The good news about climate change is that solutions exist. We can make our machines, vehicles, and devices vastly more energy-efficient. Instead of coal and oil, we can use hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, even municipal waste to generate electricity. Clean coal has not yet been tried on a large scale, but on a small scale, it has been proven to work. Electric vehicles can easily replace oil-burning cars within the next decade or two.
So we're on course. All it takes is political will.
The flip side is that carbon-friendly sources of energy are, without exception, more expensive than fossil fuels. Dirty coal is the easiest, cheapest fuel in the history of the world. There is a reason it is cheap - the true cost is paid by future generations through global warming.
But that does not change the fact that our entire civilization is based on energy being cheap. And emerging civilizations - China, India, and the rest - are relying on cheap coal to fuel their rapid economic growth.
If we do what must be done - stop emitting greenhouse gases - we must accept, for decades, more expensive energy as a basic fact of life. That means everything that takes energy - everything not made with pure manual or animal labor - in short, almost any product or service of an industrial economy - becomes more expensive. Living standards stagnate or drop. Growth slows down, maybe permanently.
Most tragic is the rise in inequality heralded by decarbonization. The rich countries got rich in no small part by running what could be called an "environmental deficit"'; they borrowed against the biosphere, using artificially cheap energy. Now the biosphere is tapped out. That means the poor countries won't be able to industrialize as easily and cheaply as the West did. With a slower growth rate all around, it will be all that much harder to catch up to the West - maybe not possible at all.
Even within Western countries, the general rise in prices will hit the poor and middle class much harder than the rich. The oil price spikes of the 1970s (and 2008) were followed by major recessions that devastated the lives of millions. (There was of course a financial bubble in 2008, but think of peak oil as the needle that burst that bubble.) A coal price spike would be much, much worse. And we've never had a major coal price spike before.
Now it becomes clear why there is so little political will to stop global warming. Nobody wants to accept the inevitably lower standard of living this entails. That's why climate change denialists take refuge in a fantasy world where global warming doesn't exist. With the recession to remind people just what a lower living standard is really like, denialism has soared. Fewer and fewer people believe global warming exists and is man-made, even as the science has solidified in the past few years. Fake pseudo-scandals that would have been ignored in 2007 become front-page news in 2010.
Is there a way out? Maybe, one day, we will figure out ways to make renewables as cheap as coal is today. But that "one day" is not likely be within the cruelly short interval within which it is possible to act. We have 20-30 years before feedback effects kick in and global warming becomes irreversible. We cannot wait until we've found a cheap replacement for coal.
And that means a lower standard of living, lowest of all for those who already have least.
]]>A pivotal moment in the campaign was the tabloid-fuelled furor over the totally bogus charge that the province was going to exempt Muslim women from showing their faces at the election booths. In fact, Québec law does not forbid anyone from covering their face at a booth, whether with a niqab or a hockey mask. But anti-immigrant hysteria will not stop and listen to anything that contradicts its narrative - that these backward, primitive darkies are coming in and destroying "our" values. So, at the last minute, the province actually introduced a double standard - Muslim women, and only Muslim women, would be required to show their faces, everyone else would not.
Mario Dumont campaigned on a platform of conservatism at its ugliest. Fortunately he did not obtain the premiership, but if he did he might well be the most anti-union, anti-immigrant, right-wing leader Québec has had since Maurice Duplessis. Indeed, there is nothing new about the Action Démocratique party, it is simply the old Union Nationale reborn. Québec is turning its back on the Quiet Revolution.
Dumont's entire career has been peppered with kooky ideas. The ADQ was founded in 1990 based on the Allaire Report, where, embittered by the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, Jean Allaire called for Québec to remain in Canada but with Ottawa reduced to licking postage stamps. At one time or another, Dumont has demanded a 20 percent flat tax, two-tier medicine, charter schools, emasculation of unions, and simultaneous cuts for business taxes and social programs.
For an explanation of Dumont's victory, one has to go no further than the town of Hérouxville. Its now-famous resolution proclaimed that practices such as stoning and genital mutilation - which have never been reported in Canada - were not welcome among immigrants to the town. This is merely a sly way of saying that immigrants tend to be barbarians who engage in such practices, and that they, themselves, are not welcome in the heartland. They are to stay in Montréal, or better yet exit the province entirely. And let them not dare to wear a headscarf at a soccer game.
Nor was there much solace to be found in the other parties. André Boisclair revealed himself to be the worst leader in the history of the Parti Québécois. In no other province could a party leader have openly goftten away with dissing Asians as "slanty-eyed immigrants". And Jean Charest was reduced to minority status not for his right-wing agenda, but for not going far enough.
The PLQ can save itself simply by adopting much of the ADQ's agenda - for, after all, the ADQ started out as a splinter movement from the PLQ. Whether it works or not remains to be seen. If it happens, Québec will have come full circle. The party of Jean Lesage will have become the party of Maurice Duplessis.
]]>Well, let me establish my bona fides. I've been a New Democrat for as long as I've known what the words meant. I canvassed and dropped leaflets for Peter Kormos in 1988, for Rob Dobrucki in 1993, for Jack Layton and Olivia Chow in 1997. I was a delegate to the 1996 Ontario leadership convention. I was on the executive of the Ontario New Democratic Youth in 1996-97. You could look it up.
Why? Because I believe in things like national pharmacare, wage insurance, card checks, debt relief, rent subsidies, and progressive taxation. Because I believe that the overriding goal of any political movement must be to redress injustice, to defend the weak, to heal the pains and agonies that torment our world.
I have never voted Liberal because, while many Liberals share these goals, many others do not. Even those that do are often all too willing to let them slip, to pander to prejudices and ignorances, in the worst case to perpetuate the evils they should be fighting.
But the NDP is not without its problems either. Chief among them is a maddening inability to listen to what its public is actually saying. An inescapable fact of Canadian political life is that a substantial percentage of the population casts their ballot primarily to oppose the Conservative party.
In 1988, they wanted to stop free trade. In 1993, they wanted the Mulroneyite bastards out. Today, they don't want a government that would give more freedom to markets than to people. They believe Stephen Harper would destroy the fabric of this country if he had a majority, and they will vote however it takes to stop him.
The NDP thinks of itself as the only progressive party and Liberals and Conservatives as barely distinguishable reactionaries; choosing between them would be like, as Tommy Douglas famously put it, a mouse choosing the colour of cat. But that was in a different era, when the United States under Roosevelt was an inspiration to progressives rather than a repulsion, before neoconservatism in all its incarnations started to destroy our world.
The ideas of Reagan or Thatcher or Bush crossed the border to become Mulroney, Harris, and Harper. It is impossible to ignore these ideas. Progressives must fight them, or they will be defeated. Yet, even in the heat of the 1988 campaign, the Liberals and NDP could not swallow their pride and come to any kind of alliance, such as a non-competition pact. They spent enough of that campaign sniping at each other for the Tories to laugh all the way to the PMO.
Today New Democrats like to ask why it's their duty to elect Liberals. It is not. It is their duty, however, to prevent the election of Conservatives. More generally, it is their duty to put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of their party. If NDP truly wants to give disadvantaged Canadians what they want, rather than what the NDP thinks they should want, it must heed this message.
This is not to say the NDP should simply merge with the Liberals - the ideological differences are too great, and Canadians do not expect this. Rather, the party should be prepared to work with Liberals to figure out the best way of defeating extremist right-wing parties. One obvious solution is non-competition agreements, where in selected ridings one of the two parties agrees not to run a candidate.
The NDP would be perfectly within its rights to demand cabinet seats in return, bringing it more power than it has ever had before. Indeed, many Canadians would welcome a Liberal-NDP coalition government - many more, in fact, than would be prepared to accept a purely NDP government, even a minority one. Canada's best and most popular governments, for the past 70 years, have been Liberal minorities propped up by the NDP. Failure to form an alliance more often than not leads to electoral disaster - witness the 1990s, or 1974, or the 1987 Ontario election.
It does no good for the NDP to stubbornly stick its head in the sand and behave like a northern version of Ralph Nader. It hurts the progressive agenda, it hurts the NDP, and it hurts Canada.
]]>Margaret Wente is not the worst columnist in the Globe's stable - that honour goes to the insufferably narcissistic, jejune, and misandrist Leah McLaren. Unlike McLaren, however, people actually take Wente seriously. She shows up regularly as a TV talking head, has won several National Newspaper Awards, frequently provides fodder for the most rabid blogs in both Canada and the United States, and has a good deal of power at the nation's most influential newspaper.
And what does she do with this media spotlight? A count of the fifty-odd columns refuted in this blog shows that fully a third are devoted to criticism of one or another non-Western culture or nonwhite people. It is hard to think of any other writer in English who is so single-mindedly concentrated on ethnocentrism as an ideology. There are, indeed, writers more Islamophobic, or more hostile to blacks, or anti-immigrant, especially in the United States. But I know of no one else who works so hard on smearing all non-white peoples with a broad brush, who will invent social problems where none exist, who will scurry to find any possible racial angle to a story.
And indeed this is why Margaret Wente provokes such fury in me, for I am everything she despises. I was born in Canada. I am not white. I look to Tiruvalluvar or Kalidasa for inspiration every bit as much as Shakespeare or Dickens. I believe the Bhagavad Gita has as much to teach us today as does Locke or Montesquieu. I make no apologies for eating samosas, celebrating Diwali, dressing my children in traditional dress, or sending them to Tamil classes. I take pride in my ancestors and their achievements.
None of these things make me any less Canadian. To Wente, however, I have not "assimilated" (in other words, abandoned my identity) and am therefore at best a living example of overly tolerant political correctness, at worst a potential terrorist. Over and over again, she tells us we don't fit in, that we don't belong. The welfare state doesn't work if we are around. Feminism cannot coexist with us. Liberal democracy breaks down under the threat of our clothes alone.
Is there any limit to the lies and distortions Wente's pen will cast? An immigrant to Canada herself, she has no hesitation in telling native-born Canadians what they should wear, how they should behave, what our identity is, merely on account of the colour of our skin. She has only contempt for our ancestors, our traditions, and our values.
Every possible stereotype, every smug expression of superiority, every casual smear at a nonwhite culture that one can conceive of has found its way into Margaret Wente's columns. She cannot see past the colour of our skins, to read us as individuals and not symbols of our races. In her world, Muslims are destroying democracy in Europe, blacks are firing guns in a gangsta rap-induced frenzy, South Asians are beating their wives, Africans are deliberately infecting women with AIDS, and aboriginal Canadians abandon their children to alcohol and drugs.
The various social problems Wente describes exist in white communities as well, and she rarely has any empirical evidence to back up her claims that patriarchy and violence are endemic to non-white communities. Indeed, she does little actual research, relying mostly on unknown cranks and "everybody knows" statements.
Her popularity is due to her uncanny ability to strike a chord in the reader's id, the hidden coterie of prejudice that all of us have but that we like to think we have let go of in a modern society. Wente strikes this atavistic nerve, reawakens the fear of all that is dark and different, tells us it's okay to let logic, reason, and evidence fall aboard, and trust the evidence not of our eyes, not even of our hearts, but of our fears.
]]>In some villages, Dalits are not permitted to ride bicycles. This causes problems in villages where there are no schools in walking distance; the bicycle is the only practical way for children to get an education. One young woman, just fifteen years old has determined to fight this.
This girl is willing to risk her life to get an education. She is a heroine in the purest sense of the word.
Update: the original link no longer works, but here is another from the Times of India.
]]>Most genocides in history were carried out to eliminate a group of people; Armenians, Jews, Rwandan Tutsis, or Darfur blacks. In contrast, killing people was not the main goal of Ukrainian genocide, but a side effect. The lives of ten million people were considered less important than the policy goals of the communist regime.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wanted to abolish private property completely and collectivize agriculture; he also wanted grain to be exported to bring in hard currency to finance his industrialization plans. The Bolsheviks had been able to seize most land in the rest of the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War of 1917-21, but Ukraine was a special case. In Tsarist times, Ukraine's economy had been less feudal, with land in the hands of small farmers, or kulaks, rather than large landholders, as was the case in Russia proper. Thus, their lands didn't simply change hands during the Bolshevik rise to power.
By 1932, Stalin was determined to break the Ukrainian peasantry, and with it the spirit of Ukrainian nationalism which he saw as a threat to his totalitarian rule. He therefore ordered "shock troops" to raid Ukrainian farms and appropriate grain supplies. The farmers were left with neither food to eat nor seed to plant for the next year. To add a dreadful finality, trains and roads leading out of Ukraine were blocked. It was war by deliberate starvation.
Starving to death is one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. The words of one victim speak for themselves:
We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Dad is completely exhausted from hunger and is lying on the bench, unable to get on his feet. Mother is blind from the hunger and cannot see in the least. So I have to guide her when she has to go outside. Please Uncle, do take me to Kharkiv, because I, too, will die from hunger. Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live a while. Here I will surely die, for every one else is dying...
Death and suffering became routine. To see a skeleton-like person drop dead in the middle of the street, to see skeleton-like corpses line roadsides, to see empty, desolate villages and fields was just a part of life.
A visiting American journalist described the horror:
A peasant woman...appeared from a side path. She was dragging a child of three or four years old by the collar of a torn coat, the way one drags a heavy bag-load. The woman pulled the child into the main street. Here she dropped it in the mud.Everybody saw the scene, but no one made a move. My escort explained that he had long since grown accustomed to such sights...The child's little face was bloated and blue. There was foam around the little lips. The little hands and tiny body was swollen. Here was a bundle of human parts, all deathly-sick, yet still held together by the breath of life.
The mother left the child on the road, in the hope that somebody might do something to save it.
To this day, the Russian government has refused to release the NKVD's files on the famine.
]]>One thousand people are dying every hour. Twenty-four thousand a day, more than eight million a year - it matters little how you count, only that it is too many.
Its name is hunger. Chronic hunger. Not just the hunger of droughts and wars and refugees, but the insidious, long-term hunger, the hunger that persists even in fast-growing economies, even in the face of bountiful yields and seemingly generous aid.
We cannot believe that 800 million people around the world are chronically undernourished, for want of just a few dollars a year to help them. The money the Western world spends on lipstick, alone, would be enough to feed them all. But there is political will for lipstick, and there is none for the hungry. Their governments are corrupt, it is said, they themselves are lazy and ignorant and untrustworthy. There is time to wring hands and issue platitudes, but there is no sense of crisis, no feeling of urgency, little belief that this is an outrage that cannot be allowed to continue.
Who is to blame? There, we have no shortage. We can blame warlords who burn crops and rape women for plunder. We can blame imperalists who carved up a continent and sucked it dry. We can blame kleptocrats who pad their Swiss bank accounts with their taxpayers' money. We can blame oversubsidized cows. We can blame international loan sharks for wringing blood - or interest, as they call it - from a stone.
But we cannot think of any way to feed these people. And so they die. They continue to die. The silent genocide marches on, and none even dare notice it, let alone stop it.
]]>Visit any of the hundreds of thousands of small rural villages in India. See farm laborers earning Rs 25 (about 50 cents) a day, for a 16-hour day. They have no electricity. Their house is a shabby hut that can't keep out the rain. The well behind their house is filthy with human and animal waste, but that is all they have to drink.
Why don't their greedy landowner-employers pay them better? Because even the landowners don't have the money to feed the multitudes. Even if India's entire GDP were distributed equally, that would still amount to just Rs 200 (US$2) per day. That's not enough to provide anything remotely resembling a decent standard of living.
Many farm workers flee to the cities, hoping to find industrial jobs there. Around all of India's major cities are vast shantytowns, where people live in sheds and shacks. Some find jobs, but even these jobs pay poorly. Not even the most enlightened employer can pay well unless he has money to pay with.
Companies make money by selling goods and services. But to whom? Few in India have the money to buy much more than basic necessities. There is not enough money to build good roads, reliable telephone lines, farm equipment, and other investments in technology to enable India to produce more.
In short, India is in a poverty trap. It is poor because it is poor.
But there are rich countries in the world. Could they not be prevailed upon for aid? On occasion, yes, rich countries will grudgingly dole out aid, but they invariably pile on so many conditions on how it is to be used to render it almost useless. Or, worse, they demand high interest rates on their loans, leaving the poor country worse off than before.
Another idea. Why not try to find some good or service that can be SOLD to rich countries? They wouldn't be so stingy if they were getting something in return.
What a brilliant idea. And India has found two things (so far) it can sell - telephone call-center services and computer software. Funded by rich-country customers, wages climb to stratospheric heights. The child of the 50-cent-a-day farm laborer can pull in ten times that sum in a call center. Those who make it into IT pull in a mind-boggling Rs 2,500 a day or more. Instead of struggling in cramped sweatshops like their parents, they work in clean, spacious, air-conditioned offices.
Money, money, money. India pulls in US$3 billion a year from call-center work - as much again as from foreign "aid". Software draws in another $7 billion a year and the total is rising exponentially. The money-multiplier works its magic - well-paid IT workers and profitable IT companies spend money locally, their customers spend money locally, and so on. The poverty trap is turning into a prosperity circle.
As recently as 1996, 42 percent of India's population lived on less than US$1 a day. By 2001, that number had dropped to 35 percent. That is 70 million people lifted out of a state of poverty most Americans couldn't contemplate in their worst nightmares.
India might be said to be in the position China was in in 1990. The history here is even more extraordinary: 33 percent of China's people had incomes less than $1 a day in 1990; by 2001 the figure had fallen to just 17 percent. With China's huge population, that works out to nearly two hundred million people.
Together, China and India are achieving the largest-scale reduction in absolute poverty in the history of the world.
How are they doing it? Simple. They are using of the only advantage a poor country has over a rich one: its lower wages. They sell goods and services to rich countries at lower prices, and take home the profits. Japan did it. South Korea did it.
This issue strikes home for me because my parents are from South Asia. My father and mother know what it is like to go to bed, every day, hungry. To have no social services, no food stamps, no Medicaid, no public hospitals.
So when I hear liberals bashing outsourcing, I get angry. Yes, low wages undercut higher wages in America. So what? Those same "low" wages are raising the standard of living in India. As a liberal, I strongly believe in any and all measures to reduce poverty in the developing world.
I believe in generous foreign aid, lowering trade barriers to poor countries, and encouraging as much investment in possible there. To me, that is a moral necessity. It trumps everything, and if I have to choose between that and taking some job losses in the United States, I'll do it.
Why should that be so unnatural for a liberal? Do you really think the poor can rise without some sacrifice by the rich? Here at home, we are the first to call for wealthy individuals to pay higher taxes to fund social programs. Why do we object when the same thing happens on a global scale?
Consider also that during the 1990s, India was experiencing a brain drain. Many of its best people took advantage of the H1-B program to work in America, and many settled permanently. Now it's payback time, but Americans gripe. Why should rich countries be the only ones to benefit from globalization? Why do liberals join in the nativist hoarding?
Should I feel sorry for IT workers in America? Well, for starters, IT is a relatively high-paying profession. Even now, after the dotcom downturn, it is far from unheard of people just out of college to pull in $60K (compared to $40K in Europe or Canada). Experienced software developers make six digits.
These people are not poor. They are not even middle class. They are upper class. And we're supposed to take jobs away from the poorest people on earth and give it to them?
That's supposed to be a liberal position???
I'm pushing the company I work for to open offices in India. We won't lay off any of our existing staff, but we can open a QA operation there that we might not have been able to afford at all otherwise.
And as an aside: open-source software undercuts wages in retail software companies, and nobody complains about that. Would you give up Linux or Apache so Sun or HP employees can keep their jobs? I didn't think so. Why then should you try to hold back Wipro or Infosys?
]]>Since Vietnam, Democrats have been tagged, unfairly, as the "peace" party. So they keep losing.
In World War I and II, it was Democrats who were the war party. Republicans were isolationist; even after Pearl Harbor there were more than a few who claimed the whole thing was a plot by Roosevelt and his "Jewish friends".
Today, if you regularly read conservative propaganda, notice just how much the imagery of World War II is used to justify the war in Iraq. See this conservative propaganda anecdote here and attempt at satire here.
A regular theme of conservative writers is that Democrats were respectable in the days of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy but lost their militarism -- and with it, electability -- during Vietnam.
Americans will never vote for anyone who isn't a militarist. They never have, and they probably never will, unless America faces an overwhelming military defeat, like Germany and Japan did in World War II. We can't fight this basic cultural fact of life; we have to work with it.
On Vietnam, for instance, only 25 percent of Americans now believe that war was justified. Yet they continue to view protesters against that war in a negative light. John Kerry's activities as a Vietnam protester brought out the Swift Boaters and arguably cost him the election.
Many Bush voters weren't voting against John Kerry - they were voting against International ANSWER and other militantly anti-war groups, whom they believe to be both anti-American and indistinguishable from the Democratic Party.
In fact, the anti-Iraq protesters were right -- and a slim majority of Americans now agree. Yet candidates who were mistaken on the war, like Kerry and Edwards, were deemed preferable to those who opposed it from the start, like Dean. In America, it's better to be wrong than to be right, if it establishes militaristic bona fides.
But, as we know, selecting Kerry as the nominee could not refute the Democrat-as-peacenik stereotype. We need to do something much more dramatic.
Peter Beinart's much-discussed New Republic article argues that Democrats should re-establish their militaristic credentials by simply expelling Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. Most of us here would reject that notion. But it leaves the key questions unanswered:
My own take is that the mission of US forces abroad should be modeled on World War II: to stop and prevent genocide and mass killings, both present and future. That would have pointed towards military intervention in Rwanda in 1994. It would support the bombings of Serbia in 1995 and 1999. It would have supported sending troops to Liberia last year. Today, it might point towards using force against the Sudanese government in Darfur, or the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.
All these actions were or would be opposed by conservatives. That makes them all the more worthy of support, in my opinion. This allows us to claim the military as our own and paint conservatives as unpatriotic and unsupportive of the military.
And most importantly, it could save millions -- literally, millions -- of lives. That's the most important of all, for a progressive.
This doesn't mean US troops should be sent abroad for every international crisis - the failed Somalia intervention of 1992-93 is proof of that. The point is that we have to craft a foreign policy where the US military is used for good, and we can become the "just war" party rather than the "peace/appeasement" party we are now tagged as.
]]>
Develop an infrastructure of think tanks, talk radio, cable TV etc. This is certainly necessary, but this is a long-term project that won't be ready in time for 2008, or even 2012.
Use religious language more. If we used biblical language to argue that invading Iraq was morally wrong, would voters have responded Maybe, but I doubt it.
This theory assumes that voters are conservative because they're religious. But what if the opposite is true: that they're religious because they're conservative Consider the Pew poll taken after the election. It found that the main correlation between religion and politics wasn't based on whether the voter was evangelical, mainline, or Catholic, but rather whether they were traditionalist, centrist, or modernist within their chosen denomination. Traditionalists voted Republican, modernists voted Democratic.
This supports the notion that if someone is of fundamentally conservative mindset, they vote Republican and interpret the Bible as conservative. If that is the case, any appeals to liberal religion will simply be attempts to reach a type of faith that doesn't exist.
Run southern candidates. Not since Kennedy has a non-southern Democrat won the presidency. But being southern didn't help Carter get a second term, didn't prevent Clinton from losing Congress, and didn't help Al Gore carry even his home state. Edwards was a southerner; Bentsen was a southerner. Yawn.
Move to the left on economic issues. This is the Thomas Frank theory; in his book What's the Matter with Kansas he argues that working-class voters, seeing little difference between the parties on economic issues, vote Republican on social issues.
Recent evidence of this actually working is hard to find. In olden days, Johnson's great 1964 victory and Roosevelt's four victories showed the power of a groundbreaking economic program, but the public had a trust of government then it doesn't have now, and is unlikely to have any time soon without the media infrastructure mentioned above. Clinton's 1993-94 economic program was only mildly liberal, but it produced a backlash that delivered Congress to the Republicans for 10 years and counting.
Besides, in 2004 exit polls indicated that most voters for whom the economy, Social Security, health care etc. were the dominant concern were already voting for Kerry. Likewise, Gore did use some anti-corporate rhetoric in the 2000 election, but he continued to run behind Bush on "moral values" and taxes, which in the end trumped his issues.
Some point to the victory in the Montana governor's race as a model. This, however, featured a move to the right on the gun issue. The pattern appears to be that leftward economics only makes a winning program if Democrats:
Move to the right on social issues. This is the standard advice coming from much of the media and DLC types. Retreat from gay marriage to civil unions; quit quibbling over Ten Commandments displays, allow some restrictions on abortion. The Clinton victories of 1992 and 1996 are usually cited as examples of this working. But those victories were Pyrrhic; Clinton's retreats on crime and welfare didn't prevent Democrats from losing Congress.
Furthermore, this tiger can't be appeased. There is nothing to stop Republicans from shifting the bar still further to the right. Clinton signed the DOMA; now they want a constitutional amendment. The Senate voted 99-0 to keep God in the Pledge of Allegiance, but four Democratic senators went down the defeat anyway. In order to neutralize social issues for conservative voters, we'd have to move so far right we'd lose the support of liberal and moderate voters.
Move to the right on defense issues: This issue has been sorely neglected in the post-election analysis, due chiefly to the CNN exit poll finding that "moral values" ranked higher than "terrorism". Moral values, however, are a composite of at least three different issues: gay marriage, abortion, and personal religiosity.
It seems obvious to me that terrorism/defense issues did cost us the election. But it's not immediately clear what can be done about it. Most Americans subscribe to "city on a hill" nationalism: America is always right, its military force is always right and moral, and to suggest that American troops might not be fighting for a just cause is disloyal and treasonable. Since the Vietnam era, Democrats have been regarded as appeasers and pacifists to America's real or imagined enemies, from communists to Islamists. Voting for war authorizations or increased defense spending doesn't help.
Conservative rhetoric regularly paints the Democratic Party in the same league as anti-war groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R, and the jingoistic rage many people feel towards war protesters outweights whatever misgivings they may have about the war.
All the criticisms we lobbed at Bush - the incompetence in the war's execution, the dishonesty in launching it, the escape of Osama bin Laden, the sad state of homeland security - couldn't penetrate this fundamental distrust of Democrats and progressivism. Voters simply refused to believe that Democrats were as serious on terrorism as Republicans.
The trouble with this argument is that it was tried in 2002. Congressional Democrats voted for the Iraq war and made a great display of supporting him. It didn't help. Yet had they simply opposed it, they would also likely have been defeated.
A new, distinctly Democratic militarism:
We need to make nationalism and patriotism work for us, not against us. Democrats need to embrace military force, but use it in ways that benefit real people instead of Halliburton. Back in 2002, we should have opposed the war in Iraq, but proposed in its place an alternative, more just war -- taking on the genocidal regime in Sudan. Judicious use of force, as in Kosovo in 1999, Bosnia in 1995, and Haiti in 1994, can topple oppressive regimes and can make the world a better place.
Clinton was able to neutralize the welfare issue in 1992 by outflanking Republicans - by actually proposing to "end welfare as we know it", something even they hadn't dared do. Likewise, any terrorism platform that would work for us has to be seen as tougher than the Republicans. We should have advocated sanctions on Saudi Arabia if it didn't stop funding madrassas and start liberalizing. We should place ultimatums to the motley crew of Arab despots who take in US aid: improve the status of women and move toward elections, or the aid is cut off. We should pull troops out of Iraq and return them to Afghanistan to finish off the Taliban.
Tough-talk rhetoric, distasteful as it might sound, makes us look strong. Fretting about alienated European allies, no matter how well that concern is justified, makes us look weak.
Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat, for heaven's sake - why should Bush be the one benefiting from faux Wilsonianism? ]]>
And as long as we remain too afraid to strike out against the part of the country that already hates us, we will always lose.
First off, our dislike of the South is not why they don't vote for us. It is the other way around. The South has been the most conservative part of America for virtually its entire history. Whether we were fighting a war against them or assiduously courting them, their attitude never changed. Even in those periods when they voted for progressives - William Jennings Bryan, or Franklin Roosevelt - they did so only under the implicit understanding that the racist policies they had at the time would be respected. Under the New Deal, they benefited hugely from spending while paying little in taxes. To this day, they get more subsidies, more defense contracts, and privileged treatment from both parties. The Democratic Party is guilty of many sins, but genuine anti-Southernism isn't it.
But that needs to change.
It is important to remember the power of propaganda. Republicans run on a carefully crafted myth - that of the soulless, atheistic, socialist, decadent Manhattanite, wealthy and prosperous. The limousine liberal who gives away other people's money, who lets criminals go free, sells our country out to Islamists (and before them, to communists) and splays sexual perversions on television.
This myth has little basis in reality, but that does nothing to diminish its effectiveness. It provides Republicans with a ready-made, permanent target. It is an image they can pull out with just a few code words, and channel decades' worth of cultural frustrations and resentments virtually on command.
The image of the Northeastern/Hollywood limousine liberal is a galvanizer for conservatives. It gives their supporters something to demonize, something to strike back against. In Orwell's novel 1984, it was Goldstein - the phantom enemy who is constantly denounced, constantly hunted down, hated by the populace, but never actually captured or defeated.
In contrast, liberals do not have such a resonant, archetypal portrait of their enemy. We denounce conservatives on an issue basis, or (as in the case of Bush) an individual personality level. But we haven't reached the point of sensing our enemy on a gut, intuitively emotional, rather than intellectual, level.
Only a relatively small, intellectual part of the population is capable of getting excited over ideas in their pure form. For most people, ideology isn't a set of ideas, it is a list of friends and enemies. And it is fighting the enemy, more than defending the friend, that provides fervor to the ideological battle.
The archetype is an incredibly powerful tool for focusing emotions and drawing on universal memory and subconscious beliefs. We used to have archetypes that drove us -- the corrupt corporation, the robber baron, the cold-hearted banker. But in a post-industrial society, these don't hold the power they once did. We have nothing to replace them. Instead of fighting with our hearts, we fight with our heads. And we lose.
I content that Democratic supporters are too comfortable as Americans. They don't have the sense that an alien, hostile force, based in other parts of the country, is trying to take away their values, their institutions, their society. They don't have the sense of resentment and fear that red staters have.
A prime example is media. Believe it or not, most liberals are satisfied with the performance of CNN et al. They don't have the sense that the deck is stacked against them, as conservatives do. They don't hunt for alternative news sources. As a result, Fox finds a ready-made audience of conservatives, while liberal networks struggle.
The reason conservatives had the energy and motivation to build their huge ideological infrastructure - talk radio, Fox, right-wing journals and newsletters, think tanks - is because they were discontent with the mainstream. Never mind how conservative the mainstream has always been - they wanted more. So they built their echo chambers. Before long, their ideas ruled the post. Ours, lacking the same force, have withered.
Most American liberals don't feel that kind of urgency. We are less minded to open our checkbooks for the Center for American Progress or Air America. And part of that reason is we don't have somebody to despise or resent - an archetype.
The anti-southern posts that flooded liberal blogs after the election point out an archetype that is there for the taking, and much more grounded in fact than the conservative archetypes. The Southern fundamentalist Christian, drawing from his racist past, ready to tear down the Constitution and impose a rigid, puritanical theoracy at home and a jingoistic imperialism abroad.
Imagine an America where California and New York are jeered at as communist, where all schools are run by churches, where children are taught creation "science" and that Columbus discovered America. Imagine a country where elderly people starve without pensions, where people die when turned away from hospitals for lack of money, where gay people are beaten and imprisoned, where jobs disappear and hope dies, where women die from illegal abortions, where thousands are killed from guns bought in corner stores.
If secular-minded people, including libertarians, truly felt this danger, truly regarded right-wing regions as threats to our country, we would be the ones bragging of high turnout and winning elections. We would have the energy, not they.
Ask yourself: in your heart of hearts, which feels better: to struggle to win over a few southern conservatives, or to put those bastards in their place? Which energizes you more?
And what would motivate your apathetic neighbor, who voted for Kerry but donated no money and did not volunteer?
"I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
That quote is actually from the elder Bush, but it symbolizes a cornerstone of American conservatism. America can do no wrong. The strength of nationalism is every bit as powerful as that of religion, if not more. Republicans have tagged themselves as the party of nationalism and the Democrats as that of apologizing for America.
Voters didn't buy it until Vietnam, but after that the label has stuck. Clinton's victories were, perhaps, only possible because of the short window between the Cold War and 9/11. He ran an essentially isolationist campaign to victory in 1992. That's no longer possible.
During the buildup to the war on Iraq, it attracted demonstrations around the world, many of whom condemned the war as "American imperialism", an "oil grab" etc. The mere use of these slogans echoed similar arguments that had been made against the Vietnam war -- and produced a similar backlash. Democrats' being tagged as America-blamers, plus their support for civil rights, led to their 61 percent of the popular vote in 1964 falling to 40 percent in 1972.
Iraq left Democrats in an impossible dilemma. If they opposed the war from the beginning, as Dean had, they would be tagged as America-blaming pacifists (as Dean was). If they at first supported it but then criticized Bush's incompetent execution of it, as Kerry did, they would be dismissed as flip floppers, with the lingering suspicion that they were America-blamers.
There's no way out. If you're not an America-first, hawkish nationalist, you lose elections. Period.
So does that mean that Democrats should concede the ground entirely, and become imperalists too No and yes. That is, we should NOT concede the ground, but we SHOULD become imperalists. Imperalists of a different sort.
Americans will not tolerate any criticism of their country. Fine. Then the solution is to change America's conduct so that it really is beyond reproach. Replace Bush's faux Wilsonianism with the real thing.
Bill Clinton showed the way. In 1999, he made the decision to bomb Serbia. The Chomskyite left called him an imperialist. Western Europeans fretted he'd only make the situation worse. American conservatives grumbled that no vital US interest was involved. All were wrong. Within a year of the bombing, a racist dictator had been overthrown and Serbia was moving towards a stable democracy.
Notice how the debate over Kosovo was the exact opposite of the debate over Iraq. Republicans were the crabby isolationists; Democrats were the Wilsonian idealists. Republicans lost that debate.
What would have happened if Kerry had called for all-out US military intervention in Darfur He could have accused Bush of ignoring genocide and appeasing the world's most cruel Islamist regime. He could have talked about slave raids on Christian villages. He could have said how Sudan had proven links to Osama bin Laden, unlike Iraq. He could have made Bush appear soft on confronting the evils of radical Islamism, and himself the tough, idealistic hawk. He could even have distanced himself from unpopular Europeans by criticizing their inaction on the issue, echoing this Howard Dean article.
Just think of the lines:
"The President went to war to stop a genocide that happened 13 years ago. I want to stop a genocide that's happening right now."
"What kind of a message does it send to the world if we let a regime with proven ties to Al Qaeda continue to enslave, rape, and murder hundreds of thousands of people"
He would have dispelled the notion that Democrats are pacifist at heart, unwilling to use force to defend American interests.
And most importantly -- if he won the election, he might really have ended the genocide and saved tens of thousands of lives.
The list goes on. Why are we giving $2 billion a year in military aid to Egypt's repressive dictatorship? Why is Bush so cozy with the Saudi royal family? Resurrecting the Carteresque emphasis on human rights is needed in our policy towards the corrupt Arab dictators (who, let's face it, are the prime cause of the despair that recruits terrorists).
Aggressive, hawkish talk on "getting tough" on the countries that actually produced the 9/11 hijackers would contrast with Bush's dishonest, phony war. Obviously we can't invade every country in the Arab world, but at the very least we shouldn't be selling them weapons and calling their ambassadors close friends. The Arab street hates us in no small part because we're so cozy with their oppressors.
Not only might that have won the election, it might have actually ended the threat of terrorism, and erased the bad taste of Vietnam once and for all. ]]>
"Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, The alien or the poor" - Zechariah 7:10
"You cannot serve God and mammon" - Matthew 6:24
"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" - Mark 12:17
"You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child" - Exodus 22:22
"If you lend money to any of my people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a moneylender to him; you shall not charge him interest." - Exodus 22:25
"When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field when you reap, nor shall you gather any gleaning from your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger" - Leviticus 23:22
"If there is among you a poor man of your brethren...you shall not harden your heart nor shut your hand from your poor brother, but you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need, whatever he needs. Beware lest there be a wicked thought in your heart...and your eye be evil against your poor brother and you give him nothing, and he cry out to the LORD against you, and it become sin among you. You shall surely give to him, and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him...therefore I command you, saying, "You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land" - Deuteronomy 15:7-11
"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether one of your brethren or one of the aliens who is in your land within your gates. Each day you shall give him his wages, and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it" - Deuteronomy 24:14-15
"The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor" - Psalm 10:2
"Blessed is he who considers the poor" - Psalm 41:1
"But he who has mercy on the poor, happy is he. " - Proverbs 14:31
"He who mocks the poor reproaches his Maker" - Proverbs 17:5
"Whoever shuts his ears to the cry of the poor will also cry himself and not be heard" - Proverbs 21:13
"He who oppresses the poor to increase his riches,
And he who gives to the rich, will surely come to poverty" - Proverbs 22:16
"If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat;
And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink" - Proverbs 25:21
"He who hastens to be rich will not go unpunished" - Proverbs 28:20
"What do you mean by crushing my people
And grinding the faces of the poor?" - Isaiah 3:14
"Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees,
Who write misfortune,
Which they have prescribed
To rob the needy of justice,
And to take what is right from the poor of my people,
That widows may be their prey,
And that they may rob the fatherless." - Isaiah 10:1-2
"Is this not the fast that I have chosen:
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the heavy burdens,
To let the oppressed go free,
And that you break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;
When you see the naked, that you cover him,
And not hide yourself from your own flesh? " - Isaiah 58:6-7
"As a cage is full of birds,
So their houses are full of deceit.
Therefore they have become great and grown rich." - Jeremiah 5:27
"Execute judgment and righteousness, and deliver the plundered out of the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong and do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place" - Jeremiah 22:3
"They sell the righteous for silver,
And the poor for a pair of sandals.
They pant after the dust of the earth which is on the head of the poor,
And pervert the way of the humble" - Amos 2:6-7
"Therefore, because you tread down the poor
And take grain taxes from him,
Though you have built houses of hewn stone,
Yet you shall not dwell in them;
You have planted pleasant vineyards,
But you shall not drink wine from them.
For I know your manifold transgressions
And your mighty sins:
Afflicting the just and taking bribes;
Diverting the poor from justice at the gate" - Amos 5:10-13
"Her rich men are full of violence" - Micah 6:12
"You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.
"You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" - Matthew 5:38-44
"Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." - Matthew 19:21-23
Then the King will say to those on His right hand, "...I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.'
"Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, "Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink...And the King will answer and say to them, "Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'
"Then He will also say to those on the left hand, "Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.'
"Then they also will answer Him, saying, "Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?' Then He will answer them, saying, "Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me." - Matthew 25:34-45
"Blessed are you poor,
For yours is the kingdom of God" - Luke 6:20
"But woe to you who are rich,
For you have received your consolation" - Luke 6:24
"When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor rich neighbors, lest they also invite you back, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind" - Luke 14:12-13
"Beware of the scribes, who desire to go around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts, who devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation." - Luke 20:46-48
"He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first" - John 8:7
"Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil" - 1 Timothy 6:9-10
"For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away" - 2 Timothy 3:1-4
"Pure and undefiled religion...is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world" - James 1:27
"For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, "You sit here in a good place," and say to the poor man, "You stand there," or, "Sit here at my footstool," have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my beloved brethren...you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts?" - James 2:2-6
All quotes New King James Version.
]]>Now the more important question: what does he plan to do about it?
Currently, there are only 400 African Union peacekeeping troops in Darfur, lightly armed, underequipped and badly trained, with a weak mandate, and with no Western logistical support.
Sending US ground troops to Sudan is out of the question for both political and practical reasons. But the same restriction does not apply to air power. NATO jets should be enforcing no-fly zones over Darfur, and bombing known janjaweed encampments and supply routes. The US and EU should be supplying both money and transportation for more African troops, preferably from Muslim countries.
Of course, the Iraq mess interferes with the far greater crisis in Sudan. The US has half its army and all its political capital tied down there; the EU has fallen into a bizarre "enemy of my enemy is my friend" mode and is actually siding with Khartoum (see Howard Dean's smackdown on that subject). ]]>