Seeking to be very brief, for those unfamiliar with events in my city of residence, the city of Northampton, Massachusetts decided that this year, in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it would install a small banner with the slogan "Black Lives Matter" above the entrance to Northampton City Hall. For my part, I found nothing particularly controversial about its decision to do so. While I have not actively taken part in any local Black Lives Matter mobilizations to protest police brutality against African-American populations, I sympathize with the aims of the movement. In broader terms, government entities at the federal, state, and local levels need to engage in a thorough and evolving criticism of current organizational forms and operations in law enforcement and criminal justice/prisons in regard to the particular ways in which these processes both possess an implicit racial dynamic and contribute to our present understandings of race in the U.S. That is to say, the current problems with police brutality against African-American communities are not going to be resolved by a handful of indictments and/or firings of blatantly racist officers, or the wholesale shuffling of particular police departments to mirror the racial distribution of host communities. Rather, law enforcement and criminal justice need a more fundamental reconsideration concerning, in particular, the role of violence in policing practices.
Having said this, it is indisputable that the Black Lives Matter movement is significantly invested in such a criticism of law enforcement and criminal justice in the U.S. Placing a banner outside the Northampton City Hall absolutely advances a political statement with regard to the practices of law enforcement officers across the U.S., including the Northampton Police Department. Again, this is not a question of which departments are guilty of explicit racial discrimination in police practices, but how all police operations and organizational (e.g. hiring) practices may be inscribed with particular racialist ideas that effectively contribute to the subordination of African-Americans. In this manner, putting up a banner effectively suggests the need for a broader conversation about how law enforcement and criminal justice must evolve in order to support the full enfranchisement of African-Americans as coequal citizens and full-fledged human beings entitled to basic human rights. The fact that such a movement has arisen in the U.S. is symbolic of the fact that the proposition that Black Lives Matter is, in fact, open for debate - a plethora of police incidents, punctuated by numerous deaths of unarmed African-American assailants in police custody, constitute practical arguments to the contrary in the course of such a debate. As such, it is entirely true that, by installing a banner outside City Hall, the government of Northampton has palpably intervened in a debate of the value of African-American lives relative to the actions of law enforcement.
On the other hand, to the extent that we recognize the installation to be a contested political statement, we further need to take a minute to ponder the alternative. That is to say, supporters of the law enforcement community may be right to say that the placement of the banner in some way constitutes a criticism against police, but the only other alternative that I can contemplate is to explicitly argue that police violence against African-Americans, including lethal violence against unarmed individuals, is justifiable if only because Black Lives Don't Matter. If no one really wants to make this argument, then the notion that law enforcement practices do not need to be thoroughly examined and reformed in ways that both recognize the practical reality of race and make explicit provisions to redress recurring grievances within African-American communities amounts to the suggestion that it is acceptable to question the humanity of African-Americans. In this respect, I have no doubt that the Black Lives Matter banner is troubling to certain individuals in the Northampton community because of what it certainly implies with regard to law enforcement, but, in the absence of coming to some common recognition that Black Lives do indeed Matter and that we need to take proper actions in the reform of law enforcement and criminal justice to reflect such a reality, the actions of the city government certainly have merit as an incitement to engage in a discussion of what is to be done.
Friday, January 22, 2016
The Problem with Bernie?
This morning, I spent a bus ride down from Northampton to downtown Holyoke attempting to assuage my friend Scott's concerns regarding the rise of Bernie Sanders, particularly among his Democratic Party friends and online colleagues. In the end, my conclusion that it didn't really matter whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Party's nomination seemed like it was less than satisfying for my friend - he spent most of the ride coming up with reasons why he thought a Sanders nomination, let alone a Sanders presidency, would be entirely futile and dangerous, not in the sense that it would portend the initiation of radical socialist policies that might be bad for the health of the U.S. economy, but because it would invite a Republican presidential victory, perhaps even by the likes of Donald Trump!! For some reason, Scott and many other otherwise Democratic and independent progressives can't fathom the idea that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination and, yet, further, cannot bear the idea of Sanders winning the Democratic nomination, in their certainty that no self-proclaimed socialist will ever win the U.S. presidency. The fact that I'm so confident that Senator Sanders' surge in the polls is neither dangerous nor indicative of any future radical turn in federal politics is probably suggestive of my broader cynicism toward the federal electoral process and the federal (Constitutional) project, per se, and my faith that, to whatever extent that Sanders' apparent rise within the Democratic primaries indicates a broader anti-institutional reaction among younger, progressive Democrats, the persistent rise of Trump and Cruz on the other side reflects a more important and more corrosive dynamic within the Republican Party, likely to promote mass defections from moderately conservative Republicans and independent voters to any Democratic candidate in the November general elections. With this in mind, I want to use this post to develop a few reasons why, as someone at least nominally progressive in his political views, I am neither terribly excited about Sanders' run for the Democratic nomination, nor frightened that he is turning over Hillary Clinton's onion cart in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, nor terrified of the improbable image of Sanders' representing the Democratic Party in the general election.
1. In contests between policy nerds and realists, the realists typically win. If there is no other reason not to fear Bernie Sanders and his potential to overthrow of the Democratic Party's best chance to retain the White House in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, then it should be that, ultimately, the defenders of the best, most ideologically pure and most innovative, rationally conceived policy agendas typically lose elections against candidates who are better at selling tepid, ill-conceived, and generally unsatisfying compromise agendas as feasible solutions for a fractious democratic legislative process to the wider electorate. If elections in the U.S., either at the primary or general level, were contests exclusively decided among intellectuals with a sustained interest in rational, enlightened policy development, then the public policy process in the U.S. would be rigorously technocratic and the political process would manifest a transparent struggle between competing strategic partisan agendas ideally oriented toward achieving ideologically pure partisan goals. On the contrary, the electoral process is about appearances, about selling personalities and advancing vague, poorly conceived policy visions that, in the event of an electoral victory, will be eviscerated through legislative and administrative/bureaucratic rule-making processes, challenged against Constitutional standards enforced through judicial precedence, and, finally, subjected to the court of public opinion under the influence of partisan media coverage/propaganda - such is the history of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, notwithstanding the best efforts of hundreds of legislators and governmental executives and thousands of well educated and well intentioned bureaucrats to envision a modest and rational reform of access to health insurance to a larger segment of the U.S. population. The broader electorate in the U.S. does not need to plead ignorance with respect to the specifics of public policy or the policy positions of candidates for public office when political campaign organizations, political action committees, and partisan mass media outlets do their best to obfuscate the stakes of the democratic process, from municipal mayoral elections to the federal presidential contest. As such, it would seem much more fortuitous to an electoral candidate to be an efficient manager of personality promotion, while the consummate elected public executive should not be a tireless advocate for an ideologically consistent policy agenda but an open and willing advocate of wishy-washy compromise solutions and coalition building with erstwhile opponents. Having no doubt that Bernie Sanders' policy slate enjoys a much more compelling appeal among young, progressive, intellectual (and overwhelmingly White!) Democrats and left-leaning independents, concerned with economic inequality, the power of big banks, the affordability of health care, and ecological sustainability, I further have no doubt that Hillary Clinton is much better at the old-time, pre-Obama, Washington game of compromise, and, if only because she can more readily convey herself as the one candidate who can get things done, she will appeal to a broader segment of both the Democratic Party primary electorate and the general electorate, who, by and large, are more likely to be put to sleep by an in depth consideration of the merits of her policy proposals in relation to those of Senator Sanders.
2. The notion that a Sanders win in both Iowa and New Hampshire will sustain a critical mass of support for Sanders against a Clinton nomination going into the Southern "Super Tuesday" primaries is overblown - Sanders needs a massive turnout of committed, young, progressive Democrats (especially in states that do not allow independents to vote in party primaries!) to close a range on Clinton in the Southern Democratic primaries. Returning to this post and this conclusion in the aftermath of Sanders' decisive win in New Hampshire, in which he carried several key demographics including women under 40 by significant margins against Clinton, I will maintain the same position regarding Sanders. The Nevada Democratic Party caucuses are closed to independents, and, apparently, the Nevada Democratic Party has a large proportion of Hispanic voters who may be less inclined to support Sanders. Why this should be the case for a state that experienced such a steep decline in economic activity and such a crisis in its housing markets during the last recession is not entirely clear - Hispanic voters have as much of an interest in many of the economic issues that Senator Sanders has emphasized as White Anglo Democratic voters in Nevada should have. Nothing from the results in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that Sanders should lack appeal among Hispanic voters. In fact, in the most recent (2/8-2/10) TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon poll from Nevada of 1,236 likely Democratic voters, Clinton and Sanders both stand at 45 percent (see HuffPost Pollster, "2016 Nevada Democratic Presidential Caucus - Clinton 45%, Sanders 45% (TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon 2/8-2/10), at: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/targetpoint-r-washington-free-beacon-23746). On the other hand, the circumstances for South Carolina's open primaries on February 27, a state with a large percentage of Black Democratic voters, seem, at least for now, to favor Clinton decisively, even if, again, there is no apparent reason why this should be the case in regard to the Clintons' record with African-Americans relative to that of Sanders. Further, a string of additional Southern primaries are to follow on March 1 (Super Tuesday), which might be expected to mirror anticipated results from South Carolina. However, both Massachusetts and Vermont vote as well on Super Tuesday and both might, presumably, go to Sanders. At the present time, Southern Black Democrats seem key to Clinton's taking a significant share of Southern primaries, but so much of this will rely on Sanders' momentum from Iowa and New Hampshire falling off prior to South Carolina and Super Tuesday and, moreover, it assumes that Sanders cannot broaden his appeal to African-Americans by crafting a unique message targeting African-American voters, especially pursuing reform of law enforcement and criminal justice (if only through an especially active Justice Department) as key areas of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Notwithstanding his meeting with the Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday, Sanders has given no indication that he will alter his central economic message in any way, and this is a problem if he needs to extend a hand to African-Americans with something more than leftist economism. There are simply not enough young, White, progressive Democrats in the South to turn these states in Sanders' direction.
3. Sanders' policy agenda is not radical, his support for single-payer health insurance notwithstanding. His "socialist" platform embodies the controversial (and oddly backward-looking) notion that it would be a good thing for the U.S. to jump start the government-centric project of the New Deal in ways that merely reinforce existing institutions like Social Security.
Emphatically, Senator Sanders' agenda seeks to preserve and broaden the agenda of the Rooseveltean New Deal where the federal government left off with it in 1946. If, in the run up to the 1946 Republican/Southern Democratic conservative victory, such figures on the labor left as Walter Reuther of UAW envisioned a publicly financed national health insurance system as a legitimate goal for the splintering New Deal Congressional coalition and backed by President Truman, then the crushing defeat of progressives in the fall of 1946 set the federal government on a course toward moderation in the development of federal policies oriented toward economic equality and democratization. In this respect, I would not view President Johnson's "Great Society" as a substantial aberration in this longer transition toward conservatism. Reflecting on the formulation of economic policies in the period since the Reagan (counter-)revolution, it seems unlikely that a vast majority of the American electorate would amicably embrace a single payer health insurance system, even if we may be moving in that direction. More pointedly, it would seem impossible for any President to successfully push enabling legislation for such a system through a Congress that disproportionately reflects conservative interests across a broad range of regional constituencies where progressive interests are still not able to dislodge sitting incumbents given, among other things, Congressional districting. Any attempt to set up a single-payer system right now would certainly be dead on arrival. The same can also be said with regard to an initiative to make public higher education free to all college-bound students. Moreover, it is questionable that a Sanders administration would even be able to fiscally reinforce the finances of the Social Security Administration, for both retiree benefits and survivor/disability benefits. In my view, we have arrived at a crucial juncture in the war against the New Deal where the idea of attacking a project like the Social Security Act through the back door, by insisting we should "save" the system by privatizing it and leaving the solvency of a collective, pay-as-you-go retirement insurance system in the hands of individual contributors to invest as they see fit, has gone fully mainstream, in an era where private pensions have virtually disappeared and joint-contributory 401k plans have been shaken by wild fluctuations in equity and bond markets. With all this in mind, you have to wonder how it is even possible that initiatives that enjoyed broad public support three generations ago (if not the support of the powers that be) could now be considered off the deep end leftist radicalism.
In this regard, what would I consider truly radical, and what would I expect Senator Sanders to advance as an agenda for the next Presidency if he was an actual "radical?" What about the idea of guaranteeing every American a minimum yearly income through the tax system by means of aggressively expanding earned income tax credits to include virtually every individual with a job and with an income under $30,000 per year? What about the idea of fiscally supporting riskier alternative forms of entrepreneurship, especially workers' cooperatives, to generate a hybrid market-centric and non-market, non-capitalist subset of the broader U.S. economy without having to rely solely on the mechanisms of corporate banking and finance? What about reinstating and reinforcing the pre-clearance procedures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ensure that new progressive voting blocs do not get locked out of the electoral process across broad regions where conservative forces have conspired to stay in power forever by stifling democracy? What about opening the nation's door and our arms to millions of refugees from the drug wars in Central America and from the battle between Assad and the Islamic State in Syria, and becoming more serious about collectively bearing the burden of being the world's super power to push for long term solutions in both of these foreign policy theaters, even if that might mean raising taxes to pay for more, not less, military spending and, possibly, reinstating an egalitarian institution of compulsory military service for both American men and women? What about making serious federal fiscal investments in renewable energy, enacting carbon taxes, and raising federal gasoline taxes substantially to pay for mass transit infrastructures in regions unable to tangibly make such investments? In all fairness, I like what Sanders has advanced as a policy agenda so far, certainly more than I like what I've heard from the Clinton campaign, even if I thoroughly doubt Sanders would be capable of enacting any of it. That stated, it is an agenda that looks backward to what might have been if only we had given the New Deal more time to restructure the American economy and the American way of life in a manner that would have made us look more like Western Europe has looked for the last half century. The present moment demands a different breed of radicalism more in tune with the problems our country faces right now, at home and abroad.
4. For all their great policy ideas, neither Clinton nor Sanders will be capable of enacting the most moderate of their ideas into law without a decisive Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress, an outcome that is distinctly unlikely even if the Republican Party advances a presidential candidate and a platform thoroughly out of touch with emerging influential electoral blocs.
I think my previous comments should have adequately conveyed the point that, while not being especially radical in the broader light of history in American domestic policy development, Senator Sanders' ideas on domestic policy are nonetheless too radical to secure a Congressional consensus to enact any of his agenda. Moreover, the tepid sort of Wall Street reforms (never mind reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banks!) and gentle tweaking of the Affordable Care Act's administration suggested by the Clinton campaign appear similarly dead on arrival in the present context of Washington politics. I do not think that this is the case because the general American electorate has become unimpeachably conservative in its political outlook. In the end, I would absolutely hold to the conclusion that either Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton is more electable than Senator Cruz, Donald Trump, or Jeb Bush. Furthermore, a Democratic seizure of control in the U.S. Senate is not entirely impossible if unlikely for 2016, with Republican seats in Illinois, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin conceivably up for grabs. Fundamentally, where statewide electorates are concerned, the Democratic Party and progressive constituencies are looking at least somewhat strong in 2016. The problem is that successive redistricting of House seats by Republican controlled legislatures at the state level have left numerous states largely closed to Democratic representation. Here again, judicial challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and especially the elimination of pre-clearance procedures, loom very large in the reconstruction of the American electorate to favor control by conservative constituencies notwithstanding the larger leftward turn of the American electorate. Moreover, the last three Congresses have demonstrated that, in the course of defending its nominal stake in federal legislative and policy-making, the Republican Party has turned less and less amenable to compromise with progressives in order to address subjects of concern to the entire country, even to the point that certain Republican constituencies have been willing to countenance government shutdowns as preferable to not getting their way completely in policy matters. In certain respects, this unwillingness to compromise with even moderate Democrats evokes a larger commitment by the Republican establishment to satisfy the demands of its most active and vocal constituent minorities, constituting the lingering elements of the Tea Party movement and other sections of radical libertarian and religious conservatism. For my part, I maintain the position that the development of the Tea Party and the larger rise of the Republican Party rightist base has as much to do with the skin color of the man in the Oval Office as it does with any of his agenda. It is not likely that a Presidential victory either by a nominally feminist and ambiguously Christian woman with a long, controversial familial history in politics, or by secular, democratic socialist from a Jewish background would constitute a balm for the truculent nature of Republican Congressional politics. Neither of these candidates stand a chance to achieve any of their legislative agendas. In these respects, both need to configure larger strategies to mobilize a broader section of the American electorate to act in extra-electoral capacities on push legislators, on both the federal and state levels, to enact agendas favorable to their broader visions. It seems clear that politics at the federal level may remain thoroughly dysfunctional and out of step with the broader politics of the majority of Americans for some time to come, and each of the Democratic candidates has to acknowledge this and be ready to act pragmatically in order to deal with this situation.
5. The Democratic candidacies of both Clinton and Sanders must be understood in relation to the broader, evolving structure of the 2016 elections and, in particular, in relation to the struggle between the Republican Party establishment candidates and the Republican outsiders, especially Trump. In the absence of a major shift toward a mainstream Republican candidate, neither Trump nor Cruz can defeat either Clinton or Sanders in a general election. The Cruz victory in the Iowa caucuses (a state with substantial numbers of Republican evangelicals) and the Trump victory in the New Hampshire primary election (a state with large numbers of Republican libertarians and a broad segment of moderate independent voters) both suggest that this year's Republican primary contest is turning decisively toward the rightist flanks of the Party base, to the consternation of the Party's Washington establishment. This turn is, again, unabashedly to the favor of whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be. It might be too much to say that neither Trump nor Cruz deserves to be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the general election, but neither of these candidates appears to pose a serious threat to poach states out of the ensemble that enabled Obama to win two terms. Further, in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, the presence of a Cruz or Trump on the Republican ballot might be sufficient to turn the vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. The picture only becomes murkier if we add a forty billion dollar independent gorilla to the contest, by whom I of course mean Michael Bloomberg, who I regard as a serious contender for the Presidency. I emphatically believe that Bloomberg will declare his intention to run before the end of February. When (not if) this happens, the potential for Sanders or Clinton to win the Presidency will become a steeper climb, especially steep for Sanders. On the other hand, it will utterly doom the chances of Trump or Cruz, as if their chances were not doomed from the beginning! Bloomberg will draw votes from both sides of the political spectrum, leaving a somewhat moderate or somewhat progressive Democratic candidate to call forth an expanding and more thoroughly heterogeneous Democratic base and challenge for moderate independent voters. The Republican candidate, by contrast, will be left to draw from a declining Republican base, with less appeal to moderates. In this situation, I cannot help but assert confidently that Bloomberg is likely to win, and we would be left to contemplate the consequences of having a corporate, pro-globalization moderate in the Oval Office (a fate that doesn't seem entirely unappealing to me!).
6. What is in a word? If the Democratic Party, by some freak outcome of primary contests, selects Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate, the broader American electorate will have to reevaluate the meaning and significance of casting a ballot for a "socialist," and what a "socialist" agenda might mean in the American context. Having made the points that I seriously believe that Bloomberg will win a three-way contest for the Presidency in November and, further, that I still think that a Sanders victory in the Southern Democratic primaries and at numerous places in the Midwest against Clinton is unlikely, let us ponder the absolutely improbable. What if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Party's nomination, against a plethora of super-delegate commitments to Hillary Clinton and against the apparent incapacity of Sanders to appeal to non-White segments of the Obama electorate coalition? Will a plurality of American voters be able to fathom the possibility of democratic socialist as President? In my view, the answer to this question ultimately rests with the interpretation of socialism ultimately embedded within the minds of tens of millions of American voters. In this respect, two obvious readings of socialism spring into my mind. The first, and the one that Sanders obviously believes in and wants to convince the American electorate to believe in, involves the potential trajectory of the New Deal and the actual experience of countries like Sweden, Denmark, and, a lesser extent, France or Germany, countries that have embraced a decisive role for government in improving the lives of citizens through regulation of free market activity, active engagement in labor market practices, and public management of institutions, like universal access to health care, either by direct state provision or substantial state subsidization of private agents. The other image of socialism, and the one that the Republican candidate will obviously attempt to emphasize, conveys the image of a sterile, grey, cradle-to-grave, state-driven, centrally planned economic lethargy, devoid of entrepreneurial energy, market choice, and personal freedom, in relation to the overpowering will of state bureaucrats. In short, it is the image of the former Soviet system, with or without the presence of all encompassing totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat! Notwithstanding the presence of socialist alternatives, and especially in view of recent retractions and setbacks in European welfare states, it seems probable that more Americans will embrace the latter imagery of socialism and ignore the hopeful potential that once motivated American working people to seek the involvement and protection of the federal government in their quest for a better life, both through the provision of retirement insurance and other social spending and through active protection of workers' rights to collectively bargain with employers to achieve reasonable compensation for their labors. Emphatically, at the present time, there are simply not enough American voters who believe in the potential for the federal government to have a positive role in improving their lives, if only because the Reagan (counter-)revolution since 1980 did so thorough a practical and ideological job of destroying the capacity of the federal government to do so. On the other hand, if the general American electorate is incapable of encapsulating within its imagination the potential for a thoroughly democratic socialism in Sanders' mold, then it might be the case that support for such ideas could resonate for diverse audiences at the state level. This is unambiguously the case in Vermont! It might also be the case, given the right candidates and the right organizations in Massachusetts or New York or even California. Maybe the best answer for democratic socialists like Sanders is to think smaller and, then, network between states.
Beyond the idea that Sanders' democratic socialism needs a smaller audience and a more intimate political canvas, I think such a socialist imagery is worth evaluating on its own merits as an alternative to the rigorously individualistic and anti-state portrait of the American economy and the regular lives of American citizens. In this regard, I am not sure that a backward looking return to the New Deal is precisely what I, as an American Marxist, am looking for, even if I think it is a more comfortable image than that of the winner take all, all against all society that seems to identify contemporary American life. As someone who was trained to be an economist, I like markets and think that, for the most part, they work well relatively unregulated. I am reasonably content to endure the existence of a (global) financial sector that is relatively unleashed from the Keynesian-inspired regulations of the New Deal. I can live with the collapse of numerous New Deal and Great Society institutions, including Social Security and Medicare. I have learned to live with the reality that I am never going to retire - I am going to work until I am dead or wholly incapacitated. Such are the trajectories of the market freedoms and the antipathy toward the welfare state that we Americans have nurtured since Reagan and which a Sanders administration could never change. Perhaps I have become an unqualified cynic with regard to the potentialities for a democratic socialism, but my images of positive, progressive change in the U.S. simply do not involve a reliance on state bureaucracies or state policy. In this respect, I remain committed to the idea that we need a more collectively oriented society, burgeoned by the presence of more privately organized cooperative organizations across broader segments of everyday life, and more collective support for the aspirations of all individuals to experience fulfilling lives. To me, this implies a lot more private entrepreneurial behavior by a much broader segment of the American population, undertaken as much or more with the intent of achieving broader progressive social change as with the intent to maximize profits. It is doubtless a more hands on and challenging road to supporting human development and economic democracy, but, at least at the present time, I think it is eminently more feasible than hoping for attitudes on social welfare expenditures by either federal or state governments to change in a radical way. We need to learn to be pragmatic and work around the impediments of disadvantageous state policy (or lack of progressive policies) and the slings and arrows of global capitalism!
1. In contests between policy nerds and realists, the realists typically win. If there is no other reason not to fear Bernie Sanders and his potential to overthrow of the Democratic Party's best chance to retain the White House in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, then it should be that, ultimately, the defenders of the best, most ideologically pure and most innovative, rationally conceived policy agendas typically lose elections against candidates who are better at selling tepid, ill-conceived, and generally unsatisfying compromise agendas as feasible solutions for a fractious democratic legislative process to the wider electorate. If elections in the U.S., either at the primary or general level, were contests exclusively decided among intellectuals with a sustained interest in rational, enlightened policy development, then the public policy process in the U.S. would be rigorously technocratic and the political process would manifest a transparent struggle between competing strategic partisan agendas ideally oriented toward achieving ideologically pure partisan goals. On the contrary, the electoral process is about appearances, about selling personalities and advancing vague, poorly conceived policy visions that, in the event of an electoral victory, will be eviscerated through legislative and administrative/bureaucratic rule-making processes, challenged against Constitutional standards enforced through judicial precedence, and, finally, subjected to the court of public opinion under the influence of partisan media coverage/propaganda - such is the history of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, notwithstanding the best efforts of hundreds of legislators and governmental executives and thousands of well educated and well intentioned bureaucrats to envision a modest and rational reform of access to health insurance to a larger segment of the U.S. population. The broader electorate in the U.S. does not need to plead ignorance with respect to the specifics of public policy or the policy positions of candidates for public office when political campaign organizations, political action committees, and partisan mass media outlets do their best to obfuscate the stakes of the democratic process, from municipal mayoral elections to the federal presidential contest. As such, it would seem much more fortuitous to an electoral candidate to be an efficient manager of personality promotion, while the consummate elected public executive should not be a tireless advocate for an ideologically consistent policy agenda but an open and willing advocate of wishy-washy compromise solutions and coalition building with erstwhile opponents. Having no doubt that Bernie Sanders' policy slate enjoys a much more compelling appeal among young, progressive, intellectual (and overwhelmingly White!) Democrats and left-leaning independents, concerned with economic inequality, the power of big banks, the affordability of health care, and ecological sustainability, I further have no doubt that Hillary Clinton is much better at the old-time, pre-Obama, Washington game of compromise, and, if only because she can more readily convey herself as the one candidate who can get things done, she will appeal to a broader segment of both the Democratic Party primary electorate and the general electorate, who, by and large, are more likely to be put to sleep by an in depth consideration of the merits of her policy proposals in relation to those of Senator Sanders.
2. The notion that a Sanders win in both Iowa and New Hampshire will sustain a critical mass of support for Sanders against a Clinton nomination going into the Southern "Super Tuesday" primaries is overblown - Sanders needs a massive turnout of committed, young, progressive Democrats (especially in states that do not allow independents to vote in party primaries!) to close a range on Clinton in the Southern Democratic primaries. Returning to this post and this conclusion in the aftermath of Sanders' decisive win in New Hampshire, in which he carried several key demographics including women under 40 by significant margins against Clinton, I will maintain the same position regarding Sanders. The Nevada Democratic Party caucuses are closed to independents, and, apparently, the Nevada Democratic Party has a large proportion of Hispanic voters who may be less inclined to support Sanders. Why this should be the case for a state that experienced such a steep decline in economic activity and such a crisis in its housing markets during the last recession is not entirely clear - Hispanic voters have as much of an interest in many of the economic issues that Senator Sanders has emphasized as White Anglo Democratic voters in Nevada should have. Nothing from the results in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that Sanders should lack appeal among Hispanic voters. In fact, in the most recent (2/8-2/10) TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon poll from Nevada of 1,236 likely Democratic voters, Clinton and Sanders both stand at 45 percent (see HuffPost Pollster, "2016 Nevada Democratic Presidential Caucus - Clinton 45%, Sanders 45% (TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon 2/8-2/10), at: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/targetpoint-r-washington-free-beacon-23746). On the other hand, the circumstances for South Carolina's open primaries on February 27, a state with a large percentage of Black Democratic voters, seem, at least for now, to favor Clinton decisively, even if, again, there is no apparent reason why this should be the case in regard to the Clintons' record with African-Americans relative to that of Sanders. Further, a string of additional Southern primaries are to follow on March 1 (Super Tuesday), which might be expected to mirror anticipated results from South Carolina. However, both Massachusetts and Vermont vote as well on Super Tuesday and both might, presumably, go to Sanders. At the present time, Southern Black Democrats seem key to Clinton's taking a significant share of Southern primaries, but so much of this will rely on Sanders' momentum from Iowa and New Hampshire falling off prior to South Carolina and Super Tuesday and, moreover, it assumes that Sanders cannot broaden his appeal to African-Americans by crafting a unique message targeting African-American voters, especially pursuing reform of law enforcement and criminal justice (if only through an especially active Justice Department) as key areas of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Notwithstanding his meeting with the Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday, Sanders has given no indication that he will alter his central economic message in any way, and this is a problem if he needs to extend a hand to African-Americans with something more than leftist economism. There are simply not enough young, White, progressive Democrats in the South to turn these states in Sanders' direction.
3. Sanders' policy agenda is not radical, his support for single-payer health insurance notwithstanding. His "socialist" platform embodies the controversial (and oddly backward-looking) notion that it would be a good thing for the U.S. to jump start the government-centric project of the New Deal in ways that merely reinforce existing institutions like Social Security.
Emphatically, Senator Sanders' agenda seeks to preserve and broaden the agenda of the Rooseveltean New Deal where the federal government left off with it in 1946. If, in the run up to the 1946 Republican/Southern Democratic conservative victory, such figures on the labor left as Walter Reuther of UAW envisioned a publicly financed national health insurance system as a legitimate goal for the splintering New Deal Congressional coalition and backed by President Truman, then the crushing defeat of progressives in the fall of 1946 set the federal government on a course toward moderation in the development of federal policies oriented toward economic equality and democratization. In this respect, I would not view President Johnson's "Great Society" as a substantial aberration in this longer transition toward conservatism. Reflecting on the formulation of economic policies in the period since the Reagan (counter-)revolution, it seems unlikely that a vast majority of the American electorate would amicably embrace a single payer health insurance system, even if we may be moving in that direction. More pointedly, it would seem impossible for any President to successfully push enabling legislation for such a system through a Congress that disproportionately reflects conservative interests across a broad range of regional constituencies where progressive interests are still not able to dislodge sitting incumbents given, among other things, Congressional districting. Any attempt to set up a single-payer system right now would certainly be dead on arrival. The same can also be said with regard to an initiative to make public higher education free to all college-bound students. Moreover, it is questionable that a Sanders administration would even be able to fiscally reinforce the finances of the Social Security Administration, for both retiree benefits and survivor/disability benefits. In my view, we have arrived at a crucial juncture in the war against the New Deal where the idea of attacking a project like the Social Security Act through the back door, by insisting we should "save" the system by privatizing it and leaving the solvency of a collective, pay-as-you-go retirement insurance system in the hands of individual contributors to invest as they see fit, has gone fully mainstream, in an era where private pensions have virtually disappeared and joint-contributory 401k plans have been shaken by wild fluctuations in equity and bond markets. With all this in mind, you have to wonder how it is even possible that initiatives that enjoyed broad public support three generations ago (if not the support of the powers that be) could now be considered off the deep end leftist radicalism.
In this regard, what would I consider truly radical, and what would I expect Senator Sanders to advance as an agenda for the next Presidency if he was an actual "radical?" What about the idea of guaranteeing every American a minimum yearly income through the tax system by means of aggressively expanding earned income tax credits to include virtually every individual with a job and with an income under $30,000 per year? What about the idea of fiscally supporting riskier alternative forms of entrepreneurship, especially workers' cooperatives, to generate a hybrid market-centric and non-market, non-capitalist subset of the broader U.S. economy without having to rely solely on the mechanisms of corporate banking and finance? What about reinstating and reinforcing the pre-clearance procedures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ensure that new progressive voting blocs do not get locked out of the electoral process across broad regions where conservative forces have conspired to stay in power forever by stifling democracy? What about opening the nation's door and our arms to millions of refugees from the drug wars in Central America and from the battle between Assad and the Islamic State in Syria, and becoming more serious about collectively bearing the burden of being the world's super power to push for long term solutions in both of these foreign policy theaters, even if that might mean raising taxes to pay for more, not less, military spending and, possibly, reinstating an egalitarian institution of compulsory military service for both American men and women? What about making serious federal fiscal investments in renewable energy, enacting carbon taxes, and raising federal gasoline taxes substantially to pay for mass transit infrastructures in regions unable to tangibly make such investments? In all fairness, I like what Sanders has advanced as a policy agenda so far, certainly more than I like what I've heard from the Clinton campaign, even if I thoroughly doubt Sanders would be capable of enacting any of it. That stated, it is an agenda that looks backward to what might have been if only we had given the New Deal more time to restructure the American economy and the American way of life in a manner that would have made us look more like Western Europe has looked for the last half century. The present moment demands a different breed of radicalism more in tune with the problems our country faces right now, at home and abroad.
4. For all their great policy ideas, neither Clinton nor Sanders will be capable of enacting the most moderate of their ideas into law without a decisive Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress, an outcome that is distinctly unlikely even if the Republican Party advances a presidential candidate and a platform thoroughly out of touch with emerging influential electoral blocs.
I think my previous comments should have adequately conveyed the point that, while not being especially radical in the broader light of history in American domestic policy development, Senator Sanders' ideas on domestic policy are nonetheless too radical to secure a Congressional consensus to enact any of his agenda. Moreover, the tepid sort of Wall Street reforms (never mind reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banks!) and gentle tweaking of the Affordable Care Act's administration suggested by the Clinton campaign appear similarly dead on arrival in the present context of Washington politics. I do not think that this is the case because the general American electorate has become unimpeachably conservative in its political outlook. In the end, I would absolutely hold to the conclusion that either Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton is more electable than Senator Cruz, Donald Trump, or Jeb Bush. Furthermore, a Democratic seizure of control in the U.S. Senate is not entirely impossible if unlikely for 2016, with Republican seats in Illinois, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin conceivably up for grabs. Fundamentally, where statewide electorates are concerned, the Democratic Party and progressive constituencies are looking at least somewhat strong in 2016. The problem is that successive redistricting of House seats by Republican controlled legislatures at the state level have left numerous states largely closed to Democratic representation. Here again, judicial challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and especially the elimination of pre-clearance procedures, loom very large in the reconstruction of the American electorate to favor control by conservative constituencies notwithstanding the larger leftward turn of the American electorate. Moreover, the last three Congresses have demonstrated that, in the course of defending its nominal stake in federal legislative and policy-making, the Republican Party has turned less and less amenable to compromise with progressives in order to address subjects of concern to the entire country, even to the point that certain Republican constituencies have been willing to countenance government shutdowns as preferable to not getting their way completely in policy matters. In certain respects, this unwillingness to compromise with even moderate Democrats evokes a larger commitment by the Republican establishment to satisfy the demands of its most active and vocal constituent minorities, constituting the lingering elements of the Tea Party movement and other sections of radical libertarian and religious conservatism. For my part, I maintain the position that the development of the Tea Party and the larger rise of the Republican Party rightist base has as much to do with the skin color of the man in the Oval Office as it does with any of his agenda. It is not likely that a Presidential victory either by a nominally feminist and ambiguously Christian woman with a long, controversial familial history in politics, or by secular, democratic socialist from a Jewish background would constitute a balm for the truculent nature of Republican Congressional politics. Neither of these candidates stand a chance to achieve any of their legislative agendas. In these respects, both need to configure larger strategies to mobilize a broader section of the American electorate to act in extra-electoral capacities on push legislators, on both the federal and state levels, to enact agendas favorable to their broader visions. It seems clear that politics at the federal level may remain thoroughly dysfunctional and out of step with the broader politics of the majority of Americans for some time to come, and each of the Democratic candidates has to acknowledge this and be ready to act pragmatically in order to deal with this situation.
5. The Democratic candidacies of both Clinton and Sanders must be understood in relation to the broader, evolving structure of the 2016 elections and, in particular, in relation to the struggle between the Republican Party establishment candidates and the Republican outsiders, especially Trump. In the absence of a major shift toward a mainstream Republican candidate, neither Trump nor Cruz can defeat either Clinton or Sanders in a general election. The Cruz victory in the Iowa caucuses (a state with substantial numbers of Republican evangelicals) and the Trump victory in the New Hampshire primary election (a state with large numbers of Republican libertarians and a broad segment of moderate independent voters) both suggest that this year's Republican primary contest is turning decisively toward the rightist flanks of the Party base, to the consternation of the Party's Washington establishment. This turn is, again, unabashedly to the favor of whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be. It might be too much to say that neither Trump nor Cruz deserves to be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the general election, but neither of these candidates appears to pose a serious threat to poach states out of the ensemble that enabled Obama to win two terms. Further, in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, the presence of a Cruz or Trump on the Republican ballot might be sufficient to turn the vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. The picture only becomes murkier if we add a forty billion dollar independent gorilla to the contest, by whom I of course mean Michael Bloomberg, who I regard as a serious contender for the Presidency. I emphatically believe that Bloomberg will declare his intention to run before the end of February. When (not if) this happens, the potential for Sanders or Clinton to win the Presidency will become a steeper climb, especially steep for Sanders. On the other hand, it will utterly doom the chances of Trump or Cruz, as if their chances were not doomed from the beginning! Bloomberg will draw votes from both sides of the political spectrum, leaving a somewhat moderate or somewhat progressive Democratic candidate to call forth an expanding and more thoroughly heterogeneous Democratic base and challenge for moderate independent voters. The Republican candidate, by contrast, will be left to draw from a declining Republican base, with less appeal to moderates. In this situation, I cannot help but assert confidently that Bloomberg is likely to win, and we would be left to contemplate the consequences of having a corporate, pro-globalization moderate in the Oval Office (a fate that doesn't seem entirely unappealing to me!).
6. What is in a word? If the Democratic Party, by some freak outcome of primary contests, selects Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate, the broader American electorate will have to reevaluate the meaning and significance of casting a ballot for a "socialist," and what a "socialist" agenda might mean in the American context. Having made the points that I seriously believe that Bloomberg will win a three-way contest for the Presidency in November and, further, that I still think that a Sanders victory in the Southern Democratic primaries and at numerous places in the Midwest against Clinton is unlikely, let us ponder the absolutely improbable. What if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Party's nomination, against a plethora of super-delegate commitments to Hillary Clinton and against the apparent incapacity of Sanders to appeal to non-White segments of the Obama electorate coalition? Will a plurality of American voters be able to fathom the possibility of democratic socialist as President? In my view, the answer to this question ultimately rests with the interpretation of socialism ultimately embedded within the minds of tens of millions of American voters. In this respect, two obvious readings of socialism spring into my mind. The first, and the one that Sanders obviously believes in and wants to convince the American electorate to believe in, involves the potential trajectory of the New Deal and the actual experience of countries like Sweden, Denmark, and, a lesser extent, France or Germany, countries that have embraced a decisive role for government in improving the lives of citizens through regulation of free market activity, active engagement in labor market practices, and public management of institutions, like universal access to health care, either by direct state provision or substantial state subsidization of private agents. The other image of socialism, and the one that the Republican candidate will obviously attempt to emphasize, conveys the image of a sterile, grey, cradle-to-grave, state-driven, centrally planned economic lethargy, devoid of entrepreneurial energy, market choice, and personal freedom, in relation to the overpowering will of state bureaucrats. In short, it is the image of the former Soviet system, with or without the presence of all encompassing totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat! Notwithstanding the presence of socialist alternatives, and especially in view of recent retractions and setbacks in European welfare states, it seems probable that more Americans will embrace the latter imagery of socialism and ignore the hopeful potential that once motivated American working people to seek the involvement and protection of the federal government in their quest for a better life, both through the provision of retirement insurance and other social spending and through active protection of workers' rights to collectively bargain with employers to achieve reasonable compensation for their labors. Emphatically, at the present time, there are simply not enough American voters who believe in the potential for the federal government to have a positive role in improving their lives, if only because the Reagan (counter-)revolution since 1980 did so thorough a practical and ideological job of destroying the capacity of the federal government to do so. On the other hand, if the general American electorate is incapable of encapsulating within its imagination the potential for a thoroughly democratic socialism in Sanders' mold, then it might be the case that support for such ideas could resonate for diverse audiences at the state level. This is unambiguously the case in Vermont! It might also be the case, given the right candidates and the right organizations in Massachusetts or New York or even California. Maybe the best answer for democratic socialists like Sanders is to think smaller and, then, network between states.
Beyond the idea that Sanders' democratic socialism needs a smaller audience and a more intimate political canvas, I think such a socialist imagery is worth evaluating on its own merits as an alternative to the rigorously individualistic and anti-state portrait of the American economy and the regular lives of American citizens. In this regard, I am not sure that a backward looking return to the New Deal is precisely what I, as an American Marxist, am looking for, even if I think it is a more comfortable image than that of the winner take all, all against all society that seems to identify contemporary American life. As someone who was trained to be an economist, I like markets and think that, for the most part, they work well relatively unregulated. I am reasonably content to endure the existence of a (global) financial sector that is relatively unleashed from the Keynesian-inspired regulations of the New Deal. I can live with the collapse of numerous New Deal and Great Society institutions, including Social Security and Medicare. I have learned to live with the reality that I am never going to retire - I am going to work until I am dead or wholly incapacitated. Such are the trajectories of the market freedoms and the antipathy toward the welfare state that we Americans have nurtured since Reagan and which a Sanders administration could never change. Perhaps I have become an unqualified cynic with regard to the potentialities for a democratic socialism, but my images of positive, progressive change in the U.S. simply do not involve a reliance on state bureaucracies or state policy. In this respect, I remain committed to the idea that we need a more collectively oriented society, burgeoned by the presence of more privately organized cooperative organizations across broader segments of everyday life, and more collective support for the aspirations of all individuals to experience fulfilling lives. To me, this implies a lot more private entrepreneurial behavior by a much broader segment of the American population, undertaken as much or more with the intent of achieving broader progressive social change as with the intent to maximize profits. It is doubtless a more hands on and challenging road to supporting human development and economic democracy, but, at least at the present time, I think it is eminently more feasible than hoping for attitudes on social welfare expenditures by either federal or state governments to change in a radical way. We need to learn to be pragmatic and work around the impediments of disadvantageous state policy (or lack of progressive policies) and the slings and arrows of global capitalism!
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Reflecting on "Spotlight": The Sins and the Merits of Roman Catholicism and the Free Press
This post seeks to advance a reaction to the film "Spotlight," an account based on The Boston Globe's revelation of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. Emphatically, it is not presented as a critique in any formal sense - I thought the cinematic aspects, acting, direction, and screenplay were fantastic, but I'm no film critic! Moreover, insofar as I am certain that screenwriters and others involved in the production consistently sought to maintain a cinematic vision in general conformity to actual events, I cannot really contest the details of the film. The nature of my comments precisely concern my reaction, as someone who has definitively abandoned Roman Catholicism but who otherwise remains in contact with the Church by virtue of devout practice of the faith by family members and friends, as well as the legacy of my own past practice of the faith.
For the record, I practiced Roman Catholicism devoutly until I was thirty (that is, I went to mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, attended confession/reconciliation at least two times a year, before Christmas and Easter, and attempted to become engaged in various liturgical practices, including a ministry to Catholics who had left the Church). I left the Church for a variety of reasons. However, I emphatically did not leave because of the clergy sexual abuse scandal! When I am questioned on the subject, particularly by people like my Episcopalian theologian friend Scott, I can definitively argue that I left for succinctly theological/Christological reasons. When I get around to it, I may start an entirely new blog to precisely elaborate my perspective on Christology and pursue resolution of numerous theological points pertinent to my life, but, briefly, as both a Marxist and a lifelong practitioner of Western monotheistic religion, I accept the existence of God but reject the Christian idea of the Trinity and question, in a somewhat dialectical sense, the divinity of Jesus the Nazareen. Emphatically, in regard to a broad array of Western theological issues, I think that we need to reopen certain Christological arguments otherwise settled for evangelicals by the gospel of John and various Pauline epistles. My present position on God resembles, at least in part, the positions of numerous Eighteenth century deists (represented in the American context notably by the religious beliefs of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and other American forefathers), augmented with a heady quantity of post-modern critical reflections on rationality and the possibility for human apprehensions of objective truth. Furthermore, as I may have stated previously on this blog, my family is almost entirely devout in its practice of Roman Catholicism, to the point that I have attempted, at least weakly, to downplay or otherwise conceal my rejection of Christianity, in general, and Catholicism, in particular. As such, my perspective on "Spotlight" is significantly shaped by my lingering (familial and theological) relationships with Catholicism, my personal rejection of Catholicism (for reasons wholly unrelated to clergy abuse scandals), and my innate conviction of religious practice, spirituality, and other evident sources of faith as motivational sources for the inherent possibilities for human civilization, however divorced from the larger development of a secular tradition of humanistic and existential philosophy.
Having asserted these points on my relationship to Roman Catholicism, "Spotlight" played out in a manner that seemed to represent a broader struggle between good (the muckraking media, acting in the best interest of its readers and the general public in the name of unvarnished, democratized civil discourse) and evil (the entrenched power of the Church in the name of religious seclusion and unquestioned implicit/secretive influence over civil governance in Massachusetts). And yet, the fine lines delineating good and evil are continuously blurred. The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston not only utilizes its influence over legal authorities to circumvent criminal proceedings against pedophile priests and sweep evidence of abuse away from public scrutiny, but also manages vast charitable resources, without which thousands of needy dependents on the good will of Catholic parishioners would be thrust onto a cruel and uncaring world of impersonal state bureaucracies and budgets balanced on the backs of individuals least able to care for their own needs. Significantly, at stake since the revelation of sexual abuse in the Church has been the fate of Catholic charities, reliant on the active monetary and volunteer support of parishioners but seriously impacted in a negative way by the reaction against settlements between the Church and victims of clergy sexual abuse - it's difficult for diocesan and parish level administrators to make demands of parishioners to give generously in support of liturgical missions and provision of care to marginalized populations when the same parishioners know that the diocese maintains legal liabilities from settlements in reparation from the actions of many pedophile priests.
Moreover, on some level, the Catholic Church continues to constitute a community in faith, structured by a 2000 year old apostolic legacy, in which faithful Catholic parishioners both bind themselves to the dictates of the Church and articulate, by their faith and their participation in myriad liturgical functions/roles, the relationships that define Roman Catholicism as a global human community. The body of the faithful (most notably, the laity) is at least as definitively Catholic as its head (the Vatican and its hierarchical structures, from Rome to every diocese and every parish community). In the absence of either, there is no Church. As such, responsibility for the evils apparent in the Church's clandestine response to localized incidents of clergy sexual abuse of minors resides in the hands of Church officials and, at least partially, in those of the laity from whom the former received a worldly blessing to administer to their spiritual needs and the material/charitable missions of the Church as they saw fit. Before I left the Church, it seemed as though various corners of the lay community, in my own parish and elsewhere, were starting to come to terms with their own culpability for enabling priests to abuse children with impunity. Groups like the "Voice of the Faithful" were actively demanding that diocesan level Church leaders account for their actions in the face of allegations against priests for sexual misconduct with children. In certain ways, the hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism, from the Chair of Peter to each individual lay communicant, simply does not afford the lay Catholic community the capacity to wield democratic oversight over Church leadership - the Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democratic body of the faithful.
On the other hand, if the Catholic lay community can gradually realize a deeper measure of responsibility, to the exclusion of the clergy, to minister to its own spiritual needs and, in more practical terms, separate the earthly liturgical/sacramental roles served by the clergy from the theological centrality of Christ as the transcendental head of the Church, then maybe lay Catholics will discover meaningful ways to "make do" on their spiritual lives without conferring on the clergy any excess capacity to serve as spiritual intermediaries beyond their sacramental duties. In this respect, I am neither suggesting that parish communities need to take on the democratic trappings of various Protestant denominations nor that lay Catholics should demand extreme changes to sacramental and liturgical practices to more fully incorporate lay participation if not direction. Rather, it seems conceivable that lay Catholics could organize themselves for collective spiritual and material/charitable practices in ways that might effectively marginalize clergy and Church hierarchy, remaining consistent with Catholic teachings and Church doctrine on spiritual/theological and social matters but enforcing a boundary between sanctified Church organizations and voluntary activism by the laity. Such a characterization seems to describe, at least in my understanding, what the Voice of the Faithful had been about. In my former parish, this group had been allowed by the pastor to meet in the parish hall. In my view, such a collaborative rapport between the Church and a lay group, especially one with a critical orientation toward Church policies, might never have been warranted. On some level, collaboration with the Church, even through the auspices of an open-minded parish pastor otherwise closely engaged with his community of believers, always portends the possibility of co-optation. In this particular case, at least in my memory, the collaboration ended abruptly when the Springfield diocese relocated the pastor in question and replaced him with a priest who was less collaborative with lay groups critical of Church practices. Alternatively, maybe the participants in Voice of the Faithful would have gained more from organizing collective prayer sessions, biblical and liturgical study practices, and/or spiritually-inspired charitable missions, out of their own homes and on other non-Church grounds. That is to say, any pretense of democratic engagement between Church leadership and the laity, otherwise fostered by the odd friendly pastor, is of dubious value within an essentially undemocratic/anti-democratic, hierarchical organization that, in any case, the laity need not confront directly to voice their concerns! In a certain sense, the sort of thing that I have in mind here might somehow approximate a "Reformation from within" by the laity that never actually threatens the Church hierarchy or its sacramental duties but permanently puts the same hierarchy in its place when it comes to the administration of extra-sacramental responsibilities. If, on the one hand, this is something that, as a Marxist, deist, ex-Catholic, I really shouldn't overly concern myself, then, on the other hand, as someone with numerous Catholic friends and family members, I can only cast a strong degree of sympathy for the present state of Roman Catholicism, globally, in the U.S., and, most directly, in my own backyard of the Boston Archdiocese. It is hard not to acknowledge that the wider world needs an active and engaged Catholic community of the faithful as much as Catholics need a Church that will acknowledge its responsibilities to change, repent its sins, and continuously resituate itself as an agency (however imperfectly democratized) in defense of a timeless moral and spiritual truth in action.
Approaching the other side in "Spotlight," it is clear that the Globe's muckrakers cannot be ascribed an entirely unblemished record with regard to the paper's treatment of Catholicism in the Boston Archdiocese. Here, of course, we are dealing quite substantially with the field of dramatization and, in this respect, we have to acknowledge that Hollywood screenwriters substantially produce the space within which they can tell a cinematically compelling story. Given my own lack of knowledge on the lives of the actual Spotlight team at the Globe, I cannot draw a dividing line between what is real and what is fiction. On the other hand, the real, whatever that might be, doesn't really matter when it comes to diagnosing the effects of a cinematic performance and, specifically, its capacity to reshape the way that we look at the given historical event that has been dramatized. As I have noted previously on this blog (specifically in regard to docu-dramatizations on the cable network History), the gap between reality and fiction is pertinent to the particular way in which an audience grasps history and how such appropriations impact the way reality in the present is lived.
With these warnings in mind, the (dramatized) Globe and its Spotlight team appear as active participants and facilitators in the Boston Archdiocese's prolonged history of clergy sexual abuse. The particular case that opens the door for the Spotlight team to begin an investigation into clergy sexual abuse, the Commonwealth's prosecution of Father John Geoghan for numerous instances of child sexual abuse in 2001, is only pursued under pressure from a relative outsider, newly hired editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who is continuously portrayed as a quintessential outsider ( a Jew from New York, coming to Boston from the Miami Herald, under the direction of the New York Times Company, owner of the Boston Globe, without any experience on the constellations of religious influence driving political power in extremely Catholic metropolitan Boston - as a welcoming present, Cardinal Law gives Baron a copy of an official Catholic Catechism, offered as a "guide map" to Boston). Otherwise, the Globe's staff appears initially cool to the idea of probing clergy sexual abuse in any significant capacity. Notably, Spotlight editor Walter "Robby" Robinson's (Michael Keaton) immediate supervisor, Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), appears continuously dismissive of the entire project, at least until it seems likely that the team will be able to uncover verifiable evidence of involvement in the early 1990s by Cardinal Bernard Law's office in the Geoghan case. Robinson, as a lifelong Bostonian and lapsed Catholic graduate of Boston College High School, apparently has his own record of dismissing widespread allegations of a cover up of sexual abuse claims in the Archdiocese. In the end, upon publishing completed investigative findings on sexual abuse by dozens of priests in the Archdiocese, the Globe awaits significant protests by supporters of the Church in reaction to the tarnishing potential of its reporting. Instead, the Spotlight team unleashes a torrent of testimonies from abuse victims, and, partly through its actions, instigates a broader reaction within the Catholic lay community, culminating in the formation of groups like Voice of the Faithful.
The larger point here is that Baron's decision to pursue an investigation on clergy sexual abuse inheres to his conviction that, in an age of alternative media and declining newspaper readership, the Globe had to discover ways to remain an relevant institution in the eyes of its readers. It raises a question, however, regarding the criteria for relevance of the print media, in particular, and media sources in general. If editorial staff for the Globe made a consistent choice over the course of the 1990s to ignore or dismiss claims made by attorneys and victims' rights associations that a widespread institution of sexual abuse by clergy and extra-judicial rectifying procedures by diocesan officials existed under Cardinal Law's watch, then, in some way, it reflects a conscious preference within the paper for participation in the maintenance of an implicitly adjudged benign status quo within the Catholic community. Furthermore, as screenwriters Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer forcibly imply, the lingering connections to Catholicism experienced by every staff member of the Spotlight team must have, necessarily, produced some underlying sense that the allegations they were tasked to investigate were too preposterously heinous to be true. As such, at least some measure of relevance in the media must exist in the passive validation of a status quo in which the boundaries of the conceivable and the inconceivable get defined and professionally enforced. If a capacity exists for the media to transform this relevance by challenging the status quo, then it remains to be asked how such a capacity it to be exercised. The screenwriters provide a simple answer - just bring in a Jew from New York who isn't entrenched in the Boston Catholic establishment to challenge the invincible political influence of the Church and treat the newspaper as his own personal vehicle for a radical social crusade. On the other hand, the story also seems to present small mutations in the mindsets of various staff members, most notably Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams). It isn't entirely clear that such mutations could have taken place without Baron's decision to take on the diocese. In this sense, we are continuously left with the problem that there is no necessary reason why the free press will be especially inclined, as an inherent condition of their role in promoting public discourse in a democracy, to engage in dangerous, radical projects against entrenched political agents that have abused the public trust (or, in this case, the trust of millions of Catholic faithful).
For the record, I practiced Roman Catholicism devoutly until I was thirty (that is, I went to mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, attended confession/reconciliation at least two times a year, before Christmas and Easter, and attempted to become engaged in various liturgical practices, including a ministry to Catholics who had left the Church). I left the Church for a variety of reasons. However, I emphatically did not leave because of the clergy sexual abuse scandal! When I am questioned on the subject, particularly by people like my Episcopalian theologian friend Scott, I can definitively argue that I left for succinctly theological/Christological reasons. When I get around to it, I may start an entirely new blog to precisely elaborate my perspective on Christology and pursue resolution of numerous theological points pertinent to my life, but, briefly, as both a Marxist and a lifelong practitioner of Western monotheistic religion, I accept the existence of God but reject the Christian idea of the Trinity and question, in a somewhat dialectical sense, the divinity of Jesus the Nazareen. Emphatically, in regard to a broad array of Western theological issues, I think that we need to reopen certain Christological arguments otherwise settled for evangelicals by the gospel of John and various Pauline epistles. My present position on God resembles, at least in part, the positions of numerous Eighteenth century deists (represented in the American context notably by the religious beliefs of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and other American forefathers), augmented with a heady quantity of post-modern critical reflections on rationality and the possibility for human apprehensions of objective truth. Furthermore, as I may have stated previously on this blog, my family is almost entirely devout in its practice of Roman Catholicism, to the point that I have attempted, at least weakly, to downplay or otherwise conceal my rejection of Christianity, in general, and Catholicism, in particular. As such, my perspective on "Spotlight" is significantly shaped by my lingering (familial and theological) relationships with Catholicism, my personal rejection of Catholicism (for reasons wholly unrelated to clergy abuse scandals), and my innate conviction of religious practice, spirituality, and other evident sources of faith as motivational sources for the inherent possibilities for human civilization, however divorced from the larger development of a secular tradition of humanistic and existential philosophy.
Having asserted these points on my relationship to Roman Catholicism, "Spotlight" played out in a manner that seemed to represent a broader struggle between good (the muckraking media, acting in the best interest of its readers and the general public in the name of unvarnished, democratized civil discourse) and evil (the entrenched power of the Church in the name of religious seclusion and unquestioned implicit/secretive influence over civil governance in Massachusetts). And yet, the fine lines delineating good and evil are continuously blurred. The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston not only utilizes its influence over legal authorities to circumvent criminal proceedings against pedophile priests and sweep evidence of abuse away from public scrutiny, but also manages vast charitable resources, without which thousands of needy dependents on the good will of Catholic parishioners would be thrust onto a cruel and uncaring world of impersonal state bureaucracies and budgets balanced on the backs of individuals least able to care for their own needs. Significantly, at stake since the revelation of sexual abuse in the Church has been the fate of Catholic charities, reliant on the active monetary and volunteer support of parishioners but seriously impacted in a negative way by the reaction against settlements between the Church and victims of clergy sexual abuse - it's difficult for diocesan and parish level administrators to make demands of parishioners to give generously in support of liturgical missions and provision of care to marginalized populations when the same parishioners know that the diocese maintains legal liabilities from settlements in reparation from the actions of many pedophile priests.
Moreover, on some level, the Catholic Church continues to constitute a community in faith, structured by a 2000 year old apostolic legacy, in which faithful Catholic parishioners both bind themselves to the dictates of the Church and articulate, by their faith and their participation in myriad liturgical functions/roles, the relationships that define Roman Catholicism as a global human community. The body of the faithful (most notably, the laity) is at least as definitively Catholic as its head (the Vatican and its hierarchical structures, from Rome to every diocese and every parish community). In the absence of either, there is no Church. As such, responsibility for the evils apparent in the Church's clandestine response to localized incidents of clergy sexual abuse of minors resides in the hands of Church officials and, at least partially, in those of the laity from whom the former received a worldly blessing to administer to their spiritual needs and the material/charitable missions of the Church as they saw fit. Before I left the Church, it seemed as though various corners of the lay community, in my own parish and elsewhere, were starting to come to terms with their own culpability for enabling priests to abuse children with impunity. Groups like the "Voice of the Faithful" were actively demanding that diocesan level Church leaders account for their actions in the face of allegations against priests for sexual misconduct with children. In certain ways, the hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism, from the Chair of Peter to each individual lay communicant, simply does not afford the lay Catholic community the capacity to wield democratic oversight over Church leadership - the Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democratic body of the faithful.
On the other hand, if the Catholic lay community can gradually realize a deeper measure of responsibility, to the exclusion of the clergy, to minister to its own spiritual needs and, in more practical terms, separate the earthly liturgical/sacramental roles served by the clergy from the theological centrality of Christ as the transcendental head of the Church, then maybe lay Catholics will discover meaningful ways to "make do" on their spiritual lives without conferring on the clergy any excess capacity to serve as spiritual intermediaries beyond their sacramental duties. In this respect, I am neither suggesting that parish communities need to take on the democratic trappings of various Protestant denominations nor that lay Catholics should demand extreme changes to sacramental and liturgical practices to more fully incorporate lay participation if not direction. Rather, it seems conceivable that lay Catholics could organize themselves for collective spiritual and material/charitable practices in ways that might effectively marginalize clergy and Church hierarchy, remaining consistent with Catholic teachings and Church doctrine on spiritual/theological and social matters but enforcing a boundary between sanctified Church organizations and voluntary activism by the laity. Such a characterization seems to describe, at least in my understanding, what the Voice of the Faithful had been about. In my former parish, this group had been allowed by the pastor to meet in the parish hall. In my view, such a collaborative rapport between the Church and a lay group, especially one with a critical orientation toward Church policies, might never have been warranted. On some level, collaboration with the Church, even through the auspices of an open-minded parish pastor otherwise closely engaged with his community of believers, always portends the possibility of co-optation. In this particular case, at least in my memory, the collaboration ended abruptly when the Springfield diocese relocated the pastor in question and replaced him with a priest who was less collaborative with lay groups critical of Church practices. Alternatively, maybe the participants in Voice of the Faithful would have gained more from organizing collective prayer sessions, biblical and liturgical study practices, and/or spiritually-inspired charitable missions, out of their own homes and on other non-Church grounds. That is to say, any pretense of democratic engagement between Church leadership and the laity, otherwise fostered by the odd friendly pastor, is of dubious value within an essentially undemocratic/anti-democratic, hierarchical organization that, in any case, the laity need not confront directly to voice their concerns! In a certain sense, the sort of thing that I have in mind here might somehow approximate a "Reformation from within" by the laity that never actually threatens the Church hierarchy or its sacramental duties but permanently puts the same hierarchy in its place when it comes to the administration of extra-sacramental responsibilities. If, on the one hand, this is something that, as a Marxist, deist, ex-Catholic, I really shouldn't overly concern myself, then, on the other hand, as someone with numerous Catholic friends and family members, I can only cast a strong degree of sympathy for the present state of Roman Catholicism, globally, in the U.S., and, most directly, in my own backyard of the Boston Archdiocese. It is hard not to acknowledge that the wider world needs an active and engaged Catholic community of the faithful as much as Catholics need a Church that will acknowledge its responsibilities to change, repent its sins, and continuously resituate itself as an agency (however imperfectly democratized) in defense of a timeless moral and spiritual truth in action.
Approaching the other side in "Spotlight," it is clear that the Globe's muckrakers cannot be ascribed an entirely unblemished record with regard to the paper's treatment of Catholicism in the Boston Archdiocese. Here, of course, we are dealing quite substantially with the field of dramatization and, in this respect, we have to acknowledge that Hollywood screenwriters substantially produce the space within which they can tell a cinematically compelling story. Given my own lack of knowledge on the lives of the actual Spotlight team at the Globe, I cannot draw a dividing line between what is real and what is fiction. On the other hand, the real, whatever that might be, doesn't really matter when it comes to diagnosing the effects of a cinematic performance and, specifically, its capacity to reshape the way that we look at the given historical event that has been dramatized. As I have noted previously on this blog (specifically in regard to docu-dramatizations on the cable network History), the gap between reality and fiction is pertinent to the particular way in which an audience grasps history and how such appropriations impact the way reality in the present is lived.
With these warnings in mind, the (dramatized) Globe and its Spotlight team appear as active participants and facilitators in the Boston Archdiocese's prolonged history of clergy sexual abuse. The particular case that opens the door for the Spotlight team to begin an investigation into clergy sexual abuse, the Commonwealth's prosecution of Father John Geoghan for numerous instances of child sexual abuse in 2001, is only pursued under pressure from a relative outsider, newly hired editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who is continuously portrayed as a quintessential outsider ( a Jew from New York, coming to Boston from the Miami Herald, under the direction of the New York Times Company, owner of the Boston Globe, without any experience on the constellations of religious influence driving political power in extremely Catholic metropolitan Boston - as a welcoming present, Cardinal Law gives Baron a copy of an official Catholic Catechism, offered as a "guide map" to Boston). Otherwise, the Globe's staff appears initially cool to the idea of probing clergy sexual abuse in any significant capacity. Notably, Spotlight editor Walter "Robby" Robinson's (Michael Keaton) immediate supervisor, Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), appears continuously dismissive of the entire project, at least until it seems likely that the team will be able to uncover verifiable evidence of involvement in the early 1990s by Cardinal Bernard Law's office in the Geoghan case. Robinson, as a lifelong Bostonian and lapsed Catholic graduate of Boston College High School, apparently has his own record of dismissing widespread allegations of a cover up of sexual abuse claims in the Archdiocese. In the end, upon publishing completed investigative findings on sexual abuse by dozens of priests in the Archdiocese, the Globe awaits significant protests by supporters of the Church in reaction to the tarnishing potential of its reporting. Instead, the Spotlight team unleashes a torrent of testimonies from abuse victims, and, partly through its actions, instigates a broader reaction within the Catholic lay community, culminating in the formation of groups like Voice of the Faithful.
The larger point here is that Baron's decision to pursue an investigation on clergy sexual abuse inheres to his conviction that, in an age of alternative media and declining newspaper readership, the Globe had to discover ways to remain an relevant institution in the eyes of its readers. It raises a question, however, regarding the criteria for relevance of the print media, in particular, and media sources in general. If editorial staff for the Globe made a consistent choice over the course of the 1990s to ignore or dismiss claims made by attorneys and victims' rights associations that a widespread institution of sexual abuse by clergy and extra-judicial rectifying procedures by diocesan officials existed under Cardinal Law's watch, then, in some way, it reflects a conscious preference within the paper for participation in the maintenance of an implicitly adjudged benign status quo within the Catholic community. Furthermore, as screenwriters Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer forcibly imply, the lingering connections to Catholicism experienced by every staff member of the Spotlight team must have, necessarily, produced some underlying sense that the allegations they were tasked to investigate were too preposterously heinous to be true. As such, at least some measure of relevance in the media must exist in the passive validation of a status quo in which the boundaries of the conceivable and the inconceivable get defined and professionally enforced. If a capacity exists for the media to transform this relevance by challenging the status quo, then it remains to be asked how such a capacity it to be exercised. The screenwriters provide a simple answer - just bring in a Jew from New York who isn't entrenched in the Boston Catholic establishment to challenge the invincible political influence of the Church and treat the newspaper as his own personal vehicle for a radical social crusade. On the other hand, the story also seems to present small mutations in the mindsets of various staff members, most notably Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams). It isn't entirely clear that such mutations could have taken place without Baron's decision to take on the diocese. In this sense, we are continuously left with the problem that there is no necessary reason why the free press will be especially inclined, as an inherent condition of their role in promoting public discourse in a democracy, to engage in dangerous, radical projects against entrenched political agents that have abused the public trust (or, in this case, the trust of millions of Catholic faithful).
Saturday, November 21, 2015
The American Civil War I: Armed forces may lose wars but they cannot win them
This post is advanced as a preliminary argument on the larger question of who won the American Civil War. As such, it emanates from quite specific concerns about the relationship between the armed conflict that took place, largely in the U.S. South, between 1861 and 1865 and the underlying political issues that instigated the conflict. On the other hand, it invariably advances arguments relevant to a generalized discussion of the relationship between politics and armed struggle. Emphatically, it is an effort to posit that armed force, resulting in the total disarmament of one party to an armed conflict, need not necessarily result in achievement of the objectives of the victorious party. If warfare is a struggle of wills between two parties to armed conflict, then armed violence against persons and property, as the means by which one party seeks to compel the other to submit to its will, is only imperfectly suited to achieving such ends.
What will follow in this post should not be construed as a general theory of warfare or even a component within a general theory of warfare insofar as such a general theory is itself impossible. Nor will I attempt to rehash axioms on warfare by Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, all of which have their place as contributions to our knowledge of armed conflict but need to be situated in relation to their time and the particular problems to which each contribution was offered as an effort to address. Rather, this post is an effort to argue that we need to disaggregate the military conflict that constituted, in part, the American Civil War from the political struggles from which it was likewise constituted. The latter struggles continue to this day in diverse forms within the broader frameworks of race relations, Constitutional law/federalism, electoral politics/voting rights, and interpretations/recitations of American history. Without such a disaggregation, we are apt to forge an arbitrary rupture in U.S. history and, in particular, the history of the U.S. South, between Antebellum and Postbellum times, a bifurcation that I would regard, at least in part, as erroneous. A longer history of geopolitical divergence within the American polity needs to be analyzed as a totality, from the ratifications of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 to the present day, through which the Civil War appears as a brief if not inconsequential aberration. Such a perspective would, in turn, inevitably reframe the terms through which we interpret the Civil War itself, marginalizing certain rationale for the conflict while accentuating others. More pointedly, for the purposes of this post, disaggregating the military aspects of the Civil War from its underlying political instigations enables us to realize one particularly relevant conclusion: notwithstanding the overwhelming victory of U.S. federal military forces against the Confederate States, the victors were incapable of imposing their will in order to fundamentally transform social structures, race relations, and the balance of power between federal and state governments within the Southern states.
Proceeding from the limited objectives of this account, I intend to argue, first, that the military victory of federal forces in the period from 1861 to 1865 was less than total, but, on the other hand, it was sufficient to fatally incapacitate the armed forces of the Confederate States to such a degree that further major organized conflict would have been futile. Second, I will argue that, in certain respects, the conclusion of major organized armed conflict in 1865 constitutes an arbitrary boundary in defining the time span of the Civil War. Rather, we need to include the span of federal military occupation of the Southern states through Reconstruction as a concluding stage of the military conflict, both to assess the effectiveness of federal military forces in compelling the submission of the Southern states to the will of the federal government and to place the Civil War in a comparative framework through which we can draw analogies to other, more recent American military conflicts. Third, I will posit the existence of a vacuum between the military policies of Reconstruction and the diverse political agendas of Reconstruction-era Southern governments, Congressional and administrative policy makers, and Antebellum (aristocratic, ex-Confederate) Southern political elites. I will argue that the existence of such a vacuum constituted a space for practical reinterpretation of the consequences of the federal victory, ultimately enabling un-Reconstructed Southern political elites to truncate the transformative capacity of the federal government on Southern social formations. Concluding, I will argue that, on the one hand, the loss in major organized conflict by Confederate military forces demonstrates the capacity of militaries to lose wars, in the sense that the Confederate States could not retrieve the broader objectives that compelled their secession and formation of a political bloc (i.e. retention of slave class structures as a major organization of surplus labor production; supremacy of individual state political prerogatives against federal Constitutional authority including, in the last instance, the capacity to vacate participation in the U.S. Constitutional structure). On the other hand, I will argue that the failure of certain federal constituencies to impose their will in transforming Southern social formations through military occupation demonstrates the incapacity of militaries to actually win wars - enduring political, economic, and cultural change cannot be foisted onto a social formation at the end of a bayonet.
The Defeat of Confederate Military Forces in Major Organized Conflict (1861-1865)
The point in this section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the larger military conflict between 1861 and 1865. Rather, the account that I will advance seeks to convey a sense of the complexities involved in geographically dispersed military conflict over a space as large as the U.S. South. It will emphasize unevenness in the measure federal military control and Confederate resistance across the space of the U.S. South. The defeat of Confederate forces will reflect a methodical if uncertain piecing together of various components over time, rendering Confederate forces relatively incapacitated, rather than a punctuated, conclusive defeat of particular armies on particular battlefields.
The generations that prosecuted major armed conflict in the American Civil War were infected by an intellectual bias favoring conclusive confrontations between large, organized military forces as the primary signature of victory in military conflict. It was a bias constituted through the strategic, logistical, and organizational development of large conscripted armies, from the beginnings of the levée en masse in the French revolutionary period through the heights of Napoleonic warfare. In certain respects, professional military specialists and at least some military historians remain infected by a similar bias today, notwithstanding a long history of low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare, and lingering political insurgencies, waged by non-professional military contingents. Even the Napoleonic period had its paradigmatic development of guerrilla warfare on the Iberian peninsula and partisan tactics waged by defiant Russian forces against French invasion, but, for noteworthy reasons, history remembers Austerlitz, Leipzig, and Waterloo, conclusive engagements that yielded conclusive subsequent political effects.
The American Civil War had numerous significant military confrontations (e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, etc.), but no single major confrontation was adequate to permanently incapacitate one or the other party. If the series of confrontations resulting in the federal seizure of Petersburg, Virginia and subsequent seizure of the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1865 might be regarded as conclusive, then they further need to be definitively situated against the background of a nine-month siege, the progressive assemblage of diverse components in federal military efforts to break down or seize control over logistical infrastructure systems across the Confederate States including seaboard transportation avenues (i.e. the federal coastal blockade and seizure of control of navigation on the Mississippi River and its major Southern tributaries), and the reaching of critical thresholds in a war of attrition between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and diverse components of federal forces besieging Petersburg, controlling the Shenandoah Valley, and traversing northward through the Carolinas against a steadily battered and dwindling Confederate Army of the West. In other words, the larger story of armed conflict in the American Civil War, as in every war, is a story of networks/assemblages in which no individual confrontational piece in the broader process of military conflict can be arbitrarily abstracted from the totality of the conflict to achieve explanatory priority.
Dispensing with the notion that we need to look for conclusive confrontations, we can characterize the evolving strategies of the federal military as efforts to articulate multifarious components in countervailing geographically and temporally dispersed networks. Federal military forces initially conceive of their strategy as oriented toward the limited goal of seizing and holding key contested ground - Richmond (the Confederate capital), Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, etc. Such a strategy operates, minimally, under the conception that by seizing and occupying key land spaces the federal government can disrupt the political will of the Confederate states and compel their re-entry into the union. Such a calculus, in turn, relies on the idea that the Confederacy is constituted, organizationally, as a fragile and electorally shallow conspiracy among elites in the legislatures of the Confederate states, capable of being fatally undermined by a well-organized effort by federal military forces to disrupt the capacity of diverse state governments to hold key geographic locations. That is to say, federal policy makers in the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the federal military establishment (e.g. Generals Scott and Hallock) misconstrue the democratization of anti-federal ideologies in the Confederate states beyond the ranks of Southern elites. As the scale of popular support for the Confederacy across the broader electorate of the Southern states becomes apparent by virtue of the threshold of military mobilization within the White Southern population, the federal strategy of holding key landspaces gives way to a range of divergent ideas that might be crudely consolidated into two separate but integrally linked goals: the need to control or otherwise disrupt logistical infrastructures facilitating free flow of materiale and military forces across the space of the Southern states, and the need to inflict persistent losses against spatially dispersed and logistically isolated field armies of the Confederate states.
By the end of major organized conflict, federal forces had largely realized both goals. The defeat of Confederate military forces, in this respect, reveals a dichotomy. The Confederate military proved incapable of defending dispersed networks of logistical infrastructures and strategically critical spaces. Rail lines were cut, riverine navigation impeded, and, especially following the federal Army of the Tennessee's campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas (1864-1865), entire swaths of land rendered barren of logistically usable resources. As its control over logistical assets and networks dwindled, Confederate field armies became increasingly disconnected from each other and dis-articulated relative to governmental control and their domestic base of support. That is to say, the Lincoln administration never loses operational control over federal military forces in a way that might have impeded logistical operations or undermined overall government supervision of strategic goals. Lincoln may not have stood continuously over the shoulders of George McClellan on the York-James peninsula or that of Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg, but he absolutely maintained some degree of direction and discretion over the general formulation of operational planning at the level of designated armies/campaigns. The same could not be said regarding the Confederate Davis administration, especially in the latter stages of major organized conflict. Davis may have enjoyed some discretion regarding Robert E. Lee's decision to invade Pennsylvania in 1863, but he certainly lacked any meaningful control over the logistical details or the staffing levels for field units engaging in the operation, if only because the constitution of the Confederate states did not grant him adequate authority to exercise such close control of the military, which was, above all, a consolidation of separate state level militia forces consolidated under loose authority by a weak central administration. Finally, to the extent that the Confederate military continued to enjoy a strong degree of popular support in local jurisdictions of the South, the Confederate government lacked any capacity to leverage such support across space to bolster the logistical status of the military. By early 1865, the staffing and supply status of the Army of Northern Virginia was lost on populations in areas still under Confederate control in Alabama or Louisiana or Tennessee, and the Davis administration was incapable of procuring material assistance from such areas because it lacked any control over logistical networks capable of doing so.
Conversely, federal successes at disrupting logistical networks and winning a war of attrition against Confederate field armies did not simultaneously manifest success at undermining popular support for the political project of the Confederacy, even in areas where the federal government quickly regained military control (e.g. New Orleans, seized in early 1862). Rather, unevenly distributed patterns emerge in areas under direct federal military administration, areas loosely under Confederate control, and areas at the margins, where federal forces contended, in certain circumstances, with resistance from regular Confederate military units and civilian organized partisan or guerrilla units (see Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., "Bushwhacking and Barn Burning: Civil War Operations and the Florida Parishes' Tradition of Violence," in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association (Spring 1995), 171-186, downloaded from JSTOR (21 Nov. 2015) at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233176).
What will follow in this post should not be construed as a general theory of warfare or even a component within a general theory of warfare insofar as such a general theory is itself impossible. Nor will I attempt to rehash axioms on warfare by Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, all of which have their place as contributions to our knowledge of armed conflict but need to be situated in relation to their time and the particular problems to which each contribution was offered as an effort to address. Rather, this post is an effort to argue that we need to disaggregate the military conflict that constituted, in part, the American Civil War from the political struggles from which it was likewise constituted. The latter struggles continue to this day in diverse forms within the broader frameworks of race relations, Constitutional law/federalism, electoral politics/voting rights, and interpretations/recitations of American history. Without such a disaggregation, we are apt to forge an arbitrary rupture in U.S. history and, in particular, the history of the U.S. South, between Antebellum and Postbellum times, a bifurcation that I would regard, at least in part, as erroneous. A longer history of geopolitical divergence within the American polity needs to be analyzed as a totality, from the ratifications of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 to the present day, through which the Civil War appears as a brief if not inconsequential aberration. Such a perspective would, in turn, inevitably reframe the terms through which we interpret the Civil War itself, marginalizing certain rationale for the conflict while accentuating others. More pointedly, for the purposes of this post, disaggregating the military aspects of the Civil War from its underlying political instigations enables us to realize one particularly relevant conclusion: notwithstanding the overwhelming victory of U.S. federal military forces against the Confederate States, the victors were incapable of imposing their will in order to fundamentally transform social structures, race relations, and the balance of power between federal and state governments within the Southern states.
Proceeding from the limited objectives of this account, I intend to argue, first, that the military victory of federal forces in the period from 1861 to 1865 was less than total, but, on the other hand, it was sufficient to fatally incapacitate the armed forces of the Confederate States to such a degree that further major organized conflict would have been futile. Second, I will argue that, in certain respects, the conclusion of major organized armed conflict in 1865 constitutes an arbitrary boundary in defining the time span of the Civil War. Rather, we need to include the span of federal military occupation of the Southern states through Reconstruction as a concluding stage of the military conflict, both to assess the effectiveness of federal military forces in compelling the submission of the Southern states to the will of the federal government and to place the Civil War in a comparative framework through which we can draw analogies to other, more recent American military conflicts. Third, I will posit the existence of a vacuum between the military policies of Reconstruction and the diverse political agendas of Reconstruction-era Southern governments, Congressional and administrative policy makers, and Antebellum (aristocratic, ex-Confederate) Southern political elites. I will argue that the existence of such a vacuum constituted a space for practical reinterpretation of the consequences of the federal victory, ultimately enabling un-Reconstructed Southern political elites to truncate the transformative capacity of the federal government on Southern social formations. Concluding, I will argue that, on the one hand, the loss in major organized conflict by Confederate military forces demonstrates the capacity of militaries to lose wars, in the sense that the Confederate States could not retrieve the broader objectives that compelled their secession and formation of a political bloc (i.e. retention of slave class structures as a major organization of surplus labor production; supremacy of individual state political prerogatives against federal Constitutional authority including, in the last instance, the capacity to vacate participation in the U.S. Constitutional structure). On the other hand, I will argue that the failure of certain federal constituencies to impose their will in transforming Southern social formations through military occupation demonstrates the incapacity of militaries to actually win wars - enduring political, economic, and cultural change cannot be foisted onto a social formation at the end of a bayonet.
The Defeat of Confederate Military Forces in Major Organized Conflict (1861-1865)
The point in this section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the larger military conflict between 1861 and 1865. Rather, the account that I will advance seeks to convey a sense of the complexities involved in geographically dispersed military conflict over a space as large as the U.S. South. It will emphasize unevenness in the measure federal military control and Confederate resistance across the space of the U.S. South. The defeat of Confederate forces will reflect a methodical if uncertain piecing together of various components over time, rendering Confederate forces relatively incapacitated, rather than a punctuated, conclusive defeat of particular armies on particular battlefields.
The generations that prosecuted major armed conflict in the American Civil War were infected by an intellectual bias favoring conclusive confrontations between large, organized military forces as the primary signature of victory in military conflict. It was a bias constituted through the strategic, logistical, and organizational development of large conscripted armies, from the beginnings of the levée en masse in the French revolutionary period through the heights of Napoleonic warfare. In certain respects, professional military specialists and at least some military historians remain infected by a similar bias today, notwithstanding a long history of low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare, and lingering political insurgencies, waged by non-professional military contingents. Even the Napoleonic period had its paradigmatic development of guerrilla warfare on the Iberian peninsula and partisan tactics waged by defiant Russian forces against French invasion, but, for noteworthy reasons, history remembers Austerlitz, Leipzig, and Waterloo, conclusive engagements that yielded conclusive subsequent political effects.
The American Civil War had numerous significant military confrontations (e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, etc.), but no single major confrontation was adequate to permanently incapacitate one or the other party. If the series of confrontations resulting in the federal seizure of Petersburg, Virginia and subsequent seizure of the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1865 might be regarded as conclusive, then they further need to be definitively situated against the background of a nine-month siege, the progressive assemblage of diverse components in federal military efforts to break down or seize control over logistical infrastructure systems across the Confederate States including seaboard transportation avenues (i.e. the federal coastal blockade and seizure of control of navigation on the Mississippi River and its major Southern tributaries), and the reaching of critical thresholds in a war of attrition between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and diverse components of federal forces besieging Petersburg, controlling the Shenandoah Valley, and traversing northward through the Carolinas against a steadily battered and dwindling Confederate Army of the West. In other words, the larger story of armed conflict in the American Civil War, as in every war, is a story of networks/assemblages in which no individual confrontational piece in the broader process of military conflict can be arbitrarily abstracted from the totality of the conflict to achieve explanatory priority.
Dispensing with the notion that we need to look for conclusive confrontations, we can characterize the evolving strategies of the federal military as efforts to articulate multifarious components in countervailing geographically and temporally dispersed networks. Federal military forces initially conceive of their strategy as oriented toward the limited goal of seizing and holding key contested ground - Richmond (the Confederate capital), Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, etc. Such a strategy operates, minimally, under the conception that by seizing and occupying key land spaces the federal government can disrupt the political will of the Confederate states and compel their re-entry into the union. Such a calculus, in turn, relies on the idea that the Confederacy is constituted, organizationally, as a fragile and electorally shallow conspiracy among elites in the legislatures of the Confederate states, capable of being fatally undermined by a well-organized effort by federal military forces to disrupt the capacity of diverse state governments to hold key geographic locations. That is to say, federal policy makers in the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the federal military establishment (e.g. Generals Scott and Hallock) misconstrue the democratization of anti-federal ideologies in the Confederate states beyond the ranks of Southern elites. As the scale of popular support for the Confederacy across the broader electorate of the Southern states becomes apparent by virtue of the threshold of military mobilization within the White Southern population, the federal strategy of holding key landspaces gives way to a range of divergent ideas that might be crudely consolidated into two separate but integrally linked goals: the need to control or otherwise disrupt logistical infrastructures facilitating free flow of materiale and military forces across the space of the Southern states, and the need to inflict persistent losses against spatially dispersed and logistically isolated field armies of the Confederate states.
By the end of major organized conflict, federal forces had largely realized both goals. The defeat of Confederate military forces, in this respect, reveals a dichotomy. The Confederate military proved incapable of defending dispersed networks of logistical infrastructures and strategically critical spaces. Rail lines were cut, riverine navigation impeded, and, especially following the federal Army of the Tennessee's campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas (1864-1865), entire swaths of land rendered barren of logistically usable resources. As its control over logistical assets and networks dwindled, Confederate field armies became increasingly disconnected from each other and dis-articulated relative to governmental control and their domestic base of support. That is to say, the Lincoln administration never loses operational control over federal military forces in a way that might have impeded logistical operations or undermined overall government supervision of strategic goals. Lincoln may not have stood continuously over the shoulders of George McClellan on the York-James peninsula or that of Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg, but he absolutely maintained some degree of direction and discretion over the general formulation of operational planning at the level of designated armies/campaigns. The same could not be said regarding the Confederate Davis administration, especially in the latter stages of major organized conflict. Davis may have enjoyed some discretion regarding Robert E. Lee's decision to invade Pennsylvania in 1863, but he certainly lacked any meaningful control over the logistical details or the staffing levels for field units engaging in the operation, if only because the constitution of the Confederate states did not grant him adequate authority to exercise such close control of the military, which was, above all, a consolidation of separate state level militia forces consolidated under loose authority by a weak central administration. Finally, to the extent that the Confederate military continued to enjoy a strong degree of popular support in local jurisdictions of the South, the Confederate government lacked any capacity to leverage such support across space to bolster the logistical status of the military. By early 1865, the staffing and supply status of the Army of Northern Virginia was lost on populations in areas still under Confederate control in Alabama or Louisiana or Tennessee, and the Davis administration was incapable of procuring material assistance from such areas because it lacked any control over logistical networks capable of doing so.
Conversely, federal successes at disrupting logistical networks and winning a war of attrition against Confederate field armies did not simultaneously manifest success at undermining popular support for the political project of the Confederacy, even in areas where the federal government quickly regained military control (e.g. New Orleans, seized in early 1862). Rather, unevenly distributed patterns emerge in areas under direct federal military administration, areas loosely under Confederate control, and areas at the margins, where federal forces contended, in certain circumstances, with resistance from regular Confederate military units and civilian organized partisan or guerrilla units (see Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., "Bushwhacking and Barn Burning: Civil War Operations and the Florida Parishes' Tradition of Violence," in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association (Spring 1995), 171-186, downloaded from JSTOR (21 Nov. 2015) at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233176).
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
The CNBC Republican Primary Debate and Liberal Media Bias
A few comments are in order on the CNBC Republican Presidential debate last week in Boulder, Colorado. To begin, from what I have heard about Boulder, I find it a little bit shocking that debate organizers could actually fill up an auditorium with an audience of prospective Republican primary voters! On the other hand, it probably stands to reason that in a profoundly libertarian state, a Republican slate that has become so self-absorbed in its litany of government loathing might be apt to draw a following, even in the bluest of collegy, artsy, liberal towns. On that note, I have neither watched this Republican debate nor any of the other debates, Republican or Democratic, so far in this primary season. Rather, I had to go about obtaining a transcript of the debate online to see what was asked of each candidate and how each replied (see "Transcript: Read the full text of the CNBC Republican Debate in Boulder," in Time (Updated: Oct. 28, 2015, 11:40PM), at: http://time.com/4091301/republican-debate-transcript-cnbc-boulder/). My only reason for doing so concerned the blustering over liberal media bias coming from certain candidates and, subsequently, the decision by the Republican National Committee to suspend its cooperation with NBC/Comcast in airing further debates. Being employed by a family business where support for conservative Republican politics is the norm, I am entirely accustomed to hearing complaints, repeatedly, about the liberal bias of the mainstream media, favoring Democratic politicians and their liberal causes against the unwavering faith of everyday Americans in God, the Constitution (as the Founders wrote it), the free market, and the simple morality of frugality, sobriety, and self-reliance. If the Republican Party since the 1960s has promulgated any unique, consistent, and pervasive mantra, then it would indisputably be “blame the liberal media for everything that has gone wrong with America.”
In an electoral cycle where, despite a bewildering array of choices between moderately conservative, starkly conservative, harshly conservative, libertarian-conservative, Evangelical conservative, ostensibly business-savvy conservative, soft-spoken outsider conservative, and just plain “out in right field,” strangely bombastically conservative candidates, it seems likely that the broader American electorate in November 2016 will, short of Constitutionally funky rigging of electoral procedures in swing states, elect a Democrat to serve as President for the next four years, it probably should not be any surprise that it is now time to drag out the liberal media as whipping boy for a demographically shrinking Republican electorate, seemingly deprived of a good reason to feel excited (by which I, of course, really mean angry).
Acknowledging, in this regard, that it’s never the wrong time to start blaming the media during Republican primary season, it seemed to me, perhaps mistakenly, as though the reaction to the Boulder CNBC debate was taking Republican anti-media politics to a new level. After all, how much can a panel of personalities from a network that specializes in business reporting and casual investment advice really demonstrate a pervasive anti-conservative bias? It was not as if CNBC executives had invited in someone like Rachel Maddow to lambaste the more spiritually minded Republican candidates for their unwillingness to accept the theory of evolution! If Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli (a personality at least partly if erroneously associated with the beginnings of the Tea Party movement!) have to be counted among the worst perpetrators in the mainstream media’s efforts to tarnish traditional American values and undermine the capacity of political conservatism to restore American exceptionalism, then the cultural state of siege faced by Republican Party conservatives at the present time must be unimaginably grim indeed - even quarters where they could once rely on staunch supporters of the free market, limited government, and individual liberty now harbor treacherous enemies and closet defenders of the welfare state and the road to serfdom! I had to see just how these “more liberal than I could ever have imagined” moderators ambushed the unsuspecting top tier Republican candidates.
To be fair, John Harwood, a columnist with The New York Times, a quintessential liberal publication, was among the moderators for the debate. It would be impossible to write off Harwood’s participation in the debate as something less than an effort by CNBC to appear balanced in organizing a debate with journalists from different corners of the political spectrum. That said, Harwood’s first question, directed toward Donald Trump, showcased the very same condescending attitude that Republican Party conservatives have been quick to attribute to mainstream journalists. Following a short summary of some of Trump’s more eccentric campaign positions, Harwood literally characterized Trump’s candidacy as a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a characterization for which Trump scolded him in his reply. Trump was right to do so, and it was, in no way, shape, or form, an appropriate way to start off a debate of Presidential candidates, however outlandish certain of Trump’s positions have been to date. In effect, Harwood opened the door to claims of media bias by phrasing his question in a way that most viewers of the debate, either in the live audience or at home, would never expect to see in the context of a Democratic debate relative to, say, Bernie Sanders’ plan to guarantee universal free access to public higher education. Emphatically, I would have expected more professional journalistic behavior from Harwood and, at least, a greater degree of situational awareness in personally evaluating the appropriateness of his own questions relative to the possibility that he might be perceived as a manipulative liberal journalist, turning an opportunity to have serious policy debate into a three-ring circus in which the top tier Republican candidates could be painted as buffoons!
I want to emphasize Harwood’s unprofessional characterization of Trump’s policy recommendations in order, among other things, to argue that, having evaluated the rest of the debate, I cannot fathom how CNBC’s moderation of the debate could be accused of fostering a bias in its treatment of the slate of candidates to such an extent that the RNC would be justified in suspending further primary debates with NBC/Comcast. After Harwood’s mistreatment of Trump, CNBC’s Becky Quick undertook a stinging interrogation of Dr. Ben Carson’s 10-15 percent flat tax proposal, arguing that it would either cause the federal budget deficit to balloon or force a reduction of the entire federal budget by 40 percent. I would fully expect and demand the same rigorous sort of treatment with regard to tax proposals, domestic projects, or entitlement reform measures in the Democratic primary debates - if the math does not add up for Hillary Clinton’s recommendations on domestic energy policies, then such proposals should be called out for scrutiny in this sort of debate context.
The first mention by any of the candidates of liberal media bias came, interestingly, from Senator Marco Rubio, who, when questioned by Carl Quintanilla about his reported absence from multiple votes in the Senate and a call by one Florida paper for his resignation, countered that Senator Bob Graham, one of Rubio’s predecessors from Florida, never received calls for his resignation when his Presidential campaign resulted in a significant number of missed votes. Later, Senator Rubio returned to the theme of liberal media bias independent of any question offered by the panel of moderators, labeling the mainstream media as Hillary Clinton’s super PAC for, among other things, converting the latter’s recent grilling before House Republicans on the special committee investigating the 2013 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate into a victory for Clinton.
Not wanting to ignore other efforts to blame the media, Senator Ted Cruz, in his first opportunity to answer a question from Carl Quintanilla on his opposition to the most recent federal budget compromise, chose to avoid discussing fiscal policy and instead blame the panel of moderators for converting the debate into a veritable “cage match” between the slate of candidates. Again, in all fairness, following Harwood’s initial treatment of Trump, Cruz had a point. On the other hand, in the context of debate that should have highlighted fiscal policy, regulation of businesses, and divergent approaches to entitlement reform, what does Cruz’s preference to avoid a fiscal policy discussion at the expense of missing an opportunity to attack the media tell us about the broader appeal of his position against fiscal policy compromises to avoid government shutdowns and/or debt default? In categorically refusing to engage in this discussion, maybe Cruz gave the most honest reply to Quintanilla’s suggestion that he was not the sort of problem-solver that the American people were looking for in Washington.
The larger point that I want to make in regard to the debate is that, in my view, the questions given to each candidate were largely appropriate and, to a great extent, it appeared that the moderators made a palpable effort to give each of the ten candidates on stage a decent share of time to both answer questions and respond to attacks from other candidates. If any of the candidates failed to command adequate attention in a way that could have boosted their campaign fortunes, then it was not for lack of an opportunity to convey their ideas on where the U.S. economy needed to go during the next Presidential administration and how the federal government could assist this process (if only by getting out of the way, a position supported by nearly every candidate on stage). Emphatically, it seemed that the format did not give Senator Paul, Governor Christie, or Governor Huckabee many opportunities to express their views, but, to a great extent, the onus for any apparent disadvantage experienced by these candidates remains not with CNBC but with the exuberance of their opponents in utilizing every opportunity to intervene in discussions even when not explicitly being called on by moderators to do so - such exuberance might at least partially explain why Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and, increasingly, Rubio have been doing as well as they have to date in the polls.
Fundamentally, if the debate formats have not been conducive to airing the views of the lower polling Republican candidates, to say nothing of Governors Pataki and Jindal and Senators Graham and Santorum (the “under card” candidates) who cannot even find their way back to the grown-ups table to debate the issues, then the fault rests with the larger primary process in the Republican Party and the plethora of candidates currently competing. It is simply impossible to accommodate fourteen candidates for an in-depth discussion of policies without having certain organizations left feeling that they have been accorded inadequate attention and, thus, that the larger Republican electorate has not been given enough of a chance to evaluate their candidate’s merit. It might be worth asking, in this respect, why, at this particular moment in its history, the GOP has presented so large and contentious a field of Presidential candidates.
In my opinion, the size and combative nature of the present slate of candidates appears symptomatic a crisis within the Republican Party as it seeks to come to terms with the changing demographics of the broader American electorate and the likelihood that, if the party is to survive into the future as something more than a regional concern, it will have to undertake a deep reconsideration of its ideological principles. As in previous electoral cycles, the GOP is undergoing a struggle between extreme partisans of moral/religious and/or economic (libertarian) conservatism and moderate/establishment Republicans, open to pragmatic compromise with Democrats in Congress and/or the executive branch. As the more principled extreme conservatives see themselves increasingly marginalized across the broader American electorate, however, their politics have become steadily more extreme and their willingness to compromise with opponents has diminished. From this standpoint, ultra-conservative Republicans, frustrated with the array of establishment moderates (e.g. Governors Bush and Kasich), have enabled the growth of an unwieldy slate of candidates in a frantic search for the sort of principled conservative candidate who might be capable of articulating a new direction for the country that can appeal to constituencies outside the GOP, emphasizing rigorous fidelity to traditional Judeo-Christian morality, limited governmental regulation, lower taxes, reduction of the size of federal bureaucracies, appointment of conservative jurists, and a more muscular American diplomatic and military presence internationally. Effectively, the Republican libertarian and Evangelical ultra-conservative base (i.e. the folks who went out to form grassroots Tea Party groups in 2009) is scouring the party looking for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan or, at least, what they believe Reagan stood for, embodied in a new candidate who will put their image of America first and put the liberals in their place. Sadly for these true believers, the America of 2016 is not the America of 1980. If Reagan ran today, he would have to veer well to the left of ideological imaginations of the Republican electorate to hold any hope of winning across the general electorate. The size of the current GOP primary slate is accentuating tendencies to undermine support for more moderate candidates while simultaneously bolstering candidates who stand very little chance of winning in a general election against the likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
With these considerations in mind, playing the media bias card is as much a tactic to appeal to the ideological predispositions of the Republican electoral base, which has been warned by GOP leadership not to trust the mainstream media since at least the 1960s, as it is an effort by individual candidates to curtail serious media inquiry on legitimate questions on personal behavior and/or qualifications. Thus, the questioning of personal spending habits and accumulation and default on personal debts by Senator Rubio becomes another issue of media bias in which matters of personal conduct that might demonstrate proclivities toward fiscal restraint and/or abandon would be admitted against a Republican candidate but never against a Democrat, because charges against the latter would tend to impugn his or her character in damaging ways. It makes little difference, in this respect, if such counterfactuals hold no basis in reality - the point is that the media is out to undermine the political projects of conservatives and, as such, any personal black mark that can be leveled at a Republican candidate will be exploited.
In an electoral cycle where, despite a bewildering array of choices between moderately conservative, starkly conservative, harshly conservative, libertarian-conservative, Evangelical conservative, ostensibly business-savvy conservative, soft-spoken outsider conservative, and just plain “out in right field,” strangely bombastically conservative candidates, it seems likely that the broader American electorate in November 2016 will, short of Constitutionally funky rigging of electoral procedures in swing states, elect a Democrat to serve as President for the next four years, it probably should not be any surprise that it is now time to drag out the liberal media as whipping boy for a demographically shrinking Republican electorate, seemingly deprived of a good reason to feel excited (by which I, of course, really mean angry).
Acknowledging, in this regard, that it’s never the wrong time to start blaming the media during Republican primary season, it seemed to me, perhaps mistakenly, as though the reaction to the Boulder CNBC debate was taking Republican anti-media politics to a new level. After all, how much can a panel of personalities from a network that specializes in business reporting and casual investment advice really demonstrate a pervasive anti-conservative bias? It was not as if CNBC executives had invited in someone like Rachel Maddow to lambaste the more spiritually minded Republican candidates for their unwillingness to accept the theory of evolution! If Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli (a personality at least partly if erroneously associated with the beginnings of the Tea Party movement!) have to be counted among the worst perpetrators in the mainstream media’s efforts to tarnish traditional American values and undermine the capacity of political conservatism to restore American exceptionalism, then the cultural state of siege faced by Republican Party conservatives at the present time must be unimaginably grim indeed - even quarters where they could once rely on staunch supporters of the free market, limited government, and individual liberty now harbor treacherous enemies and closet defenders of the welfare state and the road to serfdom! I had to see just how these “more liberal than I could ever have imagined” moderators ambushed the unsuspecting top tier Republican candidates.
To be fair, John Harwood, a columnist with The New York Times, a quintessential liberal publication, was among the moderators for the debate. It would be impossible to write off Harwood’s participation in the debate as something less than an effort by CNBC to appear balanced in organizing a debate with journalists from different corners of the political spectrum. That said, Harwood’s first question, directed toward Donald Trump, showcased the very same condescending attitude that Republican Party conservatives have been quick to attribute to mainstream journalists. Following a short summary of some of Trump’s more eccentric campaign positions, Harwood literally characterized Trump’s candidacy as a “comic book version of a presidential campaign,” a characterization for which Trump scolded him in his reply. Trump was right to do so, and it was, in no way, shape, or form, an appropriate way to start off a debate of Presidential candidates, however outlandish certain of Trump’s positions have been to date. In effect, Harwood opened the door to claims of media bias by phrasing his question in a way that most viewers of the debate, either in the live audience or at home, would never expect to see in the context of a Democratic debate relative to, say, Bernie Sanders’ plan to guarantee universal free access to public higher education. Emphatically, I would have expected more professional journalistic behavior from Harwood and, at least, a greater degree of situational awareness in personally evaluating the appropriateness of his own questions relative to the possibility that he might be perceived as a manipulative liberal journalist, turning an opportunity to have serious policy debate into a three-ring circus in which the top tier Republican candidates could be painted as buffoons!
I want to emphasize Harwood’s unprofessional characterization of Trump’s policy recommendations in order, among other things, to argue that, having evaluated the rest of the debate, I cannot fathom how CNBC’s moderation of the debate could be accused of fostering a bias in its treatment of the slate of candidates to such an extent that the RNC would be justified in suspending further primary debates with NBC/Comcast. After Harwood’s mistreatment of Trump, CNBC’s Becky Quick undertook a stinging interrogation of Dr. Ben Carson’s 10-15 percent flat tax proposal, arguing that it would either cause the federal budget deficit to balloon or force a reduction of the entire federal budget by 40 percent. I would fully expect and demand the same rigorous sort of treatment with regard to tax proposals, domestic projects, or entitlement reform measures in the Democratic primary debates - if the math does not add up for Hillary Clinton’s recommendations on domestic energy policies, then such proposals should be called out for scrutiny in this sort of debate context.
The first mention by any of the candidates of liberal media bias came, interestingly, from Senator Marco Rubio, who, when questioned by Carl Quintanilla about his reported absence from multiple votes in the Senate and a call by one Florida paper for his resignation, countered that Senator Bob Graham, one of Rubio’s predecessors from Florida, never received calls for his resignation when his Presidential campaign resulted in a significant number of missed votes. Later, Senator Rubio returned to the theme of liberal media bias independent of any question offered by the panel of moderators, labeling the mainstream media as Hillary Clinton’s super PAC for, among other things, converting the latter’s recent grilling before House Republicans on the special committee investigating the 2013 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate into a victory for Clinton.
Not wanting to ignore other efforts to blame the media, Senator Ted Cruz, in his first opportunity to answer a question from Carl Quintanilla on his opposition to the most recent federal budget compromise, chose to avoid discussing fiscal policy and instead blame the panel of moderators for converting the debate into a veritable “cage match” between the slate of candidates. Again, in all fairness, following Harwood’s initial treatment of Trump, Cruz had a point. On the other hand, in the context of debate that should have highlighted fiscal policy, regulation of businesses, and divergent approaches to entitlement reform, what does Cruz’s preference to avoid a fiscal policy discussion at the expense of missing an opportunity to attack the media tell us about the broader appeal of his position against fiscal policy compromises to avoid government shutdowns and/or debt default? In categorically refusing to engage in this discussion, maybe Cruz gave the most honest reply to Quintanilla’s suggestion that he was not the sort of problem-solver that the American people were looking for in Washington.
The larger point that I want to make in regard to the debate is that, in my view, the questions given to each candidate were largely appropriate and, to a great extent, it appeared that the moderators made a palpable effort to give each of the ten candidates on stage a decent share of time to both answer questions and respond to attacks from other candidates. If any of the candidates failed to command adequate attention in a way that could have boosted their campaign fortunes, then it was not for lack of an opportunity to convey their ideas on where the U.S. economy needed to go during the next Presidential administration and how the federal government could assist this process (if only by getting out of the way, a position supported by nearly every candidate on stage). Emphatically, it seemed that the format did not give Senator Paul, Governor Christie, or Governor Huckabee many opportunities to express their views, but, to a great extent, the onus for any apparent disadvantage experienced by these candidates remains not with CNBC but with the exuberance of their opponents in utilizing every opportunity to intervene in discussions even when not explicitly being called on by moderators to do so - such exuberance might at least partially explain why Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and, increasingly, Rubio have been doing as well as they have to date in the polls.
Fundamentally, if the debate formats have not been conducive to airing the views of the lower polling Republican candidates, to say nothing of Governors Pataki and Jindal and Senators Graham and Santorum (the “under card” candidates) who cannot even find their way back to the grown-ups table to debate the issues, then the fault rests with the larger primary process in the Republican Party and the plethora of candidates currently competing. It is simply impossible to accommodate fourteen candidates for an in-depth discussion of policies without having certain organizations left feeling that they have been accorded inadequate attention and, thus, that the larger Republican electorate has not been given enough of a chance to evaluate their candidate’s merit. It might be worth asking, in this respect, why, at this particular moment in its history, the GOP has presented so large and contentious a field of Presidential candidates.
In my opinion, the size and combative nature of the present slate of candidates appears symptomatic a crisis within the Republican Party as it seeks to come to terms with the changing demographics of the broader American electorate and the likelihood that, if the party is to survive into the future as something more than a regional concern, it will have to undertake a deep reconsideration of its ideological principles. As in previous electoral cycles, the GOP is undergoing a struggle between extreme partisans of moral/religious and/or economic (libertarian) conservatism and moderate/establishment Republicans, open to pragmatic compromise with Democrats in Congress and/or the executive branch. As the more principled extreme conservatives see themselves increasingly marginalized across the broader American electorate, however, their politics have become steadily more extreme and their willingness to compromise with opponents has diminished. From this standpoint, ultra-conservative Republicans, frustrated with the array of establishment moderates (e.g. Governors Bush and Kasich), have enabled the growth of an unwieldy slate of candidates in a frantic search for the sort of principled conservative candidate who might be capable of articulating a new direction for the country that can appeal to constituencies outside the GOP, emphasizing rigorous fidelity to traditional Judeo-Christian morality, limited governmental regulation, lower taxes, reduction of the size of federal bureaucracies, appointment of conservative jurists, and a more muscular American diplomatic and military presence internationally. Effectively, the Republican libertarian and Evangelical ultra-conservative base (i.e. the folks who went out to form grassroots Tea Party groups in 2009) is scouring the party looking for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan or, at least, what they believe Reagan stood for, embodied in a new candidate who will put their image of America first and put the liberals in their place. Sadly for these true believers, the America of 2016 is not the America of 1980. If Reagan ran today, he would have to veer well to the left of ideological imaginations of the Republican electorate to hold any hope of winning across the general electorate. The size of the current GOP primary slate is accentuating tendencies to undermine support for more moderate candidates while simultaneously bolstering candidates who stand very little chance of winning in a general election against the likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
With these considerations in mind, playing the media bias card is as much a tactic to appeal to the ideological predispositions of the Republican electoral base, which has been warned by GOP leadership not to trust the mainstream media since at least the 1960s, as it is an effort by individual candidates to curtail serious media inquiry on legitimate questions on personal behavior and/or qualifications. Thus, the questioning of personal spending habits and accumulation and default on personal debts by Senator Rubio becomes another issue of media bias in which matters of personal conduct that might demonstrate proclivities toward fiscal restraint and/or abandon would be admitted against a Republican candidate but never against a Democrat, because charges against the latter would tend to impugn his or her character in damaging ways. It makes little difference, in this respect, if such counterfactuals hold no basis in reality - the point is that the media is out to undermine the political projects of conservatives and, as such, any personal black mark that can be leveled at a Republican candidate will be exploited.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Is Trump's Candidacy a Conspiracy Against the Republican Party?
After racist generalizations against Mexican immigrants, cavalier dismissals of the idea that John McCain could be considered a hero in service to the U.S. for suffering years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, a litany of grotesque allusions to the enormity of his personal wealth, and his continuous articulation of vacuous, overly simplistic criticisms of existing governmental policies on a range of issues absent any clearly defined policy alternatives, Donald Trump has apparently decided to use this moment in the vetting out of Republican Presidential candidates to introduce a novel and refreshingly frank species of misogynistic prejudice, attacking, of all women, a Fox News personality popular among its conservative, Republican-leaning viewer base!? Isn't there something amiss here? Trump is hammering home a cavalcade of all the far right wing racist, sexist, and classist prejudices latent within the political unconscious of the Republican base, unvarnished by the slightest hint of political correctness, let alone decorum or a basic sense of interpersonal sensitivity or human decency, and, for all his efforts, he's apparently still number one in all of the major polls of announced Republican candidates! There is something that just makes me want to ask who put him up to this. This can't be for real! It sounds more like a Stephen Colbert piece off of the Colbert Report, run amok for an audience that just doesn't get the joke, or, more to the point, it harkens back to Seventies television, when conservatives could enjoy big laughs from "All in the Family" while liberal intellectuals could laugh at the caricature the show made of conservatism. Trump is playing Archie Bunker for millions of Republican conservatives who just don't get that they are the butt of the joke, and that, if the Republican Party does not get its act together and select a serious candidate who can appeal to a much broader, culturally heterogeneous electorate with a moderately conservative agenda and a willingness to engage in principled compromise with progressive constituencies, then the country is going to elect another Clinton into the White House and, probably, at the same time, bounce one if not both houses of Congress back to the Democrats!
On Failures to Coordinate: The PVTA and Zipcar on a Summer Sunday
I am writing this post as an effort to vent my recurring frustrations regarding my efforts to employ mass transit as a viable means to get from point A to point B in my day-to-day life. The story conveyed here is a piece of a much longer story, beginning about six years ago when, in the course of a teaching gig that I had down at Holyoke Community College, I got into a fender bender in a commuter parking lot with the last car that I owned, prompting me, for a long list of reasons, to seek alternative means of transit to private car ownership. I will have to elaborate on this story at some later date, but for now it suffices to say that I rely primarily on two distinct modes of automotive transportation to get from my home in the Baystate neighborhood of Northampton/Florence to work in West Springfield and to other locations that I might need to get to. I hold a membership with Zipcar, which is very useful if I need to utilize a car either to travel moderately long distances (e.g. Boston on Sundays when I can park for free in Newton, Bennington when I feel like hiking my favorite section of the Long Trail, etc.) or I just need some means of transporting things close to home when loading things on my back won't do (e.g. getting the air conditioner out of my storage box in Hatfield). However, I just don't have the means, income-wise, to use Zipcars everyday - my reservations tend to amount to a special treat for myself on a once a month basis. On an everyday basis, I rely on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), our local bus system for Hampden and Hampshire counties in the lower Connecticut/Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.
For the most part, the PVTA tends to serve my needs. If it didn't, then I would not have been able to make not owning a car work out living over twenty miles away from my workplace. On the other hand, there are recurring problems, many of which could be blamed on the performance of individual bus drivers. I rely on one particular transfer at the downtown Holyoke Transportation Center, from the 6:30PM Purple 20 bus (Springfield bus terminal to Holyoke transportation center via West Springfield) to the 7:30PM Blue 48 bus (Holyoke transportation center to Northampton Academy of Music, the last scheduled run of the night) to get home to Northampton after work at least three nights a week. Several Purple 20 drivers have succeeded in stranding me in downtown Holyoke for the night, forcing me to either walk 11 miles home (which, sadly, I did on one occasion!) or seek alternative means to get back to Northampton (e.g. call up my roomate, Joe, who has been extremely accomodating in giving me a lift back home when I most need one). By and large, however, I have managed to combine rides from coworkers, shuffle schedules, and utilize alternate bus routes to ensure that I can get to and from work when I need to and still take care of numerous other needs, including, most recently, food preparation for my father, who has been a widower since my mom passed away last year and still hasn't mastered the fine art of preparing supper outside of throwing prepared dishes into the microwave oven! Moreover, recent schedule changes for the PVTA have accomplished wonders in giving me new alternative means of getting from the Springfield area back up to Northampton, most notably the extension of the Red 41 bus schedule (Northampton to Holyoke Mall via Easthampton Center) to a location where it frequently though not always can connect with the Purple 20 from Springfield to get me back to downtown Northampton twenty minutes before the Blue 48. Of course, there are occasions in which events beyond my control manage to throw a wrench into my commute for reasons that truly cannot be blamed on any individual bus driver. Snow will fall during winter, traffic will get diverted by the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade, and motors on PVTA buses will unexpectedly overheat during August heat waves, but, for the most part, I've found ways to deal with or plan around all such excusable failures of the PVTA system.
Today represents one of those occasions when all my transit planning and calculations break down. As I am writing this post, I should have been enjoying Italian food and, quite possibly, small quantities of Italian wine down in Waterbury, Connecticut, at the Pontelandolfo Community Club Festa di San Donato with my friend, Kirk, who lives and works as a librarian in Naugatuck, the next town over. I had reserved a Zipcar for the purpose of getting myself down to Waterbury. However, in the interest of reducing the total cost of the rental, I developed a rather complex plan. Rather than simply reserving a car in downtown Northampton as I usually do, I decided to reserve an infrequently used Ford at Veterans' Park in downtown Holyoke, across the street from the Transportation Center. Being relatively closer to Connecticut, the mileage that I would have expended driving from Holyoke would have been less than what I would have incurred had I reserved a car in Northampton. Also, estimating that I would, at most, spend about two hours indulging on Calamari, Lasagna, and other regional delicacies at the festival, I limited my rental to 5 hours (Zipcars rent by the day or the hour and come with a limit of 180 free miles per rental). This should have given me a generous 90 minutes for each trip and two hours to enjoy myself. In hindsight, maybe I was cutting things a little close, but I can concede my frugal nature without embarrassment! Also, there probably would not have been a problem extending the reservation by half an hour if I was due to run a little late. The one possible wrench that could have disrupted the mechanics of my plan consisted of the fact that I would have to take the 12:00PM Blue 48 from Northampton down to Holyoke in order to get to my rental precisely at 12:30 when my five hours were due to start. At the close of my rental, I would have to take either the 5:30PM or 6:30PM Blue 48 buses back to Northampton. None of this seemed remotely problematic, however, when I initially made my Zipcar plans.
As it was, there was a major automobile accident on route 5, between Northampton and Holyoke. The Blue 48 was diverted, I'm guessing, through Easthampton and around the Northampton Oxbow. As a result, the 12:00 Blue 48 that I was waiting for to get down to Holyoke never arrived! The Blue 48 was not back onto its schedule until 1:00PM, at which point, I had already texted Kirk to let him know that there were to be no Canolis in my future today and called Zipcar to cancel my reservation 20 minutes after I was supposed to have picked up my car. It is difficult to attribute blame to anyone in this situation. I made my plans under uncertain knowledge that the Blue 48 would be running on schedule as it does every Sunday. The folks at Zipcar were nice enough not to charge me the full value of my five hour rental, although I did get socked with a fee for tying up a car for a couple of hours that probably wasn't going to be driven by anyone else for the remainder of the week. The individuals involved in the accident on route 5 certainly didn't leave their houses this morning planning to get into a major accident, with injuries, that would divert traffic flows, playing havoc with bus schedules among other things. Lastly, again, the PVTA tries its best to adjust to incidents that will obstruct bus services, but there are certain events that cannot be remedied. The one complaint that I might have concerns the fact that I took a FULL HOUR for Blue 48 service to be restored after the traffic diversion.
As a summary point in this respect, in most circumstance, I try to plan my transit usage in the area on relatively tight schedules, taking advantage of every opportunity to limit the amount of time lost from taking particular buses and arranging Zipcar reservations in order to minimize my rental costs from hourly charges and mileage. When I design a particular plan to combine PVTA travel with a car reservation, I need the plan to fall together like clockwork. That is a little bit more than I can expect from the dedicated but otherwise somewhat unreliable members of the PVTA. That is not to say that I think mass transit under the PVTA is a miserable failure or that bus drivers within the system are ambivalent toward the needs of individual passengers to get somewhere on schedule. It is, on the other hand, simply a fact that the system runs with given limitations in both rolling stock and manpower that hinder its ability to adjust to situations like a major accident on a key thoroughfair. As a result, attempting to coordinate my travel, especially in connection with my Zipcar use, against PVTA schedules requires a great deal more flexibility than I am willing to extend to the system or include within my travel planning.
For the most part, the PVTA tends to serve my needs. If it didn't, then I would not have been able to make not owning a car work out living over twenty miles away from my workplace. On the other hand, there are recurring problems, many of which could be blamed on the performance of individual bus drivers. I rely on one particular transfer at the downtown Holyoke Transportation Center, from the 6:30PM Purple 20 bus (Springfield bus terminal to Holyoke transportation center via West Springfield) to the 7:30PM Blue 48 bus (Holyoke transportation center to Northampton Academy of Music, the last scheduled run of the night) to get home to Northampton after work at least three nights a week. Several Purple 20 drivers have succeeded in stranding me in downtown Holyoke for the night, forcing me to either walk 11 miles home (which, sadly, I did on one occasion!) or seek alternative means to get back to Northampton (e.g. call up my roomate, Joe, who has been extremely accomodating in giving me a lift back home when I most need one). By and large, however, I have managed to combine rides from coworkers, shuffle schedules, and utilize alternate bus routes to ensure that I can get to and from work when I need to and still take care of numerous other needs, including, most recently, food preparation for my father, who has been a widower since my mom passed away last year and still hasn't mastered the fine art of preparing supper outside of throwing prepared dishes into the microwave oven! Moreover, recent schedule changes for the PVTA have accomplished wonders in giving me new alternative means of getting from the Springfield area back up to Northampton, most notably the extension of the Red 41 bus schedule (Northampton to Holyoke Mall via Easthampton Center) to a location where it frequently though not always can connect with the Purple 20 from Springfield to get me back to downtown Northampton twenty minutes before the Blue 48. Of course, there are occasions in which events beyond my control manage to throw a wrench into my commute for reasons that truly cannot be blamed on any individual bus driver. Snow will fall during winter, traffic will get diverted by the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade, and motors on PVTA buses will unexpectedly overheat during August heat waves, but, for the most part, I've found ways to deal with or plan around all such excusable failures of the PVTA system.
Today represents one of those occasions when all my transit planning and calculations break down. As I am writing this post, I should have been enjoying Italian food and, quite possibly, small quantities of Italian wine down in Waterbury, Connecticut, at the Pontelandolfo Community Club Festa di San Donato with my friend, Kirk, who lives and works as a librarian in Naugatuck, the next town over. I had reserved a Zipcar for the purpose of getting myself down to Waterbury. However, in the interest of reducing the total cost of the rental, I developed a rather complex plan. Rather than simply reserving a car in downtown Northampton as I usually do, I decided to reserve an infrequently used Ford at Veterans' Park in downtown Holyoke, across the street from the Transportation Center. Being relatively closer to Connecticut, the mileage that I would have expended driving from Holyoke would have been less than what I would have incurred had I reserved a car in Northampton. Also, estimating that I would, at most, spend about two hours indulging on Calamari, Lasagna, and other regional delicacies at the festival, I limited my rental to 5 hours (Zipcars rent by the day or the hour and come with a limit of 180 free miles per rental). This should have given me a generous 90 minutes for each trip and two hours to enjoy myself. In hindsight, maybe I was cutting things a little close, but I can concede my frugal nature without embarrassment! Also, there probably would not have been a problem extending the reservation by half an hour if I was due to run a little late. The one possible wrench that could have disrupted the mechanics of my plan consisted of the fact that I would have to take the 12:00PM Blue 48 from Northampton down to Holyoke in order to get to my rental precisely at 12:30 when my five hours were due to start. At the close of my rental, I would have to take either the 5:30PM or 6:30PM Blue 48 buses back to Northampton. None of this seemed remotely problematic, however, when I initially made my Zipcar plans.
As it was, there was a major automobile accident on route 5, between Northampton and Holyoke. The Blue 48 was diverted, I'm guessing, through Easthampton and around the Northampton Oxbow. As a result, the 12:00 Blue 48 that I was waiting for to get down to Holyoke never arrived! The Blue 48 was not back onto its schedule until 1:00PM, at which point, I had already texted Kirk to let him know that there were to be no Canolis in my future today and called Zipcar to cancel my reservation 20 minutes after I was supposed to have picked up my car. It is difficult to attribute blame to anyone in this situation. I made my plans under uncertain knowledge that the Blue 48 would be running on schedule as it does every Sunday. The folks at Zipcar were nice enough not to charge me the full value of my five hour rental, although I did get socked with a fee for tying up a car for a couple of hours that probably wasn't going to be driven by anyone else for the remainder of the week. The individuals involved in the accident on route 5 certainly didn't leave their houses this morning planning to get into a major accident, with injuries, that would divert traffic flows, playing havoc with bus schedules among other things. Lastly, again, the PVTA tries its best to adjust to incidents that will obstruct bus services, but there are certain events that cannot be remedied. The one complaint that I might have concerns the fact that I took a FULL HOUR for Blue 48 service to be restored after the traffic diversion.
As a summary point in this respect, in most circumstance, I try to plan my transit usage in the area on relatively tight schedules, taking advantage of every opportunity to limit the amount of time lost from taking particular buses and arranging Zipcar reservations in order to minimize my rental costs from hourly charges and mileage. When I design a particular plan to combine PVTA travel with a car reservation, I need the plan to fall together like clockwork. That is a little bit more than I can expect from the dedicated but otherwise somewhat unreliable members of the PVTA. That is not to say that I think mass transit under the PVTA is a miserable failure or that bus drivers within the system are ambivalent toward the needs of individual passengers to get somewhere on schedule. It is, on the other hand, simply a fact that the system runs with given limitations in both rolling stock and manpower that hinder its ability to adjust to situations like a major accident on a key thoroughfair. As a result, attempting to coordinate my travel, especially in connection with my Zipcar use, against PVTA schedules requires a great deal more flexibility than I am willing to extend to the system or include within my travel planning.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)