Trump and Republicans' revolutionary (?) means

A report about vandalizing a statue fits in well with an issue I've been thinking about, which is how Trump and the Republicans are willing to use "revolutionary" means to achieve their ends, while the Democratic Party tends to be phobic about the word "revolution," except when they are pushing for regime change in a foreign country whose government has fallen out of favor with them.

This is the vandalism I mean: Katy Bergen, Historic John Brown statue in KCK vandalized with racial slurs and a swastika Kansas City Star 03/18/2018; updated 03/18/2018. More on this below.

I'm more reserved than ever about easy generalizations on typical ways democracy in other countries is eroded. That's because so much of it is proposed in service of some regime-change agenda. And the international reporting in the mainstream US media is often so spotty or just plain bad, I try to be careful about jumping to conclusions.

Having said that, it's generally understood that some kind of independence of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies is necessary for the rule of law to function. And at some point, attempts to influence the justice system for political reasons does become an overriding of the rule of law.

You can tell this isn't a straight polemic, because I'm putting so many qualifications out there. But the lines can be confusing. I have serious doubts about lifetime appointment of federal judges, for instance. But electing judges is also a bad idea because that inevitably politicizes the justice system to so extent. But every system of selecting judges depends for its effectiveness on the participants taking their responsibilities seriously. The Dred Scott decision was clearly a political decision with massive consequences. It was an instance where the judicial system tossed its responsibilities and the rule of law overboard for a political cause: slavery, a cause of the worst kind.

Another famous situation where these issues were raised was Franklin Roosevelt's fight against the Nine Old Men of the 1930s Supreme Court. (William Leuchtenburg, When Franklin Roosevelt Clashed with the Supreme Court – and Lost Smithsonian Magazine May 2005) A reactionary Supreme Court was knocking down law after law passed by Congress that were aimed at improving economic conditions after the devastating Great Depression. Leuchtenburg gives a measured judgment on the practical lessons that historians and politicians have drawn from that fight:

The 168-day contest also has bequeathed some salutary lessons. It instructs presidents to think twice before tampering with the Supreme Court. FDR’s scheme, said the Senate Judiciary Committee, was “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” And it never has been. At the same time, it teaches the justices that if they unreasonably impede the functioning of the democratic branches, they may precipitate a crisis with unpredictable consequences. In his dissent in the AAA case in 1936, Justice Stone reminded his brethren, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” These are lessons— for the president and for the court — as salient today as they were in 1937.

The conventional wisdom is that FDR overstepped and tried to improperly interfere with the Court by his proposal to appoint additional Justices, remembered mainly by the pejorative label of Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme." But the CW also holds that FDR's public fight against the Court jolted them into a (genuinely) more judicially reasonable position on New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt's proposals in that situation were a very different thing from what's going on now in Pennsylvania, where the Radical Republicans are trying to impeach the state supreme court justices who struck down an extreme, partisan gerrymandering scheme the Republicans put in place. (Sam Levine, Pennsylvania GOP Moves To Impeach Supreme Court Democrats For Gerrymandering Ruling Huffpost 03/20/2018)

The Republicans are willing to use impeachment for the most crass partisan purposes. But the Democrats never bothered to even hold Congressional hearings on strong indications of what looked an awful lot like improprieties by Supreme Court Justices Clalrence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. The symbolism of this is sadly ironic: "When Justice Scalia died two weeks ago, he was staying, again for free, at a West Texas hunting lodge owned by a businessman whose company had recently had a matter before the Supreme Court." (Eric Lipton, Scalia Took Dozens of Trips Funded by Private Sponsors New York Times 02/26/2016) See also: Ujala Sehgal, A Brief History of Clarence Thomas' Ethical Entanglements The Atlantic 06/19/2011.

Currently, we have a Republican Party that is committed to appointing highly activist judges and is willing to toss normal procedural and normative practices out the window in order to get rightwing ideologues entrenched throughout the federal judiciary. (See Garland, Merrick) In 2016, the Republicans in Congress effectively nullified the Constitutional procedure for selecting Supreme Court Justices. But when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Court, there was no resistance on the Democratic side remotely comparable. The net result is that the Republicans have dominance of the selection of federal judges entirely out of proportion to the number of American voters who support their party.

As bad as that is, I wouldn't call that a "revolutionary" method. Trump's blatant threatening and bullying of the FBI and the Justice Department over the Mueller investigation is. From his public statements and the firings of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, Trump has made it very clear that he wants the Justice Department to act on his behalf in much the same way his political mentor and longtime attorney, mob lawyer Roy Cohn, did for years (Ron Elving, President Trump Called For Roy Cohn, But Roy Cohn Was Gone NPR 01/08/2018):

This much is clear: Cohn was Trump's model in the handling of public relationships and media warfare.

Cohn's code was built on self-interest and loyalty; his style was all about intensity. If he was your lawyer, he was prepared to do anything for you; if he was your adversary, no holds were barred.

The title of the NPR article refers to a Trump quote reported by Michael Schmidt in the New York Times, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation 01/04/2018)

As Schmidt reminds us, Cohn "had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986." So Joe McCarthy's authoritarian heritage that was willing to ignore democratic and Constitutional rights and norms has now come to the White House is a potent form via Roy Cohn's political protege Donald Trump. (For more on Cohn, see also: Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man New York Times 06/20/2016; Marie Brenner, How Donald Trum and roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America Vanity Fair Aug 2017; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg; The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear Washington Post 06/17/2016)

Seve Bannon has rotated out of Trumpian favor for the moment. But his declaration that his goal in February 2017 when he was still a White House strategist that his goal is the "deconstruction of the administrative state" echoes the advocates of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s, from which he draws some of his ideas and perspective. Francis Wilkerson reported last year (Bannon's Requiem for the Administrative State Business Insider 03/27/2017):

It's unclear so far what Bannon's phrase "administrative state" means, or what "deconstructing" it would entail. Deregulation is surely a key element of it. But Obamacare seems about as clear an example of the administrative state as you can get. It's a vast and highly complex regulatory regime that administers intrusive and often restrictive rules while transferring payments and benefits from some Americans to others via federal and state governments.

In effect, Obamacare is the leading edge of what National Review writer David French called a "vast and bloated executive branch -- existing through its alphabet soup of agencies such as the EPA, IRS, DOE, ATF, and the like."

The "administrative state," in other words, is all the structures and functions of government that conservatives dislike, an alien force that, as French said, "intrudes into virtually every aspect of American life." [my emphasis]

This certainly is a goal that has a "revolutionary" edge to it, though in the sense of "conservative revolution," i.e, overthrowing the existing legal order by extralegal means to establish an authoritarian order.

There is a rich and contentious history of debate and polemics over what how revolution should be defined which I'm not addressing here. But the Republicans have invoked revolutionary rhetoric for decades. The Reagan Administration and its policies were referred to by Republicans as the Reagan Revolution, a term the mainstream press didn't find alarmingly inappropriate. The official White House website still contains this: "At the end of his two terms in office, Ronald Reagan viewed with satisfaction the achievements of his innovative program known as the Reagan Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the American people and reduce their reliance upon Government." (my emphsis) 40: Ronald Reagan (n/d; accessed 03/20/2018; sourced to “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey; 2006)

Later there was the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, also called the "Republican Revolution," in which the Republicans under Newt Gingrich's leadership won control of the House of Representative. (Andrea Stone, Republican Revolution fades USA Today 01/19/2003; updated 01/22/2003) Steven Gillon in 2016 characterized the Gingrich Revolution by its highly abrasive, transgressive style of politics that failed " to appreciate the distinction between means and ends." (The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican Dysfunction Huffpost 10/12/2016) He writes:

The person most responsible for injecting [the current] virulent strain of partisanship into the Republican party was another dethroned House Speaker — Newt Gingrich. The firebrand conservative leaders today are Gingrich’s children. Gingrich rose to power in the 1980s as the pied piper of a new assertive conservatism that merged the moralistic rhetoric of the New Right, and the mystical conservative faith in tax cuts, into a powerful ideological message. It was Gingrich who manufactured the hyper-partisanship that defines modern politics.

And when Republican donors like the Koch Brothers decided in 2009 they needed an Astroturf movement to publicly protest Obama, it quickly became branded as the Tea Party, i.e., a familiar patriotic symbol of the American Revoluiton.

The there was the Neoconservative Revolution, which was heavily influenced by Trotskyism, which became the defining outlook of the Cheney-Bush Administration's foreign policy, including the Iraq War. John Judis wrote about this aspect of the neocons' outlook in the very Establishment journal Foreign Policy in 1995 ("Trotskyism to Anachronism - The Neoconservative Revolution" July/Aug 1995). Noting that the hawkish foreign policy adviser Paul Nitze, who drafted the famous 1950 NSC-68 memorandum during the Truman Administration, was a major influence on the neocons, he also writes:

The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism .... Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohistetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 193os and early 194os. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.

What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. ...

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a
crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class. [my emphasis]

The distinction between conventional war and revolutionary war was a familiar one in the 19th century. Conventional war involved fighting to defeat an enemy army, possibly taking over the opposing country or part of it, without seeking to change the basic structure of social relationships in the enemy country. Revolutionary war includes the latter. A model case would be the wars immediately after the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, in which not just conquest but the implanting of republican governments and the dislocation of feudal social relationships were a part of the goal and practice. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, that was understood as a shift from conventional war, aimed at removing the rebel governments, to revolutionary war, that intended to undo the slave system that was the foundation of the Southern plantation economy.

The main official justification for the Iraq War was Saddam Hussein's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction." And Dick Cheney didn't give a flying flip about democracy or freedom or basic human rights in Iraq. But that Administration's policy in the Middle East was also justified as installing democratic governments on the inverted-Trotskyist model.

So the Republican Party has been comfortable with the rhetoric of "revolution," though overthrowing corporate capitalism is certainly no part of their agenda. And the highly partisan approach of Trump and his party toward justice right now is a (conservative) "revolutionary" approach to policy. Joe Conason describes the recent majority report of the House Intelligence Committee on Russiagate as a "surrender of Congressional authority to the White House" of a kind which bears "a sad resemblance to the behavior of bogus legislatures under authoritarian regimes."

The Democrats on the other hand, have become allergic to the whole idea of "revolution," unless it comes in the form of a "color revolution" against a government friendly to Russia or hostile to the United States (and to Israel, in the Middle East.) We see it in the way the Democrats shrink from any favorable invocation of the party's two main founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both of whom fought in the American Revolution and both of whom were key leaders in establishing and expanding democracy. So they leave behind any patriotic imagery or symbols associated with the American Revolution and shrug when the Republicans appropriate the symbolism of the Tea Party or Andrew Jackson.

Yes, in real history there are elements in every period of American history that deserve critical summary, not the least of them slavery and Indian policy. But it's one more element of partisan imbalance when the Democrats are unwilling to claim any of the patriotic heritage of the country prior to 1860 while the Republicans effectively appropriate all of it they want to for their own purposes. The Democrats don't even contest it, for the most part, which is one of the ways they allow the Republicans to define themselves as the party of Real Americans.

In the 2016 Presidential contest, Bernie Sanders straightforwardly talked about his program as a revolution. Which he defined clearly as getting more people to participate in the political process including voting, reducing the massive corporate corruption in American politics which is plain to everyone,establishing a solid social-democratic infrastructure including single-payer healthcare, and a more peace-oriented foreign policy with a smaller military budget. Whether that qualifies as dramatic a change as kicking Britain out of the US in the American Revolution or overthrowing the Slave Power in the Civil War is open to discussion. But it certainly is more deserving of that name than the Reagan Revolution or the Gingrich Revolution.

But the Clinton campaign tried to use the "revolution" label against Sanders. Politics is politics, so of course they were going to do that. So we heard campaign-promoted comments like: revolutions get people killed; we don't want to have a revolution, we want to elect a President; Sanders talking about "revolution" and "socialism" makes Hillary the Electable One for the general election.

This kind of fearful/contemptuous attitude toward the left has been a chronic problem for Democrats since 1972. The 2016 Hillary campaign version of it just reinforced the conservative tone in which the Democrats all too often frame themselves.

It doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats could speak with approval of the Roosevelt Revolution that brought the New Deal. The Dems still will speak sometimes of the "civil rights revolution," though it's typically framed as a series of events in the 1950s and 1960s rather than anything ongoing. And even as non-revolutionary a Democrat as Lyndon Johnson could invoke the song that for the civil rights movement was a hymn invoking militancy and radical change: "And we shall overcome."

And even now, the Democrats as a group are trapped by a toxic centrism with a conservative cast that recently led them to oppose Trump's militant populist rhetoric, which included actual incitements to violence at his rallies, with a bland slogan like Stronger Together. Which goes well with the obsession with Bipartisanship that the Democrats can seem to shake off.

Which brings us to John Brown's statue. If there was any white man in the United States prior to the Civil War who was devoted to democracy, despised slavery and actively tried to end it, considered blacks equal to white and women equal to men - in other words, characteristics that liberals now condemn pretty much every citizen of the US prior to 1860 - it was John Brown.

But will Democratic Party liberals be jumping up and down in outrage over seeing his statue defaced? This is the Democratic Party we're talking about, so the answer is: not many. The reason is illustrated by the opening paragraph of an article on Brown from 2005 by historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote a good short biography of Andrew Jackson that takes a nuanced view of him without falling into anachronisms ("Homegrown Terrorist" New Republic The New Republic 10/24/2005):

John Brown was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes. Every one of his murderous ventures failed to achieve its larger goals. His most famous exploit, the attack on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, actually backfired. That backfiring, and not Brown’s assault or his later apotheosis by certain abolitionists and Transcendentalists, contributed something, ironically, to the hastening of southern secession and the Civil War. In a topsy-turvy way, Brown may have advanced the anti-slavery cause. Otherwise, he actually damaged the mainstream campaign against slavery, which by the late 1850s was a serious mass political movement contending for national power, and not, as Brown and some of his radical friends saw it, a fraud even more dangerous to the cause of liberty than the slaveholders.

While it's a serious point, Wilentz' argument here bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the notorious "moderate" argument during the 1960s: if blacks actively protest against segregation, it will make whites more resistant and damage their own cause.

John Brown fought in the guerrilla war between the pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas Territory. And the operation during which he was captured at Harper's Ferry was one he designed to set up resistance bases in the Appalachian Mountains to encourage and facilitate the flight of slaves from their masters' plantations. But America's center-left party, the Democrats, don't really want to invoke that heritage, either. It might get in the way of Bipartisan cooperation.

I'm not suggesting that the Democratic Party set up guerrilla bases in the mountains. In fact, I can't really envision such a thing in my imagination.

But the Democrats mostly let the Republican have John Brown, too! Antiabortionists invoke John Brown to justify extralegal violence against abortion providers. The racism and anti-woman attitudes so common in that movement would be completely repugnant to Brown.

And the Democrats should be able to recognize that in the face of a Republican Party in power employing revolutionary means to wreck liberal democratic institutions, something more militant than Stronger Together bipartisan bromides is needed. As long as they are allergic to even talking about "revolution" in the sense of getting more people out to vote, they will have a hard time getting there. And unless they can do more than "bipartisan" surrender to Trump and the Republicans on issue after issue, it will be hard to convince voters than the Resistance talk is serious on their part.

On the other hand, for the Democrats to try to imitate the loose talk from the right about "Second Amendment solutions" sounds kind of bizarre. (Ed Kilgore, Democratic Congressman Hints at Armed Rebellion Against Trump New York 03/19/2018) A party that can't organize its Congressional representation to block an ill-conceived bank deregulation law isn't going to be organizing its own popular militia.

The problem for the Democrats is that so many of its leaders and office-holders are stuck in the we-aren't-lefties attitude that establishment Democrats in the 1968-72 period used, even Democrats who were born well after that time. This way too often leads them to frequently adopt conservative framing and conservative arguments for their more liberal/progressive positions. They really need to stop doing that, as George Lakoff has been urgently recommending for years now.

Also, despite their enthusiasm for "color revolutions" today, Democrats have often blundered and sometimes caused great harm in no small part due to their inability to take a practical, nuanced view of homegrown revolutions in other countries, from Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution, to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Libya and, to some extent, Syria.

John Danforth criticizes Trump

Democrats are real suckers for touting Republicans who agree with them and stretching at times to do so. I'm going to indulge that impulse a bit here and quote former Missouri Sen. John Danforth on his public warnings about Donald Trump and the need for Republicans to distance themselves from him.

But before I get all bipartisan here, I want to recall that Danforth was the Senator who sponsored Clarence Thomas to be a Supreme Court Justice. Thomas is African-American, of course. He is also a hardline conservative ideologue who generally opposes efforts to prevent discrimination. Thomas voted on the conservative/reactionary side on some of the most significant and damaging Court decisions of recent decades, including Bush v. Gore, Citizens United (allowing billionaires to flood political campaigns with their money), Shelby County (gutting the Voting Rights Act), and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (which rejected a voluntary local school integration plan in terms that seemed to reject the basic principles of Brown v. Board of Education. Responding to a pro-segregation dissent by Thomas in a 2013 case, Charlie Pierce wrote of him, "It's not often that you see anyone take this much utter self-loathing out for a walk without it ending up in gunplay or a dive off a bridge. ... If there's a sadder figure in American politics, I can't think of one offhand." (See my post Back to 1963 with the Roberts Court 06/27/2013).

That's Danforth's most important legacy to the American body politics. Keep that in mind.

Danforth at age 80 sounds good in terms of the physical and intellectual vitality he conveys. And since he's left the Senate, he has occasionally grumped about the Christian Right. This earned him praise from pundits for his statesmanship. Because in the Republican Party, making a statement now and again opposing theocrats and white supremacists who hate democracy counts as "political courage."

His latest turn on the statesmanship stage comes in a Washington Post op-ed, The real reason Trump is not a Republican 08/24/2017:

It isn’t a matter of occasional asides, or indiscreet slips of the tongue uttered at unguarded moments. Trump is always eager to tell people that they don’t belong here, whether it’s Mexicans, Muslims, transgender people or another group. His message is, “You are not one of us,” the opposite of “e pluribus unum.” And when he has the opportunity to unite Americans, to inspire us, to call out the most hateful among us, the KKK and the neo-Nazis, he refuses.

To my fellow Republicans: We cannot allow Donald Trump to redefine the Republican Party. That is what he is doing, as long as we give the impression by our silence that his words are our words and his actions are our actions. We cannot allow that impression to go unchallenged.

As has been true since our beginning, we Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the party of the Union. We believe in our founding principle. We are proud of our illustrious history. We believe that we are an essential part of present-day American politics. Our country needs a responsibly conservative party. But our party has been corrupted by this hateful man, and it is now in peril.

And he declares, " There hasn’t been a more divisive person in national politics since George Wallace."

Mark Shields took the occasion to gush over Danforth a bit (Shields and Brooks on Trump’s contrasting speeches, GOP ruptured relations PBS Newshour 08/25/2017), "Jack Danforth comes with credentials as a senator, as the Senate sponsor, personal endorser of the only African-American ever nominated to the Supreme Court by any Republican president, Clarence Thomas, who had worked for him. So, he is — he is someone who has certainly street cred on this issue."

Did I mention that that Clarence Thomas has been a consistent reactionary in his Supreme Court votes?

A fight worth losing: investigating Clarenece Thomas

Since the Senate is finally getting serious about stopping Republican shenanigans around judicial nominations, it's worth recalling that one of the worst appointments even made to the Supreme Court was a Republican one, Clarence Thomas. Old Man Bush made the nomination. Alleged GOP moderate Sen. Senator John Danforth of Missouri sponsored him.

Politico's Jennifer Epstein reported several years ago now in Clarence Thomas revises disclosure forms 01/24/2011 on the dubious behavior of Justice Thomas:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has amended 13 years’ worth of disclosure reports to include details of wife Virginia Thomas’s sources of income, documents released on Monday show.

The documents indicate that Thomas's wife, who goes by Ginni, had worked for Hillsdale College in Michigan, the Heritage Foundation and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, among other entities.

A serious Senate hearing on Supreme Court ethics that examined Thomas' considerable ethical lapses and Antonin Scalia's as well would certainly be a useful exercise.

Tags: antonin scalia, clarence thomas

Is "false consciousness" meaningful in politics? And what does Clarence Thomas have to do with it?

This article from former British Labour Member of Parliament David Marquand, Why the left is losing the crisis New Statesman 11/25/2010, has some valuable observation about how the embrace of neoliberalism (the "free market" Washington Consensus so beloved of the International Monetary Fund for developing nations in the 1990s) has placed center-left parties in Europe in the position of losing ground in a serious way to the right. And this in the midst of a depression, in which the right is advocating Herbert Hoover economics, known as the "Treasury view" in Britain.

But somehow he felt the need to qualify his polemic against austerity economics by "punching a hippie," in the form of griping about the faults of Marxism:

The ancient Marxist myth of false consciousness dies hard on the left. It says that, if hitherto left voters swing to the right, it is because they have been led astray by racists or demagogues, or because they have been seduced by false promises, or both: in short, because they don't understand what their true interests are. Unfortunately for its purveyors, the myth does not stand up. There was plenty of false consciousness around, but its chief repositories were the leaders of the social-democratic left, not the voters who deserted them. The deserting voters sensed that the statist paradigm in which their erstwhile leaders were trapped was a busted flush: that, as the American political economist Charles Lindblom once put it, the central state consists of "strong thumbs and no fingers" and those strong thumbs were no longer enough to induce lasting change.

I have no idea what that last metaphor about the thumbs and the fingers and the "central state" is supposed to mean.

But the argument that "the left" foolishly looks down on voters who don't agree with them as people who "don't understand what their true interests are" is a favorite theme of American conservatives. It's a stock feature of rightwing verbal populism. George Wallace in the 1960s sneered in his speeches against "pointy-headed intellectuals" and perfessers who ride bicycles. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann regularly remind their fans of who the libruls and the "lamestream media" look down on the Real Americans.

There's also a highbrow version of the same argument popular among neoconservatives. I don't know that Christopher Lasch was ever considered a a neoconservative. But his version of the argument in introduction to his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) makes a case with which neocons would feel comfortable. In the preceding pages, he has made it clear that he is discussing "the left" as everyone from self-identifying Marxists to Democratic Party liberals:

The left had no quarrel with the future, I discovered, but only with the backward, benighted, or simply misguided opponents of progress whose blind resistance might prevent the future from arriving on schedule. It was the belief in progress ... that explained the left's curious mixture of complacency and paranoia. Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive people unbearably smug and superior, but they felt isolated and beleaguered in their own country, since it was so much less progressive than they were. After all, the political culture of the United States remained notoriously backward - no labor party, no socialist tradition, no great capital city like London or Paris, where politicians and civil servants mingled with artists and intellectuals and encountered advanced ideas in cafés and drawing rooms. In America, the divorce between politics and thought had always found geographical expression in the distance between Washington and New York; and the culture of Washington itself, for that matter, seemed light-years ahead of the vast hinterland beyond the Alleghenies - the land of the Yahoo, the John Birch Society, and the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

That's how you do a highbrow mocking of the pointy-headed perfessers riding bicycles.

This comes from the last years of Lasch's life and career. And by this time, he had clearly embraced some rightwing perspectives. As we see in that excerpt. And, like my puzzlement at Marchand's metaphor, it's hard for me to even guess what real-world entities might have some correspondence to those Lasch is mocking. "In America, the divorce between politics and thought had always found geographical expression in the distance between Washington and New York"? Say what? And for that matter, what the heck is a "drawing room," really? Have you ever known anyone who had a part of their house they called a "drawing room"?

Okay, that's my own little bit of mockery. But, honestly, looking at the political scene during the Reagan and the Old Man Bush Administrations, who is he talking about here? Walter Mondale? Michael Dukakis? Bill Clinton? Al Gore? Please. One would have to look very hard in The Nation or The Progressive to find articles that expressed such a viewpoint. It might be marginally easier to find in the New York Review of Books. But it certainly was not the attitide of the broad group he takes as "the left."

Here Lasch explicitly embraces on of the favorite themes of conservatives, segregationists - and also the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC):

The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible - ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children - helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories - desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion - were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of seeking to create a popular consensus behind these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed. The trauma of McCarthyism, the long and bitter resistance to desegregation in the South, and the continued resistance to federal spending (unless it could be justified on military grounds) all seemed to confirm liberals in the belief that the ordinary American had never been a liberal and was unlikely to become one. [my emphasis]

Lasch was considered a serious intellectual, and I don't mean "Serious" in the contemporary sense of embracing Beltway Village conventional wisdom. But this stuff was downright tendentious. Liberals were very aware that only a minority of the US public self-identified in polls as "liberal." But, then as now, on major policy issues, clear majorities and pluralities poll as supporting liberal positions on policy issues.

Now, real live liberals and progressives today do make the argument that in some cases, notably abortion rights, that advocates have become complacent about mobilizing political support for their causes, in part because the legal rulings were favorable to the cause in question. Yes, Brown v Board of Education ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional. But the Civil Right Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted by, uh, Congress. Lasch's argument is nothing but his version of the endless segregationist whine about the alleged tyranny of the courts.

That he was making this argument against "the left" in a book published in 1991 has an especially ironic sound today. The biggest judicial controversy of the Bush I Administration (1989-1993) was the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The federal courts have since become heavily dominated by Republicans. The Supreme Court decisions in Bush v. Gore (Rehnquist Court, 2000) and Citizen's United (Roberts Court, 2010) were blatantly partisan and anti-democratic, and rank with the Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions as some of the very worst in the entire Court's history.

Today's Republicans have no problem with using the federal courts for blatantly partisan and ideological purposes, enacting in reality a mirror-image of the false claims the segregationists always made against desegregation decisions. The Cheney-Bush Administration had all their Supreme Court nominees vetted through the crassly ideological and partisan Federalist Society. Clarence Thomas is currently receiving well-deserved criticism for his overtly partisan associations and the big money his wife takes from partisan conservative groups; she has herself been a prominent Tea Party activist. On Thomas' ethical challenges, see Mike McIntire, Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics New York Times 06/18/2011; Digby's Today's Court is just another political player Hullabaloo 06/19/2011; and, Ian Millhiser, Clarence Thomas Decided Three Cases Where AEI Filed A Brief After AEI Gave Him A $15,000 Gift Think Progress 06/21/2011. Digby observes:

I think the Court sees itself as an explicitly political branch now and any attack on Thomas is done in that light. Bush vs Gore was a watershed --- the idea that the Court was above crass political considerations (even if it often wasn't) was fully abandoned and there's no going back. (Recall that Chief Justice Roberts worked on the Bush recount.)

To gripe about how "the left" relies too much on the courts to achieve their goals is a bad joke in today's judicial reality in the US.

Oh, and one of the three cases referenced in Ian Millhiser's piece is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), a school desegregation case. Thomas filed a concurring opinion emphasizing what sounds like his opposition to the federal courts allowing any school desegregation plan that was anything but a one-time remedy for previous legally imposed (de jure) segregation in that school district. Justice Robert's opinion for the Court at the end cites Brown v. Board of Education as banning the recognition of race in a plan to alleviate actual (de facto) racial discrimination. The opinion didn't reverse Brown explicitly. It's safe to say it stood the Brown ruling on its head.

Justice Breyer, in a dissent joined by the other three dissenting Justices, said:

The plurality pays inadequate attention to this law, to past opinions’ rationales, their language, and the contexts in which they arise. As a result, it reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown's promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality. [my emphasis]

The ruling banned a desegregation plan that was adopted by the school district on its own initiative, not as a result of court orders. But remember, it's "the left" who wants to use the courts to impose their political views!

Justice Stevens filed his own separate dissent describing memorably the cynicism of the majority's reasoning:

There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE'S reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294 (1955). The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." Ante, at 40. This sentence reminds me of Anatole France's observation: "[T]he majestic equality of the la[w], forbid[s] rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions. Compare ante, at 39 ("history will be heard"), with Brewer v. Quarterman, 550 U. S. ___, ___ (2007) (slip op., at 11) (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting) ("It is a familiar adage that history is written by the victors").

All this is a long way of saying that Marquand's argument about "the left" and "false consciousness" is a whopping red herring. Every political party, like every sales person in any business, tries to convince those to whom it's marketing itself that it better represents their interests than the alternative (voting for another party, not buying the product). In other words, it assumes that the skepticism or indecision of the targeted customer toward the party marketing itself in a political campaign is a form of "false consciousness," which the campaigner seeks to change.

In other words, in the context used by Marquand and by Lasch, the argument simply takes ordinary political persuasion and tries to paint it as elitist arrogance on the part of "the left." I don't know if there's any way for it to be meaningfully measured. But I'm guessing that the notion that people are too stupid too understand their own real interest is far more often expressed by the Tea Party types groups than by "the left." At least that's the only place I recall hearing it lately.

But in the context of electoral political activity, it's a silly play on the concept of the most elementary political marketing.

Tags: clarence thomas, christopher lasch, david marquand, republican supreme court, segregation

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

Isn't something like this impeachable?

I mean, isn't it pretty much a public sneer at his oath of office and basic duties as a Supreme Court Justice? From Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students by Adam Liptak New York Times 04/13/09:

The event, on March 31, was devoted to the Bill of Rights, but Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives.

"Today there is much focus on our rights," Justice Thomas said. "Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights."

"I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances,” he said. “Shouldn’t there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?”

He gave examples: “It seems that many have come to think that each of us is owed prosperity and a certain standard of living. They’re owed air-conditioning, cars, telephones, televisions.”

Approving Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court was one major milestone in the Congressional Democrats - and specifically the Senate Democrats - being unwilling to fight for the most obviously necessary goals. Even before the sexual harassment issue surfaced, it was painfully obvious that Thomas didn't have the qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice. And his answers to the Judiciary Committee were painfully obviously dissimulating.

This is something to remember when we think about what passes for "moderates" in the Beltway Village image of the Republican Party today. Thomas is one of the worst rightwing ideologues ever put on the Supreme Court. And it was that great "moderate" Old Many Bush who nominated him. And it was the "moderate" John Danforth who was his chief sponsor in the Senate.

Tags: establishment press, bush doctrine

Bob McElvaine on Sarah Palin and the Republican tradition

The creepy-looking photoshopped picture he came up with illustrates Bob's theme in this post very well. It's a reminder of how the Republicans once before used a mirror-image version of their own phony caricature of affirmative action, in that case for Old Man Bush to get a rightwing Justice on the Supreme Court who has largely facilitated the Republican Party's war on the Constitution ever since.

She's Not Quayle; She's Thomas by Robert S. McElvaine

"I got a woman," John McCain is singing, "way over the continent," and she's good for me, oh yeah. ... Yeah she's a kind of friend I need."

The Republican presidential nominee-to-be had to alter a few of Ray Charles's words to adapt the song. But he's got his woman, first-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Contrary to what some critics of the selection are saying, McCain didn't want just any woman. She had to be qualified. Not qualified to be president, obviously; but qualified by being right--extremely right--on all the right-wing issues.

Unlike Ray Charles's woman (and many regressive women and men), Sarah Palin doesn't "know a woman's place is right there now in her home." But that's one of the few areas where this woman who opposes abortion in all cases, even rape and incest, who is a Creationist, who doesn't think human activities contribute to global warming ... (the list goes on and on) parts company with the extreme right.

There has been much talk of Sen. McCain's choice of Gov. Palin as something akin to the 1988 pick by George H.W. Bush of Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle to be his running mate.

Like the senior Bush's choice of not-ready-for-prime-time Quayle, McCain's choice of Palin (who, as just one example of her total lack of qualification for the presidency, says she hasn't "really focused much on the war in Iraq"), came, as the saying goes, out of left field--except that in both cases the picks actually came out of right field--the deepest part of right field.

But the far more apt parallel for the choice of Gov. Palin is an even worse nomination made by Bush the Elder three years after his selection of Quayle.

On July 1, 1991, the first President Bush announced the nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Like Palin now, Thomas then was indisputably far less qualified than numerous other possible candidates, and was chosen entirely on the basis of demographics and ideology--an ideology shared by Thomas and Palin that opposes choosing people on the basis of their demographic group.

The parallel between the Thomas and Palin selections is almost exact:

1. An attempt was being made to replace on the Court Justice Marshall, one of the leading figures in advocating civil rights, with a person who shares his complexion but is his polar opposite on civil rights issues.
2. An attempt is being made to persuade women to replace in their affections Senator Clinton, one of the leading figures in advocating women's rights, with a person who shares her hormones but is her polar opposite on women's rights issues.

Neither women nor African Americans are, of course, of one mind when it comes to political and social issues, and some women are in tune with Sarah Palin, as some African Americans are in agreement with Clarence Thomas. But the women who agree with Gov. Palin are already Republicans. Sen. McCain's cynical ploy is aimed at winning over women who voted for Hillary Clinton.

A woman who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 but would vote for a female whose choice made Dr. James Dobson and the rest of the Jesus Thieves of the so-called "Christian Right" ecstatic would be as foolish as a black civil rights advocate who would approve an African American Supreme Court nominee whose choice thrilled the "Religious Right" and the right-wing in general in 1991.

A second X-chromosome is no more a sufficient qualification for being women's choice for the vice presidency than dark pigmentation was for being African-Americans' choice for a seat on the Supreme Court.

And mention of seats on the Supreme Court brings the parallel between Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin into even sharper focus. The election of McCain and Palin would assure the appointment of more justices who share Thomas's ideology and would guarantee the overturning of Roe v. Wade along with many other progressive and pro-woman and pro-civil rights decisions.

How many supporters of Hillary Clinton would have voted for Margaret Thatcher? How many would vote for Phyllis Schlafly? That's exactly how many should vote for John McCain and his new help-mate.

So while John McCain is happily humming "I Got a Woman," the rest of us need to sing--no, scream--the lyrics of another song from the 1960s, the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again":

Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

If the voters do allow themselves to get fooled again, as they were fooled by the Republican politics of fear and lies in 2004, the nation will find itself with John McCain as president and Pete Townshend's closing lines of that song tell us exactly what that would mean:

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

The song combined with images of Thomas and Palin, Bush and McCain, Karl Rove and a quick clip of a 2004 swift boat ad would make a great television commercial.

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America.]

Tags: clarence thomas, robert mcelvaine, sarah palin Memorandum