Morning Awful: The ACLJ
Aug 5, 2010 Authoritarianism, Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, Morning Awful
Pat Robertson’s “answer” to the ACLU is leading the fight to keep a Muslim YMCA (NOT a mosque) from locating near the site of the 9/11 tragedy. Curiously, the ACLJ and ADL are contradicting themselves to do so:
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the legal advocacy group leading the charge, has argued repeatedly and forcefully in federal court on at least three occasions that local land-use laws like historical landmark designations don’t trump the religious and property rights of religious groups to build houses of worship. So has the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which controversially came out in opposition to the mosque last week. The group has filed no less than five amicus briefs in federal court arguing that local governments can’t use zoning laws to prevent the building of churches and synagogues.
The ACLJ is dedicated to culture war, not just in America but overseas:
The ACLJ is characterized by a yearning for apocalyptic confrontation. The ‘A’ should stand for authoritarian.
Tags: aclj, pat robertson
BP to Obama: Check “In The Mail”
Jul 26, 2010 BP oil spill, Kulturkampf
BP may have fired its CEO, but the president still has to wrestle the beast. BP PLC has failed to deposit any money into the $20 billion fund it promised to create:
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — Ken Feinberg said today he hasn’t been able to start writing claims checks because BP PLC has not yet deposited any money into the $20 billion escrow fund it promised to create. Feinberg, who was appointed last month to administer individual and business claims stemming from the oil spill, held an early morning town hall meeting in Bayou La Batre on Saturday before meeting with the Press-Register editorial board in downtown Mobile.
Bob Cesca wonders “how long this will go on”; the answer is that this president can never, ever go wrong fighting BP. It is an extremely convenient punching bag for November — but the president must be seen to take up the gauntlet.
The blogosphere has a reputation for impatience because an excited fringe is more profitable than a general audience when it comes to internet page loads. I make no profit from my moderation on all things Obama; indeed, no blogger has been more understanding of the Obama Doctrine. I have explicated its grounding in the principles of nonviolence here, here, here, and here. I understand it is precisely the mild-as-milk opposite of the right-wing caricature (while also not the corporatist-sellout of firebagger caricature). No blogger is more patient with this president than me.
But to the other side, politics is war; kulturkampf is the continuation of culture war by political means. BP’s inaction presents the White House with a golden moment to not only take strong action, but to be seen taking strong action, in a matter of Cultural Warfare. His base (the one he wants to excite enough to get them to the polls this November) desperately wants to see him take down an opponent.
In my first panel at Netroots Nation this year, I heard a panel of respectable green bloggers and NGO heads say there would be no “sixties demonstration” phase to the green movement in America. During question-time, I respectfully called bullshit: there hasn’t been a massive, green-energy and hold-fossil-fuels-accountable demonstration in Washington because the guys with the fancy websites and big organizations haven’t made it happen.
In an era when FreedomWorks can rent buses to turn 50,000 teabaggers into news, it should be easy for this vast, liberal media conspiracy to arrange a million-greens march on the National Mall against BP. It should be easy for this president to take strong, vital action against the intransigent oil conglomerate when he enjoys massive popular support. And if the minority party wants to apologize to BP? Fucking let them.
There are two issues that bring the college left out in force: (1) sexual freedom (2) the environment. The president has made some progress on the first, but not enough to satisfy the base. When BP offers him an opportunity to excite them by cracking a whip over the corporateperson known as BP, he should not hesitate.
After all, it isn’t slavery. It’s justice. Just ask anyone who lives in Prince Williams Sound.
Note: I’ll be visiting Area 51 today. Light blogging.
Tags: gulf oil spill, oil
Can I Have The Money Quote Please?
Jun 29, 2010 Afghanistan, Kulturkampf, Republican Party, republicans, republicans suck, social security
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review characterizes the remarks of House Minority Leader John Boehner thusly: “Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system.” But it’s not in his words, it’s in their words. The money quote linking the “need” for war to the “need” for Social Security cutbacks has been left out of their online video of the interview:
Let’s review: according to a major daily, the House Minority Leader wants to push retirement age back so we can pay for wars. After po-mouthing the president on everything else,
Boehner had praise, however, for Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan and stepped-up drone attacks in Pakistan. He declined to list any benchmarks he has for measuring progress in the nine-year war, at a time of increasing violence and Obama’s replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus. (Emphasis mine)
That’s the modern GOP in a nutshell. Victory is unimportant for Republicans; war itself is the object. The price in blood and treasure helps promote their anarcho-Randian domestic agenda. It would be nice if the Tribune-Review put the entire quote online so we could all see it ourselves. It’s already going to be a source of explosive controversy, and ought to be. Such a quote deserves to become campaign ad fodder.
I really hope the newspaper isn’t holding back out of some Lara Logan-like concern for their access.
Tags: Afghanistan, john boehner, Kulturkampf, social security
New Culture War Declared
May 31, 2010 Culture Wars, Kulturkampf
At Washington Post, Arthur C. Brooks wants to declare another Kulturkampf…for Chicago-Randian economics:
This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.
If Brooks means “limited government” as health care costs so out-of-control they threaten every American with bankruptcy, then yes. If he means “limited government” as regulators rubber-stamping British Petroleum memos and counting them as safety paperwork, then yes. If he means a financial system that rewards NINA loans, builds toxic investments disguised as premium investments, and then bets against them, then yes — this style of economics is under threat.
It needs to be. It must compete with a different kind of economic system: one in which energy companies are forced to spend a few of their millions on safety instead of billions on cleanup. I just don’t see that as “statist.” Nor is a managed economy around the corner; the president has not declared Teh Global Socializms™ in effect yet because he never will.
As for large-scale income redistributions: we just finished having one. It was a gigantic upward-transfer of wealth on the backs of America’s poor and middle. If doing away with that is socialism, then Brooks’ Kulturkampf would seem to be off to a bad start; and in fact, he’s already lost. But that is not the point of Kulturkampf. As Orwell put it:
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
The real tension in Brooks’ world is between the very rich and the rest of us. He wants this social, economic, and political structure to remain intact. His side has held out the promise of wealth — a prosperity gospel — to convince Americans to vote against their own interests. The utter bankruptcy of that promise is the reason why his side has lost; the call to Kulturkampf is a way of trying to outlast events.
Kulturkampf And Rand Paul
May 21, 2010 Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, Lost Cause mythology, Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul, Republicans Meet The Teabag Terror, racism in politics
Kudos to Rachel Maddow for recognizing that tea party extremism is essentially leftover reaction to the Sixties. The word she’s looking for — the noun that describes this kind of regressive politics in which history is re-fought, from Texas schoolbook boards to Kentucky Senate races and passing through the town halls of August 2009 — is Kulturkampf. I prefer the German term because I’m a political scientist, and it sounds far more scientific than “culture war.”
I refer now to a post I wrote years ago, back at the beginning of this particular blog:
Kulturkampf is never a call to conversation; Kulturkampf stops all conversation. Kulturkampf is not a call to debate; it is The End of Debate. Negotiation and resolution are impossible — all that remains possible is annihilation of the other side. The only thing left to say is that “they” are wrong.
And on the related subject of “Lost Cause” mythology in February 2009:
In that dialectic of Kulturkampf, Obama destroyed the unspoken bastion of the GOP’s political theology just by being elected. The GOP sees his agenda — health care for all, peacemaking abroad, and active, competent governance — as a threat to their very ability to wage Kulturkampf. Not for nothing have they fostered mistrust of the very word ‘government’ and conspired to “drown it in a bathtub.” There was no coincidence in the Bush doctrine of incompetent government.
Kulturkampf is both means and end to the Culture Warriors. It is no coincidence that their target demographic has bought 60,000,000 copies of the apocalyptic Left Behind series: this is their political End Times.
The Bush era ended with conservatism in collapse. The tea party was an attempt to create a new American right, but what the astroturfers have actually done is resurrect the settled issues of the past. Rand Paul may be walking back his position on the Civil Rights Act, but he cannot help himself; between now and November he will be the gift that keeps on giving. David Frum describes Paul thusly:
Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It’s as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.
As a libertarian, Rand is likely in favor of the right of suicide. But thanks to him, the damage will now be felt by others too, who will now be called upon to explain where they stand on every fruitbat idea ever aired in back issues of the Ron Paul newsletter.
And how. Even worse than Paul will be the Paulites. Argue with them, and you’ll find yourself rehashing the Civil Rights Acts, the gold standard, and the question of a central bank that was argued and re-argued throughout American history until the creation of the Federal Reserve. They want to undo history; they are all about going back to some mythical, golden utopia of their imagination. Along the way, they would undo every advance of American society and politics.
Lest you think I exaggerate, look at who Rand Paul hangs out with.
Koch’s Suckers
Apr 18, 2010 Culture Wars, John Birch Society, Kochs, Kulturkampf, Piltdown politics, Sunday Sermon
This is an epic deconstruction from Maddow.
It is the most absurd form of right-wing projection that all of media and government are in the hands of some sinister conspiracy. In fact, that conspiracy theory itself is the conspiracy. Koch Industries was founded by a man who founded many things besides, including the John Birch Society — a subject Maddow has covered before:
JBS was essentially an update of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion formula (edit: see note below). In fact, all the diverse paranoias of political ages past were recycled into JBS. Anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic, and anti-Catholic lies were turned into anti-communist ones, just as fluoridation “mind control” has recently been updated for a back-to-school speech. There’s nothing new in the paranoid universe.
The tinfoil hat set has been around a while. Wealthy right-wing capitalists from Henry Ford to Fred Koch to Don Blankenship have paid good money to keep conspiracy theory alive and kicking. Climate change denialists invoke this bogeyman of Teh Global Socializms™ all the time; it is no accident that Kochs have outspent Exxon in supporting climate change denial shops. Koch money appears at any number of conservative “free market” prop-shops like the CATO institute and even the Ayn Rand cult. That shouldn’t be surprising; Rand’s libertarianism is a natural fit, though a strange bedfellow given her atheism.
Indeed, the conspiracy to keep conspiracy theories alive is itself an old, vast, international coalition of conspiracy creators (Protocols came out of Russia). The Russian connection picks up again with the history of the Koch fortune, which was built with Stalin’s money.
In other words, this right-wing stupid-propagation system is an old thing. Its progenitors have always been hip deep in culture war, and have always served the interests of wealth and power. They have updated ancient hate-speech and paranoid histories to serve in new eras; now they have moved online and into the number one cable network to create the tea party movement.
The direct-mail lists of the John Birch Society have morphed into the email lists of Americans For Prosperity, with JBS growing as a result.
Organized by the powerful and rich, for the powerful and rich, to the benefit of powerful and rich people, the tea party phenomenon is “grounded” in a mindset I call the paranoid universe. First described by Richard Hofstadter, a picture of the leviathan very much resembles its own picture of the world, in which
both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world order managed by a “one-world socialist government.”
As close readers of this blog will know, there has been a move away from the non-profit model of astroturfery to the for-profit model. Suckers will pay for their apocalypse porn.
Worse, in the age of email suckers can be born every nanosecond and propagate creatively at will, shooting from Ning.com to Sara Palin’s Facebook page to Twitter and back before truth ever finds out it is needed.
Breaking this conspiracy-to-promote-conspiracy open is the easy part. Getting it into the mainstream consciousness is much harder, but Maddow has done yeoman’s work in making that happen.
ADDING: As per the comments below, I should like to explain “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion formula.” Protocols is a famous case of Piltdown politics; anti-Semitic texts crossed the borders of Europe into Russia. The ideas were published in a volume that found its way to Henry Ford, who propagated the story.
The same method has been applied by the Kochs. Blaming Jews commies for all the world’s ills, a powerful western capitalist promotes the lie that a cabal of Jewish bankers satanic international conspiracy wants to drink the blood of your children wants to create a global collectivist state.
1) Exotic origin
2) Secret knowledge
3) Sinister plan
Or as Hofstadter defined it more broadly, and I summarize:
1) THEY are against you and want to make your life hell
2) THEY control everything; trust no one (except me)
3) THEY are all in it together
Both Ford and Koch supported a fiction — a narrative — that defined a paranoid world, and there are only three moving parts to that narrative. Individual memes in either body of arcanum vary, but they come from a global continuum of crazy with roots older than the printing press. That’s because memes pass from generation to generation.
This blog post in no way promotes the idea that Kochs and Fords are somehow mixed up together in a vast, sinister conspiracy; that would be paranoid.
Why Does Joe Lieberman Hate The Constitution?
Apr 4, 2010 Joe Lieberman, Kulturkampf
Over at Cesca’s place, Steven Weber asks the right question:
Do Republicans actually like Democracy?
Really. Their strategy seems to be one of complete disdain for the last 200 or so years of that defining American civil exercise. They are behaving as though they’ve discarded all pretense of caring or participation. Weird.
I’d say Joe Lieberman is the Democrat that proves this hypothesis. In case you weren’t watching, here was Joe Lieberman (?-CT) on Meet the Press today:
“We are at war,” Lieberman said. “We were attacked on 9/11. And I think when you’re at war, even though this is a different kind of war, people you capture, enemies who are aiming to attack or have in fact attacked you, ought to be tried according to the rules of war.”
That concise summation of neocon evangelism is utter nonsense. Someone, somewhere, please ask Joe to explain how the underpants bomber fits with this theory. Abdulmutallab is cooperating with the FBI today because instead of threatening his family, the United States brought his family from Africa to see him.
The problem with the Global War on Terrors™ hypothesis is that it flies in the face of all current empirical evidence. To date, almost all successes in the War That Shall Not Be Mentioned (WTSNBM, codename WITSENBAUM) have been the result of (1) law enforcement actions and (2) drone strikes.
But think about it: Lieberman is basically complaining that a president would follow the constitution in time of “war.” The only problem with this idea is that neocons were promising a very long war from the very beginning. We must suspend the Constitution in order to save it, and we don’t know how long it will take — maybe a hundred years. Wars against states are quick; wars against things are invariably endless and expensive. Exhibit A: drugs. Exhibit B: guns.
Guns are at least physical things; terror is a feeling. A war on terror makes as much sense as a war on happiness. Insofar as America remains mired in military conflict, it is because we forgot this and pursued the imperial energy ambitions of two Texas oilmen.
There have been seven years of needless waste in pursuit of Rome. This is not Rome, and our founders did not want America to be that sort of empire. Commercial empire? Certainly. But more importantly, they relied on that body of empirical evidence called “history.”
About which the Becks of the world know nothing. More on that tomorrow.
Scorsese Decoded
Mar 11, 2010 Culture Wars, Directors, Kulturkampf, Scorsese, Twitteratti, movies
Via Roger Ebert’s new voice comes this summation of the director’s work:
Every one seems to be about a man who has realized the dichotomy of his life and making a choice. Once blind, now seeing… for better or worse.
I noticed this years ago. Scorsese’s always taken a very personal approach to the gospel; I was more offended by the Brooklyn accents in “Last Temptation” than the material, which was pretty tame compared to Genesis. I may add it is strange how that movie was vilified, considering Scorsese’s entire life’s work has been a redemption of Christian parable.
Defeat Strategy
Mar 4, 2010 11-Dimensional Chess, Kulturkampf, Lost Cause mythology, health care reform
Senate Republicans are turning their desperate ire on the Senate Parliamentarian, a man seldom seen and rarely even photographed. Politico’s Manu Raju writes:
“I think most people don’t trust him,” said a senior GOP official who regularly works with the parliamentarian.
So you work with him on a regular basis, but he’s not trustworthy? Logical! Almost as fun as Jim DeMinted questioning Alan Frumin’s “objectivity” — this is the man who explained to Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel that they could not pass the entire Senate bill through reconciliation. Remember September through December? That was Frumin’s fault.
Of course, all of this noise is intended to “inform” the right wing Lost Cause mythology that inevitably follows defeat. Just as the 16th Amendment was supposedly never ratified, wingnuts 20 years from now will say that ObamaCare was rammed through Congress in an illegal way. Revisionist histories are now built in real-time.
But what most interests me about this news is that it’s a defeat strategy. There may be no depth to how far Republicans will sink before the bill passes, and that is the point.
Maintaining my boycott of Politico links:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33814.html
Morning Breakfast
Feb 10, 2010 11-Dimensional Chess, Consensus, Culture Wars, Kulturkampf, President Barack Obama, The Peace of 2008
I’m having eggs and bacon and biscuits with toast and coffee. It’s cold outside and dammit, this is the south.
There will be new FDA rules to end the days of misleading nutritional information because Obama is just like Bush.
Frank Rich recognizes the 11-D chess move that is Obama’s DADT strategy:
In another, milder cross-examination — on “Meet the Press” last weekend — John Boehner, the House G.O.P. leader, fended off a question about “don’t ask” with a rhetorical question of his own: “In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat, why would we want to get into this debate?” Besides Mullen’s answer — that it is the right thing to do — there’s another, less idealistic reason why President Obama might want to get into it. The debate could blow up in the Republicans’ faces. A protracted battle or filibuster in which they oppose civil rights will end up exposing the deep prejudice at the root of their arguments. That’s not where a party trying to expand beyond its white Dixie base and woo independents wants to be in 2010.
Obama is turning the demographics of social change into a wedge between Republicans and independent voters as well as the military — which also affirms my thesis that Kulturkampfers have already lost, and that Obama knows exactly how to use opinion polls. When he described an end to the culture wars in his inaugural speech, he wasn’t kidding.
Obama understands the concept of “divide and conquer.” In the politics of consensus, it is called “wheat from chaff.”
