Jeb's Esquire interview

The text of the interview that our next Republican President former Florida government and current leading hope of the Bush dynasty, Jeb Bush, did for Esquire is now online: Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party 07/08/09. The interviewer is conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.

Our next Republican President Jeb is pretty explicitly saying that he's trying to promote what another Bush dynasty member might have called a "compassionate conservative" marketing strategy for the same Predator State strategy his brother and Dick Cheney practiced for eight years. He basically says he's glad the OxyContin radio screamers are doing what they are doing, but he wants Republican elected officials to project a more restrained and dignified image in public places.

He's about as explicit as it gets in saying that the Republicans' electoral troubles are not in substance or policy but are rather a matter of packaging, messaging, marketing:

Conservatives can win, can draw people toward our cause with the proper language and the proper ideas. I don't think that conservatism has been rejected in the United States. I don't believe it. ...

I don't think all is lost. The country is a center-right country. The problem has been that conservatives in positions of responsibility, particularly in the Congress, lost their way. And in general conservatism has gotten a little nostalgic and less focused on the here and now, and on the future. I'm a huge Ronald Reagan fan. The Republican primary was almost all about Ronald Reagan: Who was the heir to Ronald Reagan? Well, I mean, Ronald Reagan would be talking about ideas, would be talking about broad principles, would be talking about issues, more than what we heard in the primaries. The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different. ...

I don't think there's any seismic shift. The Democrats have won on tactics. ... In fact, [Obama] basically won the tax debate, which is breathtaking if you think about it. Cutting taxes is generally considered a center-right idea, not a center-left or left idea. He made it appear like McCain was going to raise taxes, which was unfair, but there was no response back. When there was an ideological component, it was generally centrist or even center-right. Had he said what he was going to do as a candidate, [Obama] would have lost. [my emphasis]

That's the "compassionate conservative" posture that they famously compassionate George W. Bush used in his Presidential candidacy in 1999-2000. Say things like, "The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different," that your press admirers can pick up on to say, now here's a man with fresh ideas and a new vision. But for policy, stick to the same old boilerplate slogans like in this interview: "What's the alternative? The alternative is to take time-tested practices and convert them to the world we live in. Which means you're going to cut taxes and cut spending."

Got that? Our next Republican President Jeb understands that the world has changed radically in the three decades since Reagan successfully ran for President on a program of cutting taxes and cutting spending. And so we need a radically new message for these very changed circumstances: "cut taxes and cut spending."

Our next Republican President Jeb is also a climate change denier, like virtually all of his Party:

Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, "... My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions." ...

[Q:]Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?

I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further... It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we've actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it. [my emphasis in italics]

Media Matters has been addressing this particular talking point of the climate change deniers highlighted in bold, e.g., Media promote claims of global cooling despite overwhelming consensus to the contrary 03/30/09.

The global-warming-denial scam uses a similar approach to the industry-friendly Tobacco Institute, which presents research findings on the health effects of tobacco whose only purpose is to create an impression that the scientific/medical consensus on the matter is somehow "in dispute". Creationists use a similar method in opposing the entire concept of evolution, the existence of which is not in scientific dispute. But by raising pseudoscientific objections to it, the creationists try to leave the impression that a scientific controversy is there which doesn't exist. And this creation of phony controversies is accompanied by a denigration of science, framed as opposition to "dogmatic" science that defends elitist notions like evolution in some kind of more-or-less conspiratorial attempt to bamboozle the regular folks.

Our next Republican President Jeb plays directly to that brand of Republican Know-Nothingism in his comment, "I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist." The contrast between "scientist" and "skeptic" is a classic example of conservative up-is-down thinking. And also of the Christian fundamentalist outlook, which has always been obsessed with pitching their arguments against science in pseudoscientific terms and claiming that it's science and scientists who are the dogmatists taking things on blind faith, not their own form of the Christian faith and its practitioners .

This kind of pitch has a lot of appeal for the Republican base. And it's the kind of thing that our sad excuse for a national press can be persuaded represents plain-spokenness and a downhome touch. Time recently ran an article about Sarah Palin that shows how easily our press can turn their currently-prevailing Palin-is-a-dummy narrative into Palin-speaks-the-language-of-the-ordinary-people narrative. In fact, this Time piece adopts the latter approach and is downright adoring in tone. Their praise of Palin's Know-Nothingism could also apply to the type that Our next Republican President Jeb uses in his Esquire interview.

The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next? by David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small Time Online 07/09/09:

... Palin's unconventional step [announcing she will step down from the Alaska governorship] speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print. [my emphasis]

I don't know exactly how Beck's book has been sold. But it's not unusual for the wingnut-welfare system of Republican foundations and think tanks to boost the early sales of favored conservative books by placing large initial orders and using the books as gifts, or returning some of them later to be remaindered. Also, can even Time reporters imagine that Beck's highly partisan, rightwing Republican schtick is a "pox-on-all-their-houses" posture?

But he also does his "compassionate conservative" feint to praise the value of expertise in the context of foreign policy:

I think it's okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it's okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we're living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you're misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn't going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don't get inspired by shameless populism.

Palin hits similar themes to those of our next Republican President Jeb; from the Time article:

Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him."

She continues. The cap-and-trade energy plan "is going to drive the cost of consumer goods and the cost of energy so extremely high." Democratic health-care proposals, she says, look increasingly like the ideas that McCain proposed during the campaign. [This characterization by the writers doesn't seem to reflect the Palin quote that immediately follows.] "One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question, and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this one- or two- or three-trillion-dollar health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know."

Our next Republican President Jeb would apparently like to continue his brother's work in attempting to abolish Social Security and Medicare:

It was, to the extent that my brother was unable to get the Congress to go along with meaningful entitlement reform, although he tried, which by the way the Republicans were not supportive of. It was because we fought a war, and we had to build a homeland-defense structure that didn't exist. But I think my brother gets a bad rap about the general idea that there were massive amounts of spending beyond those two things.

National security, in his view, is endangered by Medicare:

The interest on the debt, and Medicare alone, will weaken our country to the point where we're not going to have the same influence that we need to have, or should have, or want to have in the world.

And in case anyone thinks that the Catholic former Governor of Florida is going to be less Chrisitianist than his brother as President, he spells out how the Republican Party has to deal with its sins. No, not the torture program, not unjust war, not the Katrina disaster, not reckless disregard of the needs of our citizens, but the sin of losing the 2008 election to the Democrats:

In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.

[Q:] What are those sins?
We didn't advocate our positions well enough to win.

We're all sinners under God's watchful eye. There's a road to redemption. But the road to redemption requires some humility and some patience. To campaign on these ideas is a good way to do it. It's not about a person's ambition. It's about the power of these ideas. And they need to be developed thoughtfully, with the input of a whole lot of people and the advice of a whole lot of people. It doesn't have to be in Washington. It can grow organically... I'm going to be involved as best I can.

A glimpse at the future envisioned for us by our next Republican President Jeb Bush.

Tags: jeb bush, republican party, republicans, sarah palin

Jim DeMint

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint thinks Germany was a "social democracy" just prior to the Second World War. Which he apparently thinks is kind of like Iran and Venezuela and being dependent on the gubment. Go figure.

No, it doesn't make jack for sense: DeMint: America is ‘Where Germany Was Before World War II’ by David Weigel Washington Independent 07/09/09.

Tags: jim demint,, republicans

Texas is the future?

The conservative London Economist is suggesting that Texas is the wave of the future: America's future: California v Texas 07/09/09.

It does provide a handy definition of the problem that has forced California's staet government for years to chronically operate on the verge of bankruptcy:

No state has quite so many overlapping systems of accountability or such a gerrymandered legislature. Ballot initiatives, the crack cocaine of democracy, have left only around a quarter of its budget within the power of its representative politicians. (One reason budget cuts are inevitable is that voters rejected tax increases in a package of ballot measures in May.)

But in thinking that Texas style government is the wave of the future, I guess The Economist's editors just snoozed through the Cheney-Bush administration, when we got to see Texas-style government implemented on a national and international scale. That would be the experiment that wrecked the world's financial system, slammed the world economy into the Great Recession, put the United States into the torture business, and produced corruption on a scale that makes Teapot Dome sound like an immaterial accounting error.

Oh, and produced the worst strategic disaster in the history of American foreign policy with the Iraq War.

No, thanks, eight years of that kind of "Texas" government was more than enough for a century or two!

Tags: bush administration, california politics, predator+state, texas

Secular conservative culture warriors

Back in the days of Spiro Agnew, when the "culture war" as we know it was in its youth, being secular and a conservative culture warrior didn't seem like such a contradiction. With the dominance of the Christianist Right in today's Republican Party, though, it seems to be an odd eccentricity.

Taki's Magazine is an Old Right isolationist online publication that tries to cling to a lonely brand of secular culture war. This article by Steve Sailer of the rightwing-extremist nativist hate group VDARE, How Multiculturalism Killed the Counter Culture 06/24/09, makes some weird argument about how rock-and-roll music is white ethnic heritage, or some such garbage. Sailer's ideological equivalents in the 1950s were calling the then-new popular music of rock "race music". And they didn't mean the white race, either.

Aside from the bigotry, he makes this strikingly unreflective historical observation:

The late 1960s remain the fastest-changing period in my lifetime. For example, I was recently telling my son about the worldwide demonstrations in 1968, when he asked, “Did feminism play a big role in 1968?”

"Oh, no," I corrected. "Nobody cared about feminism in 1968. Feminism was 1969, not 1968." On further reflection, I helpfully added, "Environmentalism, however, was 1970, not 1969."

At that point, it struck me how bizarre it must seem by today’s slow-motion standards to assign huge historical movements to a single year with such confidence. For a child of the 1960s, however, it seems natural.

Uh, dude, if you're old enough to actually remember 1968, it most likely was the fastest-changing period in your life. You know, puberty, adolescence, acne, first kiss, etc. Maybe a teenager distracted by raging hormones and other things would only be able to grasp such things as fads. And while a young teenager might not realize that feminism long predated 1969 and environmentalism 1970, one would hope that he might have picked up on that sometimes during the subsequent decades.

This column calls to mind what Arlo Guthrie has often said: "Anyone who says they remember the sixties probably wasn't there."

And it's another anecdotal reminder that hardline conservatives are more defined by their image of "the sixties" than anyone else in American society.

Tags: sixties, steve sailer

Jeb Bush

Jeb.Bush. Jeb Bush Slams Obama, Neglects To Mention Palin As Future Leader Of The GOP Huffington Post 07/07/09

Think about the implication of those words: Jeb.Bush. Bush Doctrine II. Compassionate enhanced interrogation. A kinder, gentler Predator State.

Jeb.Bush.

Tags: jeb bush

Newsweek on "populism"

The 06/30/09 03/30/09 issue of Newsweek featured several essays on "populism". I was intrigued to see how various participants defined it.

Rick Perlstein:

The habit of messily dividing the world into "the people" and "the elite" - whether it's left calling out right, or right calling out left - is distinctively, ineluctably American. It's not going away. And there's much more to it than the name-calling of angry political factions. It is the governing folk wisdom of a nation without an inherited aristocracy, distrustful of privilege that is not "earned." It is our American common sense.

Michael Kazin:

At its core, populism in the United States remains what it has always been: a protest by ordinary people who want the system to live up to its stated ideals—fair and honest treatment in the marketplace and a government tilted in favor of the unwealthy masses. The best way for big men, and big women, to respond to such protests is to try to do what is moral, as well as popular—and treat Americans as partners in the grand enterprise of governance.

Joel Kotkin seems to think that "populism" is just another word for anger in politics:

The notion of a populist outburst raises an archaic vision of soot-covered industrial workers waving placards. Yet populism is far from dead, and represents a force that could shape our political future in unpredictable ways.

People have reasons to be mad, from declining real incomes to mythic levels of greed and excess among the financial elite. Confidence in political and economic institutions remains at low levels, as does belief in the future.

Robert Samuelson isn't necessarily trying to define populism. Instead, he seems to think that there is a mass wave of demand to abolish capitalism altogether:

The story of American capitalism is, among other things, a love-hate relationship. We go through cycles of congratulation, revulsion and revision. Just when the latest episode of revulsion and revision began is unclear. Was it when Lehman Brothers failed? Or when General Motors pleaded for federal subsidies? Or now, when AIG's bonuses stir outrage? No matter. Capitalism is under siege, its future unclear.

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th century's eminent economists, believed that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Its chief virtue was long term—the ability to raise wealth and living standards. But short-term politics would fixate on its flaws—instability, unemployment, inequality. Capitalist prosperity also created an oppositional class of "intellectuals" who would nurture popular discontents and disparage values (self-enrichment, risk-taking) necessary for economic success. [my emphasis]

Fareed Zakaria also doesn't try to define populism, he just knows it leads to limits on "free trade", one of the sacrosanct concepts among the Beltway Village:

I'm certainly not going to defend those AIG bonuses. But the trouble with populist outrage is that it bubbles over, sweeping from one justifiable issue across to many others. Waves of populism are now working their way through the American government on several fronts. The area I'm most worried about is trade, where populism leads to protectionism. The scandal of the moment, the bailout bonuses, will pass; in a year or two (one hopes) the U.S. government will no longer own banks and insurance companies. But protectionism and trade wars, once started, are hard to reverse.

Niall Ferguson frets about those picked-on financiers being pushed around by politicians (as if!):

Nothing would be easier than to blame everything on the bankers. I blame them for much of what has gone wrong, but I blame the politician more. It's just too easy to heap opprobrium on Wall Street. And if you noticed, that's exactly what the politicians do. Could it be that they're trying to divert our attention away from Washington's own responsibility for the debacle?

John Steele Gordon pretty much agrees:

Wall Street is not an institution, it's a collection of individuals, inherently susceptible to the madness of crowds. Blaming Wall Street is like blaming the atmosphere for thunderstorms. It's going to happen. Washington is supposed to be the guys with the striped shirts. They make up the rules and enforce them. And then they sometimes change the rules to accommodate some of their friends.

Robert Frank thinks that whatever the market does about executive pay is something akin to divine guidance:

Executive pay is much higher in big companies because those executives' decisions—good and bad—matter more. Despite the occasional mistake, the people they choose are a remarkably talented lot. The highest-paid people in each domain are paid such large amounts because they are worth that much to the organizations that employ them. That's good for them and for the country, too. Capping executive pay would just encourage talented potential managers to choose careers as personal-injury lawyers or hedge-fund managers.

Especially, he says, "Anger at AIG must not cause us to lash out at those whose talent and effort have made the country so wealthy."

Glenn Greenwald at Salon (The virtues of public anger and the need for more 03/21/09) has his own take on the current bout of "populism" that so disturbs our Beltway pod pundits:

Obviously, mass rage can entail its own excesses and, and if unchecked, can lead to mob rule, a form of majoritarian tyranny (as Armando notes, its isolated, unrepresentative excesses (death threats!) are already being exaggerated to discredit the underlying anger itself). But we are far, far, far away from the point where unchecked public sentiment plays too great of a role in how our political institutions function. Rather: we're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.

The overarching question is not: why is there so much public rage? The overarching question is: why has there been so little? A political establishment that can function without any fear of the citizenry will inevitably trample on its interests. That is what has been happening more than anything else. And it is why we need far more public outrage, and fear of that outrage more deeply implanted in the minds of our political and financial elites.

Tags: populism, us economy

Sarah Palin: the media needs to get beyond their "dumb" script

Being more-or-less hostile to Sarah Palin is one instance in which the dysfunctionality of our American press corps actually worked in the Democrats' favor. At least in the short term, during the last months of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

The media's many problems generally do more damage to the Democrats than to the Republicans. And so when one of their dysfunctional habits works in the Dems' favor, the Dems should be thinking of it along the lines of, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

The press corps sets up "scripts" for various public figures, e.g., John McCain is a Maverick, Al Gore is a big ole liar. Then they work hard to squeeze any information about that person into their consensus script. The results are not infrequently painful to behold. When Maverick McCain acts like a nasty old Republican rightwinger, which is most of the time, the media script has it that it deeply pains the Maverick to have to act that way because he's really a very honorable Maverick at heart and so someone must be forcing him to act that way.

Now, Sarah Palin certainly looked shockingly unfamiliar with the issues one could have expected to be part of the Presidential campaign. So the press corps fastened onto the notion that she's dumb. So, "news" shows treated Tina Fey's comedy routines about her as though they were the definitive political commentary on Palin's candidacy. But the one time I heard Tina talking on TV about Palin outside of her comedy routine, she actually made Palin sound like an appealing, engaging personality. As I recall, she said that Palin is "the real deal", and she clearly meant it as a compliment.

And, since fashion is one thing they like to focus on and it doesn't strain their minds too much, the press played up the issue about Palin's campaign clothing budget.

That freed them from pursuing more serious and relevant matters which were central to Palin's political identity: her reliance on cronyism in administration, disturbing irregularities in her conduct around the state trooper who was her former brother-in-law and still involved in legal battles with Palin's sister, Todd Palin's role in state administration, the involvement of both Palin's with the far-right neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party, and her commitment to the Third Wave Pentecostal movement which involves strong authoritarian tendencies as well as a highly emotional and superstitious approach to Christianity. I'm afraid in some of those areas, she is the "real deal".

Geoffrey Dunn at the Huffington Post raises a new such question in Palin Pallin' Around with Scientologists: Todd & Sarah & John & Greta 03/21/09. His story also involves the close ties of FOX News specifically to the Republican Party.

Palin could still be a serious candidate for President in 2012, though her unexpected resignation as Alakan Governor has raised new doubts about that. She is obviously very popular among the Christian Right, the main voting base of the Republican Party. If our press corps were actually in the business of journalism instead of infotainment, they would have been taking Palin a little more seriously and investigating more substantial issues in her role as a public figure. And not trying to out-mock Tina Fey.

Tags: sarah palin

This can't be good

From Borzou Daragahi, Iran's Revolutionary Guard takes command Los Angeles Times 07/06/09

The top leaders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard publicly acknowledged they had taken over the nation's security and warned late Sunday that there was no middle ground in the ongoing dispute over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a threat against a reformist wave led by Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite military branch, said the Guard's takeover of the country had led to "a revival of the revolution and clarification of the value positions of the establishment at home and abroad."

"These events put us in a new stage of the revolution and political struggles, and all of us must fully comprehend its dimensions," he said at a Sunday press conference, according to reports that surfaced today.

It's not really clear to me what this means, and may not be clear to the Revolutionary Guard, either. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still in charge. Presumably this means that the military will not direct the police rather than the civil government doing so. But even that isn't clear from the article.

Gary Sick a few days ago in The Thugs Who Lead Iran's Supreme Leader The Daily Beast 06/27/09 makes it sound like The Revolutionary Guard had been pretty much calling the shots in national policy, including economic policy, for a long time anyway. And he actually knows a lot about Iran.

Meanwhile, Robert Perry reminds us that prolonged dissension within Iran over the results on the recent presidential election there could delay progress on peace negotiations, in Obama's Iran Peace Talk Dilemma ConsortiumNews.com 07/07/09.

Tags: gary sick, iran

Obama and Latin America

I didn't catch this until today. But Tom Hayden reported on July 2 at TPM Cafe on The Possibility of an Obama-Chavez Understanding. Referring to the April Trinidad conference, he writes:

What has not been reported is that Obama, leaving his advisers behind, held lengthy private conversations with Chavez where only an interpreter was present.

It is not known what occurred in the secret talks. But sources in Caracas say that Chavez has become fascinated with Obama, seeking to understand the new US president and the forces around him, partly with advice from Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

I definitely have my criticisms of Obama, particularly on the Afghanistan War and prosecuting the torture perpetrators. But there is no question that his foreign policy has already shown some major improvement over the Cheney-Bush rolling disaster. Just returning to a situation where diplomacy is considered to be something more than the use of military threats to get other countries to do what the US wants is a huge improvement.

Obama's administration does seem to be taking a straightforward anti-coup, pro-democracy stance on the Honduran crisis. Latin America under democratic regimes is getting more and more serious about protecting democracy and maintaining international peace in their region. We saw that in the general Latin American reactions to Colombia's military strike on Ecuadorian territory and to the separatist violence in Bolivia. It makes very good sense for the US to align ourselves with those basic goals and not allow American government agencies or businesses to mess around with promoting coups or separatist movements or wars in Latin America.

Tags: hugo chávez, obama administration

Heinrich Heine's Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is an informative and entertaining description of recent trends in German philosophy and theology in the early 19th century. Yes, entertaining. Originally written as a series of articles in a French newspaper, it's purpose was to explain its topic to a contemporary French audience. He compiled it into book form in 1834.

He focuses on figures like the following, some of them the "usual suspects" today, other not: Martin Luther (1483-1546), who not only kicked off the Protestant Reformation but whose vernacular translation of the Bible "created the German language", as Heine puts it; Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, given name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493-1541); Jakob Böhme(1575-1624); Réne Descartes (1596–1650) of the cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am); John Locke (1632-1704); Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza (1632-1677); Philipp Jacob Spener (German link) (1635-1705); Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibnitz (1646-1716); August Hermann Francke (1663-1727); Christian Freiherr von Wolff, aka, Christian von Wolfius (1679-1754), whose "spiritual rule" lasted "more than half a century" in Germany; Voltaire (1694-1778), who Heine calls "the bookseller Nikolai" (?!); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), of whom Heine doesn't seem to be terribly fond; Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825); Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling(1775-1854); and, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who Heine says "closed the great circle" of German philosophy.

I was surprised to find no mention of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who the ecumenical Christian theologian Hans Küng considers to be among the greatest of all Christian theologians.

Heine elaborates a theory of questionable historical provenance but perhaps some conceptual value that argues that German concepts of religion are more heavily influenced by a pre-Christian concept of a spiritual world populated by various forces that act on the material world in observable ways. And he argues that German philosophical-religious thinking is dominated by a kind of spiritual dogmatism that assumes that doesn't take adequate account of the limitations of the material world. He describes this in terms of a spiritual concept in contrast to a sensual one.

Heine gets entertaining mileage out of the young Fichte's efforts to pal around with Kant. And he tells a funny anecdote about Hegel on his deathbed saying, "Nur einer hat mich verstanden. Und der hat mich auch nicht verstanden." (Only one person has understood me. And he also didn't understand me.")

Tags: heinrich heine, hegel

Review of Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts

Vietnam in Iaq: Tactics, lessons, legacies and ghosts, edited by John Dumbrell and David Ryan, has a publication date of 2007. But the 11 essays in this collection predate the announcement of The Surge. But there is real value to looking at contemporary commentary on the Iraq War. Because just as with the Vietnam War, later claims of new perspectives and revisionist history on the war in general can be checked against publications like this.

As the title indicates, the book explores the similarities and differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. One striking thing about both is both involved nation-building and counter-insurgency efforts for which the military were not prepared. Overestimation of American power in those particular situation was a particular problem in the initiation of both wars. Sadly, even with the lessons of the Tonkin Gulf incident and other situations in front of them, the Congress of 2002-3 was just as deferential to Presidential claims, though the falsehoods involved with the Cheney-Bush buildup to the Iraq War make the Tonkin Gulf claims look almost honest. At least there actually were enemy boats in the water in the Tonkin Gulf! A contrast to the non-existence of the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" and the equally non-existent operational ties between Saddam and Al Qa'ida.

Trevor McCrisken of the University of Warwick (UK) has an essay on "No More Vietnams: Iraq and the analogy conundrum" that reminds us that making foreign policy by analogy can be a very perilous business, common as it is. The "Munich analogy" as it has been simplified to near-meaningless in the American political vocabulary has become especially treacherous. McCrisken calls attention a very meaningful lesson from the Vietnam War now there to be relearned from Iraq (and, in 2009, from the escalating "AfPak" War):

If there is an ultimate lesson of the Iraq War it is that it reiterates one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War: there are limits to the power of the United States, particularly in terms of the utility of the use of force.

This is a criticism that both military planners and civilian officials need to take very seriously. Not all of them will.

David Ryan Of University College, Ireland, explores a related problem in "'Vietnam', Victory Culture and Iraq: Struggling with lessons, constraints and credibility from Saigon to Falluja". But Ryan is far too impressed with the underlying assumptions of the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, better known as the Powell Doctrine, that aimed at setting prudent conditions for American military intervention. He doesn't seem to grasp that, in practice, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine was largely a justification for the Pentagon to focus its training, equipment and planning on fighting the Soviet Union - even after the USSR no longer existed - and avoiding future counterinsurgency wars. Worse, he seems to buy the assumption that American public opinion is the great weakness of American military might, and that the Powell Doctrine assumption of short, quick wars is still basically the solution to that perceived problem. He at least notices some of its weaknesses, such as the fact that in the "shock and awe" approach at the beginning of the Iraq War, "US tactics and use of overwhelming force on the ground and from the air was counterproductive." If the goal involves the complete conquest and reconstruction of a country, the military strategy has to take that fully into account.

Marilyn Young concludes her essay, "The Vietnam Laugh Track", with an observation about the idea that ending a war short of total victory somehow dishonors the dead:

A final thought: in Iraq, as in Vietnam, many people are convinced that only victory gives meaning to the (American) lives lost. To stop fighting short of victory is to render meaningless the deaths and maiming suffered thus far. More deaths, more grievous wounds are required to one end only: the making meaningful of the deaths and wounding already suffered. After the war, William Ehrhart asked a Vietnamese general what he thought of the Americans as warriors. After politely praising their bravery, the general named what he saw as their military shortcomings: fixed positions, dependency on air support, and ignorance of the country. 'Would it have mattered if we had done things differently?' Ehrhart asked. No, the general replied, 'Probably not. History was not on your side. We were fighting for our homeland. What were you fighting for?' Ehrhart answered, 'Nothing that really mattered'. George Swiers, returning directly from the battlefield to San Francisco in 1970, remembered how he had 'set out to speak to his Fellow Americans. To share with them his hideous secrets, to tell them what went on daily in their names'. For a short time, the message Swiers and other veterans like him brought home to America, aka the Vietnam syndrome, served as a prophylactic against another Vietnam. In the decades that have passed since Swiers' return home, the hideous secrets have been forgotten, or worse, transformed into memories of virtue, sacrifice and service.'

Americans, the late Gloria Emerson wrote, have 'always been a people who dropped the past and then could not remember where it had been put'. This time, they've put it in Iraq. [my emphasis]

Tags: iraq war, lessons of iraq, lessons of vietnam, vietnam in iraq, vietnam war

Biden talking carelessly on Israel and Iran?

Helena Cobban thinks so: Joe Biden's loose lips Just World News 07/05/09. She criticizes the Vice President for seeming to repeatedly declare his indifference to a military strike by Israel on Iran in a weekend interview with George Stephanopoulos. "Whether we agree or not," Biden said. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that..."

Helena spells out three problems with that idea:

1. The hardware the IDF would use to strike Israel would certainly include US-supplied items, all of which are supplied on the basis of explicit agreements that they will be used only for defensive purposes.
2. As Stephanopoulos was smart enough to point out, the US controls the air-space in Iraq, Saudi, Arabia, and other countries that Israel would need to overfly in any air-launched attack on Iraq.
3. Finally-- and this for me is the clincher--It is US forces, not Israeli forces, that are "on the front-lines" against Iran. If Israel attacks Iran, the Iranian government can justifiably assume, based in part on points 1 and 2 above, that it did so with at least US collusion, if not active US partnership. On this basis Iran would be entitled to respond to any Israeli attack by counter-attacking against not only Israel but also the many, very vulnerable military assets that the US has very near Iran's borders and coastline-- whether in Iraq, in and around the Gulf, or in Afghanistan.

With our troops in Iraq, the United States is part of the neighborhood. And what happens there that affects our position in Iraq is very definitely an American concern.

Tags: helena cobban, iran, israel, joe biden

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566)

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was a Dominican friar and theologian who is remembered today for his eloquent protests over the treatment of the aboriginal populations in what the Spanish conquerers called the New World. A prolific writer, his best-known of many works on the subject is Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias [Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies] of 1552 (written in 1539), the Indies in this case referring to the Caribbean Islands who were the first in the New World to received the decidedly mixed blessings of European Christianity.


The fact that Las Casas and other Dominicans denounced Spanish practices like making unjust war on the aboriginal peoples, forced conversion to Christianity, and the encomienda system, which was the main instrument in Las Casas' time by which the Spanish colonizers subjugated the native peoples into political submission and forced labor, is a powerful reminder that there were Europeans from the start of the settlement of the New World who criticized the practices of the colonizers. And, in the case of Las Casas, made such criticisms over decades and in increasingly sharp terms. So it was possible by the standards of European Christianity in the early-modern decades ("modern" is conventionally dated from 1492) to object to those practices in Spain. And the Spanish version of those standards weren't known for their extreme tolerance, to put it mildly. Las Casas lived during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, the height of Spanish imperial power and expansion, and the Counter-Reformation.

The works of Las Casas are of particular historical interest because of his presence in the New World during much of the first century of European colonization and because of his sympathetic view of the native inhabitants. He first went to the Caribbean in 1502-1507, returned as a chaplain to the Spanish forces that conquered Cuba in 1512 remaining until 1515, made a brief return to the Caribbean in 1517, and then was present in 1522-1540, returned again to the New World where he was selected as Bishop of Chiapas, returned to Spain in 1547 where he participated in a famous coloquium of theologians in which his views on the New World were criticized by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490-1573), and died in Spain in 1566. During his time in the New World, he lived in what is now México, Central America and Peru. Adriano de Utrecht, who became Pope Adrian VI, described Las Casas as "protector universal de todos los indios de las Indias" (universal protector of the Indians of the Indies).

Though the Brevísima relación is his most famous work, he wrote much longer works elaborating the theological and practical bases of his positions on the treatment of the Indians and his opposition to slavery, including Historia de las Indias, Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión, Dieciseis remedios, Historia de las Indias, and Apologética historia sumaria. The December 1974 edition of the Spanish philosophical-literary journal Revista de Occidente was devoted to various essays on the philosophical and theological assumption of the defender of the peoples of the New World.

The essay by André Saint-Lu, "Significación de la denuncia lascasiana", addresses the polemical style of his famous criticisms of Spanish policy in the New World. Defensive historians of Spain have accused Las Casas of gross exageration, but Saint-Lu argues that even though some of the figures he used for populations and geography were too high, that his basic claims were correct and that Las Casas was not deliberately falsifying his data. After all, there was scarcely anything like a comprehensive pre-Columbus census of the native people of the Americas. And there are parts of the continents that remained uncharted well into the 20th century. The criticisms from Las Casas were scarcely embraced by the Spanish monarchs. But they also were neither entirely unwelcome nor completely ineffective. The Spanish military leaders in the New World were a potential source of opposition to the Spanish kings, having as they did access to immense wealth in the conquered territories. His criticisms were influential in the promulgation of the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542 which aimed at abolishing slavery and forced labor by the Indians in the Spanish domains.

John Phelan in "El imperio cristiano de Las Casas, el imperio espanol de Sepúlveda y el imperio milennario de Mendieta" focuses on an aspect that other writers in the Revista agree was central to Las Casas' thought. Las Casas believed that the mission to convert the native people of the Americas to Christianity was the main task of the Spanish and the chief blessing of the discovery of the New World. Although Las Casas specifically opposed the forced conversion of the Indians and argued against the prevailing consensus that Christian nations were justified in conquering pagan nations on the basis of the superiority of the Christian religion. This central focus of the views of Las Casas points once again to the tragic aspects of the European conquest of America, alongside those that were rightly regarded by critics like Las Casas as sinful, wrong and criminal. If views like those of Las Casas had prevailed on Spanish policy after 1492, it would presumably have meant that they would have established colonies in the New World with the aim of trading with the Indian peoples, of which the Incas were the most highly developed in European terms.

But the European diseases to which the native people had no immunity and for which they had no effective medicines would still have likely taken a tremendous toll. Those were the main source of the dying out of much of the native populations in the Americas. That alone would have provoked military clashes between the natives and the colonizers. On top of that, there were the European notions of property and sovereignty, eventual competition by other expansionist European kingdoms, and just plain greed. Add to that the strongly-felt imperative by many Spaniards - including Las Casas and other clerical critics of the Spanish methods - to Christianize the natives.

Las Casas seemed to be persuaded by the notion that many of the Indian peoples were quite receptive to Christianity, and even had knowledge of some primitive version of the True Faith. In this, he was probably deceived as many other Europeans were by the syncretism of so much of native religion, in which accepting Christian baptism or attending Christian services was by no means considered inconsistent with practicing their traditional "pagan" religions. Francis Parkman, one of the few American historians of the 19th century who actually knew a great deal about Indian religions, customs and social structures, has described this huge gap in understanding between the Europeans and the natives of North America in his books like The Jesuits in North America. Las Casas' principled opposition to forced conversion could have given the Spanish conquerers and the Church a way to live more peacefully with the pagan civilizations of the Indians. But these alternative scenarios are so far from what actually happened that a "lascasian" alternative seems downright utopian.

And in philosophical terms, his thought was utopian, as the Revista essays make very clear. Utopian thinking was heavily influential among European Christians at the time. Thomas Moore's De optimo reipublicae statu de que nova insula Utopia was first published in 1516. José Antonio Maravall notes in "Utopía y primitivism en Las Casas" that Las Casas never cites Moore's work, but he also argues that the ideas of Las Casas were closer to those of Moore than perhaps any other thinker. Whether it was by direct influence, indirect influence, common sources of understanding or just the ideas being "in the air" is hard to say. Maravall observes that the inspiration for both came from the very early experience of Spanish colonization in America. Moore objected to the kind of exploitation he saw developing in the New World in the emerging capitalist order, though it wasn't called that until later. Las Casas proposed alternatives to the colonial practices which he considered capable of adoption, based on what Maravall calls the "quasi-natural" mode of agriculture practiced by poor farmers in Spain. He describes Las Casas' vision for New World societies "basadas en la agricultura y sin más que los elementos minimamente necessarios para mantenerlas" (based on agriculture and without more than the minimally necessary elements to maintain them).

This was not a realistic vision. And it was also a vision based on creating societies of (voluntarily) Christianized natives in the Americas organized along a brand of European model, although one less brutal and avaricious than the encomiendo system. The great positive contribution of utopian thinking has been to critique existing or emerging social and political realities in the light of a model that rejects that worst aspects. But since the 16th century, we've had quite a number of examples of utopian thinking degenerating into dystopias of violence and oppression. It doesn't mean that utopian thinking is inherently bad. To borrow a well-known phrase, utopias don't create dystopias, dystopians do. It's just that utopian thinking needs to be handled with the care a loaded gun deserves.

Utopian thinking in Las Casas' time was closely related to eschatologial (End Times) thinking, which was very widespread and influential at the time. Apocalyptic thinking influenced the actions of people and rulers, and influenced the interpretations they put on events. And western Christian Europe had some shattering events in the 1500s, such as the Protestant Reformation, the subsequent Wars of Religion, and the Peasant War in Germany. The discovery and colonization of America was also interpreted as a hopeful sign of the Last Days and the associated Last Judgment. Of course, that didn't stop the Christian monarchs of Europe from lusting after the long-term advantages of colonies in the New World. But such terrestrial considerations could and did coexist with apocalyptic understandings of current history.

Maravall draws on the later concept of Martin Buber to distinguish between eschatology and utopian thinking. The concept of the end of the world in the Jewish and Christian traditions views the approaching end of the world as a consummation brought about by God which produces an exit from history as we know it. (The notion of the "end of history" played an unfortunate role in American foreign policy in recent years, but that's several centuries after Las Casas' time.) Utopian thought envisions a just and peaceful society within the context of human history, where human possibilities produce a society free of the evils of an existing one. Maravall observes that utopian criticisms that are founded in backward-looking ideas from a departing or departed past time can nevertheless produce useful and forward-looking criticisms. And he suggests that the work of Las Casas falls into that category. A more recent example of this phenomenon would be the Christian philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002).

Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552)

John Phelan's essay shows some of the ways that worked with Las Casas. Describing the famous debate in Valladolid in 1550-1551 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, Phelan argues that Las Casas defended a medieval outlook in his late-modern-sounding plea for the fundamental equality of all and his opposition to forced conversion. Those were ideas based in the Aristotelian thinking of Thomas Aquinas. Sepúlveda also based his ideas on Thomist thought, but came to very different conclusion. Sepúlveda, Phelan argues, was actually more modern in his argument in that context, because he defended a notion of the Spanish mission that reflected an emerging Spanish nationalism. (The modern system of nation-states is commonly dated from the Treat of Westfalia in 1848.) Another leading contemporary Spanish theologian, Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525-1604), offered a very different vision. His notion was based on a mystical version of Christianity. But his mysticism led him to argue for the forced conversion of the American natives on the grounds that their conversion would initiate the apocalyse. By contrast, Las Casas used eschatological notions to warn the Spaniards that their misconduct toward the Indians would bring divine judgment onto their heads.

Whether one wishes to regard Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth I of England as the hammers of God in delivering that judgment is a different matter that I won't attempt to explore here. But that prophetic aspect of the work of Las Casas is the focus of Marcel Bataillon in "Las Casas, ¿un profeta?". Bataillon argues that, at least in his later phase dating from the Vallodolid disputation, Las Casas viewed himself in more political than in religious terms, Phelan argues, though he viewed his role in petitioning the Spanish crown for changes in New World policies toward the Indians as being in the tradition of the religious prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew warned their rulers of the consequences of their injustices in the real world of policy toward the poor and weak in their kingdoms, in particular.

A third important element of the lascasian outlook was the notion of the natives of the Americas as examples of the "bien salvaje", the good savage or the good primitive. "Noble savage" is probably a better English translation because that's the form in which the concept is more familiar in the Anglo-Saxon world. The concept didn't begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). It actually goes back to classical Greco-Roman philosophy. Las Casas viewed the Indians of the Americas as noble savages. He drew humane conclusions from that idealization of the native peoples. But the concept also probably inevitably carries an element of paternalistic condescension in thought. And when a group of people are viewed as some utopian idea and then they turn out to be just as ignoble and "savage" as the civilized peoples are, idealization can easily transform into demonization instead. But this concept of the Americas as an unspoiled land populated by noble savages was a very widespread and influential one in Europe, and heavily influenced Las Cosas.

The essay by Jose Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Las Casas y Carranza: fe y utopía" compares the thinking of Las Casas and one of his contemporary partisans, Bartolomé Carranza (1503-1576), who endured a long heresy trial over his Comentarios sobre el catecismo cristiano (1558), which focused on issues of Church governance and practice. Carranza was eventually acquitted, but was required to renounce portions of that work. Carranza's experience is yet another example of the limits of dissent, even for prominent Churchmen in that time. Las Casas passionately defended his friend Carranza to the Inquisition. Tellechea Idígoras makes a comment that is reflective of the prophetic nature of Las Cazas' life's work: "Su voz es incómoda, entonces y ahora" (His voice is uncomfortable, then and now). Comforting the comfortable was definitely not the mission to which Bartolomé de las Casas devoted his life.

Tags: bartolomé de las casas, españa, spain

That sure didn't take long!

"Give 'Em Whine Harry" Reid, alleged Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate, is already rolling out his excuses for why he can't get Democratic programs through even with a "veto-proof" majority of 60. From What’s So Super About a Supermajority? by Carl Hulse New York Times 07/01/09:

“We have 60 votes on paper,” Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said Wednesday in an interview. “But we cannot bulldoze anybody; it doesn’t work that way. My caucus doesn’t allow it. And we have a very diverse group of senators philosophically. I am not this morning suddenly flexing my muscles.”

If we could get a real Senate Majority Leader in his place, I'd gladly hand Give-'Em-Whine Harry to the Republicans. That would give the Dems "only" a 59-vote majority. But anyone who was willing to act like a real partisan leader could get pretty much all the Democratic programs through, including Obama's appointments, with a majority like Reid has had this year. Then they wouldn't have to whine. Or promise not to flex their "muscles", a statement premised on the claim that Reid actually has any real Democratic "muscles" to flex.

The batty notion that the Dems should choose majority leaders from marginal Democratic states is just nuts. The Nancy Pelosi model is much better. As a Democrat from San Francisco, the only electoral challenge she would really have to worry about would come if she weren't partisan and progressive enough.

Tags: harry reid, democratic party, democrats