In any other age -- including the last administration -- this story would have been presented as a scandalous exposé. The genuinely creepy scenes of the "nominating process" alone would have been seen as horrific revelations. Imagine the revulsion at the sight of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld sifting through PowerPoint slides on "suspected terrorists" all over the world, and giving their Neronic thumbs up or down as each swarthy face pops up on a screen in front of them. Imagine the tidal wave of moral outrage from the "Netroots Nation" and other progressive champions directed at Bush not only for operating a death squad (which he did), but then trotting out Condi and Colin and Bob Gates to brag about it openly, and to paint Bush as some kind of moral avatar for the careful consideration and philosophical rigor he applied to blowing human beings to bits in sneak attacks on faraway villages.I think we all accept by now that America's parties aren't competing factions at all but rather complementary parts of a single machine, and it's oddly impressive to watch it operate at peak efficiency. If you've ever had the chance to see an industrial slaughterhouse in action, you'll know what I mean--the awesome speed and mechanized balleticism with which formerly living things are reduced to their constituent parts. MBA-land lingo would say something like: Republicans create the practice; Democrats develop the process.
But the NYT piece is billed as just another "process story" about an interesting aspect of Obama's presidency, part of an election-year series assessing his record.
-Chris Floyd
The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.
The Democrats' role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don't resist the rightward movement -- they let it happen -- but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.
-Stop Me Before I Vote Again, zee livruh
As we head into another election season--is it right to call it a season when it only occurs every couple of years? isn't it more like, uh, el Nino? a climatological phenomenon of sorts?--this is worth bearing ever in mind. Voting for a president is like voting for the weather. If it happens to rain on the day you selected, you may believe that your choice has been affirmed; if not, well, there is always next time.
43 comments:
Ah, I see Ryerson season has opened once again.
Happy trolling, M'sieur.
He's a cagey one, though.
Ravens v Steelers.
The ratchet makes the state more bureaucratic, more unaccountable and therefore, authoritarian, more a justification unto itself. That, however, isn't really a move to the right. The whole point is that the right-left dichotomy is something to keep us all amused.
and boy does it keep us amused ...
BDR: you take that back! Terrell Suggs has promised not to go into lobbying should he be forced out due to his injury.
No difference? Easy for people like you to say, but gays and lesbians know better and they'll be voting in droves for the party that defends their interests.
I feel bad for Floyd from a stylistic perspective. There is no double vision here. None of that stuff sounds all that far out of the imagination, that's more or less how I remember the Bush years.
Justin, Floyd's style has a lot to do with his heart. It's a big heart but it's got a big Donkey tattooed on it.
Disinformation, coercion, and targeted violence are neither Left nor Right in origin or by inclination, any more than totalitarian impulses themselves. They are similarly rationalized means to ends which in auspices remain as different as night and day, unless one posits power for power's sake as the goal of all political leaders. Otherwise, it's the celebration and protection of equality versus the same for inequality.
"auspices ... different as night and day"
Auspice 1:
Good for the Jooooooooooz!
Auspice 2:
Bad for the Jooooooooooz!
M'sieur really SHOULD make you register, Inky.
Floyd and Greenwald tremble before the radical might of Oxtrot, the corporate lawyer.
And if you vote for Ralph Nader it's like pissing your pants and calling it rain, or something like that.
Look at you go, nonny, asserting some strange perspective that I don't hold.
Floyd admits he's got a fondness for the Donkle; Greenwald shows it in his writing; all other commentary you suggest... irrelevant. Good try though. That nerf punch floored me!
uh, ochs, yeah it really sounds like floyd has wood for dems.
yuh, ochs, maybe you should stop fondling that donkle...stop drinkin' that non-alchoholic beer...get yerself down to R E P U B L I C A N S A N O N Y M O U S.
KFO tries to cover up his love for Democrats by attributing it to any other target, no matter how absurd. Classic projection.
Take it easy on KFO. Being a lawyer in the employ of Sam Walton's family eats away at whatever shreds of dignity he has left.
Idle plans for the idol rich,
Knitting the economy not dropping a stitch,
Destroying anything that doesn't quite fit,
Waiting for witch hunt
there but for fortune go you or i
"MBA-land lingo would say something like: Republicans create the practice; Democrats develop the process." Praxis.
"No difference? Easy for people like you to say, but gays and lesbians know better and they'll be voting in droves for the party that defends their interests." And we will all be the better for it! #sigh
That stopme thing is 180 degrees wrong. There is a ratchet alright -- but he's got the direction of rotation wrong, and the identity of the pawl. The wheel turns ever leftward. And it is the Republicans, the "conservatives", who are the stupid party pawl.
This ratchet is why, for example, we are now getting gay marriage. That's a leftward turn of the wheel. And the Republicans, after fighting a long rearguard action, are signing on to it. ("Click".) Take almost any issue you want, and Americans today are to the left of their parents, and far to the left of their grandparents. This is hardly a surprise given that they were educated by liberals, and continue to get their information from the liberal media. Educating the people is one of the perks of sovereignty, and the left would be fools to let the education system return to a free market.
What confuses progressives like "Michael J Smith" is that they don't understand their own party. The Democrats -- the left -- are the party of government, not progress per se. (j r at 10:37 has this right.) Only the left wing of the left is progressive; power in the party is rarely held by an actual progressive. Rather power is held by the most fanatic power-seekers and amoral climbers, typically also gifted with charisma. These men don't care about progress, they care about power. They are modestly progressive only because they expect the electorate to continue its slow slide left for the obvious reasons previously mentioned. (And note that even Obama, a born and bred progressive, has been acting like one of these creeps on the gay marriage issue. Finger in the wind.)
The Democrats are led by progressives, but only ideologically. Progressives are "for" the party of government as an instrument of leftward social change. But the other members of the party aren't; they are for the party as an instrument of holding onto or expanding their existing power (teachers, unions, the civil service) or of simple clientage (welfare, farmers, elderly).
The progressive left is for "democracy" when it means "the rule of scholars". They are against "democracy" when it means "the rule of the people". The former is "public policy", it is "nonpartisan", driven by acknowledged "experts", administered by a "civil service". All of which words warm the power-loving hearts of the progressive. By comparison, the people are, on average, dangerous, stupid, and uneducated. They believe in God (for real, not like Obama), dislike abortion and taxes, love guns, and vote Republican! Letting them rule would be obviously disastrous -- it's the "mob" variety of democracy, which we see more starkly in the third world. This is the democracy of "partisanship" and "party politics", of "politicization", etc. All things abhorrent to the progressive.
Seems to me the left right thingy is to keep the rubes divided, from rebelling in any serious manner, confused, and without a clue. It works pretty well.
"That stopme thing is 180 degrees wrong. There is a ratchet alright -- but he's got the direction of rotation wrong, and the identity of the pawl. The wheel turns ever leftward. And it is the Republicans, the "conservatives", who are the stupid party pawl."
Seems someone took the bad acid today
Studies have been done (many times) comparing newspapers editorials to the public opinion and always, the PTB's is to the right of the public opinions on money and war. these are the important issues, most think.
Simultaneously, on Gay marriage/gun control/abortion/affirmative the PTB is always to the left of the public
I believe this seeming paradox makes sense because it allows the political/chattering classes to have control over everything
being allowed to do something is not the same as the power to do it if you want to
Jesus, why did I never read that "Stop Me Before I Vote Again" until now? That thing is effin' great!
BTW, your last sonnet was nice.
***still chuckling at Enron's last comment***
Yeah, I don't get Leonard's take on the ratchet thing, but the rest of what he said is probably true.
Ridiculing so-called progressives is pretty effortless.
But from among which group would you expect anarchists to spring? From the left. The right has its own sandbox for the disheartened and dispossessed.(See Ron Paul).
Anarchists are recovering progressives. Libertarians are failed fascists.
Take almost any issue you want, and Americans today are to the left of their parents, and far to the left of their grandparents
What about labor rights? Unions aren't exactly at the height of their power right now. Didn't people used to take Communism seriously, too, back in grandpa's day?
Also, whatever else it may be, I can't call the increased bipartisan support for Presidential death panels a move to the "left".
Good call, Abonilox - about libertarians. As for anarchists, elsewhere than the States they do tend to be people who've been ejected from the orbit of the left, but whose trajectory is still leftward (see Italian autonomists, Spanish syndicalists, Greek and Low Country councilists).
In the States, the anarchist-as-solipsist is far more prevalent: I have a co-worker who thinks we have a lot in common because he's an anarchist and I'm an anarchist.
Except that, he's a survivalist, pagan white prider who thinks that anarchism must and can only mean a social darwinism where the weak get what they deserve; that government exists to keep the weak alive as parasites on the productive and skilled.
It's bat shit crazy to associate that with the anti-hierarchy assertion which is essential to actual anarchism; but it's also common enough, especially for the white manarchists whose only anti-hierarchical notion is reducible to "I gots mine, you go fuck yourself, now and I don't want no bosses saying otherwise." Beyond that, they tend to be as misogynist, privileged and lily white as most bond traders, with the same truncated notions of collectivity and conviviality as any other kind of emotionally stunted prolonged adolescent fuckface with a law or business degree and a territorial devotion to small town America, bootstrapping and "rugged individualism"...
Leonard, where did you get the idea that MJS is a Democrat, let alone that the Democratic Party and the Left are one and the same thing?
And Jack, yeah, a great many American so-called anarchists are just crpyto-fascists like your co-worker, but sadly, even a lot of American left-anarchists are also weighted down by stupidity and white-privilege baggage (i.e. the Crimethinc kiddies, primitivists, and lifestyle anarchists in general).
crpyto=crypto
The Prims are monsters, JTG. And not the healthy kind.
JTG, I don't know anything about MJS other than the most obvious. I don't think he is a registered Democrat, if that's what you mean. He is a natural Democrat, though, in that he is obviously progressive and the Democrats are the political vehicle of modern progressivism, ever since 1932. As such, he is a de facto ally of the Democratic party even if he not declared as such. He is a pro-government agitator, as all leftists are, "anarchist" or not. Go to an Occupy gathering and see for yourself.
Or just look at MJS's last chapter -- oh, he's all about politics, do not doubt, and "politics" mean government -- he wants more, more more. His problem with the Democrats is not that they they are pro-government, it's that they are not pro-government enough.
Indeed he even starts the chapter with a quote from FDR (PBUH), to wit: The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. When FDR says "bold experimentation", he is not talking about dropping acid. He's talking about setting up brand-new government agencies willy-nilly, staffing them with scholars who cannot be fired, and giving them power. (With hindsight, we know that government agencies never "fail", at least not enough that anyone will admit it, much less trying something else. Instead, and "failure" is an isolated incident, or else it is a consequence of the agency not having enough power.)
Jack, your "anti-hierarchy assertion" is certainly not "essential to actual anarchism", at least as most people understand the term. Anarchy meaning, no state. As such, there is no agency which can enforce leveling. And people being diverse, they will not naturally be level. Hunter-gatherer groups of 100 people can exist in anarchy without hierarchy. They all know each other. Larger groups of humans have hierarchies, or else they rapidly evolve them.
Your leftist egalitarian anarchy is a square circle. One can easily talk about square circles, but one cannot make one.
Leonard,
Anarchy does not mean "no state." It means "without ruler(s)." It's perhaps the wrong venue for this discussion, but the State is not identical with government. The State is that which is governed, that which is captured, that which is encapsulated by the hierarchies of government, but it is not the same as those hierarchies. The concept of the State fictionalizes a unity between rulers and those ruled.
Hierarchy is literally "sacred power, holy ruler(s)." It obligates ranks, because it establishes an essential difference, and degree of separation, between those who are governed and those who govern.
The anarchist, as a first and only condition, is and must be without that distinction, ie, anti-hierarchical.
The anarchist does not have to have a theory about, for or against everything which hierarchies have captured (the State, economies, war machines, the Commons), though it helps.
jack,
that's nonsense.
puppylander,
Huh?
Leonard, the Democratic Party was only *nominally* progressive from the 1930's to the early 1970's, after which the party started giving Labor the shaft in earnest by cheering on economic neoliberalism (which libertarians like yourself also support) while also simultaneously pushing a shallow social-liberal agenda. If you want to bash the Left, fine (hell, I do it all the time myself), but you could at least get your facts straight.
Puppylander - 'an' - without, 'archos' - leaders [authority, sovereignty]. Jack is dead on in his definition. Why not read some actual anarchist literature and history.
JTG,
I'd probably say that the single most anti-labor piece of legislation passed in this country was in fact a cornerstone of the New Deal: the Wagner Act, which folded labor unions into state-approved bureaucracy and banned wildcat strikes. This was exactly what capital wanted, a superfluous negotiator class that would always act in the interests of management, while permanently crippling via state force the ability of workers to organize. Later neoliberal measures, all of which have been pretty severe statist interventions, were in that tradition.
Leonard equates democracy with the Left, a fairly uncontroversial assumption. He also seems to equates statism with the Left, which is more controversial (see Hayek, Rothbard, Hess) though at least somewhat understandable, the New Deal being the peak of progressive statism. The Old Right, even if the term was a misnomer, was formed specifically against it.
BDR: you take that back! Terrell Suggs has promised not to go into lobbying should he be forced out due to his injury.
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