't even want to talk to anyone not in their group, and only associate with those comfortably like themselves, "'cause all those others are so unreasonable."
no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 07:43 pm (UTC)Of course. But we are at a point when the Chief Executive and supporters are specifically and explicitly calling the President above the law, and getting away with it, with the effective co-operation of both major parties.
Part of my problem with your analysis is that it makes sweeping generalities like this. The parties are not monolithic. On most of the assertions of increased presidential power, a majority of elected Democrats voted the right way. So it's not fair to say the entire party is cooperating, just that they're failing to put together an effective opposition. There are also differences between the houses of Congress that are obscured when you say "both major parties." For example, on the surveillance issue, the House is pushing a bill that (deplorably) allows surveillance of communications outside the US when all participants are non-citizens, but explicitly bans it in every other case without a court-issued warrant along standards stronger than pre-9/11 FISA. It also contains a sunset provision that means it would have to be renewed in December 2009, after the election of a hopefully Democratic president and a change in the political climate. The Senate version of the same bill basically gave Bush everything he wanted.
So, the result effectively is what you say it is, but the details and process are much more complicated and in the end, provide a much more optimistic of where all this will eventually end up.
That's a new low, and it crosses what I see as a critical, a crucial line. All sorts of things Nixon did, for example, were illegal. Some of his cronies made commentary about how the Presidency is the law, but got slapped down. Most of the real argument outside of the immediate Nixon circle was either that it wasn't actually illegal or - about as often - didn't actually happen, and not that the law didn't apply at all. The key failure is in the failure to repudiate this claim.
The real difference between then and now isn't the Democratic Party, though. The Democrats are willing to repudiate Bush, but don't have the votes to make is stick. The difference is with the Republicans (enough of them had integrity then; they don't now) and the media (it had some reporting then, and even arguably a liberal bias; now it is an infotainment wasteland with a right-wing bias.)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 06:32 pm (UTC)I'm speaking of summed results, which, I think you've agreed, is accurate.
On most of the assertions of increased presidential power, a majority of elected Democrats voted the right way. So it's not fair to say the entire party is cooperating, just that they're failing to put together an effective opposition.
When the leadership of the party is part of the problem, and that leadership claims to represent the majority of that party, then the party as a whole is part of the problem. And the leadership is absolutely part of the problem. "Not everyone in the party is okay with it" does not answer the criticism.
The Democrats are willing to repudiate Bush
No, they're not. They're not, because they don't. Actions matter.
Put simply, you can't pretend that the party leadership is not the party. Conservatives used to throw this line at me about the fundamentalist movement in the 1990s, too; I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now. The party leadership sets the agenda, and that agenda has been consistent so far; the party leadership has consistently and continually ruled out the actual kinds of measures needed to repudiate Mr. Bush. They've ruled out even considering them. (Did you see Speaker Pelosi's commentary about the people protesting her over not doing enough about executive power and the war? I've lost the link or I'd paste them in.) As the leadership, elected by the party, they presumably represent the party. There is an apparent minourity within the party that feels differently; you cannot extrapolate from them to the party as a whole.
I do absolutely agree that the media is a significant part of the problem and have ranted about this in the past. (C.f. my commentary on the Court at Versailles.) But the Democratic Party is a real difference, on par with the rest.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 07:46 pm (UTC)But [the Boomer generation] is perfectly willing to continue to allow them, which institutionalises them, whether they are in favour of them or not. The institutionalisation is critical. More to the point I was making, the dynamic between the sides of this split is fixed - or, as I said above, calcified. It will not resolve internally, but neither will they be forced to share power soon enough to prevent institutionalisation.
I don't understand how the Boomers institutionalize this when they're no more likely to oppose many of these powers than other generations. I don't see how moving these people out of power and replacing them with younger people equally or even less resistant to increased presidential powers is going to help. Your larger point about calcification has some merit, but I really think the calcification is political, not generational. The conservative movement may have started its march to power in 1964 (and as such preceded the rise of the Boomers to power), but it's a multi-generational movement. While there are certainly less right-wing authoritarians (from center-right Clinton on some issues and the sectarian hard left on many more), the bulk of liberals, progressives, and leftists are anti-authoritarian, and they have not contributed to the overall trend except as hapless victims.
Things will begin to change when the multi-generational conservative movement falls apart. On a range of issues, things look good for the long term. On social issues, there is a generational shift in a gradient from oldest to youngest, with the youngest being least conservative. The religious right will not be able to sustain itself in the face of this demographic reality; we just have to limit the damage in the meantime. I think their failure to find a presidential candidate this year, and their potential willingness to sabotage the conservative movement's decades-old coalition in a fit of purist pique are signs they're running out of steam. The more worrisome part of the conservative movement is that surrounding issues of government abuses of power and government secrecy. Call them the Giuliani-Lieberman faction, which includes some right-leaning Democrats. They favor empire abroad and repression at home, and play to fears and prejudices to gain power for themselves. The ray of light with this group is that a lot of their influence rests on a successful outcome to both the debacle in Iraq and the so-called war on terrorism. They might be able to gain short-term support for increased presidential power when they can still convince enough people that they're protecting the country, but as both of these efforts continue to fail they will lose influence, and in any case without the electoral support of the theocons they'll have a hard time putting together a governing majority. The key to encouraging this in the short run is to marginalize the key people who support this faction, including everyone associated with Bush, the neocons, Giuliani's supporters, and the right-wing Democrats. Electing Democrats in 2008 from the president on down will help tremendously on every count. The key is to make the continued support of Democrats conditional on rolling back the Bush-era expansion of powers.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 06:45 pm (UTC)The calcification is of the argument itself, not the contents thereof. The actual facts, the data, aren't relevant. What's relevant is what side they're on and with whom there are perceived scores to settle.
I mean, if content didn't matter, would you have ended up with a "conservative" movement - Goldwater's conservative movement! - supporting the lawless, unchecked executive, foreign war adventurism, and religious government? Would you have seen it throwing its weight behind the biggest government advancement of spending since LBJ, the very President and actions that Goldwater rallied against?
Of course not. This was possible only because the content had become irrelevant. Only the labels and sides - the tribes - mattered. And while there's some splintering off here and there one way and the other, these two sides have been mostly locked in place. The content itself doesn't matter. That needs to break up before reality can change.
Your larger point about calcification has some merit, but I really think the calcification is political, not generational.
And for the Boomers, generational==political. They are a politically identified generation, and have been pretty much since always.
The religious right will not be able to sustain itself in the face of this demographic reality
In this case, I marginally agree; I've stated a few times that I think they're on the way down, at least for now. There will be a resurgence, tho'; they are aware of the situation and are working very hard to form a generationally sectarian political base. I think this will work less effectively than it has in the past, but I could be wrong. Hopefully I am not.
their potential willingness to sabotage the conservative movement's decades-old coalition in a fit of purist pique
The reaction to Giuliani is not a fit of purist pique. I completely agree with them on that. They cannot support him without betraying the religious core causes of their movement. That's not "purism," that's "do we betray what we are?" What they are is sad, but it's still what they are. The idea that "refusal to abandon core beliefs for power" can be considered "a fit of purist pique" makes no sense to me.
The ray of light with this group is that a lot of their influence rests on a successful outcome to both the debacle in Iraq and the so-called war on terrorism.
See above, seriously - I have a four-part reply to
They might be able to gain short-term support for increased presidential power when they can still convince enough people that they're protecting the country, but as both of these efforts continue to fail they will lose influence, and in any case without the electoral support of the theocons they'll have a hard time putting together a governing majority.
This, to me, confuses content and side, again. Have they lost if they've achieved their goals? They individually may no longer be in power, but as long as the goals they desired are still in place, how have they actually lost?
no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 06:49 pm (UTC)Yes. Goldwater had some integrity, but his influence has been subject to a lot of revisionism. This is a guy who wanted to take a more active military posture in Vietnam, possibly as far as ordering a nuclear strike, without a formal declaration of war. That's the sign of someone willing to increase executive power so long as it was in line with his principles. What happened with the conservative movement is that the Goldwater folks made common cause with the neocons and theocons starting in the 1980s. The factions compromised on principle in order to sustain power. That is, far from calcifying, they showed political flexibility in order to expand their coalition.
You're right that the fiscal irresponsibility of conservatives in power is at odds with Goldwater's general posture, but Goldwater did support increased military spending and lower taxes, which are the root cause of the current deficit. What happened there isn't that the movement changed in anyh essential way, but that it came to power. The party in power will seek to expand government unless it is checked by a strong minority party. One reason Clinton was so fiscally responsible is that he was a triangulator checked by a vigorous conservative Congress.
To your other points:
There are plenty of apolitical Boomers, and I don't really see that they are political. If anything, they are associated with the decline in the power of political parties. Their parents were more politically active, and for good reason--their experiences of WWII and the Depression made politics impossible to ignore. Boomers were born to relative affluence, and for many of them that enabled a retreat into introspection, religious experimentation, the counter-culture, the self-help culture, and all sorts of distractions from political life. Just because recent generations are arguably more apolitical does not make the Boomers particularly political.
The religious right reaction to Giuliani is purism in the same sense that the support of Nader was purism. Yes, it was an honest reaction to the mainstream candidate rejecting its traditional values in both cases. But it's also counterproductive in the long run because it empowers the opposition coalition. It's self-defeating. Your calls for a third party and theirs are bad ideas for the same reason.
I don't see how the conservative coalition can achieve its goals if it loses power and its biggest projects (Iraq, the war on terrorism, the creation of a theocracy, the destruction of the welfare state) are correctly seen as failures. So I guess I don't understand the side/content distinction you're making. The sides enable the content. When the content fails, the side loses power, and cannot advocate for its content until the content of the other side fails. They're linked.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 08:12 pm (UTC)However, I don't see where [the American left and liberals] have any kind of serious track record of helping, aside from the now-swept-away post-Nixon laws.
Imagine this fight without the ACLU. The ACLU was founded by socialists, and not in the now-current right-wing sense of anyone who advocates any kind of role for government at all. The founders were members of the Socialist Party and the IWW, emerging from a series of grassroots free speech campaigns and WWI-era repression similar and in many ways worse than what we now face. The fact that we have a century of legal rulings with any consideration for civil liberties at all is thanks to the ACLU. Now, the ACLU is disconnected from the elected Democratic Party, but just compare ACLU ratings between the two parties. Democrats are far more likely to have the right position on actual legislation.
Post-McCarthyism, amid the Cold War, the effective and sensible left was slowly marginalized by patriotism, militarism, and big business. The conservative movement we face today took those elements and added racial bigotry starting in 1968, and religious extremism around about 1980. The only successes in that period were post-Watergate, and were systemic and bipartisan.
I think a critical problem right now is that when the Soviet Union fell, we did not repudiate our Cold War mistakes, and instead committed to expanding them. The person most to blame for that was the elder George Bush, but Bill Clinton only made things worse. The turning point was the first Iraq War, a venture that most people mistakenly support in hindsight. The glimmer of light in this cloud is that the current Iraq war is undermining the whole logic of empire abroad, without which the trend toward repression at home is unsustainable. The right wing movement got everything it wanted in the Bush presidency, and the result is abject failure across the board. We'd be in real trouble if the invasion had gone well, because then the associated abuses of presidential power could associate themselves with that success.
It's not just Iraq that's a failure, though. The war on terrorism is a failure, and most people haven't realized that yet even if they're against the president on Iraq. Terrorist attacks have not been stopped by the draconian measures, the specific terrorist mastermind of 9/11 is alive and well and plotting more attacks in Pakistan, torture techniques used on his key associates led only to false leads and wasted time, nuclear terrorism is more of a threat than ever, and the US has lost any claim to moral authority, without which a diplomatic track to stop terrorism is impossible.
So it's not that I think Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic candidates for president, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi are inherently more likely than Bill Clinton to stop the authoritarian slide, it's that I think that the negative effects of that slide to date are doing their job of discrediting that whole way of thinking. And other problems, like global warming, will necessitate an approach over the next decades that is less reactionary.
It's the historical long view, which is easy to lose track of in the depressing day-to-day events we now face.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 06:50 pm (UTC)Bad swap out! "they" is not "the American left and liberals." "They" referred to the left sections you were describing, the ones who went to Stalinist and Maoist bullshit. (And giving them any credit for the post-Nixon laws was a bit too damn generous on my part, but I was trying to be fair.)
Imagine this fight without the ACLU. The ACLU was founded by socialists, and not in the now-current right-wing sense of anyone who advocates any kind of role for government at all.
And predate the whole Stalin/Maoist post-war bullshit. Calling the ACLU the American far left is to my mind a non-starter.
The founders were members of the Socialist Party and the IWW, emerging from a series of grassroots free speech campaigns and WWI-era repression similar and in many ways worse than what we now face.
Oh, absolutely worse. It's not worse than where various people - including people on my friendslist - would like to take us, but it's worse than we have now.
The fact that we have a century of legal rulings with any consideration for civil liberties at all is thanks to the ACLU.
As a regular ACLU member, I see one key difference between the ACLU and the Democratic Party being that the ACLU is content-based, not factionalism-based, which gets back to the whole calcification-of-sides thing I keep talking about above.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 07:26 pm (UTC)The problem with discussing the American left is that it is so often confused with both the self-defeating radicals on one hand and the mainstream Democratic Party on the other. In reality, its spirit lives on in activist groups like the ACLU, with the only electoral concession being to symbolic campaigns within (Kucinich) and outside of (Nader) the Democratic Party.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 08:36 pm (UTC)I have a set of other thoughts on the long-term decay of the nation-state which interact with all of these questions. However, before that happens, the nation-state will reach out with all of its powers to prevent its own minimisation, and it will have significant capabilities of doing so. The new reality - or at least large components of it - will remain in place for a generation unless actively repudiated. The longer this repudiation takes, the less likely it becomes in a form other than systemic transformation.
Our ally here is the fact that authoritarianism doesn't work in the long run, despite its occasional successes. Military and police states usually tend to overreach (one reason Burma and China's rulers are still around is that they've been sparing with their use of power abroad), and create the conditions for their own demise. That is now happening with US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. Similarly, repression tends to undermine itself at home as it is directed against elements of the establishment who then turn against those policies. We're already seeing that across the board with resignations from the government over the widespread abuses of power by the Bush administration. Crossing both arenas is the growing number of recent veterans who have turned against both the war and the attack on civil liberties.
Finally, I really think that the twin crises of planetary ecology and increasingly tight worldwide energy supplies are forcing a combination of international cooperation and renewed local action, both of which undermine the notion of a repressive nationalist state. While some information-limiting regimes survive, in general information technology is undermining the power of national governments. So long as we manage this crisis without a social collapse, the increased cultural and social contacts across borders will contribute to this trend.
Which brings us to your next point:
I actually consider this one of the optimistic attainable scenarios, and is why I like various regionalist institutions and co-operative agreements, particularly those which span nation-state borders, as they will be able to practice central-government avoidance more adroitly than single-country institutions.
I think that historical lower-l libertarianism and social democracy will converge in the future (probably post-us, barring a big break in human longevity) along just these lines, even if they seem opposed in our current climate. The view I see is of voluntary associations at the local level asserting power historically exercised by governments, and then forming broader associations that decide on common contractual arrangements and mediate disputes among members. With the waning of state power, so too does the power of big corporations wane. All of the arguments about coercive power and taxes and the size of government will be replaced by an ethic of "we have common interests and must negotiate for and fund our mutual well-being."
Which is rather my point with the Democrats in particular; they are moribund. As is the national media. I further do not really believe they are reformable. Otherwise, I agree.
For me, it's a matter of what we do until we can fix the more fundamental problems in the long run. Given that I'm going to live in the short and medium-run, I'm not going to undermine even the moribund institutions when they can be used to protect my interests. The Democrats are better than the other institutional alternative, non-participation in the electoral arena, or trying to create a new institutional alternative from scratch. The reality is that third parties are even *more* moribund than the Democrats, and that if they ever replaced either party they'd only fall into the same institutional traps. So why waste time on what in the long run of declining nation state power is an irrelevance, and what in the short-term is actively harmful to my day-to-day existence and that of billions of others? The best thing I can do is try to improve the existing institutional party while planning for the day when it is no longer relevant.