Category Archives: conservatism

Reactionaries

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A commenter who labels himself “r4d20” left comments to the “Being Liberal Doesn’t Mean Being a Patsy” post, here and here, and I want to answer these comments at length because the writer brings up some important points. Beginning with:

Not to be a pendant, but the first step in elevating the culture is to at least get some terms more specific than “righties/lefties”, or “the right/the left”. I understand that its a quick and easy reference point, but I think that excessive use of generalities does interfere with clear thought.

I am a big proponent of using words and phrases with precision, but in our current political culture attempts to define various factions by standard political nomenclature will fail, IMO, because the partisan forces tearing us apart are not fundamentally political forces, but cultural ones.

Once upon a time I referred to righties as “conservatives,” because that’s what they called themselves, but whether they are or are not conservative depends a whole lot on how you define conservative. And that’s a perilous thing to do, because if you go by the bare-bones dictionary definition, “One who strongly favors retention of the existing order; orthodox, traditionalist, etc.,” the next thing you have to do is figure out what “existing order” is to be retained, and that can change over time and from place to place.

According to The Reader’s Companion to American History (Eric Foner and John Garraty, eds. Houghon Mifflin, 1991),

A uniquely American form of conservatism first arose in opposition to the nation’s sense of boundless optimism about human nature under democracy. And for roughly the first two hundred years of the Republic, conservatism was defined politically and culturally by its fears of the political excesses, economic egalitarianism, and cultural vulgarity generated by a democratic society shorn of any aristocratic restraints.

This is from an excellent overview of conservatism in America by Fred Siegel that can be found on this page, but you have to scroll down to get to it. It’s under the “American History” heading, and begins “The Reagan presidency has been hailed as the high point of twentieth-century American conservatism.” To understand fully where I’m coming from here it would be helpful to read the whole thing, but I’m just going to quote a little more, skipping to the 1920s —

According to what came to be known as “constitutional morality,” legislation supporting the right to unionize or limiting children’s working hours was an un-American form of group privilege. Laissez-faire conservatism reached its intellectual apogee in the 1920s. A critic complained that by 1924 you didn’t have to be a radical to be denounced as un-American: “according to the lights of Constitution worship you are no less a Red if you seek change through the very channels which the Constitution itself provides.”

In Europe conservatism was based on hereditary classes; in America it was based on hereditary religious, ethnic, and racial groups. The GOP, a largely Protestant party, looked upon itself as the manifestation of the divine creed of Americanism revealed through the Constitution. To be a conservative, then, was to share in a religiously ordained vision of a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. This civil religion, preached by President Herbert Hoover, was shattered by the Great Depression and the usurpation of the government by an “alien” power, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in league with “un-American,” that is, unexceptionalist ideas.

Conservatives were traumatized by their fall from grace. Diminished in place and prestige, they consoled themselves with bizarre conspiracy theories and cranky accusations of communist infiltration. Overwhelmed and resentful, they did not so much address the disaster of the depression as yearn for the days when they were able to run their towns, their businesses, and their workers in the manner to which they had been accustomed. Then, in 1940, just when it seemed they had Roosevelt on the ropes, World War II revived and extended his presidency.

At war’s end conservatives unleashed their frustrations. On the one hand, postwar popular conservatism was based on an anticommunist hysteria that antedated the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Politics for the McCarthyites was not so much a matter of pursuing material interests as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

From here, Siegel goes on to describe the conservative political revival that began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964 and the conservative intellectuals and activists of the 1960s who called for a “restoration” of pre-New Deal America.

But this new conservatism did not so much win the country over to its perspective as board the empty ship of state vacated by a 1960s liberalism that had self-destructed. Conservatism triumphed because New Deal liberalism was unable to accommodate the new cultural and political demands unleashed by the civil rights revolution, feminism, and the counterculture, all of which was exacerbated by the Kulturkampf over Vietnam.

I agree with Siegel that New Deal liberalism, along with the New Left, had self-destructed by the 1970s, although the New Deal itself has yet to be entirely dismantled. But while “identity politics” and other factors splintered liberalism into thousands of ineffectual pieces, the Right got its act together. Some extremely wealthy right-wingers — Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Smith Richardson, among others — provided the seed money for the mighty right-wing think tank-media infrastructure, which you can read more about here. This infrastructure has put control of most of the federal government and news media safely in right-wing hands.

Yet, weirdly, the Right continues behave as if it is a desperate fight against a mythical “liberal elite” that runs everything, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t exist, and that progressivism itself has been cast out of power and left wandering in the wilderness for at least 40 years.

Today you’ve got the “social” conservatives, who want to return to 19th-century cultural mores; the “free market” conservatives, who want to return to the Gilded Age; the “Christian” conservatives who want to return to a theocratic America that never actually existed except in their imaginations; and the neoconservatives, who have taken the notions of American exceptionalism to new and more demented heights. And variations thereof.

Somehow these diverse groups have formed a coalition they label “conservative”, in spite of the fact that they advance contradictory agendas. Contemporary conservatism, for example, advocates restricting civil liberties in the name of freedom and extols small government while building the mightiest military-industrial complex the world has ever seen. About the only thing the various elements of the coalition have in common is that they all hate liberals, meaning not actual liberals but a cartoon straw man that represents liberalism in their minds, but which has little resemblance to those of us who are still foolish enough to call ourselves “liberals” in spite of the fact that we’re asking to be rounded up and shipped out on the first bus to the re-education camps.

This conservatism, IMO, isn’t all that conservative. It’s far more radical, revolutionary even, to label conservative. I think reactionary gets closer to it, although the standard dictionary definition of reactionaries — people who vehemently, often fanatically oppose progress and favor return to a previous condition — only works up to a point. Aggressive imperialism is a bit hard to square with returning to a “previous condition,” for example. To make that work you need to understand their urge to impose American hegemony on the rest of the world as a pro-active isolationism — eliminating the “threat” of foreignness by gettin’ it before it gets us.

In other ways, of course, reactionary works quite well — the stubborn refusal to admit that global warming is really happening, for example.

But ultimately, to paraphrase Siegel, I think the current American Right is all about politics as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

And, since we’ve got to call these people something, I say “rightie” works as well as anything else.

In its extreme forms, rightieness is just hate. I mean, what are Michelle Malkin’s or Ann Coulter’s political principles, other than that they hate large groups of people that they associate with “the Left”? The hate comes first; whatever political principles they claim were adopted as props to justify the hate.

The commenter r4d20 continues,

While I choose to register Republican, like many/most people I straddle the line, which means that hardcore lefties call me “right” and hardcore righties call me “left”. According to the current “talking points” I am both a jingoistic warmonger, and a pro-Al Queda traitor – but at least both agree I should be shot 🙂 .

Even as a “Rightie” I have more in common with a “moderate” leftie than with a Christian Conservative. As a “leftie” I have more in common with a moderate rightie than with almost any Anarchist or Socialist.

Yet, somehow, politics on the blogosphere has divided itself fairly neatly into “right” and “left” camps, and all (except, these days, the purer libertarians) know extinctively in which camp they and everyone else should be sorted.

Here on the Left Blogosphere, you’d have a hard time finding an anarchist or genuinely socialist blogger. Most of us bloggers are the political heirs of New Deal Democrats. Most of us hold political positions that would have been considered “centrist” or even moderately conservative years ago. Yet today we’re painted as a radical “leftie” fringe utterly beyond the pale of decent, Gawd-fearing American politics. Much of the Right Blogosphere has utterly slipped its tether to reality, yet it gets called “centrist.”

And these days, a “moderate” is someone who doesn’t know what the hell is going on. If you want to preserve long-established American political processes, if you believe in the rule of law and the Bill of Rights and separation of powers and all that old stuff, you’re a leftie. Unless you just say you believe in those things even while you are trying to destroy them, which would make you a rightie.

But if the moderates on each side have been conditioned to think of all the people on the “other side” as extremist stereotypes then they will naturally choose the extremists of their own side over those of the other. The only winners are the wingnuts who maintain their support out of hyped-up fear of possible doomsday alternatives.

Yes, but the wingnuts really are going to bring about doomsday if we don’t stop them. Fence-straddling is not a sustainable position these days.

Welcome to the Nut House

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Blogging time is short today, so I’m just going to link to a few things going on elsewhere —

Per Glenn Greenwald, Michelle Malkin is not only certifiably unhinged, she has persuaded some of her more loosely wired followers that New York Times editors and reporters deserve to be hunted down.

Let’s start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen.

Do you have an idea where they live? Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous – grab for the golden ring.

This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that gets people assassinated. If I were any of the people named in this post, I’d be calling lawyers.

Yesterday David Neiwert posted revealed that Malkin’s, um, thinking has been heavily influenced by a prominent white supremacist. Not exactly a surprise, although it does make one wonder what witches’ brew of character disorders is bubbling in Malkin’s (non-Caucasian) psyche.

[Update: The Heretik links to the wingnuts so I don’t have to.]

For a sad testimony to how far off the tracks our nation has gone, see “Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his career” by Paul Shukovsky in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Follow that up with visits to Billmon and Digby.

Finally, Gary Farber tells us how to have a great 4th of July celebration.

Not Too Swift

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Via Glenn Greenwald: Bryan Bender writes in today’s Boston Globe that, um, the program to track terrorists through financial transactions, was not exactly a secret secret.

News reports disclosing the Bush administration’s use of a special bank surveillance program to track terrorist financing spurred outrage in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but some specialists pointed out yesterday that the government itself has publicly discussed its stepped-up efforts to monitor terrorist finances since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks….

…a search of public records — government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 — describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

“There have been public references to SWIFT before,” said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. “The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.”

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. “A lot of people were aware that this was going on,” said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

“Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

I can hear the righties now — the UN Security Council are traitors, too.

Dan Froomkin tells more:

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world.

But the existence of SWIFT itself has not exactly been a secret. Certainly not to anyone who had an Internet connection.

SWIFT has a Web site, at swift.com .

It’s a very informative Web site. For instance, this page describes how “SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”

(And yes, FATF has its own Web site, too.)

Yet yesterday press secretary Tony Snow said he was “absolutely sure” terrorists didn’t know about SWIFT. Sure.

As explained by Ron Suskind on Monday’s Hardball, some time back terrorist organizations deducted that their financial transactions were giving them away.

MATTHEWS: Well let me just tell you what you said. “Eventually not surprisingly,” and we‘re talking about electronic transfer surveillance, “our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long,” said one intelligence official.

So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.

SUSKIND: Right, it‘s a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they‘re not idiots. They say, “Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing.” They‘re not leaving electronic trails like they were.

Matthews was quoting from page 279 of Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Solution. If you start reading on the previous page, you see that Suskind was writing about all manner of “electronically traceable activities — from satellite phone calls to bank account withdrawals.”

And that’s largely how we managed, from early 2002 to late 2003, to know a great deal about al Qaeda, get a sense of who was connected to whom, and capture quite a few suspects, most of whom have vanished into overseas U.S. prisons or similar, maybe worse destinations inside Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt. …

Eventually, and not surprisingly, our opponents figured it out. It was a matter, really, of deduction. Enough people get caught and a view of which activities they had in common provides clues as to how they have have been identified and apprehended.

“We were surprised it took them so long,” said one senior intelligence official. …

…The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slows the pace of operations, if not necessarily their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory. …

Incarnations of terror cells, meanwhile, were taking shape. Stealthy, diffuse, and largely unconnected to a centralized network, these were self-activated, often self-funded, and ready to download key operational guidance from an explosion of jihadist Web sites. There was no money to trace; no calls up and down the chain of command they needed to make …

There’s been some speculation about why the White House doesn’t seem interested in going after who in government leaked the program to the New York Times. Maybe it’s because there was no leaker.

Yet the pile-on continues. The Hill reports that House Republicans leaders are expected to introduce a resolution condemning the New York Times for “leaking” information about the SWIFT program. Howie Kurtz concedes —

President Bush calls the conduct of the New York Times “disgraceful.” Vice President Cheney objects to the paper having won a Pulitzer Prize. A Republican congressman wants the Times prosecuted. National Review says its press credentials should be yanked. Radio commentator Tammy Bruce likens the paper to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street is remarkable — especially considering that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also published accounts Friday of a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. So, in its later editions, did The Washington Post.

That’s because this isn’t about national security. It’s about politics. Republicans are out to smear everybody who stands still long enough to get smeared in order to deflect public dissatisfaction away from themselves. And if GOP party operatives plus the usual useful idiots like Tammy Bruce keep repeating the story that media is the enemy, that will make future propaganda efforts sooo much easier. Although it’s not as if media were getting in the way of the propaganda catapults up to now.

Bryan Preston Is a Shameless Liar, Too

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The question at hand is whether there’s something about being a rightie and being a pathological liar that tend to go together. Or being a rightie and pathologically stupid; take your pick. Bryan Preston at Hot Air is shamelessly calling ME a liar and then twists facts to “prove” it.

Bryan pulls a sleight of hand by implying that I claimed the audience at Hillary Clinton’s speech had not booed at all, which is a lie. I said they had not booed the troops in the part of the speech presented in the Michelle/Bryan video clip. And then he quotes a bit of a Time magazine article about the boos at the Clinton speech to “prove” that I lied. But the Time article refers to a different part of the speech, and in fact the Time magazine article corroborates what I wrote about the speech last Tuesday. Behold — this is what I wrote Tuesday:

Earlier, Senator Clinton had also spoken on the subject of Iraq. She is opposed to an open-ended commitment of troops, she said, but does not support setting “a date certain.” This inspired some boos, as well as applause.

Time magazine:

But then she came to Iraq. “I do not think it is a smart strategy,” she said, “either for the President to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain.” Members of the crowd yelled, “Why not?” There was loud booing. It was almost impossible to hear Clinton as she spoke over the crowd to declare, “I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country.” After her speech, as Clinton was walking along the stage and shaking hands with attendees who had rushed to meet her, more than a dozen members of the crowd stood and started chanting “Bring the troops home! Bring the troops home!”

Bryan the Dim claims that Time magazine “has our back”; no, dear, it has MY back. Not yours. If you listen to the UNEDITED version of the speech, it should be obvious even to an idiot — which, I suppose one could argue, might leave out Michelle and Bryan — that the crowd was heckling Clinton, not booing the troops. The heckling isn’t clear in the video, but I was in the hall during the speech, and I heard some people yell “bring them home.” Which is what the Time magazine article says, too, although it refers to the end of the speech.

And anyone who is a regular here knows I am no Hillary fan. I might have heckled her myself except that I was wearing a “press” pass and was trying to look objective.

I wrote more about what went on in the hall in another post titled “Booing Hillary” and followed up a bit more in “Take Back Washington.” Clearly, I never said that the audience didn’t boo during the Clinton speech. I had already written three posts referring to boos during the Clinton speech. What I said was that they were booing Senator Clinton, not the troops.

Bryan also makes a Big Bleeping Deal about him being the one who edited the speech, not Malkin. But Malkin claimed ownership of the video clip on her blog — “We’ve captured and posted the video of Hillary getting booed as she asks progressives to support the troops.” So as far as I’m concerned, whether she or Bryan did the actual technical work (and chopped off the video clip to give a false impression of what happened) is beside the point.

For more from someone else who was there, see Susie at Suburban Guerrilla.

Update: Taylor Marsh, who was there too, is a better person than I am. She attempts to walk Michelle and Bryan through the speech to show them where they went wrong. Patience of a saint, I say. I just want to hang bells and warning signs — “flaming liar” or some such — on them just to let folks know to keep their distance.

Update to the last update: We need bells and warning signs for this little wingnut, too.

Update to the update of the update before that: BTW, the little wingnut linked above seems to think the U.S. won the Vietnam War.

Eye of the Storm II

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Now I have more blogging time, mostly because I really, really need to rest a bit before dinner and the evening program, which will include a speech by Sen. Harry Reid. So while I’ve got a few minutes I’d like to respond to some comments by Marc Schulman left on my post from this morning.

I, too, regret the right/left war. For what’s it’s worth, it may surprise you to learn that I blame the Republicans for starting it — the Clinton impeachment was partisanship carried to an extreme. Although it’s mostly left unsaid, it seems to me that the left wing of the Democrats and those even further to the left are partially motivated by payback.

I haven’t taken a survey, but I think the Clinton impeachment is water over the bridge for most of us now. First, we progressive netroots types are hugely ambivalent about the Clinton Administration. Righties seem to think we worship the ground the Big Dog walks on; this is far from the truth. Second, we have much bigger and more dangerous problems facing us now than to spin our wheels over the Clinton impeachment.

However, most of us are angry over the way the Right has smeared, slimed, demonized, marginalized, and misrepresented liberalism over the past 25 or so years. Well, I should clarify — this goes back more than 50 years, really, to the age of Joe McCarthy. And the Nixon/Agnew administration engaged in liberal baiting as well. But it was really in the 1980s, especially after Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine, that rightwing talk radio and media like Fox News began a coordinated campaign to brainwash America about the nature of liberalism, rendering the “L” word into a pejorative, as part of their campaign to take control of the federal government.

(That and the fact that many of us believe sincerely that the Republican Party — which in my childhood was associated with the centrist Dwight Eisenhower and “Republican” cloth coats — has been taken over by an extremist, hard right faction that Eisenhower would not have associated with. We progressives are closer to the center than the so-called “conservatives” who run the Republican Party, yet somehow we’ve become the extremist and the extremists are called the center.)

Righties just love to comb through leftie blogs and commentaries and pick out insults of conservatives, so that they can whine about how mean lefties are. But I sincerely believe that the Right has us beat in the hate department tenfold. And you can’t see it. You excuse the extremism and hatespeech on your side, but pounce on every squawk from our side as justification of your hatred of us.

That said, in any group of people there will be some with bad judgment and poor impulse control who will react to insult and abuse with retaliatory insult and abuse. I think such reaction is not just misguided, but plays into the Right’s hands; the Right baits and slimes lefties until somebody reacts in anger, and then the Right can point to the reaction as an example of how angry the Left is. We talked about this in a panel discussion today. To a person, the panel counseled not taking the bait.

I see the wisdom of turning the other cheek, as do most of us here. Several speakers today urged the attendees not to stoop to the level of the Right, now or ever. The Republicans have been practicing Scorched Earth politics for 25 years, and it hasn’t just hurt the Democrats, it has hurt America. We’re angry, yes, but I’ve heard no one here talk about retaliation. Instead, we want it to stop. We want a politics of unity, in which people across the political spectrum understand that just because we disagree on some points of political philosophy or policy doesn’t mean we all don’t want what’s best for America. And we want political leaders mature enough to understand that compromise isn’t surrender.

I was in my 20s when the Watergate scandal broke. I was never more proud of my country than I was when I watched the Senate and congressional hearings. People of both parties put aside partisan politics and just went after the truth. No excuses, so whiny “the Dems to it too” crap that is the Right’s usual response when they’re caught doing something unethical these days. The Republicans of that time put the United States and the Constitution ahead of their party. Few Republicans seem able to do that now.

On the other hand, many of us believe the Bush Administration, or some elements thereof, have engaged in criminal activity. We think it is vitally important to thoroughly investigate this. If we are wrong, then investigation should show us we are wrong. But if we are right, this must not be buried and forgiven the way, for example, Iran Contra was buried and forgiven. This is not about retaliation; it’s about the rule of law and the integrity of government. Future administrations of either party must be put on notice that they will be held accountable for crimes.

Whatever the reasons are for the verbal civil war, I can’t help but be concerned about the reality denial and vindictiveness expressed in many of the quotes in my most recent post and earlier ones on the same topic. Using Haditha as a rationale for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is an example.

Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more than a meeting of the minds. If you, and others, would like to engage in a conversation to that end, count me in.

I will not engage in any such conversation until you are able to fully admit to the denial and vindictiveness of the Right. Even though I choose not to retaliate, I ain’t about to just lie down and let you kick me in the head and call it “discussion.” Especially not on my own blog.

As far as “Using Haditha as a rationale for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is an example” — I’m not passing judgment on something I haven’t read for myself. You might want to read my take on this — the enormous pressure placed on the troops in Iraq pretty much guarantees that some will snap, and some bad judgments will be made. This, I argue, is a big reason why a military invasion was the wrong tool to use to achieve the Administration’s goals in the Middle East. It shouldn’t have been done at all, in other words. (Please read my entire argument before you try to argue with me about this; if I see you making assumptions about what I think that is not what I wrote, you will be banned from this blog.)

When Mom’s away, the kids will play

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So my mother runs this here blog, and she sent me an email before she left for YearlyKos saying that I should post some links and things for you people so that you don’t get bored in her absence.

And you may already know me as the daughter partly responsible for last fall’s blog re-design (so, yes, you can blame all the display glitches on me, thanks) and the occasional subject of posts on diaper rash or whatever. I also blog, but I think the only people who read my blog are my friends, so it’s kind of neat to annex this blog for a few days, since it reaches a much wider audience. I hope I don’t blow my audition.

Yesterday’s big news was the death of Zarqawi, but I don’t really want to post about that, particularly since a) it won’t make much difference in the war effort, and b) we could have got him without going to war, and that whole debate makes me weary. Also, I generally don’t really feel qualified to say much about Iraq, since my knowledge of the subject is limited, so lets talk about things I am familiar with: women and science! (But feel free to talk about Zarqawi in the comments if that rocks your boat.)

I want to preface this by saying that this discussion has been kicking around on the feminist blogs for a while, but my perception here is that the demographic here skews a little differently, so I hope you learn something new!

The big story this morning is that the FDA approved the HPV vaccine. Under any other circumstances, a vaccine that prevents cancer would be cause of celebration and ticker tape parades and all that, but because the disease prevents a cancer caused by a sexually transmitted virus that mainly affects women, we have to stop and talk about it.

So first, congrats to the FDA for being less stupid about the HPV vaccine than they are about emergency contraception.

But second, boo! to the conservatives that would block the administration of the vaccine. Arthur Caplan at MSNBC points out:

[T]he best time to vaccinate is just before women become sexually active. And that is why this new cervical cancer vaccine is sure to be ethically controversial.

Some conservative religious groups and family-values advocates believe that the best way to prevent any sexually transmitted disease is to teach young people to be abstinent until marriage. They don’t want HPV vaccine offered to young women because it will encourage, in their view, sexual promiscuity. Or they only want the vaccine discussed by parents not in schools or in the doctor’s office. But there is a big flaw in this reasoning.

Even though a woman may remain chaste until marriage she may marry someone who wasn’t. She would still be at risk of infection. Given that risk, the case for getting schools, doctors, public health departments involved even if you are someone who wants to keep all talk of sex in the home starts to become very strong.

Not to mention the pressure a lot of girls feel to have sex anyway, regardless of how much abstinence is emphasized. A new study indicates a lot of teenaged girls have sex when they don’t want to, “and the result may be a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.” That’s a whole other post about how girls are socialized and expected to behave, but the study speaks to the point that teaching abstinence is not going to prevent the spread of STDs like HPV. (There’s been some buzz recently about teens breaking their virginity pledges as well. So much for that, eh?)

Further, there’s no reason to think access to the vaccine would encourage more girls to have sex anyway. Studies in countries where emergency contraception is available over the counter indicate that there was no rise in sexual activity once the pills became available, so there’s no reason to think an HPV vaccine would cause that either, especially since this one vaccine doesn’t really make women immune to, you know, every other STD plus pregnancy. More to the point, HPV is one of the least talked about STDs (AIDS kind of trumps most discussions) but is also the most common.

But there you have it, folks. For some conservative Christian groups, choosing between cancer and sex, sex is the greater evil.

The other problem is that the vaccine is expensive, and some groups are pushing for administration of the vaccine to be mandatory for pre-teen girls, which begs the question of who will pay for it. And there’s also an interesting ethical dilemma: should we treat a vaccine for a sexually transmitted virus the same as we treat the vaccine for the measles? Or are we framing the question wrong? The Times article I linked to above says that cervical cancer — almost all of which is caused by HPV — is the second-leading cause of death among women worldwide. If that’s the case, why not say we’re administering a vaccine for cancer? Isn’t that revolutionary? Take sex out of the equation.

Heh, my first post on my mom’s blog and I write about sex. Good thing she’s so cool! (Hi, Mom!)

No Dominion

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Righties wag their fingers at us and claim we liberals promote a “culture of death.” The nature of this “culture of death” seems a bit hazy, and wading through overwrought rightie rhetoric on the topic doesn’t clarify it much. But the more I think about it, the more I think there’s a real culture of death alive and well on the Right. Right-wing support for “preventive” war and capital punishment are obvious examples. The rightie culture of death, however, is a complex one, and their enjoyment of death depends a great deal on context.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article by David Carr comparing Iraq War photography to photographs of past wars. More specifically, he noted that compared to Vietnam, Iraq War photography is nearly devoid of dead American bodies.

FOR war photography, Vietnam remains the bloody yardstick. During the Tet offensive, on Feb. 9, 1968, Time magazine ran a story that was accompanied by photos showing dozens of dead American soldiers stacked like cordwood. The images remind that the dead are both the most patient and affecting of all subjects.

The Iraq war is a very different war, especially as rendered at home. While pictures of Iraqi dead are ubiquitous on television and in print, there are very few images of dead American soldiers. (We are offered pictures of the grievously wounded, but those are depictions of hope and sacrifice in equal measure.) A comprehensive survey done last year by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, almost no pictures were published of the American dead in the mainstream print media.

Photographing the dead on a battlefield goes back to Matthew Brady, whose 1862 exhibition “The Dead of Antietam.” shown in his New York gallery, displayed to shocked viewers the mangled corpses of Civil War soldiers. A New York Times review of the exhibition said that Brady had brought “home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.” A quickie search at the National Archives turned up photographs of a dead American soldier in Europe, Word War II, and the dead of the Malmedy massacre, which has been in the news lately.

Even though the U.S. military vowed to keep tighter control on war coverage after Vietnam, Carr suggests the biggest reason there are few photographs of American war dead is self-censorship. Squeamish news organizations won’t publish such photos. They don’t seem to have a problem showing Iraqi dead, though.

But what interested me even more than Carr’s article was rightie reaction to it. They were outraged that anyone would even think about showing the bodies of dead soldiers. This guy describes war photographers ghoulishly looking for “potential Pulitzer-winning ‘money shots'” of dead Americans. And another guy wrote,

But why the need to put the bodies of others on display?

Is there something to be proud of in showing those pictures? And these are the same people who won’t show a decapitation because supposedly it’s too gruesome. That leaves one to you wonder if they don’t show those gruesome images because it doesn’t fit their anti-war agenda.

Ah, yes, beheading videos. Rightie bloggers just love beheading videos. They link to them fervently and demand loudly that all good Americans watch them. For example, in 2004 a blogger at Wizbang was incensed that leftie bloggers were not linking to the Nick Berg video. You know how it is — liberals hate America.

Last month, a particularly grisly video alleged to show the beheading of Iraqi journalist Atwar Bahjat turned up. The “money shot” blogger and many others described it in graphic detail. Another said,

Our own media feels the need to shield us from such brutality, even as they report daily on the US and Iraqi death count—or seemed almost to fetishize the torture photos from Abu Ghraib.

But presuming to protect us from the nature of our enemy, like many of the MSM’s other actions in framing the war on terror, is irresponsible—and either presumptuously paternalistic, or cynically calculating.

True, there is a fine line between “war porn” and the dissemination of information. But we nevertheless have the right to know who it is we are fighting.

Rightie bloggers wallowed in white-hot righteousness over the depravity of the murders, usually attributed to “terrorists,” although it was not at all clear from the video who the murderers were. But as my blogger buddy The Heretik noted, there wasn’t a peep from the rightie blogosphere when news stories reported Atwar Bahjat’s death in February. And he poked a stick at a rightie who discussed the difference between “war porn” and “the dissemination of information” — “dissemination of information”? or gratifying a “beheading of the month” fetish?

Unfortunately for the righties, it turned out the beheading video was a hoax. It showed not the horrific murder of a beautiful and virtuous pro-western Iraqi, but just the horrific murder of some guy from Nepal. The blogswarm dissipated quickly.

On the other hand, the death of Rachel Corrie is still viewed with great hilarity by many righties. She was dubbed “St. Pancake” and honored with a pizza-thon. “A pity that St. IHOP could only be run over once,” said one.

So far we’ve seen that showing victims of Islamic terrorism is good, although just about any atrocity committed by a Muslim will do. It’s “dissemination of information.” The more horrific the atrocity, the better. Beheadings should be shown on the evening news when children might be watching. But showing photographs of Iraqis being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison is not “dissemination of information,” but “fetishism.” And it’s bad, and reveals an un-American agenda.

But if Abu Ghraib photos are bad, photographing dead American soldiers must amount to obscenity. The righties, you know, demand protection even from an accounting of the number of dead. Recently this blogger documented the gut-wrenching experience of being forced to listen to an antiwar graduation speech (emphasis added):

He spent a good five minutes talking about how President Bush lied, there were no weapons of mass destruction, we need to bring our troops home, etc. (the typical rhetoric of the left). He even gave the number of U.S. casualties to date.

This poor oppressed child was forced to hear a number! The horror! I hope the boy gets his news from Sinclair Broadcasting.

The same people who supported the Iraq invasion from its misbegotten beginnings do not want to hear the numbers. They do not want to hear the names. They do not want to see the bodies. They will open their eyes only to funerals, where a flag-draped coffin will hide the fruit of their war-mongering from their sensitive eyes. They talk about supporting the troops, and honor and sacrifice, and I understand many look forward to the 2008 release of the film “No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah,” starring Harrison Ford.

But they don’t want to hear the hard numbers. They don’t want to see actual bodies, even in photographs. They don’t want to know the true names.

The Middle Way

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I got up this morning determined to find something political to blog about, because I’ve spent most of the last couple of days first writing and then defending the religion post at Unclaimed Territory. By last night, after repeating the same couple of simple points for the five hundredth time, I had a throbbing headache and was veering perilously close to the “kiss my ass” stage of Rogerian argument.

The most frustrating part of the effort was that a great many people did not base their criticisms of the post on what I actually wrote. I don’t mind — well, maybe I mind a little, but only in an ego-attached way — those who expressed disagreement with something I did write. But a large part of the criticisms were from people who assumed what I must think and attacked me for opinions I do not have.

For example, a couple of self-described atheists attacked me for being anti-atheism and opposed to the separation of church and state. In fact, I have on occasion chided the religious for their intolerance of atheism. (I wish I could say I have defended atheism a lot, but the fact is most religious people don’t exactly, um, respect my opinions, either. I don’t belong to the majority tribe.) And there’s no other civil liberties issue that I care more passionately about, on a personal level, than protecting the separation of church and state.

I was both fascinated and frustrated by the commenters who assumed I am Christian even though I explicitly said I am not. Obviously, something in their heads caused the adjective religious to override “not a Christian.” Several complained that I didn’t understand how dangerous religion is, even after my rhetoric about “warring religious whackjobs” and “a genuine threat to civilization on this planet.” Others were dismissive of the post because I didn’t address their pet religious agendas. In some of those cases I actually agreed with the agendas, but they were way outside the scope of the points I was trying to make in the post.

And then, of course, my defenses of the post pushed buttons, too. Although I hadn’t wanted to write about my personal religious adventures, when one commenter complained that he didn’t understand what religion I followed, I provided a simple explanation as devoid of proselytizing as I could make it. Then another commenter complained because I was making “religious declarations.” I wrote that not all Christians are James Dobson zealots and was called a “Christian apologist.” When I expressed alarm at the dangers posed by James Dobson zealots I was told I was bashing religion.

I suppose now I’ll be told I’m whining.

If there’s one point that was driven home to me, it’s that some (adj., a portion or an unspecified number or quantity of a whole or group: He likes some modern sculpture but not all) on the Left really do harbor a palpable hostility toward religion per se. I know this is not true of the entire Left, but until this weekend I would have said the hard-core religion haters were a minority and not representative of the Left. I still think they’re a minority. Probably. But they’re sure as hell a big and assertive minority, and representative of something.

Bloggers before me have hit the same flame wall. This post by Steve Waldman at Washington Monthly discussing hostility to religion on the part of some liberals drew complaints that he was spreading GP talking points, interspersed with comments that were hostile to religion.

I’d like to clarify that I did not make a request for tolerance of religion because I’m worried about the rightie mythos that “The Left” hates religion. You know that righties are going to claim “The Left” hates religion as long as they can find even one leftie who hates religion. This doesn’t have anything to do with their concern for religion; they’re just looking for reasons to hate lefties. One stumbles onto rightie bloggers who admit they aren’t religious themselves but who still beat lefties over the head with the “they hate religion” meme. Libertarians tend to be unreligious, yet the Right thought the Libs were just peachy until the Libs turned against George W. Bush.

On the other hand, many UT commenters who denied there is a liberal bias against religion would, in the next paragraph, make some knee-jerk, narrow-minded comment about religion. I’d find you some examples except that I’m afraid to go to UT today. By now they’ve probably got me pegged as a paid agent of Jerry Falwell.

In an ideal America, voters wouldn’t care about a political candidate’s religious proclivities. Well, unless those proclivities involved human sacrifice or a belief that URLs are coded messages from another galaxy, in which case some concern might be warranted. But a vast body of empirical evidence shows us that just because a politician says he’s found Jesus doesn’t mean he can find his ass with both hands. And I doubt, sincerely, there’s even a slight statistical correlation between public declarations of faith and private virtue. Even Jesus told his followers that displays of devotion do not constitute quality assurance. (See, for example, Matthew 7:15-23.)

But many Americans live a culture that combines a crass religiosity with jingoism and nativism and several varieties of bigotry, simmered together in a toxic, psuedo-fascist soup. And appeals to reason, tolerance, social betterment, prosperity, or good government do not get soup-dwellers to the polls nearly as well as waving the Bible and promising to uphold God’s Law. (God’s Law being a nasty, repressive business that no god worthy of respect would have any part of.)

This culture has existed in one form or another throughout American history. However, in my lifetime I’ve seen it get worse. The marriage of the GOP and the Christian Right, combined with the power of mass media, has made it both more powerful and more widespread.

The power of the Christian Right has hurt the Dems, no question. Political pundits tell Dems they have to get “more religious” to appeal to Christian voters if they’re going to win the White House in 2008. Maybe, but there are good ways to do that, and there are stupid ways to do that. The stupid way is for candidates who are uncomfortable with Bible Belt culture to try to “fit in” by talking about Jesus. Even if the Jesus talk is sincere, the politician will still transmit the message “I’m an alien to your world” in a thousand subtle ways. Trust me on that.

The smart way, IMO, is to enlist the help of native religious moderates to persuade other religious moderates that it’s OK to vote Democratic.. See, for example, “When Would Jesus Bolt?” by Amy Sullivan in the April 2006 Washington Monthly. Even better, right now the Dems should be searching for presentable and articulate liberal evangelicals (not an oxymoron, believe it or not), to take guest bobblehead gigs on political talk shows. The public face of Christianity doesn’t have to be a right-wing one.

As I said, the hard-core Right is a lost cause, but they aren’t the only voters in red states.

We must break the grip of the Christian Right’s political power, but the way to do that is not for secularists to wage war against religion. The way to do that is for the non-religious, and the religious who want to maintain religious liberty, to make common cause against the theocrats.

I’d like more religious Americans to understand that a “secular society” is not hostile to religion. Rather, a secular society is one in which citizens are free to explore many religious paths, or none, without coercion or interference from government. It is a society in which religion can remain free of the corruption of worldly political power and flourish according to its merits.

Maybe someday we’ll see a society in which an atheist can be elected President of the United States. Well, I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, but eventually.

And in the far distant future, maybe secularists will stop spouting knee-jerk, narrow-minded views about how all religious people are knee-jerkers with narrow minds. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

[Cross-posted to The American Street because I lack the nerve to post it on Unclaimed Territory. I’m not into martyrdom.]

Defending Jesus

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Jesus didn’t ask me to defend him, but sometimes I do anyway. He gets picked on so.

Today’s potshots come from Barry Seidman, who describes himself as a humanist and secularist. In response to recent advances by the Christian Left, Seidman writes that he’s happy the Christian Left is “joining the good fight against Christo-fascists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and President Bush.” However,

… the coupling of religion and politics is as dangerous for the left as it is for the right, because absolutism, authoritative supernaturalism and the actual tenets of the Abrahamic religious texts can never be reconciled with democracy and freedom.

In my experience religious liberals tend to respect the principle of separation of church and state, so it’s not clear to me what worries Mr. Seidman. I infer he thinks religious people will always try to impose their doctrines on others and thus cannot be trusted in politics, liberal or not.

Seidman bases much of his opinion on a book by Hector Avalos titled Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence. Avalos is an anthropologist and biblical scholar who teaches at Iowa State University. I have not read this book, but Avalos states his basic thesis in this interview:

In Fighting Words Avalos looks at the role religion has historically played and continues to play in violence in the three main Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

“Most religious violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources,” he said. “When people believe that there is not enough of something valued, they may fight to acquire it or to maintain it. When religion causes violence, it does so because it has created new scarce resources.”

Fighting Words focuses on four scarce resources that can be created by religious beliefs – inscripturation (sacred scriptures), sacred space, group privilege and salvation. The book shows examples of how each of these can be seen as scarce resources that have precipitated violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The “scarce resource” of inscripturation can look at religions who say that God communicates to us in only one text (the Koran or Bible for example) and access to God is available only through the one text the religion believes in.

This explanation seems thin to me. I am inclined to think most religious violence occurs when religion (any religion) becomes tribalistic or gets mixed into struggles for political power. As I said I haven’t read the book, and perhaps Avalos makes a good case. But the “Abrahamic religion” thing bothers me. One, we’re back in the same old trap of defining religion as monotheism, when most of the world’s religions are not, in fact, monotheistic. And as I sort of argued here, even within the monotheistic religions the occasional genius or mystic has broken out of the God box — Spinoza comes to mind.

It has long seemed to me that there are two basic ways to approach religion — legalistic (or dogmatic) or mystical. All three of the major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have mystical traditions as well as legalistic ones. It is true that the legalistic and dogmatic approach is far more common. The dominant sects of all monotheisms tend to treat scripture as law and assume that theological and moral questions can be answered by referring scriptural statute.

On the other hand, most other religions (there are exceptions) more often take a mystical approach and treat sacred texts as guides to truth, not truth itself.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.

Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet. (Judaism is much less dogmatic, and I don’t know enough about Islam to judge.) In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, even the nonreligious assume this must be what religion is all about. But it can be argued that Christianity’s emphasis on literal and rigid belief in doctrines is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all schools of Christianity.

Further, the notion that a Christian must accept the entire Bible without question is not as rigidly a given as Seidman and, apparently, Avalos believe. I have had lovely discussions with liberal Christians who understand the Bible was written by people with limitations and prejudices, and that ideas about God have evolved over time. They can even accept historical evidence that the Gospels were not, in fact, written by Apostles but by second- and third-generation followers who didn’t know Jesus personally. Once you accept that Jesus’s teachings may have been imperfectly recorded in the Gospels, then disregarding the parts that seem out of whack or are of questionable provenance (e.g., most of the Gospel of John) is not “cherry picking,” but critical thinking. (See also the Jesus Seminar.)

Seidman writes,

Even apart from his discussion of religious-created scarcities, Avalos uses a close reading of the Bible to reject the view that Christianity essentially espouses love and peace. He argues that in Romans 12:14 we do not really see an example of Christians loving their enemies at all, though this section is often cited by Christians for this very reason. The section begins, sure enough, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” But what most liberal Christians then ignore is the rest of the section, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20). Heaping burning coals on their heads? Avalos suggests that read as a whole, the commandment to be nice is a way to build up the potential for violence against an enemy. The nicer one is to one’s enemies, the more they will deserve the violence done to them in the end.

To which a liberal Christian would say that the book of Romans was written by Paul, and reflects Paul’s understanding, which may not have been the way Jesus saw things. Look instead at Matthew 5:43-48, which possibly had a eyewitness account as a source:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

I submit that to love others requires not wishing to heap burning coals on their heads, the authority of St. Paul notwithstanding. Seidman snorts at Christians who “cherry pick,” then does some pretty selective cherry-picking himself.

Whatever Jesus was about got buried pretty quickly under the interpretations of lesser teachers and dogmas that arose in the centuries after his death. The Doctrine of Trinity itself didn’t become the central doctrine of the church until the 4th century; many biblical scholars doubt very much that Jesus saw himself as God. (As a Jew, he might have been appalled at the idea.) And although most Christians don’t question doctrine, there are some who find their true spiritual quest in digging through the doctrinal minutia of the ages to get closer to the authentic Jesus.

Dogmatism and mysticism struggled with each other throughout Christian history. Great Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross lived in the shadow of the Inquisition. Dogmatism prevailed, but mysticism didn’t die altogether. And in a time when the light of science makes dogma seem absurd to thinking people, some Christians are working to restore the mystical traditions to their former place of respectability. Even though I ducked out of that struggle to take up the Buddhist path instead, I heartily wish them well.

My point here is that secularists like Mr. Seidman should not prejudge the religious and assume we’re all enslaved by ancient superstitions or even believe in God. Clearly, Mr. Seidman has a narrow and limited understanding of what religion is.

Thomas Jefferson said “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Likewise, Mr. Seidman need not concern himself with the religious views of others who aren’t concerning themselves with the secularist views of Mr. Seidman. Instead of worrying that the Christian Left will contaminate democracy, I recommend that he, like Jefferson, swear “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” That’s the enemy of us all, religious or not.

New Media, New Politics

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Jonathan Alter gets it …

Bob Schieffer of CBS News made a good point on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week. He said that successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times. The Founders were eloquent writers in the age of pamphleteering. Franklin D. Roosevelt restored hope in 1933 by mastering radio. And John F. Kennedy was the first president elected because of his understanding of television.

Will 2008 bring the first Internet president? Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of “early money” is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That’s why all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “war chest” making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around. Money from wealthy donors remains the essential ingredient in most state and local campaigns, but “free media” shapes the outcome of presidential races, and the Internet is the freest media of all.

No one knows exactly where technology is taking politics, but we’re beginning to see some clues. For starters, the longtime stranglehold of media consultants may be over. … just as Linux lets tech-savvy users avoid Microsoft and design their own operating systems, so “netroots” political organizers may succeed in redesigning our current nominating system. But there probably won’t be much that’s organized about it. By definition, the Internet strips big shots of their control of the process, which is a good thing. Politics is at its most invigorating when it’s cacophonous and chaotic.

I’m not sure about Alter’s example, Unity08, which is an organization dedicated to elected a “unity” ticket of one Dem and one Republican in the 2008 presidential elections. The “crashing the gate” netroots initiative to reform an established party — the Dems — seems more practical. We’ll see how that goes.

Last week Jamison Foser called media “the dominant political force of our time.” Foser and Eric Boehlert, in his new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (which I’m currently reading) make essentially the same point: In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and looney. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue.

Certainly much of media does little more than act as a conduit for right-wing propaganda. The reasons for this are complex. Many media personalities (passing as journalists) are ideologues pushing their dogma with an evangelical zeal. But others of them are, I suspect, unconscious of the role they play in the noise machine. Matt Bai comes to mind. He seems sincerely oblivious to the power of mass media politics even though he is immersed in mass media politics. (Which may be the problem; does a fish perceive water?)

We can’t reform American politics without either reforming media or breaking its stranglehold on the political process. Using the Internet to strip big shots of their control of the process seems the way to go.