Essentially Contested America

According to economist James Galbraith our economic crisis is much worse than is generally reported. Check out this Mother Jones article. Consider these chilling remarks from his testimony before Congress. “In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote, ‘The world has been slow to realize that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.’ That catastrophe was the Great Crash of 1929, the collapse of money values, the destruction of the banking system. The questions before us today are: is the crisis we are living through similar? And if so, are we taking adequate steps to deal with it? I believe the answers are substantially yes, and substantially no.” Chilling news from a responsible economist. President Obama has promised to listen to the views on all sides. Has he listened to Galbraith? Has he heard him? See also, Paul Krugman’s praise or the President’s budget and David Brooks’ criticism.

Barack Obama gave his first address to Congress on what we typically call Mardi Gras.  Mardi Gras is the day before Lent begins on the Christian holy day Ash Wednesday.  Typically, we think of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) as the day of gorging before the day of reckoning.  I wish Barack Obama had used the Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday dichotomy in talking about our country. Leaving the more obvious gorging/fat cat analogies to Fat Tuesday alone, it is fair enough to suggest that our nation has not engaged in much retrospection over the last several years.  We have not been terribly mindful of our responsibilities to our fellow Americans, to our fellow countries or to the world in general.  However, we can leave those failings to the side on Fat Tuesday night.   Ash Wednesday is a new day, albeit a somewhat depressing one.  In many churches, Ash Wednesday includes services at which one’s minister reminds parishioners, as he or she is putting ashes on foreheads that, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”  However, once the shock wears off, we realize that Lent is about self-examination, self-denial and fasting (another form of self-denial), among other things.  The core of Lent is not about showing how much pain we can inflict on ourselves physically or psychologically, nor is it explicitly about losing weight.  Indeed, Lent is not really about giving something up or taking something on, as many folks do during Lent. Rather, the self-examination, self-denial and fasting – by stripping ourselves bare and using fewer things that make us feel better – allow us to realize that we have been given all we need to survive in this world.  In the process of counting our God-given assets, we can determine whether we are making the very best use of those assets.  We can come out of Lent, a season of want, with real hope for the future and a recognition that brighter days are ahead.  Those brighter days are not brighter because we can stop fasting, but because we will recognize that we do not need as much stuff for the journey.

It may be that Barack Obama is guiding America through its own Lent.  We as a country have been given an embarrassment of riches.  If the self-examination is critical enough and if the self-denial is serious enough and if the fasting is productive enough, we just might be able to see our brighter days ahead with a leaner and more focused republic that is an even more powerful force for good in the world.  President Obama is not the Messiah.  However, he knows his way around a church and should feel very comfortable climbing into his bully pulpit for the good of the country.

How many times have we heard that Democrats are for government, while Republicans are for ordinary citizens? What a choice! Between the two who could argue that government is a more comforting, a more deserving institution?  But that’s not the real Republican choice. Republicans are thoroughly disingenuous when they present the choice as between government and citizens. What they want is the choice between government and corporate culture presiding over both government and ordinary people. So you must ask yourself: if you must be represented by someone whom would you choose? Government? Or corporations? That’s the real choice Republicans offer us despite how deeply they try to hide it.  Consider Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama’s congressional address embodies this subterfuge. Jindal says “Democratic leaders in Washington — they place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you, the American people. In the end, it comes down to an honest and fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government. We oppose the National Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and to create jobs.” No Jindal and his Republican cohorts want to strengthen corporations at the expense of the people and the government representing the people. This has been the very best kept political secret in decade. Americans keep faith with this secret at their own peril.

Rupert Murdoch apologized for the racist cartoon printed in the New York Post last week. Here’s the best he could do:

As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me.

Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.

Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of people and I now better understand the hurt this cartoon has caused. At the same time, I have had conversations with Post editors about the situation and I can assure you – without a doubt – that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation. It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such.

We all hold the readers of the New York Post in high regard and I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.

A more diverse editorial board and news staff might have prevented this cartoon from ever being published. That’s just one of the positive practical effects of racial diversity. When will Americans of good faith say enough to racist jokes, cartoons, and innuendos? One thing is for sure: it won’t happen until contemporary Americans take responsibility for the racism of the past and the present. To do so, we must transcend our rationalizations, denial, and moral cowardice.

Race has played a monumentally influential role in the precise character of American constitutionalism as well as in the social history of the Republic. slavery to the present, white Americans have enjoyed an enormous advantage over African Americans, indigenous peoples, and others whose skin color wasn’t politically correct.  As Attorney General Eric Holder puts it in his recent controversial speech, “[t]o get to the heart of this nation, one must get to its racial soul.  Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Holder’s point seems to be that the atrocious treatment of African Americans has caused even well-intentioned whites to avoid talking about the role race still plays today in the American experiment. He chides us to contemplate that in fifty years there will be no majority race in America and that a dialogue about race is necessary to unleash a powerful force for good in a racially diverse society.

In my view, many white Americans seem incapable of recognizing that the responsibility for contemporary racism is our responsibility. White Americans have benefited from slavery and segregation, and continue to benefit from racism. Yet, we as a people seem to believe that our current racial relations are unencumbered by the effects of the past. We often reject this responsibility by insisting that other racial, ethnic, and religious groups were discriminated against as well as African Americans as if the discrimination against the Irish, Italians, or Jews, say, was more or less equal to American racial apartheid.  Or by insisting that since our ancestors lived elsewhere during all or some of the atrocities of America’s racial past, contemporary Americans have nothing to do with American racism. Alternatively, our complaint sometimes seems to be that although white Americans historically have perpetrated genocide against African Americans and other racial groups, now when de jure racism is past, there is no need for dialogue about race. So thorough is our denial that the notion of a dialogue about race makes us wince. Why bother rehashing old stories of racial injustice when we live in a different world where African Americans are clearly equal to whites. Perhaps, it is such denial that Holder calls cowardice.  If Americans are not cowards regarding race, we need to explain why a conversation about its role in contemporary American society frightens us to such a great extent. This question needs to be satisfactorily answered if one rejects the Attorney General’s comments.

Expect the remnants of sociopathic racism—racism without a sense of shame—to persist even throughout the tenure of one of the most qualified individuals ever to assume the presidency, and, who is also black. Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency has hit the failsafe mark of no return to American apartheid.  Generations of white and black kids will develop in a world where the question of whether an African American can reach the presidency has been answered and the ramifications of this (symbolic) triumph will filter throughout the various walks of life having nothing to do with politics.  I am convinced this is the trajectory of Obama’s victory. Fortunately, it is now part of the hard wiring of American society. Unfortunately, that does not mean that sociopathic racism is dead.  Quite the contrary, sociopathic racism will continue to use the symbols of racial apartheid to denigrate, insult, and offend African Americans, but this time it will try to camouflage its message in mixed racial symbols. Consider the above cartoon. Three venomous racial symbols are unarguably present. First, there is the allusion to a black man (who just happens to be president of the United States) as a chimpanzee. Second, the cartoon evokes the double-image of assassinating (lynching) a black man black as well as assassinating the president. Third, the cartoon portrays police brutality against blacks endemic to American apartheid. No amount of rationalization can excuse this grotesque image as referring to a tragic incident earlier this week when a domestic chimp viciously attacked a friend of the chimp’s owner and was shot and killed by the police. That dog (chimp?) won’t hunt. The reference to the cartoon’s chimp as intimately associated with writing the stimulus bill forecloses that analogy. We will as a society never be rid of racism until those claiming not to be racists take responsibility for expressions of their sociopathic racism.  The responsibility here squarely lies with the cartoonist, but even more importantly, with the editor of the New York Post where the cartoon first appeared polluting America’s public culture. Indeed, despite the newspaper’s weak, unpersuasive apology, the editor should resign.

This week, President Obama signed a stimulus bill that is designed to end our country’s downward economic slide.  Given the dire circumstances we are in, you might expect that the Republicans in Congress would be open to the plan suggested by a new president whose victory last fall was based in large part on his economic vision.  Yet the Republicans remain steadfastly opposed to the plan.  To hear the congressional Republicans talk, you’d think the election was still going on.  This is especially true of the Republican standard bearer, John McCain, who continues to advocate the same free market tax cutting policies of the former Republican president, despite the fact that the American people overwhelmingly rejected those ideas last November.  Moreover, current polls show that the American people favor the stimulus bill, and congressional Republicans lag far behind the Democrats in their approval ratings.  Why are the Republicans being so obstructionist? Rush Limbaugh over-simplified the reason when he said he hopes that Obama will fail (even though if Obama fails, thousands more Americans will suffer).  The real reason is that the Republicans really hope that Obama will fail, because they are haunted by the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Congressional Republicans know enough about history to understand what happened the last time a charismatic, articulate president, who was able to instill hope and confidence in the people, took over from a Republican president whose free market ideology had contributed to economic devastation in our country.  Roosevelt’s New Deal policies rejected that free market ideology, expanded the government safety net, and contributed to the country’s economic recovery.  More importantly, the American people gave FDR credit for saving the country from the Depression.  They re-elected him by a landslide in 1936, and re-elected him again two more times.  The success of FDR and the perceived success of his New Deal led millions of Americans to become lifelong Democrats, and contributed to the Democratic dominance of Congress for over 40 years.  Given President Obama’s charisma, political savvy and popularity with people below the age of 30, if he is perceived to succeed in reviving our economy, we could be facing another generation of Democratic rule.

In the past thirty years, the Republicans have sought to dismantle the successes of the New Deal, and the Democrats have mostly gone along with them.  Unfortunately, they were largely successful at cutting back on government regulation of the financial industry and effectively ending welfare (with the help of President Bill Clinton).  Fortunately, President George W. Bush did not succeed at gutting our social security system, the steadfast iconic New Deal success.  However, the Democrats’ cooperation with the de-regulation of big business, the restrictions on organized labor and welfare “reform” made it possible for Bush to argue in 2004 that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Roosevelt.

I am hopeful that the Democrats are returning to their legacy as the party of FDR under the leadership of President Obama.  Above all, that legacy was based on the idea that government can work, and that ir can help working people.  The Republicans are haunted by the ghost of FDR.  Let’s hope that the Democrats are, too.

During and after the battle over the stimulus package, many prominent Republicans complained about a supposed lack of bipartisanship demonstrated by Democrats and President Obama.  Sen. McCain, Sen. Graham and Rep. Boehner all have pointedly noted the very small number of Republicans who voted for the stimulus package, claiming that this proves that the bill was not bipartisan.  Of course, that a small number of Republicans voted for the bill hardly means the bill is not bipartisan.  The bill itself may be bipartisan.  That is, it may reflect fairly reflect principles largely thought to be Republican principles, even if the bill is not the same bill the congressional Republicans would have drafted.  It is entirely possible that not only should the Republican congressmen have voted for the bill, but that rank and file Republicans and centrists may generally support the bill.  If that is the case, likely because congressional Republicans (and especially Republican senators) are isolated from and more conservative than average Republicans, it is the congressional Republicans who are not reaching out far enough rather than congressional Democrats leaving Republicans out of the discussion.

Not surprisingly, what it likely occurring is that the big-name Republicans simply have not adjusted their outlook to the new reality.  When Republicans were in the majority, they wrote bills.  When Republicans were a filibuster-proof minority they had the power to help write bills by stopping bills from passing.  Now that Republicans number barely 40 in the Senate and have no filibuster to protect them in the House, all they have is the power to persuade and the ability to stomp their feet if they do not get their way.  For newly elected Republicans who know no better, bipartisanship may appear to mean merely that one’s ideas will be given a fair hearing.  However, to Republicans like McCain, Graham and Boehner who have wielded power, bipartisanship means the ability to wield power even when one is in the minority.  To them, bipartisanship is what happens when they have to be courted for their votes because Democrats are required to reach fairly deeply into the Republican caucus to try to get votes.  Now that these senators are merely being courted for the quality of their ideas, rather than their votes, bipartisanship appears to them to be dead.   I am not ready to argue that the stimulus bill incorporates large chunks of Republican orthodoxy.  However, I am willing to say that the mere refusal of Republicans to vote for the stimulus package does not mean that centrist and Republican concerns were not taken into account when the bill was written.

Just when some influential scholars are championing the idea that not all the members of the Court should be lawyers, Chief Justice Roberts embraces the view that it would be good for all the members of the Court to be former federal appellate judges. For the first time in American history all Supreme Court Justices had been federal appeals court judges. Prior to this questionable development ‘the practice of constitutional law — how constitutional law was made — was more fluid and wide ranging than it is today, more in the realm of political science.’ But the new composition of the Court has seen ‘the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal arguments. What are the texts of the statutes involved? What precedents control?’ According to Roberts, the result is ‘a more legal perspective and less of a policy perspective.’ In the erroneous jargon of the day, the Court now interprets the law rather than making it. Can this be right? The Chief Justice is oblivious to the possibility that the more narrowly defined criterion for Court membership the more likely the Court will become committed to a perspective unreflective of the concerns of ordinary Americans.  Without such a perspective, Supreme Court arguments are destined to mimic arguments over how many angels fit on the head of a pin. As Adrian Vermeule explains, “[o]n epistemic grounds, sensible institutional design demands a modicum of professional diversity among the arbiters of the law. None of this requires us to impugn the motivations of lawyers or of the Court’s members.  It only requires a willingness to see the epistemic benefits of professional diversity along with other types of diversity.” Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason 23 (2009). Epistemic diversity, in this passage, refers to the idea that law, as reflective of society in general and the different categories of knowledge in American society in particular, requires different methods for deciding complex and stylized conflicts in practical reasoning. Consequently, “the basic suggestion is that it is bad, on epistemic grounds, that all of the Supreme Court’s members are lawyers.  Nothing in law or elsewhere requires this, and in a world of substantial common-law-making by the Justices (both in nominally constitutional and in nominally statutory cases, it is a bad idea to have all the Court’s membership drawing upon the same, highly correlated sources of professional training and information.” Id. Since constitutional conflicts typically involve philosophical, political theoretic, historical, and sociological issues, confining the qualifications for judges to a narrow, legalistic domain seems ab initio, a bad idea.

The Chief Justices’ perspective derives from an ill-advised commitment to the discredited dichotomy between law and politics. Roughly, law is neutral, impartial, and requires an autonomous, independent epistemic base, while politics concerns contentious policy conflicts reflecting only the values of political partisans.  Together with this failed dichotomy Chief Justice Roberts’ view depends upon a tendentious dichotomy between fact and value. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2004). In this view, facts are objectively verifiable while values are subjective and relative. Both the law and politics dichotomy and the fact/value distinction rest on failed jurisprudence and a troubling ontology. Building these elements back into the jurisprudence of the Court will create either a Frankenstein monster of judicial tyranny or a Court irrelevant to American controversies, or in different cases, both.  This Chief Justice’s recommendation to return to some halcyon era where judges perform like baseball umpires will continue to exacerbate the anomaly of a life-tenured, unelected Court running roughshod over a republican democracy. Since amending the Constitution through Article V is so difficult, a Robertsian Court can permanently thwart the reflective judgments of generations of majorities. American deserves better. Click here for Roberts on judges as umpires.

The novelist, Zadie Smith, has a beautiful piece in the New York Review of Books on the multiple voices of biracial individuals.  Indeed, once articulated we can discern multiple voices in everyone or at least those courageous enough to listen to their own multiple and diverse narratives. Here she describes a metaphorical place, Dream City, where multiple selves prevail, her own as well as President Barack Hussein Obama’s.

It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Dream City is liberating. It removes the enormous pressure of singularity and society’s penchant for unity in one’s personality and character. Smith presents the issue in the context of biracial individuals, but she is completely aware how this issue of multiplicity and singularity is a universal feature of civilization. For those interested in the philosophy of the self and the so-called “social construction  of the self” this article is a treat.