I think it’s time to remind people that in the early Red Scares, post-Bolshevik Revolution, communism didn’t represent “totalitarianism” but “anarchy.” In early anti-communist literature, “communist” and “anarchist” are used as synonyms. You see this in this 1920 essay by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds.” The case Palmer makes is not that Communism would create an oppressive totalitarian state but that it would destroy all authority and let lawlessness and crime run rampant.

Of course, as government calling themselves “communist” became ruthlessly dictatorial, peoples’ ideas about communism shifted. But Marx’s original vision was of a society without government where free people, unencumbered by class distinctions, would communally and democratically make decisions together. Yeah, it didn’t work.

I thought of this after reading the comment thread attached to this post at Reason. The blogger dutifully criticizes Sen. Richard Shelby for holding up nominations just to secure pork for Alabama. But most of the commenters don’t see it that way. Example:

Yes,Team Blue is in power.They hold the executive and legislative branches of government.When Team Red is trying to constrain state power I’m rooting for them.

Exactly how Shelby’s act of grandstanding isn’t “state power” also eludes me.

Anyway, some of the commenters refer to themselves as “an-cap,” which I take it stands for “anarchist-capitalist.” The an-caps are opposed to all government, period. When one person issued a challenge, “Who enforces your contracts,” an an-cap had a ready answer — a link to this document, “Privatizing the Adjudication of Disputes,” in which a couple of whackjobs seriously argue in favor of a private, for-profit criminal justice system.

Just read it. It’s one of the most jaw-dropping-ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. The bozos authors criticize the “near-monopoly of law that most governments possess,” and argue in favor of putting “public” courts out of business.

Here’s a radical idea of returning to the good old days:

Legal centralists posit that legal systems must govern everyone to function at all. If lawbreakers could simply drop out of the system, law could hardly protect us from their misdeeds. And yet, history contains many instances of pluralistic legal systems in which multiple sources of law existed in one geographic region. These were much more sophisticated than primitive law. In medieval Europe, for example, canon law, royal law, feudal law, manorial law, mercantile law, and urban law co-existed; none was automatically supreme over the others. Naturally, some jurisdictional conflicts occurred. But this system of concurrent jurisdiction overlapped with a period of economic development (c.1050-1250), not a period of chaos and impoverishment. Apparently these diverse systems did what Thomas Hobbes declared impossible: They created social order and peace in the absence of a distinct, supreme sovereign.

Look at the time peoriod — they are talking about the glory days of European feudalism, folks. I guess you could say there was social order and peace, but there was also serfdom. The real thing, not the kind Friedrich von Hayek wrote about. If you were one of the privileged few born into the aristocracy, I guess life probably was pretty sweet. But otherwise, Hobbes was right — for serfs, life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper:

For arbitration to live up to its full potential, however, government has to stop holding it back. Public courts should, as a matter of policy, respect contracts that specify final and binding arbitration. Legislatures should abolish laws that hamper ostracism, boycott, and other non-violent private enforcement methods. These small changes would make private courts much more attractive than they already are – and go a long way toward putting the public courts out of business.

“Private enforcement methods.” It sounds so banal. As in sending around that nice Vinnie “the Nickle” De Luca to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Before long a small coterie of people with means will have a monopoly on “private enforcement.” That’s not at all what the authors of the paper intend, of course, but it’s how their ideas would turn out in the real world.

The early Marxist ideal was to eliminate private property, and utopia would follow. The an-caps think that by making everything private, utopia will follow. Both groups value human freedom and desire an end to oppression. Put into practice, seems to me both inevitably lead to the utter subjugation of most people under the rule of a powerful few. Extremists may go around opposite sides of the circle, and their rhetoric and ideals may be utterly different, but sooner or later they end up in the same place.

This is grossly over-simple, but it’s how politics works. Extremist ideas all end up in about the same place, whether they originated on the Left or the Right. That’s because ideas that aren’t based in reality and real human nature generally pave the way for oppression and, eventually, totalitarianism. Anarchism has never brought about greater freedom; it just sets up conditions for some sort of Strong Man, whether tribal warlords or a national dictator, to step into the power vacuum.

All we can hope is that “an-cap” ideas never get put into practice.

For another perspective on Shelby et al., see Krugman.

One of the bright spots in the recent SOTU speech was about stopping subsidies to private student loan lenders. This practice is a huge ripoff for everybody, students and taxpayers alike. Cutting out the “middleman” could free up billions of dollars that could be loaned to students directly by government. Or we could just subsidize education, period. But that’s another rant.

Well, apparently loan industry lobbyists have brought the plan to a stop.

All together: ARRRRRGHHHH!

Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put a “blanket hold” on at least 70 of President Obama’s nominations, meaning the nominations can’t be voted on by the Senate until the Dems put together a 60-vote majority. Apparently the Senator is holding the nominations hostage until he gets two lucrative programs for Alabama: a $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers and an explosive device testing lab.

It’s not clear to me how one Senator could put a hold on nominations, but several sources are reporting this.

I may have more to say about this later. Right now I’m just feeling pure disgust.

Update: Ezra Klein explains how the “hold” thing works.

Surfing around this morning, looking for something to blog about, finding a big pile o’ nothin’.

Recently the President suggested that during tough times, people shouldn’t “blow a bunch of cash in Vegas.” This has been blown up into a scandal. The White House had to issue a statement that the President supports the tourism industry.

Righties are still outraged that the “Underpants Bomber” was read Miranda rights, even after it was revealed the “Shoe Bomber” of 2001 also was read Miranda rights. William Jacobson argues that “Bush did it too” doesn’t make something correct, and for once I agree with him. But this is only a “scandal” because to righties the only way to handle an accused terrorist is to torture him, preferable on video. However, by all accounts the Underwear Bomber is providing actionable intelligence.

We learn that Gov. Mark Sanford didn’t break his marriage vows, because he had the “faithfulness” clause removed when he got married.

Senator Chris Dodd says the President’s new plans to rein in Wall Street are “too grand.” Dear Senator Dodd: STFU.

The health care reform bill is still stalled, and Francisco Franco is still dead.

I haven’t said much about about the James O’Keefe case, but there is something about it that no one is talking about, especially on the Right.

According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, two of O’Keefe’s associates entered Senator Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans and tried to pass themselves off as phone company employees. They were wearing phone-company-type work clothes, including hard hats, and told office workers they were there to fix problems with the phone system. O’Keefe was already sitting in the office, saying he was waiting for someone else to arrive. When the associates showed up, O’Keefe began recording them with his cell phone.

One of the two “workmen,” Joseph Basel, requested access to the phones. He was allowed access to the phone on the front desk, and according to a witness he took the handset off the phones and manipulated it somehow. Then he and the other “workman,” Robert Flanagan, made some show of calling back and forth with cell phones to show that the phone wasn’t working.

After that, Basel and Flanagan were taken to the GSA office where the main telephone lines could be accessed. It was at that time someone challenged their credentials, and when the two young men said their credentials were in their car, it was not long after that someone figured out the two guys did not work for the phone company.

Based on this, Basel and Flanagan were charged with entering a federal building under false and fraudulent pretenses for the purposes of interfering with a telephone system operated by the federal government, and O’Keefe and Stan Dai allegedly aided and abetted these acts.

Now, all four young men are innocent until proven guilty, and it is possible the affadavit is inaccurate. On the other hand, there is evidence that laws might have been broken, meaning there needs to be a trial. I understand O’Keefe was ordered to go live with his parents until the trial. I assume the other three are out on bail also.

Righties have whined incessantly ever since that it is somehow unfair for these four even to be charged with a crime. So much for the rule of law. Even if you accept the claim that the four were journalists working undercover to get a story, that doesn’t give them immunity from the law. I know journalists sometimes use subterfuge to do exposes of things like bad food handling practices in restaurants or phony massage parlors, but we’re talking about a federal building here. You know, the kind of place terrorists like to case and sometimes blow up.

No, I don’t think for a minute that the four clowns were terrorists. I suspect they were trying to stage something that would embarrass Senator Landrieu. Even so, we can’t be tolerant of people entering federal buildings, or any other potential terrorist target, under false and fraudulent pretenses, even if just for a prank. This is post-9/11 America, after all. If only out of courtesy to fellow citizens, you respect security protocols and don’t ask for them to be lifted just for you. When we start to make exceptions, security is weakened.

It’s way past time for people like Ben Stein to grow up. There are some things one doesn’t do, like yell “bomb” on an airplane, even if it’s a joke. And you don’t pull a stunt like this in a federal building and expect a pat on the head. I don’t think the boys deserve ten years in prison, but if they are found guilty of breaking federal law they should get enough of a sentence to discourage other “pranksters” from pulling stunts like this.

See also “Right-Wing Media Spin the Conservative Activist James O’Keefe’s Crime”

Speaking of being robustly ignorant of just about everything — the Daily Mail reports that the British National Health Service is guilty of sending many hospital patients home too soon, resulting in 500,000 readmission a year. Naturally righties are seizing on this as proof that “Obamacare” won’t work.

What they’re not noticing, beside the fact that NHS in no way resembles anything being proposed in Washington, is that the U.S. has a huge hospital readmission problem also. This is true in spite of the fact that many Americans who need hospitalization are not admitted even once, never mind again. Readmissions are a significant driver of health care cost in the U.S.

One 2004 study found that “The percentage of multiple hospital readmissions averages between 21% and 27% in the United States today.” However, most of the data for hospital readmission that I could find is confined to hospitals, states, specific illnesses, or programs (e.g., Medicare), but not the nation as a whole. The all-cause readmission rate for patients originally hospitalized with heart failure is 49 percent, for example. If anyone can provide more comprehensive data showing hospital readmission rates for all populations in the U.S., I’d appreciate it.

Frank Rich writes,

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education.

I’d very much like to read Professor Brinkley’s analysis of why that is true. Rich blames political polarization, the corruptions of special interest, and a lack of leadership in Congress and in particular the Senate. I think most of us would agree with Rich’s analysis.

But, while I couldn’t find Brinkley’s precise argument about why Congress is so ineffectual, there are clues to his thinking in an op ed he wrote in September 2008. In “The Party’s Over,” Brinkley discusses the role political parties played in government in the past and says that role fundamentally has changed in the past 40 years. The problem, he says, is that we’re moving into a post-partisan world.

That’s way out of line with conventional wisdom, but hear him out. Before the 1960s, Brinkley says, party loyalty played a stabilizing role in American politics. This was partly because party loyalty was more important to most Americans than ideology.

The two major parties in the late 19th century had few policy differences and, on the whole, shared a common, conservative philosophy; but that was of little importance to the way in which the political process worked. Few voters seemed to care. They were not much committed to their candidates, but they were passionately committed to their parties — in much the same way many people today care about baseball or football teams. Party loyalty, like fan loyalty today, had little to do with most people’s economic or social interests, but it inspired great passion nevertheless.

The two major parties, whether Whigs and Federalists or Democrats and Republicans, both represented a spectrum of opinions and positions. Generally, IMO, one party tended to skew more or less progressive than the other, but this role relative to the other party shifted over time. A century ago, for example, the Republican Party on the whole was the more progressive of the two.

Also, conventional wisdom about each party’s proclivities shift over time. For example, I remember adults of the 1950s and 1960s stoutly declaring that Democrats liked to start wars to boost the economy. I haven’t heard that one lately.

The point is that in the past a political party was not expected to be as rigidly and narrowly ideological as we seem to want them to be today. In fact, Brinkley says, through most of American history the parties were a “bulwark against factional anarchy.” Because each party enjoyed robust and reliable support from a citizen base while representing a spectrum of views, “reaching across the aisle” was not so difficult nor so politically perilous.

Further, before the 1960s it was usually the case that the president and the congressional majority were of the same party, and the president’s party played a vital role in ensuring their president had a successful administration. Ultimately, his political success was their political success as well.

Now, you’ve got one party that has locked itself in a tiny ideological box, to the point that it cannot be worked with. President Obama spoke to this on Friday —

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.

I saw some rightie blog posts that called out this remark, and the bloggers clearly were baffled by it. They had no idea what Obama was saying here. But of course, the President is exactly right. The Republicans have done such a good job persuading the party base that Democrats are the Devil Incarnate that a Republican who compromises with them at all is risking his career. Conceding so much as half a stale doughnut to a Democrat can get a Republican targeted to be taken out in the next primary by somebody more rigid and uncompromising.

Meanwhile, the Dems have turned into the “every man for himself” party. Their personal political careers are no longer tied to their president’s success. They’ll support him if and when it is politically expedient to do so. They’ll turn against him if and when it is politically expedient to do so. This leaves the President in a weakened and more vulnerable position than were presidents of the past. It also set the stage for a handful of Democratic senators to sink the party’s signature legislative issue, health care reform, without fear of punishment.

“Today, untethered from the party system, many voters seize increasingly not on issues that affect their lives, but on whatever simply catches their interest — inflammatory social issues, personalities, and even lapel pins,” Brinkley writes. Beneath that, IMO, is a kind of ideological tribalism that is in many ways more primitive than the party loyalties of the past. No issue — lapel pins are an example — is so trivial it can’t be turned into an effective dog whistle.

However, these days on the Right the dog whistles aren’t coming from the party as much as from right-wing media personalities and their corporate sponsors. IMO the departure of Karl Rove left a vacuum that no one within the party was able to fill, and the Koch Foundation et al. were all too happy to charge in and fill the void.

Both parties are guilty of being more responsive to special interests than to their constituents, but at the moment the actual leadership of the Republican Party is almost irrelevant. Weirdly, as we see in the “tea party” movement, the Party’s lemming base is more loyal to the special interests than they are to the party. Or, at least, the special interests are doing a better job of dog-whistling these days, and they are no longer relying on the GOP to do their dog whistling for them.

Thanks to right-wing media and the phenomena of astroturfing, the Powers That Be can manipulate the base directly without the GOP having to be involved. But of course this puts elected Republicans in an even tighter box, since they have no following except by the grace of the Corporate/Media Overlords. This is another reason why softening their positions and working with Democrats even a little bit is political suicide for Republicans.

The Dems have the opposite problem, since much of what might be the national Democratic Party base is actually at odds with the corporate powers and occasionally at odds with some legislators’ more conservative voter base. Further, I don’t think Washington Dems count on progressives to be all that reliable a base. So individual Dems make individual calculations about how “progressive” they can allow themselves to be and still be re-elected. And, as I said, since party loyalty is no longer a determining factor in elections, it is less and less a determining factor in individual Democrats’ legislative positions.

So, while the Republicans are rendered dysfunctional by being locked in a tiny ideological box, Dems are rendered dysfunctional by a lack of cohesion — the party of Know Nothings and the party of Do Nothings.

Whenever I bring up parties some genius always chirps that what we need is a third party. Beside the fact that third parties can’t win national elections in the U.S., I think this is a variation on Sara Robinson’s third fallacy — the belief that the key to enacting progressive legislation is packing Congress with politicians who think the way we do. If we don’t do something to change the nation’s political culture, there is no reason to believe such a party would be any more effectual than the Dems are now, because that third party would soon fall prey to the same corruptions that got to the Dems.

It’s clear to me that a matrix of reforms is needed to restore the government to something approximating competence, including media reform as well as reform of governmental institutions. I still fear things haven’t gotten bad enough yet to make such reform possible.

All the buzz is that President Obama mopped the floor with House Republicans yesterday at the Republican retreat in Baltimore. It was so good that Fox News cut away to begin presentation of the predetermined Republican rebuttal talking points a full 20 minutes early.

Marc Ambinder:

Accepting the invitation to speak at the House GOP retreat may turn out to be the smartest decision the White House has made in months. Debating a law professor is kind of foolish: the Republican House Caucus has managed to turn Obama’s weakness — his penchant for nuance — into a strength. Plenty of Republicans asked good and probing questions, but Mike Pence, among others, found their arguments simply demolished by the president. (By the way: can we stop with the Obama needs a teleprompter jokes?)

More than the State of the Union — or on top of the State of the Union — this may be a pivotal moment for the future of the presidential agenda on Capitol Hill. (Democrats are loving this. Chris Hayes, The Nation’s Washington bureau chief, tweeted that he hadn’t liked Obama more since the inauguration.)

During the presidential campaign, it was John McCain who proposed a form of the British Prime Ministers’ questions for the president. It was derided as a gimmick. This is no gimmick. I have not seen a better and perhaps more productive political discussion in this country in…a long time. 90 minutes worth!

The full video and transcript are here. Much of the question-and-answer part can be boiled down Republicans claiming they have better ideas and plans for solving the nation’s problems, and Obama saying that yes, I’ve seen your ideas and plans, and they sound grand, but nobody can tell me how they’ll work in the real world.

Here’s just a snip:

CONGRESSMAN PENCE: [Speaks to high unemployment and the President’s stimulus bill] … Now, Republicans offered a stimulus bill at the same time. It cost half as much as the Democratic proposal in Congress, and using your economic analyst models, it would have created twice the jobs at half the cost. It essentially was across-the-board tax relief, Mr. President. …

PRESIDENT OBAMA: [Discussion of what the stimulus bill accomplished] … And the notion that I would somehow resist doing something that cost half as much but would produce twice as many jobs — why would I resist that? I wouldn’t. I mean, that’s my point, is that — I am not an ideologue. I’m not. It doesn’t make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn’t say, great. The problem is, I couldn’t find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made.

Elsewhere, responding to the claim that the GOP has a great health care reform proposal —

It’s not enough if you say, for example, that we’ve offered a health care plan and I look up — this is just under the section that you’ve just provided me, or the book that you just provided me — summary of GOP health care reform bill: The GOP plan will lower health care premiums for American families and small businesses, addressing America’s number-one priority for health reform. I mean, that’s an idea that we all embrace. But specifically it’s got to work. I mean, there’s got to be a mechanism in these plans that I can go to an independent health care expert and say, is this something that will actually work, or is it boilerplate?

If I’m told, for example, that the solution to dealing with health care costs is tort reform, something that I’ve said I am willing to work with you on, but the CBO or other experts say to me, at best, this could reduce health care costs relative to where they’re growing by a couple of percentage points, or save $5 billion a year, that’s what we can score it at, and it will not bend the cost curve long term or reduce premiums significantly — then you can’t make the claim that that’s the only thing that we have to do. If we’re going to do multi-state insurance so that people can go across state lines, I’ve got to be able to go to an independent health care expert, Republican or Democrat, who can tell me that this won’t result in cherry-picking of the healthiest going to some and the least healthy being worse off.

So I am absolutely committed to working with you on these issues, but it can’t just be political assertions that aren’t substantiated when it comes to the actual details of policy. Because otherwise, we’re going to be selling the American people a bill of goods. I mean, the easiest thing for me to do on the health care debate would have been to tell people that what you’re going to get is guaranteed health insurance, lower your costs, all the insurance reforms; we’re going to lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and it won’t cost anybody anything. That’s great politics, it’s just not true.

So there’s got to be some test of realism in any of these proposals, mine included. I’ve got to hold myself accountable, and guaranteed the American people will hold themselves — will hold me accountable if what I’m selling doesn’t actually deliver.

Here’s a partial video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The thing is, I doubt very much if the extremist ideologues who make up the “House GOP” actually understand that a stack of paper containing bullet points that repeat the words “common-sense” and “affordable” a lot are not the same thing as a real policy proposal. The House GOP actually has a website called “GOP Solutions” that amounts to prettily presented air. Here’s the health care reform page, for example. It’s all unsubstantiated claims.

Do you remember the Bush Administration’s “strategy for victory in Iraq,” released with great fanfare in late 2005? (It doesn’t seem to be online any more, or at least my old link to it doesn’t work.) I wrote at the time that the thing presented no strategy at all; it was just a list of goals with no indication of how those goals would be achieved. I also said at the time that I doubted the Bush Administration had any clue what a real strategy looked like.

When I was a child I had a picture book about paleolithic cave paintings. The author speculated that Cro Magnon artists drew many, many pictures of game animals in caves to make game animals abundant. It was magic, see. I think the GOP is working on the same principle — produce many, many stacks of paper with many, many bulleted lists saying your plan will make everything better without costing any money, and it will magically happen.

Update: Reaction from the Right — Gateway Pundit writes a blog post titled “ANGRY Obama Lashes Out at House Republicans– Tells Them ‘I Am Not an Ideologue’ (Video).” Then he writes, “Look at how ANGRY he is while speaking to the House Republicans:” and posts this video —

Um, I’m not seeing any anger. The President is speaking truthfully but patiently. Of course, to Gateway Pundit he must be angry, because he is (1) a leftie (in a wingnut’s mind) and (2) black. But by dismissing the President as being “angry” he doesn’t have to address the substance of what he said.