Jerry Brown, 1995: theology, politics, civil liberties and corporate Democratic politics

"Theology is more important than politics." - Jerry Brown, 1975


Jerry still reflected that perspective 20 years later in an interview he did with The Progressive in 1995 that was published in their September 1995 issue:

Q: What did you learn from the time you spent in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and on spiritual retreat in Japan?

Brown: True spiritual practice teaches you to overcome your conditioning, your programming. From Zen, I learned how conditioned I was. From Mother Teresa, what it is like to observe the poorest of the poor, and how generous human beings can be.

You can either unselfconsciously follow your program or you can work to transcend it. That's what enlightenment is. That's what the Buddhists call nonattachment and the Jesuits call detachment. The precondition is to free yourself from, as they say, your addictions. In the religious context, they call it your attachments. Saint Ignatius, which I studied as a Jesuit novice, said you have to free yourself from inordinate attachment. Inordinate attachment, that means you crave, you need, you are dependent on desires for material things that distort your capacity for wisdom. If your consciousness is broadened and if you increase your awareness, then your action should follow, because action and consciousness are linked together. Even when we do dumb things, it's because we have a dumb idea in the back of our head. People who live selfish lives or spend their time building little private empires of greed are missing something.

Q: Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

Brown: I would say I'm certainly aware of the world of spiritual practice. I've pursued it for many years of my life and I've also neglected it for many years of my life. [my emphasis]

As this quote shows, Jerry's religious views don't imply a theocratic perspective. But it does give him a real intellectual perspective from which to take a critical perspective of politics and society.

One of the biggest reasons people find Jerry's perspective puzzling is that they don't take account of his religious perspective. He actually is more familiar with philosophy and theology and thinks more in those terms of perhaps any major political figure in the US. I assume that people like Sarah Palin are serious about their professed religious convictions. But that's a whole different thing than having a general perspective rooted in reflective theological and spiritual thinking.

This is not something that every Democrat would find reassuring because of the very real concerns today about the commitment of today's Republican Party to Christianist theocratic ideas. But a real advantage it gives to Brown is that he actually understands religion and religious language in a way that other Democratic politicians don't and can reassure voters who may have real (as distinct from propagandist) concerns about the Democrats' alleged lack of respect for religion. He's also far less likely to be conned by the "theocracy lite" approach of the so-called "common ground" anti-abortion zealots than some other Democratic politicians have been.

This response is an example of Brown's intellectual/theological perspective, which basically none of our Pod Pundits today could process in any meaningful way:

Q: what would you'say to those people who doubt your sincerity based upon your background?

Brown: Well, I think that's a good place to start: with great doubt [laughs]. What is it they say--to achieve enlightenment you need great faith, great perseverance, and great doubt. All three working together.

At this point in his career in 1995, Jerry had left his role as head of the California Democratic Party to host a liberal national radio program. At the time of this interview, he had moved to Oakland to promote local community activism. Although he had described himself as a "recovering politician" in this period, he was presumably thinking of running for Oakland Mayor with his move to Oakland.

His interview is worth reading in full, not only for the perspective it gives on Jerry's own history but because he remained critical of the Clinton administration from a liberal/left perspective. Even though I was aware of his position on this, I was a bit jarred to read his harsh words for the civil liberties implications of the anti-terrorism legislation proposed by the Clinton administration in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Today, a suggestion to return to the Clinton administration, pre-Cheney standards of civil liberties would be regard by Republicans and most Democrats as practically a radical step. Here was Jerry's criticism in 1995:

I believe we have to look into our collective condition and we have to say, "Does this square with what we know to be right?" We can look to the Bible, we can look to our experience. How do we treat friends? Is this the standard that we're seeing applied? That's the analysis that's missing. And if we don't do that in some collective way, we're going to see the country continue to move in a fascistic direction.

If your approval ratings go up fifteen points after Oklahoma City where 168 people are killed, how do you think you react to that as a President? Do you care more about your poll ratings, or do you care more about those people whom you never met before? The system is rewarding things that shouldn't be rewarded. There's no reason why the President's polling should go up fifteen points. That is perverse. Just the measurement of that is perverse.

The FBI trots out its wish list and you get several hundred more agents and all the other agents combined are up to 1,000. And they get new powers of surveillance and infiltration. [my emphasis]

I should note here that Jerry, unlike today's Republicans, actually knows what the word "fascism" actually means and doesn't confuse it with every thing else than one might consider bad.

That passage also shows an example of how Jerry can reference the Bible as a source of values relevant to a moral judgment on politics without it sounding self-conscious and to promote what would be a liberal/left position in politics.

This is also a strong statement on the dangers of the loss of civil liberties:

The Supreme Court voted 6-3, with two of Clinton's appointees forming the majority, that if you want to play sports, the school can drug-test you, the state can drug-test you. The most significant part of this is again the tilt toward authority, toward subservience, toward obedience, toward a nation of sheep. You take the child's mind at a vulnerable age and you embed deeply in the consciousness of that child the idea that taking orders is what it's about to be an American. Take your pants down and pee in that little jar and we will send it to a certified laboratory. You won't see it, but you will know, you can believe, that the results will tell us whether you're clean or not. This is the way the state builds totalitarian consciousness. It's what Ivan Illich calls the "symbolic fallout" of the use of technology. The symbolic fallout of drug testing is that the child learns without even being able to debate it that his job is to follow orders even to the point of yielding up bodily fluids to the state to be evaluated by a process that he or she can't understand. That's true disempowerment.

This is an interesting example of how Jerry can draw meaningful distinctions that we just don't hear very much from our broken national press:

Q: Do you fear the far-right agenda?

Brown: I don't know about the far-right agenda. It's the survival agenda of the incumbents that I'm most concerned about. The militias are going in there and calling attention to the dangerous power-grab of the state. What do you have? You have the ACLU and the NRA, two groups that are not viewed by the establishment very seriously. So The New York Times did a piece comparing the militias to the Black Panthers, not ever drawing the conclusion that they both were talking about excess oppressive practices by the government. They drew the conclusion that, well, the Panthers were wacky, and now the militias are wacky. The Panthers committed crimes, but that doesn't mean that they weren't speaking from an authentic community and speaking heroically in many, many instances. And all these militia people are marching around because they think the state has been taken over. If you really look at it, the United States has certainly been submerged in a transnational system where one-person-one-vote or the checks-and-balances as envisioned by the founders in the Federalist Papers barely exist.

Here's one place where I wonder if Brown was taking the problem of far-right extremist politics seriously enough. But in the context, he was pointing to the civil-liberties concerns that concerned him and citing the diversity of criticisms in the same way that Glenn Greenwald often does. I would prefer to see these kinds of analyses be more specific about the distinctive and limited nature of far-right arguments that momentarily overlap with civil-liberties concerns.

But maybe that's not an appropriate criticism of a statement like that in which Jerry was stating that the Black Panthers were reacting to very real problems that the established system was not addressing back in the 1960s. You don't hear many politicians, and especially white politicians, making those kinds of comments in either 1995 or today. (Jerry's no dummy, so he obviously knew that those comments were likely to play better in Oakland than in many other places.)

Brown made a harsh criticism of the Cold War policies that had already in 1995 morphed into the Long War, though that name came from the Cheney era:

Q: What do you think the price is we're paying for all the murder and mayhem committed by the United States abroad?

Brown: I don't know about prices. It's wrong for the people who suffer. If you say human-rights violation, that's an abstract word. If you say castrating somebody, putting a balloon full of water down their throat, or cutting their arms off with electric saws--what they did in El Salvador and Guatemala--horrible, horrible things, cutting heads off, putting them on platters, that was reported by the Jesuit magazine America. Why is the money and prestige of America playing into that? The entire story of Haiti. That was an eye-opener to read. The people who were involved with the murders of Haiti were receiving American intelligence payments. So what is that all about? It appears to be a deeply corrupted form of activity that cannot be good for the American government, is not right morally, it is not good for the country, and it's kept a secret.

If we don't have morality at the top, how do you expect morality at street level? It's not going to work. Clinton had a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. [A 1993 bombing attack.] There was no war, there was no judicial order--not even a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It was just, "Let's send twenty-five Tomahawk missiles toward Baghdad." I believe a half dozen or more landed and eight people were killed. Now what's that? What's the moral label that you affix to that? Does he have a right to kill innocent people to send a message to Saddam Hussein? Those people didn't do anything. It was supposed to be about the alleged plot against [Old Man] Bush. What happened to the alleged plotters? They were not the ones who were killed. It's almost like burning a witch. It reminds me of the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery, in which the town picks one person to be stoned every year. We need a few people to die, just to make an example of them. [my emphasis]

Finally, his criticism of the campaign-financing system and the ability of the wealthy to corrupt the democratic process is even more relevant today. He references his ploy in the 1992 Presidential campaign of setting a $100 limit on individual contributions to his Democratic primary campaign against Bill Clinton. And he ties foreign policy into his observation, which again is informed by a more general sense of morality based in his religious frame of thought:

Every one of these guys--Dole, Gramm--they're playing football, and in the football game of politics, you have to have the big bucks and the 1 percent who own 39 percent of all the assets. That power is the reality, unless you have an agenda for changing that reality, disrupting it, coming up with an alternative for the people to consider. ...

The experience of the $100 limit in the campaign, making fundraising no longer the key to the campaign, gave me a detachment and a separation to observe the incredible dependency of the politician, and therefore the government, on this very narrow band of people at the highest strata of the society. That goes contrary to the notion of a middle-class, almost class-less society, that the American political class likes to pretend we have. So that's on one level, the political.

Then as I read more about covert action, what the intelligence agencies are doing, and what really went on in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Reagan's bombing of Qaddafi, Clinton's bombing in Baghdad, or Bush's intervention in Panama, I realized that there is an immoral, inhuman kind of formula that is being pursued by the government.

And the magnitude of the injustice appears to be increasing. [my emphasis]

These are perspective worth keeping in mind as the Obama administration is again starting to play footsie with the anti-Social Security fiscal hawks, escalates its disastrous war in Afghanistan, backs off on its commitment to counter global warming and proceeds to gut the rule of law by continuing to use the Cheney-Bush military commissions and promoting extreme claims for government secrecy powers and surveillance.

Tags: jerry brown

Thanksgiving with Darwin

Charles Darwin's Bible

Roy Edroso takes an entertaining look at how Rightbloggers Fight War on Thanksgiving (And, Of Course, Muslim Obama) Village Voice 11/26/09. I didn't know that there was a mythical War on Thanksgiving along with the equally fictional War on Christmas. But why not? When you need something to be afraid of and are used to creating phantoms in the air, I guess one is as good as the other.

Darwin doesn't actually have anything to do with Thanksgiving. Though we can be thankful for his work, since he theory of natural selection forms a huge part of the basis of present-day science. But Edward J. Larson has a good piece out this week on the sometimes-uncomfortable meeting of Darwinism and Christianity, "I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically": Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate Religion Dispatches 11/24/09.

Darwin was open to the notion early on that humanity as well as other animal species could have evolved on a natural basis, a process that could be explained without resorting to divine intervention:

Alluding to William Paley’s analogy between a crafted telescope and the human eye, which was a key part of the Anglican theologian’s famous proof of an intelligent designer behind organic creation. Darwin then added, “Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressing designed.” Even human nature and mental ability might result from natural processes, he concluded.

The sequence in Darwin’s letter to Gray is telling. It passed quickly from observations of what seemed bad in nature (such as cruel animal behavior, which even devout creationists hesitate to blame on God) to ones about what seemed good in nature (such as the human eye, which Victorians typically credited to God), and then moved on to ponder the origin of what seemed best of all, human morality and mentality, which natural theologians typically hail as the ultimate gift and proof of the divine supernatural. In Origin of Species, Darwin avoided making comments about human evolution, fearing that they would prejudice readers against his general theory, but his private notes, essays, and letters reveal his longstanding fascination with the issue.

While the article is very good in describing the history of this conflict, I don't really like the next-to-last section "Humans are Survival Machines" in which he writes, "Today, Darwin’s sketchy social theories have matured by way of E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology and modern evolutionary psychology to become foundational for understanding in the social sciences." Uh, no, "sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology" are nothing but cleaned-up terms for Social Darwinism, which is certainly not "foundational for understanding in the social sciences" or for understanding anything but Social Darwinism. The arguments that go by those terms are barely-updated versions of Victorian-era arguments that the current "traditional values" hierarchies of gender, class and (if you look closely) race are rooted in immutable biology. And it's hard to imagine that Darwin wouldn't have been embarrassed to see the sloppy, speculative reasoning that underpins most of their arguments.

What we've come to call fundamentalism, the notion that the Christian Bible should be read as though it were a history and science text, was also a 19th-century phenomenon like Darwinism. But it wasn't only in opposition to the theory of evolution and new astronomical and geological discoveries that it developed. Especially in Germany, scholars like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) were analyzing the Scriptures with new historical and linguistic methods. Strauss' Life of Jesus (1835-1836) argued that the New Testament did not actually describe Jesus as God in human form, which is the basic Christian notion of the Incarnation.

The whole concept of history as describing accurately and analyzing the procession of actual events that took place was one that began developing with the modern age in 15th-century Europe and took centuries to establish itself as a more general understanding. (Keith Thomas describes some of this process in the print edition of the New York Review of Books, "Fighting over History" 12/03/09 edition) So those who felt uncomfortable with the religious implications of the historical-critical method of seeking to understand the Bible - a method which was by no means linked exclusively to atheism or strict materialist philosophy - began to articulate an understanding of the Bible that redefined it in more literalist terms than had been common among Christians before that.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, darwin, evolution

Two resignations, two columns and the American press today

High-level resignations have been in the news lately.

Greg Craig, chief White House counsel, resigned after being targeted by press leaks blaming him for the failure to close Guantanamo by next January, a goal Obama announced this past January and has now abandoned. On Tuesday, Phil Carter, an attorney, former blogger and Iraq War veteran, resigned from his Pentagon position as the top official there for detainee affairs.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the latter in Phil Carter's resignation from key detainee policy post Salon 11/25/09. He puts Carter's resignation into the context of Craig's and of the rule-of-law disputes over trying terrorism suspects that have been held for years at Guantanamo and other stations of the Bush Gulag. He also states straightforwardly that both men "remained loyal to Obama by refraining, at least thus far, from publicly criticizing any administration policies." He provides some careful speculation about what policy differences might have been part of their decisions but does so in a way that his information and analysis is still informative and useful even if both resignations turn out to be effectively unrelated to policy issues.

This is what not so long ago in the United States, and still today in much of the world, is called "journalism".

(On the Carter resignation, see also Noah Schactman's Danger Room piece, Why Phil Carter Left the Pentagon 11/25/09.)

Then there's Maureen Dowd. Her column Thanks for the Memories New York Times 11/24/09 is actually an example of why many of us once thought of MoDo as a good columnist of a generally liberal bent. If you didn't know anything about her track record, this piece would probably read like a liberal Democratic criticism of Obama for not delivering to the Democratic base on some important issues. And the Craig resignation is a big part of her analysis. (She doesn't mention the Carter resignation.)

But if you follow MoDo as closely as I do for some sad reason, or if you were a casual MoDo readers and concentrated on what she's actually saying, you would notice what she's really saying is: Obama sucks as a President and it's Bill and Hillary Clinton's fault. By some miracle - or maybe her editor had a brief moment of diligence - she doesn't mention her favorite female character from the Clinton story that The Voices in her head continually remind her about. She does mention Lani Guinier and Kimba Wood as obvious examples of the Clintons' badness. Quick, without using a search engine: who is Kimba Wood?

MoDo winds up telling us nothing worth remembering about Craig's resignation. The Huffington Post gives MoDo's column credit for revealing that Bill Clinton lobbied against Caroline Kennedy being appointed to fill Hillary's New York Senate seat: Maureen Dowd: Bill Clinton Lobbied Gov. Paterson To Keep Caroline Kennedy Out Of Senate 11/25/09.

I see two problems with this. One is that I never take MoDo as an authoritative source on anything because she makes stuff up. Second, MoDo is such a committed Clinton-hater that I doubly discount her claims of knowing Bill Clinton's motive for this alleged anti-Caroline-Kennedy lobbying. And she doesn't cite even an anonymous source for the claim. She writes:

Gov. David Paterson was dragging [Kennedy] through mud and refusing to announce a decision on the appointment for the New York Senate seat. Paterson was being lobbied by a vengeful Bill Clinton. Bill was still upset at Caroline for bestowing the Camelot mantle, which he had tried to claim during his campaigns, on Obama.

And then she says what probably for her is the nastiest thing she could say about Obama: she compares him unfavorably to Bill Clinton.

And she notes in a chipper tone that Obama's alleged actions are:

... especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election - and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line. (A new poll shows Obama and Sarah Palin neck and neck among independents, but then it is a Fox survey.)

She's pumping up Sarah Palin again like she was doing in her previous column. But if she doesn't think the FOX News "survey" is reliable, then why is she using its results to make her point?

So, a story of two columns. One, from Glenn Greenwald in Salon, which says something useful and is careful with facts. The other, from one of the countries leading pundits writing at the "paper of record", the New York Times, filled with pointless speculation about what might be going through the heads of Obama and of Bill and Hillary Clinton, without any particular concern for facts. But then, who needs facts when you have The Voices?

Tags: glenn greenwald, maureen dowd, obama administration

Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race

Guido von List (1848-1919)

Earlier this year I spent some time looking at the relation between what was once commonly called the ancient Aryan language and the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of the "Aryan race" that the Nazis made so infamous.

This article, Arier, from the Glossar Rechextremismus of the German state of Brandenburg gives a very good summary (in German) of the concept of "Aryan" as it came to be used by the Nazis.

As they employed the term, "Aryan" actually meant little other than "not Jewish". Although the Nazis considered Germans a superior race to Slavs and others, as well. But my focus in this post is not the Nazi concept but the much older history that racist thinkers and propagandists have claimed as a background for the so-called Aryan race.

As the Glossar Rechtsextremismus notes, the Nazis so discredited the word "Aryan" that the ancient langauge that was once described neutrally as Aryan is now called "Indo-European."

The Indo-European languages are many, extant and otherwise: the proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the following languages, in alphabetical order: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Avestan, Bengali, Celtic, Czech, English, Faliscan, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Illyrian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latin, Latvian, Luvian, Messapic, Oscan, Persian, Phrygian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Thracian, Tocharian, Romany, Welsh, and Yiddish.

J.P. Mallory in his text In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (1989) argues that the most plausible location of the original Indo-European "homeland" is in the steppes of the "Pontic-Caspian" area, very roughly the area north and northeast of the Black Sea. The primary evidence for this reconstruction of prehistory is linguistic and archaeological, but primarily linguistic. He dates the development of the original Proto-Indo-European language as no latter than 2500 BCE and with evidence of an existing "cultural vocabulary consistent with a date of roughly the fourth millennium BC." Language and archaeology are related in examining the evidence. He describes, for instance, how the Proto-Indo-European word for horse, *ek'wos, correlates with the archaeological evidence of the spread of horses in Central Europe and the types of terrains which would have been most congenial for them.

Mallory writes:

Proto-Indo-European probably evolved out of the languages spoken by hunter-fishing communities in the Pontic-Caspian region. It is impossible to select which languages and what areas, though a linguistic continuum from the Dnieper east to the Volga would be possible. Settlement would have been confined primarily to the major river valleys and their tributaries, and this may have resulted in considerable linguistic ramification. But the introduction of stockbreeding, and the domestication of the horse, permitted the exploitation of the open steppe. With the subsequent development of wheeled vehicles in this area, highly mobile communities would have interacted regularly with the more sedentary river valley and forest-steppe communities. During the period to which we notionally assign Proto-Indo-European (4500-2500 BC), most of the Pontic-Caspian served as a vast interaction sphere. ... Words would have passed freely between different dialects, and the later isoglosses which seem to leap geographical boundaries, such as Greek or German and Tocharian, may have been the result of these interactions. In addition, higher versus lower variants of Indo-European languages may have been spoken, which would further account for why some linguistic groups preserve certain words and others lack such reflexes. In the east, both Proto-Indo-Europeans and later ancestors of the Indo-Iranians were in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers. In the west, the shared agricultural vocabulary of the European languages may have developed along the middle Dnieper or in contact with the numerous Tripolyean settlements of the western Ukraine.

This common linguistic background reflects a cultural background. But it can't be considered a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word. Much less a group of pure descent from some original proto-Indo-European speakers 4500 years ago. Whatever their distinctive physical characteristics may have been in 2500 BCE, their genes have been widely shared since then, and other genes widely shared with theirs.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)

The racial theories of the 19th century were largely pseudo-science, or just plain bad science. The late Stephen Jay Gould did a fascinating book called The Mismeasure of Man (1981) describing how white scientific researchers on race who appeared to be seriously trying to ground their work solidly in evidence were nevertheless heavily influenced in their interpretations by their cultural assumptions on race. He does so by re-examining the original data from which they were drawing there conclusions.

But pseudoscientific theories of race like those elaborated by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) cannot be assumed to have been based on scientific good intentions. Those influences heavily formed the Nazi brand of racism and anti-Semitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Chamberlain's view in its article on Race:

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits ... Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization - Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art – emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

This wasn't science or good-faith inquiry. It was crass anti-Semitism and racism cooked up to meet the prejudices to which Chamberlain wished to pander.

But pseudoscience isn't the only source of misinformation about the fictional "Aryan race". Esoteric groups also promoted racist notions about the "Aryans", particularly the theosophists. The Austrian cranks Guido von List (1848-1919) und Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) were two esoteric racial theorists whose work influenced Hitler's thinking and the racial/historical writing in his book Mein Kampf.

Tags: indo-european language, national socialism, nazism, racism

Stooping to Establishment press standards

I was really disappointed to see this article by Michelle Goldberg, who has done some excellent work in the past: Palin's Ego Trip The Daily Beast 11/18/09.

Because in it she indulges one of the worst habits of Beltway Village pundits, the amateur psychiatric diagnosis of politicians. And what may be an even worse sign, in the first two paragraphs she works in two references each to Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Bob Somerby analyzes part of her article in the Daily Howler 11/23/09. And apparently intends to return to it tomorrow. So I'll refer you to him for the more detailed takedown.

I'll just add one point. After using a quotation from a psychiatry professor to buttress her dubious case, she writes:

Years ago, during the Goldwater campaign, so many psychiatrists publicly speculated about the Republican candidate’s psychology that the American Psychiatric Association adopted guidelines prohibiting such analysis.

Are we supposed to conclude that this means that while it's not ethical for psychiatrists, who have some relevant medical experience, it is ethical for journalists who don't?

I hope Michelle gets off this particular track, and fast.

Tags: establishment press, sarah palin

How quickly they change

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)

MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. But the American approach to counterinsurgency wars didn't spring full-grown from the brow of David Petraeus. It is heavily conditioned, if not completely dominated, by the experience of the Vietnam War.

I've seen a couple of good analyses lately of the Vietnam War that provide useful critical perspective on Obama's current decision on how much to escalate the Afghanistan War. One is Bill Moyers Journal of 11/20/09, this past Friday, which looks at Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process from November 1963 when he assumed the Presidency to the decision to Americanize the war in 1965 by committing to a direct US ground combat role. Some of the background assumptions and habits of the military establishment from those pre-Internet days sound awfully familiar today.

The other is The Fifty-Year War by Jonathan Schell The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 edition). Schell looks at the decision-making on the Vietnam War against the background of the Cold War that after the fall of the Soviet Union morphed into the Long War. He calls special attention to the effect of McCarthyism and the Republican hysteria after 1949 over "who lost China", the "lost" referring to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in mainland China. He writes:

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

And because of that "right-wing veto", it appears that actually withdrawing from Afghanistan isn't even an option the White House is seriously considering.

William Polk in Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan Informed Comment 11/22/09 writes about a different and more recent historical experience of counterinsurgency that is also worth considering around the American role in Afghanistan now. He's talking in particular about the historical role of village, tribal and national assemblies called jirga, or loya jirga at the national level:

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, vietnam war

Who you callin' a socialist?

Claude Henri de Rouvroy Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

I must admit, even having as low a general opinion of the Republican Party as I do, that even I'm surprised at the popularity among the Republicans on the Know-Nothing usage that has become as common as dirt in which socialist, liberal, communist, fascist, and Nazi are used as interchangeable concept. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to it, members of Congress do it, "movement conservatives" with intellectual pretensions do it, and rank-and-file Republicans do it. I really wonder what they mean, what image in their minds those interchangeable words call up, other than something like "bad". And I know for the Christian Right they all mean something like "atheist", too.

But how crack-brained is that? Jon Stewart did a brilliant skit that was less a satire than just an imitation of Glenn Beck in which he said that Beck had had apendicitis. And he explained the significance of that: "Youre appendix is connected to your large intestine which is connected to your small intestine which is something that Karl Marx had." That kind of arbitrary association is what passes for thinking among many Republicans today.

How can someone even have a simple-minded understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between those concepts? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because, trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you. Even though the Beckians love to compare Obama to Hitler.

Without knowing some basic facts about the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19, without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933, without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing and how their position meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget it. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

What's even worse for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from, yes, communists and socialists.

As far as what "liberal" means in the rest of the world, I strongly advise that you not go look at the Web site of the Liberal International (LI), the Federation of European and other parties in the world that self-identify as liberal. If you go there and start reading, your head may explode. Or not, because it has nothing to do with whatever it may be that the Beckians and Limbaugh dittoheads, i.e., most Republicans, mean when they use the term "liberal". The affiliate of the LI in Germany is the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are part of the current "center-right" coalition in Germany. The "center" part of that name refers to the conservative party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); the FDP is the "right" portion. The FDP is anti-union. The CDU has a union "wing".

If you should stumble across their Liberal Thinkers section. You will find people listed there like Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of American economic "libertarians", i.e., advocates of de-regulated Killer Capitalism. And also (gulp!) Ayn Rand. Yes, the John Galt and Fountainhead Ayn Rand, guru of Alan Greenspan. And Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute.

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Tags: socialism, radical right, republican party