Libya as Afghanistan, circa 1979

Robert Fisk reports in America's secret plan to arm Libya's rebels The Independent 03/07/2011:

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a "day of rage" from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington's highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago. ...

The Saudis have been told that opponents of Gaddafi need anti-tank rockets and mortars as a first priority to hold off attacks by Gaddafi's armour, and ground-to-air missiles to shoot down his fighter-bombers. [my emphasis]

The Saudis certainly set up an effective network for financing and delivering arms to rebels backed by the United States in Afghanistan in 1979 and on a much bigger scale after St. Reagan took office in 1981. A Saudi billionaire's son who was later to become famous worldwide was a big player in that effort, Osama bin Laden. The particular toxic mix of Islamic fundamentalism and politics that became Al Qai'da's brand of jihadism was forged in the Afghanistan War against the Soviet Union.

But Libya's a different country. What could go wrong with this plan?

Tags: libya

Neocons "heart" war - in Libya, Iran, wherever

Neocons, always interested in encouraging war and more war, are jumping on the opportunity they see presented by the revolution now turned to civil war in the major oil state of Libya to do what they do best and apparently like the most, warmongering for United States military intervention. David Dayen has some recent news on the Obama Administration's current position on military intervention: US Mulls Limited Intervention in Libya FDL News 03/07/2011.

As we should all learn from the neocons' support of the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions in the 1990s and their drumbeat of demands to resume war against Iraq essentially from the moment the shooting stopped in the Gulf War of 1991, these folks play the long game. Kosovo was a sideshow to them. Iraq was the main event. For the 2010's, Libya is their current "Kosovo", a sideshow on the road to the main event of war against Iran.

The National Interest, published by the Nixon Center and a journal friendly to the Realist school of foreign policy thought, carries Jacob Heilbrunn's on The GOP's Neocon Addiction to War 03/07/2011.

Why has the GOP become addicted to war? The default response of the party to almost any international conflict has been to argue that America should intervene, or, to use a less polite term, intrude into what amounts, more often than not, to a domestic dispute. Add the political capital that congressional leaders and presidential aspirants believe can be derived from pummeling a Democratic president for passivity, appeasement, and you have a recipe for embroiling America in messy foreign conflicts.

This is a brand of militarism which is very much a feature of today's Republican Party and all too much a feature of the Democratic Party, as well.

Heilbrunn clearly thinks a Libya war would be a bad idea. But then he breezily assets, "Maybe a no-fly zone could be established with NATO. But this is not the time for America to come swaggering in by itself." The NATO intervention in Afghanistan is a genuinely multilateral one, although Dick Cheney and George Bush declined to make it a NATO operation from the initial intervention in 2001 because unilateral swagger and shooting and bombing and torture were what they wanted to do. Did I mention that this intervention started in 2001, now close to ten years ago, with no end in sight?

Neoconservative cheerleader Bobo Brooks has been eagerly pushing for war on Libya on the PBS Newshour and Meet the Press. The bold Maverick McCain, who generally follows the neocon foreign policy direction, was on This Week pumping for war on Sunday, too. Jim Lobe at Neo-Con Hawks Take Flight over Libya LobeLog Foreign Policy 02/25/2011 reports how the current cutting-edge neocon organization, Foriegn Policy Initiative (FPI), presented a statement encouraging preparations for military intervention in Libya, whose signatories included quite a few names familiar for having been so disastrously wrong about invading Iraq: Elliott Abrams, Eric Edelman, John Hannah, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Sen. Joe Lieberman, the bold Maverick McCain, Dan Senor (who is married to former CNN celebrity reporter Campbell Brown), Marc Thiessen, Peter Wehner, and Paul Wolfowitz.

I plan to post more from another piece from The National Interest by the leading Realist foreign policy theorist, John Mearsheimer, Imperial by Design 12/16/2010 (Jan/Feb 2011 issue). He describes from a Realist perspective what the post-Cold War grand strategy options for the United States were. The one which Old Man Bush's Administration (in which Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense) adopted, and which the Clinton Administration continued, Mearsheimer calls "global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda."

I'm a grudging fan of the Realist approach, although it's not the main way I look at international issues. But Mearsheimer's account of the problems in US foreign policy the last two decades is very perceptive. And he explains that within the global dominance strategy, there are two major variants that have predominated:

There is ... an important disagreement among global dominators about how best to achieve their strategy’s goals. On one side are the neoconservatives, who believe that the United States can rely heavily on armed force to dominate and transform the globe, and that it can usually act unilaterally because American power is so great. Indeed, they tend to be openly contemptuous of Washington’s traditional allies as well as international institutions, which they view as forums where the Lilliputians tie down Gulliver. Neoconservatives see spreading democracy as a relatively easy task. For them, the key to success is removing the reigning tyrant; once that is done, there is little need to engage in protracted nation building.

On the other side are the liberal imperialists, who are certainly willing to use the American military to do social engineering. But they are less confident than the neoconservatives about what can be achieved with force alone. Therefore, liberal imperialists believe that running the world requires the United States to work closely with allies and international institutions. Although they think that democracy has widespread appeal, liberal imperialists are usually less sanguine than the neoconservatives about the ease of exporting it to other states. As we set off to remake the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these principles of global dominance set the agenda. [my emphasis]

I don't agree with the global dominance strategy, so that means I have to be cranky about many of the foreign policy choices of both parties. But there's obviously a big difference between a reality-based perspective that has some recognition of the limits of American power and a healthy caution about going into a foreign country and start bombing and shooting people, and the neocons' testosterone dreams of easy, short and invariably successful imperial expeditions.

In practice, a no-fly zone is an act of international war that the United States should not blunder into. It's plausible that in the midst of days-old civil war, a no-fly zone could provide a significant boost to the rebels. But once we've taken sides in a civil war, we would inevitably have to worry about who actually comes out on top in that conflict and how or if we will support them militarily. And, of course, once we were involved militarily, the temptation to assure the best possible deals for American oil multinationals would be great. (Not that I would suggest that oil has anything to do with US foreign policy!) As Bill Clinton found out with the Somalia intervention that Old Man Bush started in the final months of his Presidency, mission creep is a very real problem in such matters.

It's also worth remembering that the US and Britain maintained no-fly zones over large parts of Iraq from 1991-2003. They involved a considerable amount of firing of rockets at ground targets, which rose to the level of a short but very serious air war in late 1998, creepily dubbed Operation Desert Fox by the PR wizards in the Pentagon. The no-fly zone represented a continuing military commitment which gave plausibility to the neocons' war agitation against Iraq and which effectively deferred any feasible improvement of diplomatic relations with Iraq. A no-fly zone is a big deal, not "just" a no-fly zone.

Michael Tomasky gives us a useful contrast between the way British historian Timothy Garton Ash approaches the question of military intervention in Libya and how Marty Peretz, formerly the hawkish editor and still publisher of The New Republic, approach the question: Garton Ash and Peretz on Libya: case studies Guardian 03/07/2011.

Tags: libya, militarism

Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (2 of 2)

Karl Löwith (1897-1973)

This is the second of two parts of a discussion of Karl Löwith's 1941 book, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Marx und Kierkegaard (I'm working here from the second edition of 1949).

Hegel's historical scheme of development implied that history had reached a kind of culmination point. His successors and contemporaries were very much influenced by the religiously founded but secularly oriented end-times mood of Hegel's philosophical system. Including Marx and Kierkegaard. Löwith writes of their respective works, The Communist Manifesto (1847, in Löwith's dating) and the Literary Applications (1846):

Dieser Gegansatz bedeutet aber geschichtlich betrachtet nur zwei Seiten einer gemeinsamen Destruktion der bürgerlich-christlichen Welt. Zur Revolution der bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Welt hat sich Marx auf die Masse des Proletariats gestützt, während Kierkegaard in seinem Kampf gegen die bürgerlich-christliche Welt alles auf den Enzelnen setzt. Dem entspricht, daß für Marx die bürgerliche Gesellschaft eine Gesellschaft von "vereinzelten Einzelnen" ist, in welcher der Mensch seinem "Gattungswesen" entfremdet ist, und für Kierkegaard die Christenheit ein massenhaft verbreitetes Christentum, in dem niemand ein Nachfolger Christi ist.

[But this opposition {between the viewpoints of Marx and Kierkegaard} merely represents two sides of a common destruction of the bourgeois-Christian world. Marx counted on the masses of the proletariat {working class} for a revolution of the bourgeois-capitalist world, while Kierkegaard in his fight against the bourgeois-Christian world staked everything on the single individual. This corresponds to the fact that for Marx, bourgeois society is a society of "isolated individuals" in which the person is alienated from his "genus essence," and for Kierkegaard Christianity is a widely disseminated institutional Christianity in which no one is a follower of Christ.]

Löwith brings a range of 19th century philosophers into the discussion of the longer-range implications and development of Hegel's thinking in addition to Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, especially Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), Max Stirner (1806-1856) and David Friedrich Strauß (1808-1874). Those five were among the Left Heglelians, as were Marx and Friedrich Engels also. The Left Hegelians developed the implications for social theory and radical politics. Bauer, Feuerbach and Strauß were also important in developing the historical-critical school of Biblical studies, which American fundamentalist would later deride as "Higher Criticism."

The Old Hegelians Löwith discusses only briefly, in the persons four of the most important: Rudolf Haym (1821-1901), Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805-1892), and Kuno Fischer (1824-1907) and Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879). Of Rosenkranz, Löwith approvingly cites Arnold Ruge's comment that he was "by far the freest Old Hegelian." He notes that originally, Old Hegelian referred to Hegel's direct students who propagated his ideas during Hegel's lifetime. But, he writes, “For the historical movement of the 19th century, they are without significance.” And he provides a short discussion of New Hegelians like Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Julius Ebbinghaus (1885-1981), Richard Kroner (1884-1974), Georg Lasson (1862-1932), Johann Max Emanuel Plenge (1874-1963), Heinrich Scholz (1884-1956) and Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915).

Löwith has a fascinating section comparing the perspectives of Hegel and Goethe on history. He uses the comparison to raise several issue about the grand theories of history from both Hegel himself and his followers, which also had great influence on those who were not admirers or followers of Hegel. Löwith argues that Hegel's concept of world history, by which the World Spirit develops in ever greater stages of freedom, is essentially Christian teleology dressed up in more scientific trappings. It contains within it the danger of arrogance in having people assuming they understand the nature of history and the direction it is going and needs to go. Hegel's concept of the world-historical individual carries with it the risk over over-estimating the significance as well as the virtues of the showy and the powerful.

Löwith also sees an element of Hegel's view of history that celebrates the successful in the form of the dominant and powerful, a variant of which can look a lot like Social Darwinism. Or, as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher put it, "God intended the great to be great and the little to be little.” As a caution against such a view, Löwith quotes Nietzsche, "Der Erfolg war immer der größte Lügner" ("Success has always been the biggest liar.")

And Löwith raises an important point about Hegel's theory that neither his more traditional-minded nor his more radical followers in the 19th century were inclined to challenge: Hegel's philosophy assumed a sharp distinction between humanity and Nature, between the person as Subject and Nature as object. This sharp distinction has long since become highly problematic. Löwith makes the point well through a contrast of Hegel's view of history to Goethe's:

Hegel hat seine Vorlesung über die "Philosophie der Geschichte" in den Jahren 1822/3-1830/1 vorgetragen. Die Einleitung dazu erklärt das Prinzip seiner Betrachtung, welches die stufenweise Entfaltung des Geistes und mithin der Freiheit ist. Der Geist, welcher als Weltgeist die Weltgeschichte beherrscht, ist gegenüber der Natur negative, d. h. der Fortschritt in der Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit ist ein solcher in der Befreiung von der Gebundenheit an die Natur. Die Natur als solche hat daher in Hegels Philosophie der Geschichte keine selbständige und positive Bedeutung. Sie ist nicht der Grund der Geschichte der Welt, sondern nur ihr geographischer Boden. Das naturgegebene Verhältnis von Land und Meer, die Gestaltung der Küsten, der Hochländer und Ebenen, der Lauf der Flüsse und die Form der Berge, Regen und Trockenheit, das heiße, kalte und gemäßigte Klima – das alles ist zwar immer von Einfluß auf das geschichtliche Leben der Menschen, aber es nie schlechtweg bestimmend. Dem "Naturtypus" einer bestimmten "Lokalität" entspricht Typus und Charakter des darin lebenden Volkes, weil sich der Geist überhaupt in Zeit und Raum auseinanderlegt. Diese Entsprechungen zwischen der natürlichen und der geistigen Welt hat Hegel oft bis ins Eizelne ausgeführt. Im Prinzip galt ihm die Natur aber doch nur als der natürliche "Schauplatz" des geistigen Geschehens der Welt. Für Goethe ist die Natur der Schlüssel für dessen Verständnis.

[Hegel delivered his lectures on the "Philosophy of History" in the years 1822/3-1830/1. The Introduction to them declares the principle of his treatment, which is the stage-by-stage unfolding of the Spirit and with it freedom. Nature as such has here no self-standing and positive meaning in Hegel's philosophy of history. It is not the basis of the history of the world, but rather only its geographical grounds. The naturally established relationship of land and sea, the formations of the coasts, the highlands and the plains, the course of the rivers and the form of the mountains, rain and dryness, the hot, cold and mild climate – all of that is certainly always an influence on the historical life of humanity, but never absolutely determines it. The "natural type" of a particular "locality" corresponds to the type and character of the people living there, because the Spirit lays itself out in time and space in any case. Hegel often explained these influences between the natural and the spiritual world in detail. But in principle, he held Nature to be only the natural "showplace" of the spiritual occurrences of the world. For Goethe, Nature is the key to its understanding.]

Nietzsche

Löwith has written extensively on Nietzsche's philosophy in other works as well as this one. Nietzsche, even more so than Hegel, suffered from association with National Socialism in both Anglo-Saxon and orthodox Marxism-Leninism traditions. In a reflection of the latter, Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995), who was persecuted as a dissident Marxist in Communist East Germany, wrote even in the late 1980s about Nietzsche as a hidebound reactionary in "Revision des marxistischen Nietzschebilds?" Sinn und Form 5/1987 (Sept/Okt). Writers from Leon Uris to Walter Kaufmann have written at length about the problems with such an interpretation. In the philosophical tradition in which Löwith and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were working, Nietzsche’s thought was seen as a source of valuable insights, though scarcely accepted uncritically. (Is it possible to accept Nietzsche's thinking uncritically?) Psychoanalysis also has generally had a high regard for Nietzsche’s psychological insights.

Löwith in this book gives a succinct definition of what he sees as Nietzsche’s philosophical system:

Nietzsches eigentlicher Gedanke ist ein Gedanken-System, an dessen Anfang der Tod Gottes, in dessen Mitte der aus ihm hervorgegangene Nihilismus und an dessent Ende die Selbstüberwindung des Nihilismus zur ewigen Wiederkehr steht.

[Nietzsche's real though is a thought system, in whose beginning stands the death of God, in whose middle stands the nihilism that proceeds from it and at whose end stands the self-unwinding of nihilism in the eternal return.]

Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return had to do with the idea that a person would live his life again and again in exactly the same way. Löwith takes that concept as a sign of how indebted Nietzsche's thinking always remained to Christianity:

Sie ist ein ausgesprochener Religionsersatz und nicht weniger als Kierkegaards christliches Paradox ein Ausweg aus der Verzweiflung: ein Versuch aus dem "Nichts" in "Etwas" zu kommen.

[It is an outspoken substitute for religion and not less than Kierkegaard’s Christian paradox a way out of despair: an attempt to get to "something" out of the "nothing."]

Löwith also spends some time on aspects of the work of Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891), Nietzsche’s close friend Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905) and Georges Sorel (1847-1922).

Löwith in the final section of his book focuses on "The Problem of Christianity." Löwith's discussion of Kierkegaard uses three different German words that all translate into "Christianity" in English: Christlichkeit, Christenheit, Christentum. Christlichkeit in the chapter title isn’t much of a problem. But Kierkegaard used terms that translate into German as Christenheit, by which he meant the present state of the Christian institutional churches, and Christentum, which he regarded as the true, original core of Christianity.

Both the real nature of Christianity and the state of institutional Christianity are problems with which the thinkers of this time were concerned, not only Kierkegaard. Löwith here calls attention to the heavily Protestant cast of 19th century German philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Strauß, calling again on Nietzsche, who wrote, "Der protestantische Pfarrer is Großvater der deutschen Philosophie, der Protestantismus selbst ihr peccatum originale." ("The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself its peccatum originale [Original Sin].")

Tags: goethe, hegel, karl löwith, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche

Down to the wire on the California budget

Thursday March 10 is the deadline for the California state legislature to vote to put a tax extension on the June ballot, which Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed as part of his package to close the projected state's approximately $25 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011-12 starting July 1. He proposes $10 billion in cuts, $10 billion in tax extensions and $5 billion in one-time fund shifts to cover one-time expenses.

As Kevin Yamamura explains in this article, Brown's Countdown, Day 51: As deadline looms, hurdles remain Sacramento Bee 03/01/2011, March 10 isn't a hard-and-fast drop-dead date for this action. That's a goalpost based on the time it takes for the Governor to call a special election and then go through the process of actually holding the election.

The Bee has been doing a daily article in a countdown which Brown established for himself of getting a budget plan in place within the first 60 days of his term. March 10 will be day 60. The Democrats are ready for a floor vote on Wednesday, March 9, that is expected to pass Brown's plan, even the highly controversial closing down of local redevelopment agencies.

In the day 55 article, How the state budget has changed 03/05/2011, the Bee's Jack Chang explains the actual state of alleged runaway government spending (if you believe the Republicans' endless chant to that effect):

The general fund portion of the state budget proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown spends $5.05 per $100 of personal income earned statewide. That's the lowest amount since the 1972-73 budget year, when Ronald Reagan was governor and state spending per $100 of personal income was $5.01.

This is a dramatic and heartening contrast to the national scene, where the Democrats are falling all over them to compromise with Republicans no matter how intransigent the Republicans are. And the Democratic leadership, especially the White House right now, refuses to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans' obstructionist wrecker tactics.

Tags: california politics, democratic party, jerry brown

Jerry Brown putting California Republicans on the spot over state budget deficit

The Republicans in the California state legislature, not surprisingly, are stalling on coming to terms with Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democrats over the state budget. Brown has asked for a legislative action that would be needed this month to put a referendum on the June ballot for a statewide vote on extending some current taxes to cover $10 billion of the projected 2011-12 budget deficit, and have $10 billion covered by permanent cuts.

But Jerry, unlike too many other Democratic politicians, is willing to call out the Republican obstructionists and tell them to put up or shut up. Dan Morain reported some good examples in Brown: It's time to take a risk Sacramento Bee 02/27/2011:

In this coarsening partisan scene, California's septuagenarian governor took the extraordinary step of entering the legislators' lair the other day, and engaging in a civil conversation about this state's never-ending budget crisis.

"When you folks say, 'No, no vote, no plan, no,' that is not America," Jerry Brown told legislators. "It is not acceptable, and it is not loyalty to California." ...

If the tax plan fails, Brown warned, he will answer with an all-cuts budget that will erase the deficit. Every state service would face reductions. Not that we should suspend skepticism, but Brown certainly seems serious.

"I don't want to be here for four years, and play games," Brown told the joint Assembly-Senate budget conference committee. "We've got to meet the moment of truth now. I would ask that all of you help me in that process."

Jerry is sticking with his Josiah Roycian theme of loyalty to the community. And he's not flinching from head-to-head confrontation with the Republicans over the deficit issue.

Former presidential candidate Brown understands ambition. Sure, legislators take risks by taking stands. But maybe they should grow some spine, as Brown urged:

"America is facing a real challenge, the trillions of deficits, over-extension all over the world. Where is the leadership? All they do is fight over who is going to be the next congressmen, the next president, the next senator.

"I have played the games you all play. I'm telling you time is running out for California and this country if politicians just keep squabbling all the time. You've got to get out of your comfort zone." ...

Brown needs Republican support to place the tax package measure on the ballot and directed most of his comments at the legislative hearing to Republicans.

When Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, complained that Democratic legislators weren't cutting enough, Brown urged: "If you can find some better (cuts), then come on down. I'll be glad to talk about it."

When Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of Orange County asked for "some pension reform, some regulatory relief," Brown urged horse-trading, a quaint concept.

"This is your chance to make (Democrats) do something they don't to do. You have to step up and do something you don't want to do," Brown said.

"We can't go there," Harkey said, keeping true to her anti-tax pledge. [my emphasis]

This kind of confrontation with the Republican wrecker Party is what the Democratic needs to be doing over and over.

Tags: california politics, jerry brown

Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (1 of 2)

Karl Löwith (1897-1973) was a German philosopher who shared a great deal with the Frankfurt School in his perspective on philosophy, having studied under Martin Heidegger and giving special attention to Nietzsche and the Hegelian tradition in his life's work. He also shared a great deal biographically with other Frankfurt School notables. Although he was a Protestant Christian by baptism, under the Nazi standards he was considered Jewish by descent and left Germany in 1934, living and working first in Italy, then Japan, then the United States (Theological Seminar of Hartford, New School for Social Research in New York), returning to Germany in 1952 and finishing his academic career at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

His concerns with Nietzsche and the Hegelian tradition are both very much visible in his book Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Marx und Kierkegaard (first published 1941; I’m working here from the second edition of 1949). The "Marx and Kierkegaard" of the subtitle is somewhat misleading. He gives a great deal of attention to both in the book, but as part of Hegelian tradition as it was reflected in a line of thinkers up to Nietzsche, and to some extent beyond.

Marx and Kierkegaard represent for Löwith the two extreme sides in the development of Hegel's basic thought as it applies to society, while Nietzsche represented a different fundamental perspective on the present world. (All translations here are mine.)

Marx und Kierkegaard war die Welt fremd geworden, in die sich Hegel noch "eingehaust" hatte; sie waren hinüber und hinaus, oder "absurd" und "transzendierend," wie Goethe den kommenden Geist des Jahrhunderts benannt hat. Und vollends Nietzsche war nirgends mehr zu Hause, sondern ein "Übergang" und ein "Untergang," so daß er sogar im griechischen Dasein nicht mehr die existierende Heimatlichkeit und den plastischen Sinn erkannte, sondern nur noch das tragische Pathos und den Geist der ihm durch Wagners Modernität inspirierten Musik.

[The world had become foreign to Marx and Kierkegaard, in which Hegel had “made himself at home”; they were beyond and outside, or “absurd” and “transcendent”, as Goethe called the coming spirit of the century. And finally Nietzsche was no longer at home anywhere, rather he was a “going-over” and a “downfall”, so that even in the Greek mode of existence he no longer recognized the no longer existing being-at-home and the three-dimensional sense, but rather only the tragic pathos and the spirit of modernity as he was exposed to it in Wagner’s music.]

Löwith provides a good discussion of Hegel's concept of history, particularly his famous/infamous statement that the real is rational. He also compares Goethe’s concept of history with Hegel's, finding Goethe's sympathetic while not quite rejecting Hegel's notion of broader historical laws. And he gives a very good summary of Nietzsche's thought, providing yet another reminder that even refugees from Nazism like himself and Max Horkheimer did not buy into the Nazis pseudo-scholarship claiming that Nietzsche was an intellectual predecessor of National Socialism.

Hegel

Hegel famously wrote in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig": "What is rational, that is real; and what is real, that is rational." This has caused much metaphoric shredding of clothing and gnashing of teeth on the part of later scholars and ideologists. As Löwith puts it:

Wir können uns heute nur noch schwer den ganzen Ernst des Streites und die tiefe Erregung vergegenwärtigen, die dieser Satz schon zu Hegels Lebzeiten ausgelöst hat, weil wir als Erben des 19.Jahrhunderts unter der "Wirklichkeit" vollendete "Tatscachen" and "Realitäten" eines Realismus verstehen, der erst nach dem Zerfall des Hegelschen Real-Idealismus hervortreten konnte.

[Today, it is only with difficulty that we can get an immediate sense of the complete seriousness and the deep agitation that this sentence had already set off during Hegel’s lifetime. Because we as the heirs of the 19th century understand by "reality" finished "facts" and "realities" of a realism that could only emerge after the collapse of the Hegelian Real-Idealism.]

I still remember an undergraduate political theory text I had that used the controversial sentence to justify including an excerpt from Hegel together with one from Mussolini (!?!) in a chapter on "Cult of the State" or something similar.

Wrong-headed as it is to lump Hegel in with Mussolini in such a way, it has been a common thing in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, though hopefully it has fallen into disrepute now. Both the lazy anti-German version of Anglo-American Hegel scholarship and the post-Second World War Soviet-line Marxist versions shared something of this attitude, which was derived from the Left Hegelians. Their criticism was correct in so far as Hegel did see his philosophy in his later years as supporting the existing Prussian forms of royal rule.

The earlier Soviet scholar David Riazanov (1870-1938) expressed a more realistic view of this aspect of Hegel's philosophy in his Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1927 English version). Riazanov was head of the Marx-Engels-Institute in Moscow from 1920 to 1930 and worked on the comprehensive German edition of the works of Marx and Engels known as MEGA, from the German initials for Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Riazanov worked with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. He later fell out of official favor in Russia, and died in 1938. In his 1927 book, he wrote of Hegel’s philosophy:

Hegel regarded every phenomenon as a process, as something that is forever changing, something that is forever developing. Every phenomenon is not only the result of previous changes, it also carries within itself the germ of future changes. It never halts at any stage. The equilibrium attained is disturbed by a new conflict, which leads to a higher reconciliation, to a higher synthesis, and to a still further dichotomy on a still higher plane. Thus, it is the struggle between opposites that is the source of all development.

(That passage from Riazanov uses the conventional terms of "synthesis" and "dichotomy", which aren't necessarily the best for describing Hegelian dialectic; "ablation" [Aufheben] and "contradiction" would be preferable, respectively. But they work well enough in that passage for our purposes here.)

In Hegelian philosophical terms, "the real" (Wirklichkeit; or "the actual," as it is also translated) is the unity of essence (Wesen) and existence. The appearance, the outward form that we experience and perceived as immediate fact, is not fully expressive of the inner truth, the essence, of a thing. In Hegel's dialectical understanding, processes develop by the essence continually emerging into outer form. In the Science of Logic, Hegel describes essence as the "unendliche Bewegung des Seins" (unending movement of Being). Hegel also says (Encyclopedia of 1831 § 112) that "mere appearance" is Being that has been ablated (aufgehobenes, preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level). What we see, in other words, what we today understand by "the real," is only part of what Hegel understood as the real.

As Löwith notes, Left Hegelians like Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx shared the Hegelian understanding of the Real as the unity of essence and existence, though they criticized the conservative conclusions that Hegel drew from it for social development toward the end of his life.

Löwith explains that the concept has a theological dimension, as well:

Den Theologen, meint Hegel, müßte der Satz ohne weiteres einleuchtend sein, weil ihn die Lehre von der göttlichen Weltregierung doch selber schon ausspreche, und die Philosophen müßten so viel Bildung haben zu wissen "nicht nur, daß Gott wirklich", sondern daß er "das Wirklichste, daß er allein wahrhalt wirklich" ist. Die Gleichsetzung der Vernunft mit der Wirklichkeit begründet sich also – ebenso wie die Wirksamkeit der "Idee" – aus einer Philosophie, die zugleich Theologie ist und deren Endzweck es ist: durch die Erkenntnis der Übereinstimmung des Göttlichen und des Weltlichen die Versöhnung der "selbstbewußten Vernunft" mit der "seienden Vernunft," d.i. der Wirklichkeit, endlich hervorzubringen. Die Wahrheit von Hegels Versöhnung der Vernunft mit der Wirklichkeit wurde von Ruge und Feuerbach, von Marx und von Kierkegaard in einer Weise betstritten, die auch schon die Argumente von Haym bis zu Dilthy vorwegnahm.

[To the theologian, thought Hegel, the sentence must be enlightening without anything further said, because the teaching of the divine rule of the world has already expressed it. And the philosophers must have enough education to know "not only that God is real," but also that he is "the most real, that He alone is truly real." The equation of reason with reality is founded therefore – just like the effectiveness of the "Idea" – on a philosophy that at the same time is a theology and whose end goal it is: through the perception of the agreement of the divine and the earthly, to finally bring forth the reconciliation of the "self-conscious reason" with the "becoming reason," that is, the reality. The truth of Hegel's reconciliation of reason and reality was contested by Ruge and Feuerbach, by Marx and by Kierkegaard, in a manner that also anticipated the arguments from Haym until Dilthey.]

Tags: hegel, karl löwith, von hegel zu nietzsche

Frankfurt School, 1938: Big trends in American history writing

The 3/1938 number of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung includes a review in German by F.N. Howard of several contemporary histories in which he discusses three major trends over time in American historical writing.

One he describes as history-writing with "an outspoken epical character," which was dominant from roughly 1825-1875. He gives as examples George Bancroft (1800-91), Francis Parkman (1823-93), William Prescott (1796-1859) and John Lothrop Motley (1814-77). "History was the medium," he writes, "through which they enunciated their social and political philosophy." They wrote in an epic style about big events like the American Revolution and the conquest of Mexico and Peru. "They engaged monarchy, slavery, mercantilism." And they depicted the course of American history as "a path to freedom and happiness blessed by God."

And their taking of positions on certain issues was "open and clear." For instance, the "fight of the Puritans against the despotism of the Tudors and Stuarts." These historians and their approaches had their drawbacks. "Their scholarship was often not that great, their categories not all that exact, their judgments were often determined by particular interests."

During the last quarter of the 19th century and through the First World War or so, historians like John Fiske (1842-1901) and James Ford Rhodes (1848-1927) challenged this optimistic view. The result wasn’t a more progressive outlook. "The American Revolution loses its heroic qualities and became almost a gentleman's affair. Democracy, freedom, equality remain magical words; but their content became more and more non-specific." They also tended "to lose themselves in endless details of diplomatic, military and political histories." He gives credit to Henry Adams (1838-1918), James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936), Charles Beard (1874-1948) and Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) for bringing in more progressive perspectives and social history. But Howard argues that their progressive influence was limited.

Howard characterizes the period from around the First World War to the time he was writing (1938) as one in which a nominally non-partisan and value-free specialization dominated American history writing. "The times of the dramatic and didactic history writing about men who had actively taken part in the political and ideological fight are over. ... The writer of history has become a specialist.” This type of historian "fetishizes his nonpartisanship." They use a positivist methodology and avoid sweeping historical narrative. Consistent with the general Frankfurt School criticism of positivism and a supposedly value-free perspective, he argues that such historians fail to do what he argues is the most decisive thing for history writing: "by their ability to reconstruct the social reality in its dynamics."

But, as he points out, partisanship can hide behind this positivist nonpartisanship. He observes, "The history writers of the 19th century were all bitter opponents of slavery." He overstates the case here, because slavery apologists had their own spokespeople, though none of them rose to the stature of a Francis Parkman. "Now historians like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips [1877-1934] and his students are now undertaking to show the slaves, after the first violent deeds had finally been overcome [apparently meaning the slave trade] for the most part actually not treated badly."

He concludes by noting that, fortunately, there were opposing trends in history-writing in America at that time.

Tags: f n howard,frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, us history

Beltway blather about public debt

David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark Shields hold forth here about the alleged horrors of public debt, with the unstated implications that people other than billionaires and star TV pundits will have to suffer in order to right this scary, scary debt problem. The liberal Sleepy Mark reflects of the great foresight of, uh, Ross Perot on debt:



Bobo thinks we should go to war in Libya. He doesn't mention any concerns about boosting the debt in connection with yet another neocon war wetdream. Sleepy Mark manages to state fairly coherently why that would be a seriously-to-disastrously bad idea. Bobo and his neocon friends never tire of advocating wars for other people for other people to kill and die in. Bobo is here spinning a boys-with-toys fantasy and making a quick-and-easy strike in Libya, which in neocon fantasy-world would then magically create democracy.

But this bipartisan consensus among the punditocracy and even, sad to say, in Congress and the White House that it's a dandy idea to slash domestic public outlays in the early stages of a fragile and slow-moving recovery is just remarkable for its disconnect with the practical needs of the moment.

Tags: david brooks, mark shields

Patriotic self-censorship by journalists (or celebrity reporters) and historians

An article that more than balances Gabriel's Ladeen's shut-up-and-cheer-for-the-wars-I-support piece is Stephen Walt's Reporters, scholars, and patriots Foreign Policy 03/02/2011. He's discussing the admission by some reporters that they self-censor their national security reporting out of patriotism or even jingoism.

Acknowledging the classical case of a need for the press to maintain secrecy in the case of reporting troop movement in a war zone, Walt explains why such patriotic self-censorship is problematic for reporters and scholars as well:

First, it is a common error to equate "patriotism" or "love of country" with deference to or support for the policies of the government. In fact, the main justification for a free press in a democracy rests on the assumption that it will take a skeptical, even adversarial, attitude towards the government and its policies. ...

The second problem with the idea that journalists should let their "patriotism" guide their coverage is that it assumes reporters know ex ante what is really "good for the country." I suspect Judith Miller and the other journalists who parroted the Bush administration's bogus case for war with Iraq thought they were serving the national interest by doing so. In reality, however, they were helping pave the road to a national disaster. When reporters allow a misguided sense of patriotism to interfere with their critical judgments, in short, it is more likely that the "national interest" will be subverted rather than served.

And he makes a similar point about the risk of blowback from foreign policy and how citizens actually need to know about operations that can produce such negative consequences:

Finally, when journalists indulge in "patriotic self-censorship," they by definition end up deceiving their fellow citizens in ways that can be deeply if unintentionally harmful. If Americans are not fully informed about what their government is doing (i.e., because clandestine activities are concealed by the government or by sympathetic journalists), then citizens have no way of knowing how much a military campaign or other foreign policy initiative is really costing us. If we don't know how much the country is doing, we have no way to gauge whether the results are consonant with the level of effort. Equally important, when we don't know what our government is up to, we have no way of knowing why other societies are reacting as they are and we become more vulnerable to "blowback" (i.e., hostile backlashes whose true origins have been concealed). [my emphasis]

The jingo argument that Gabriel Ledeen makes effectively dismisses the idea that citizens should be passing judgment on anything our glorious generals may be doing in the name of "war."

He also makes an important point about patriotic distortion in professional history-writing:

This same principle applies to other purveyors of knowledge -- including scholars -- and sometimes with tragic results. In a classic International Security article ("Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War"), historian Holger Herwig showed how government officials and historians in the Weimar Republic actively colluded to whitewash Germany's role in causing World War I. Their goal was to absolve Germany of blame for the war and thus to undermine the Versailles Treaty, and no doubt these Germans believed they were doing their patriotic duty. Alas, their efforts unwittingly reinforced Germany's unwarranted sense of victimization, smoothed Adolf Hitler's path to power, and undermined Western resolve in the face of Nazi revisionism. What they thought was an act of patriotism was actually helping plunge their country--and the rest of Europe--into another terrible war.

Tags: establishment press, stephen walt

Gabriel Ladeen on cheering for the home team and not worrying about a citizen's responsibilities on war

I don't know if we're starting to see the AOL-ization of the Huffington Post, or if this article is an example. Regardless, it's a straightforward statement of the idea that it is the duty of American citizens to cheer for any war in progress as though it were a high school football game: Gabriel Ledeen, Who Supports the U.S. Soldier? 03/04/2011. It's not Ledeen's first stab at this pitch. He has been doing it for years, as in the conservative National Review Online in 2006 and 2003. If the Absolute Astronomy and Wikipedia entries on neocon and Iran-Contra figure Michael Ledeen are correct, Gabriel is his son.

High school civics class is a better reference point. A soldier signs up to be a soldier, which includes carrying out any legal mission to which they are assigned. They operate under regulations limiting their freedom of dissent while operating in their official roles. Soldiers who are citizens of the US - most American soldiers but not all of them are - are also voters who make decisions about leadership and policy in their role as voters. Soldiers also have freedom of speech and opinion in their private lives.

A factory worker doesn't have to like the model of car he's building, his job as a factory worker is to build it. He can be enthusiastic and conscientious about his work without having a high opinion of the end product. If employees of a corporation had to be personally convinced of the wisdom of the policies they are required to implement as part of their jobs, no corporation could function.

Ledeen's article is one of those that either strikes an accord and you agree with it - or you actually think about what it says, in which case it probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially if we start off recognizing that pretty much anyone over the age of 15 or so can recognize that soldiers in the heat of battle typically don't concentrate on debating the finer points of international diplomacy at that moment. Here's his pitch:

Once our volunteer soldier deploys, his sole purpose is to achieve the objectives he is ordered to secure by our elected leaders. In fact, every soldier swears an oath that defines their duty, to "obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me." The soldier, more than anyone else, wants these orders to be well-considered, valid, popular objectives that are worthy of his sacrifices.

Once he receives these orders, he wants to accomplish these objectives as quickly and as decisively as possible. Every delay exposes him to further danger and risks the mission. Once he is so engaged, "supporting" him necessarily means sharing this desire for victory, defined as successfully fulfilling the mission. [my emphasis]

Here in the real world, neither Democrats nor Republicans operate on such a premise. Nor can they, unless they just turn over their responsibilities as office-holders and citizens to some general who gets to define a military mission any way he wants to. That is not how the American form of government is set up, however. And the overall mission of every US soldier is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

When the "Black Hawk Down" incident happened in Somalia in 1993, Republicans demanded that President Clinton pull all American troops out of Somalia immediately. Democrats and Republicans have criticized in various ways the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The effects and advisability of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen have been widely discussed, if inadequately reported by our national media.

Were Republicans wrong to criticize the Somalia mission in 1993? Should they have just cheered for "victory"? Even if they couldn't define what constituted "victory"? General Petraeus when bragging about the alleged brilliant success of The Surge in Iraq stated that the military situation had been on the verge of disaster in 2006. Were the Democrats who pointed that out - in the face of Republican lies about the brilliant successes in Iraq in 2006 and Republican accusation that they were being unpatriotic in questioning the unending successes of our glorious generals - also undermining "victory"? How in a democracy is it okay for our Savior-General Petraeus to say that something needs to be done differently and not be impeding "victory" but it's not okay for members of Congress who have the Constitutional power and responsibility for declaring war not to do so?

Ledeen continues:

Undermining public support for the effort, delegitimizing the mission, and declaring victory unattainable make it tougher for the soldier to decisively achieve his objectives by emboldening the enemy, damaging morale, and undermining political leadership. Therefore, from this perspective, there is a logical and inherent contradiction in claiming to "support" the soldier while taking actions that undercut his efforts.

Well, dude, what if victory is unattainable? Or, to use the calculation that every nation that's ever gone to war has had to make, is "victory" attainable at an acceptable cost? And if it's not, is it responsible in the least for conscientious citizens and voters to just shut the hell up and cheer for disaster?

I've given Ledeen's cheer-for-the-generals-no-matter-what pitch more attention than the actual arguments he makes are worth. All you have to do to see how frivolous his argument actually is, is to look for where in his article he gives even a vague definition of what "victory" actually is in what he calls "the protracted, unstructured war [sic] in which we are engaged, where public and political support are critical elements of success."

In fact, what war is he even talking about? Afghanistan? Iraq? The secret missions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and who knows where else?

Like I said, if it fits you agenda of the moment, Ledeen's article may resonate to you. Otherwise, it's just more Republican "culture war" hot air.

Tags: gabriel ladeen, militarism, neoconservatives

Why don't the Democrats demand impeachment hearings on Justice Clarence Thomas?

Rightwing Republican Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have both been involved in partisan activities of a kind that, to put it mildly, is highly questionable for a Justice of the highest court in the US. Both Thomas and Scalia voted for the majority decisions in Bush v. Gore (2000) and Citizen's United (2010), two of the worst decisions in being destructive to democratic government that the Supreme Court has ever made.

The Democrats no longer have a majority in the House, which would have to make an impeachment vote. But the Dems can certainly use a push for impeachment hearings against Thomas and/or Scalia to raise a stick about the crass partisanship of those Republican Justices.

As Robert Reich notes at his blog in Clarence Thomas and the Politicization of the Supreme Court 03/03/2011, some House Democrats showed the moxie to make a public issue out of Thomas' conduct:

Back in 1991 when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Citizens United spent $100,000 to support his nomination. The in-kind contribution presumably should have been disclosed by Thomas.

At the very least you’d think that, given his connections with Citizen’s United and with the Koch brothers, Thomas would have recused himself from the Citizens United decision in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He would have recused himself, that is, if he were as concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as he says he.

Thomas has also failed to disclose financial information about his wife’s employment. Virginia Thomas is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization now receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to Citizen’s United. Among the things she’s lobbying for are the repeal of what she terms the “unconstitutional” healthcare legislation.

Because of his wife's direct involvement, seventy-four House Democrats have sent a letter to Justice Thomas asking him to recuse himself from any case questioning the constitutionality of the legislation. "Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has 'experience and connections' and appeals to clients who want a particular decision," the legislators wrote. "They want to overturn health-care reform."

The Democrats needed to raise the roof in 2000-1 about Bush v. Gore. When the Court issued it's plutocrat Citizen's United decision, President Obama declared in his weekly address on 01/23/09, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People:

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

He called for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama Administration has come to mean little more than preemptive surrender to the hardline Republican Party. The Republicans see no partisan incentive to set Citizen's United aside, any more than they saw one in opposing Bush v. Gore. And in fact, Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress in 2010 did nothing effective to mitigate the disastrous effects for democracy of the Citizen's United decision. Even the mild requirement for reporting donors that the Democrats proposed didn't get enacted.

We should expect more on an issue which the Democratic President said "strikes at our democracy itself"! "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," the President said. Accurate words. No follow-up even close to matching the seriousness of the words.

Some relevant stories:

Jed Lewison, Clarence Thomas defends wife, but not himself Daily Kos 03/01/2011

Ben Adler, The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal Salon 02/20/2011

Kim Geiger, Clarence Thomas failed to report wife's income, watchdog say Los Angeles Times 01/22/2011

Lee Fang, Group Requests DOJ To Investigate Scalia and Thomas Involvement With Koch Corporate Fundraisers Think Progress 01/20/2011

Warren Richey, Campaign finance ruling: Should Supreme Court justices have recused themselves? Christian Science Monitor 01/20/2011

John Dean, A Closer Look At The Case From Which Justice Scalia Has Refused To Recuse Himself: The Momentous Stakes, and the Larger Political Context Findlaw 03/26/2004

David G. Savage and Richard A. Serrano, Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows Los Angeles Times 02/05/2004

Tags: antonin scalia, citizens united decision, clarence thomas, supreme court

Ray McGovern on Robert Gates' newfound agnosticism about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

Ray McGovern has weighed in on the speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on February 25 that I discussed in a previous post in How to Read Gates's Shift on the Wars Consortium News 03/02/2011. This was the speech in which the SecDef warned against getting involved in more wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan in the future.

McGovern, who was once Gates' supervisor at the CIA, looks at the statement in the context of Gates' career ambitions. The SecDef's skepticism about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars certainly seems on the face of it to be a recent revelation:

In his first months at the Pentagon, Gates certainly didn't seem like a hesitant skeptic about the war policies. He played a key role in helping President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney escalate the war in Iraq and thus make their escape into the sunset without having lost a war on their watch.

That was 90 percent of what the celebrated "surge" of troops into Iraq was about, staving off an obvious defeat, even if it cost the lives of an additional 1,000 or so U.S. soldiers and many more Iraqis. ...

Then, after he was kept on by Obama, Gates supported a similar "surge" in Afghanistan, pushing for a 40,000-troop increase in late 2009. Obama groused that Gates and the generals wouldn’t provide a meaningful set of alternative options to the escalation, but Obama finally relented and sent 30,000 more troops.

McGovern concedes that one cannot rule out such a dawning of revelation. But he thinks it's more likely that Gates is playing the career game as follows:

Yet, I would venture to suggest that – more likely – the timing of Gates’s conversion can be pinned on two other factors, a typically windsock reaction to recent polling on Afghanistan and an attempt to burnish his future wise-man reputation:

--U.S. public opinion has swung dramatically against the war in Afghanistan, with some polls showing that as many as 86 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans want a speedier U.S. pullout from the war.

--Gates has announced he will retire in the coming months. By abandoning his post on the bridge of the sinking pro-war ship now, Gates will let the next secretary of defense take the blame when the U.S. does not "prevail" in Afghanistan. Gates can point to his echoing of MacArthur's warning [against ground wars in Asia].

Gates' career is a reminder of how previous official misconduct can haunt policy for decades to come:

More serious still was Gates's denial of any awareness of Oliver North's illegal activities in support of the Contra attacks in Nicaragua, despite the fact that senior CIA officials testified that they had informed Gates that they suspected North had diverted funds from the Iranian arms sales for the benefit of the Contras.

Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation (1986-93), later wrote in frustration that, despite Gates’s highly touted memory, he "denied recollection of facts thirty-three times."

Gates's dubious explanations about the Iran-Contra scandal forced the withdrawal of his first nomination to be CIA director when he was supposed to replace Casey who died in May 1987. Gates's career appeared to be at a dead end, but in 1989, President George H.W. Bush gave him a spot as deputy national security adviser.

The lack of real legal accountability for high-level officials breaking the law is a very bad tradition - and it really has become a tradition in American politics and government. Although the Republicans will surely make an exception if they think they can pin some real or imagined crime on Barack Obama, just as they did in Clinton's impeachment. There are many reasons that Obama's Look Forward Not Backward policy on Cheney-Bush Administration crimes is a bad one.

Keeping Gates on as SecDef from the previous Administration was one more aspect of the larger Democratic willingness to not hold the previous Administration responsible in even the political sense for misconduct and failures.

Tags: ray mcgovern, robert gates

Philosophy and the Huck (aka, Mike Huckabee)

It's kind of painful to think of using the term "philosophy" in connection with Christian fundamentalism. George W. Bush unintentionally illustrated why in his famous response to a dorky question in a Republican Presidential debate on who his favorite philosopher is, "the Lord Jesus Christ." I'm not sure, but that may have made Shrub Bush the first person in history to consider Jesus a philosopher.

John Maynard Keynes once observed that businessmen often p[ride themselves on having derived all their ideas about economics from practical experience, when in reality they are the intellectual slaves of some long-dead economist. American Christian fundamentalists are not a very philosophically inclined bunch - not that any other significant group in the US is, either. But their religious thinking is actually influenced by a school of thought called Scottish Common Sense philosophy, of whom the most famous were George Campbell (1719-1796) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). You can read a bit more about the general concept in this article by Alexander Broadie of the University of Glasgow.

Like Keynes' practical businessmen, today's Christianists are often running off some philosophy that looks much more like a brand of Social Darwinism than anything coming out of the Gospels. Even though they claim to what they call Darwinism, better know to most people as the science of biology.

Mike Huckabee's recent statement about Obama having been raised in Kenya sounds like a garbled version the claims of Dinesh D'Souza's frivolous book about Obama's alleged anti-colonial obsessions: Sarah Posner, Huckabee on Obama vs. "Average Americans" Religion Dispatches 03/02/2011. As Sarah Posner explains:

The reference to the Brits is by now a storyline that has reached fever pitch among conservatives: as part of the standard personalizing of the Oval Office by new presidents, Obama returned a bust of Winston Churchill -- which was on loan to former President Bush by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and replaced it with a bust of his own choosing, of that notorious un-American figure... wait for it... Abraham Lincoln. [my emphasis]

The American President replaces the bust of a foreigner (Churchill) with one of the American all-but-universally regarded as the greatest President (Lincoln): and conservatives see this as sinister? The Huck's excuse for a clarifying statement included this: "The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country -- as do most Americans."

Between free-market zealots, neoconservatives who believe in the Leo Straussian doctrine of governing by deception, and Christian fundis, more and more of what Republicans say sounds like one thing in American English and another in RepublicanSpeak. Blue Texan (Mike Huckabee a Victim of Epistemic Closure Firedoglake 03/02/2011) thinks the Huck has fallen victim to a philosophical disease. But it's one that is epidemic among his fellow Republicans: "this Obama/Mau Mau talk is perfectly mainstream in right-wing circles, and fruitloops everywhere else. Ditto death panels, the socialist conspiracy behind climate change, and the looming threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US."

Sarah Posner translates the Churchill business into American English for us:

But there's a lot more embedded in Huckabee's comment about Obama's "view of the Brits" and the supposed snub of returning the Churchill bust. First, in suggesting that Obama is anti-imperialist, Huckabee intimates that the president, in what conservatives frame as a civilizational war between the west and the rest, doesn't embrace the superiority of western civilization (which can also be read as Obama doesn't embrace "American exceptionalism.")

Second, and probably even more important, for an evangelical and Christian Zionist like Huckabee, Churchill is a figure of enormous symbolic power. In this scenario, Obama is an appeaser like Chamberlain -- whether it's on Iran's nuclear ambitions, or in failing to address the "Holocaust" of abortion -- Churchill is an Esther-like figure who finally intervened for the Jews (much as Christian Zionists see themselves as protecting Israel from Iran) in a Holocaust (much as ardent anti-choice crusaders see themselves protecting fetuses from what they attempt to portray as genocide). [my emphasis]

She goes on to frame this as "winking and nodding to his base." It looks to me more like an increasingly cult-like alternative political language among the Christian Republican White People's Party.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, mike huckabee, sarah posner

Bob McElvaine on the union movement

Tags: robert mcelvaine, union movement

Mark Hertsgaard: climate change deniers are cranks, not skeptics

Tags: global climate change, global warming, mark hertsgaard

Small government conservatism and the war on women's rights

Linda Campbell of the Austin Star-Telegram adresses one of the anti-choice bills debated in the Texas state legislature in Would Jesus mandate sonograms but cut pre-K? 02/23/2011:

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio got carried away during debate on the sonogram bill, saying (according to Texas Tribune live blogging), "It is our responsibility to protect that child once that child's born, too. When we start debating a budget, let's make sure we don't cut 100,000 vaccines. Let's make sure we've got health insurance. We seem to worship what we cannot see, but as soon as that baby's born, oh no, we don't want to be intrusive. Texas is going to shrink government until it fits in a woman's uterus." [my emphasis]

Thompson also says, "It's worth remembering that Jesus was prescribing a path to salvation, not a menu of public policy options."

Meanwhile, the chief ideologist of the Republican Party, junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh, calls the National Organization of Women (NOW) "whores to liberalism." The Republican drive to Talibanize women's status in America continues. It ain't pretty.

Tags: christian right, republican party, women's rights

Jerry Brown on current politics

Jerry Brown gave an interview to the Sacramento Bee last Friday that they published Sunday, Q&A: Cagey Brown lets the budget process play out by David Siders 02/27/2011.

Jerry did seem to be taking a more cautious attitude than usual in this interview. I'm not sure if he was being cagey or just cautious with this particular reporter, who seems to have a fondness for celebrity-time coverage. But if you ask Jerry Brown silly horserace/gotcha questions like the following, you're likely to get answers like the following:

Do you think you've made any strategic missteps since taking office?

None that anyone has identified.

I like the way Jerry turned the following question around; the question was basically just tossing a Republican slogan at him:

Are Republicans right that regulations in California are too burdensome on business?

They're right and wrong. In some respects, they may be right. The regulations on the banking and mortgage industry were obviously inadequate, to the extent that billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, have been lost and destroyed because of the lack of regulation. And people lost their lives in San Bruno because somebody wasn't watching the pipes. [A reference to a disastrous pipeline explosion in September 2010.] So it all depends which particular problem, which particular regulation.

It's a rhetorical call, and it's one that I think always needs attending to. But just as a generality, it's not very helpful.

California is going to generate $2 trillion worth of gross domestic product. That's more than, you know, 110 nations. There's a lot of wealth here, and very smart people are getting a share of that, and they're not leaving it, they're coming to it. So there's a lot of rhetoric in that, but there are burdensome regulations that I'm looking at.

Why can't Barack Obama frame issues like Jerry does? A big part of the answer is that Obama has bought into the neoliberal/deregulation/Washington Consensus worldview in a way that Jerry never has.

Because of Siders' inside-baseball approach to the interview, he didn't really get anything of substance out of the Governor on the budget issues. A mid-March deadline is approaching for putting tax extensions on the balance. Jerry's approach to closing the approximately $25 billion project deficit for the fiscal year 2011-12 beginning July 1 has been to propose about $5 billion in one-time financing of expenses that are not continuing expenses, and handle the remaining $20 billion with $10 billion in cuts and $10 billion from an extension of existing taxes that are set to expire.

One of his promises during last year's gubernatorial campaign was that he would approve no tax increases without a vote of the people. So he is asked the legislature to put the tax extension on the ballot for June. If the tax extension isn't approved, he's saying the $20 billion will all have to come in cuts. It's a high-stakes game. But Jerry is confronting the Republican scam that they've been running since 1978 of saying you can cut your own taxes and not lose any services that are important to you. David Siders tried a gotcha question on the issue:

Why in the campaign didn't you tell the public that you were considering tax extensions?
I said exactly what I would do: no taxes without a vote of the people.

Do you think it would have been harder to win if you'd said you were considering tax extensions?

I have no idea. But politics and the way the game is played, statements are very easily manipulated and become more than they are in the form of commercials, and so very small, slim statements can be repackaged and become something very different.

So one has to be careful what one says. And that's why most candidates are under strict discipline and are not allowed to speak. I'm one of the few candidates that can speak my mind, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to be careful.

And he was careful. His pledge about no tax increases without a vote of the people was a message his campaign ads repeatedly showed him making. And to anyone but a reporter looking for horserace factoids, it's clear that Jerry is sticking with that pledge. He's approaching the tax extensions (which the Republicans of course call a "tax increase") in a straightforward way, working with California's semi-plebiscitory form of state government to address the severe budget problem that his Republican predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger left him.

On Monday, more of the interview was published by Siders on the Sacbee Capitol Alert blog, Jerry Brown: Politics isn't Sunday school 02/28/2011. Maybe Siders thought he had a horserace score with this one:

Do you think you'll run for a second term?

I have no idea.

If this year's focus is the budget, if it works out ...

Well, it's not just the budget. I have, you know, corrections, realignment,
energy, education, these are important, these take, occupy time.

All this year?

Yeah, of course.

You were young and rising in politics, so why is the governorship ...

Now I'm old and rising.

But are you rising, or is this it?

I don't know. What does that mean?

Is the governorship the highest office you'll ever hold?

Probably, but maybe I'll take another lower, I may take another office.

Like what?

I don't know.

You won't run for president, though?

Maybe I'll run for mayor.

Of Sacramento?

No. I liked being mayor. I liked being mayor. Mayor is a very good job.

Do you like it better than governor?

I'm enjoying being governor right now because it's very interesting. But I certainly liked, I liked helping get things built in Oakland.

For all Siders' horserace approach, the printed excerpt makes it look like Siders didn't realize that Jerry pointedly evaded (is that a valid phrase, "pointedly evaded"?) saying that he would not run for President.

I seriously doubt that he will. But still, when a prominent figure with national appeal like Jerry Brown gives an answer like that, he's sending some kind of signal to the White House. It comes on the heels of a third snub from the California Governor of an invitation to the White House. (Jerry Brown to skip governor confab in Washington Sacramento Bee 02/24/2011, also a David Siders piece)

I'm guessing that the message Jerry is sending to Washington is that the Obama Administration is badly letting down the states by not even trying to provide federal funds to cover all or part of the severe deficits the states face. It's bad for the states, bad for the state and national economies, and bad politics for the Democratic Party. I don't see Jerry running for President against Obama in the primaries in 2012, much less on a third party ticket. But I can much more easily imagine him giving support to some other credible liberal primary challenger to Obama, if someone like Russ Feingold steps up to do it.

Tags: 2012 election,, california politics, jerry brown