Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: Segregation ideology and contemporary conservatism

Chauncey DeVega can be blunt: "Given what we know about racial framing in the news media, and the increasing overlap of conservatism and racism (they are now almost one and the same thing) ..." (my emphasis)

That's from Colorblind Politics in Practice? Puzzling Through Kermit Gosnell and Racial Framing in the Right-Wing Media WARN 04/14/2013 about the case of Gosnell, who as Scott Lemeiux explains, is "a Philadelphia doctor accused of committing infanticide, and maiming and, in some cases, killing his patients (most of them poor women) in an unsanitary abortion clinic." (Five Lessons from the Gosnell Abortion-Clinic Controversy The American Prospect Online 04/15/2013.

Is DeVega's statement fair, that "conservatism and racism" are "now almost one and the same thing"?

It is fair, because what is popularly called "conservatism" in the US largely equals the Republican Party and the Republican Party has fully embraced voter-suppression approaches targeted at African-American and Latino voters.

The denial of the vote to black citizens was the core the segregation system in the South from roughly 1875-1970. The terror involved in lynch law, the discriminatory acts of employers and law enforcement, and the neurotic trappings of segregation proper (the "Jim Crow" laws with separate public drinking fountains for blacks and whites) were all very much part of that system. But the political core of it was the disenfranchisement of blacks. It took that, and the collapse of the national parties' commitment to protecting basic civil rights in the South, to overthrow the democratic governments of Reconstruction.

The fact that the Republican Party has now made racially-targeted voter suppression part of their standard operating procedure means that they are now trying to reimpose a key element of white racism, white supremacy and segregation.

Does that mean that the Democratic Party now has clean hands and a pure heart on issues involved with white racism? Leaving aside whether a political party can be said to have a "heart," no, it doesn't. There are many aspects of American life, such as the way in which law enforcement and prison sentencing work, especially in connection with the never-ending War on Drugs, that the Democratic Party either accepts or gives a low priority to correcting. President Obama's proposed cuts to benefits for Social Security and Medicare would disproportionately harm communities of color.

But it's also safe to say that those who are concerned with issues of opposing discrimination and eliminating racial discrimination do not, with rare exceptions, identify with the Republican Party and what we take for "conservatism" in the US today.

And voter suppression is a red line on this. Anyone who supports voter suppression supports white racism, whatever they may claim their subjective feelings are about racism.

DeVega raises a thought-provoking set of questions about the Kermit Gosnell case. It's a cause for the antiabortion movement which is a central part of today's Republican Party. But he observes, noting that Gosnell is black:

... given the Right-wing media's efforts in 2008 to smear then candidate Barack Obama as a "radical" "baby-killer" and how contemporary conservatives wallow in white racial resentment, the connection between racial anxiety and hostility, partisanship, abortion as a public policy issue, and Kermit Gosnell should be too much to resist. My survey, however limited, of the Right-wing media has revealed few if any such connections.

One suggestion he raises as a question is to ask if because antiabortionists argue that "abortion is a tool used by 'progressives' to commit 'genocide' against the African-American community, have conservative opinion leaders developed 'race neutral' talking points about Kermit Gosnell to mobilize the anti-women's reproductive rights base?"

His aren't easy questions, though people who have been following that case closely might have good answers. With the activists antiabortion movement, you get deep into fanaticism and Christian dominionism, and many of the experienced activists are media-savvy. That particular argument that the Evil Libruls want to use abortion to commit genocide against blacks is in itself so uncoupled from what we quaintly call reality that its a marker of serious fanaticism. When rightwingers are indulging in this extreme of racial role-reversal with a genuinely weird twist, you don't have to dig too far to find white racist attitudes. But that doesn't answer his question just quoted, which has to do with the public vocabulary used for conservatives to mobilize supporters around this particular issue.

Part of the rightwing schtick around this case has been to falsely claim that the ever-threatening Liberal Media Conspiracy has tried to suppress the story. I notice in this column from one of the older conservative media outlets, The Gosnell Embargo Cracks Human Events 04/12/2013, John Hayward says of the Evil Libruls accomplishment, "The Men in Black could not have erased this story better with their neuralyzers."

On the substance of the accusation against the Evil Librul Media here, Scott Lemeiux writes:

Whether the mainstream national media has given adequate attention to the Gosnell case is a matter of judgment, although claims that it's been entirely ignored are incorrect. (Consider, for example, Sabrina Tavernise's lengthy New York Times story from 2011.) But it should be remembered who hasn't been ignoring the story: feminist writers. Many prominent feminists, for obvious reasons, reacted with horror to the charges against Gosnell.

That second link in Lemeiux's quote is to Irin Carmon, There is no Gosnell coverup Salon 04/12/2013.

But I also wanted to call attention to the description DeVega gives of how white racism operates in real life in his post on the Gosnell case:

There are volumes of research in the Social Sciences which have repeatedly demonstrated that race is an important variable in news coverage of crime (people of color are grossly over-represented as criminals; whites are grossly under-represented). Race also impacts how individuals quite literally "see" and understand events, as well as judge human social interaction.

In tests measuring implicit bias and sub-conscious racism, harmless objects held by black men are magically transformed into dangerous objects such as guns and knives when viewed by white test takers. This has real life and death consequences: police routinely murder innocent people of color because they claim to have seen a cellphone, a wallet, or house keys as deadly weapons.

Psychologists also conducted experiments where they showed test takers pictures of Tony Blair and Barack Obama. The former, then British Prime Minister, and white, was judged to be "American." Obama, the country's first black president, was seen as a "foreigner."

In the collective (white) American subconscious, "whiteness" equals belonging; "non-whiteness" is a mark of outsider status, of being a perennial Other and anti-citizen--even if you are President of the United States.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, kermit gosnell, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 14: Rand Paul tries to talk to some Negroes, or, real-time white racism, playing somewhere near you (2)

This video from the FreedomWorksAction YouTube channel, Liberty & Civil Rights speech by Senator Rand Paul Howard University 04/10/2013, shows "Baby Doc" Paul's full speech at historically African-American Howard University this past week:

Baby Doc's cringe-worthy presentation is like a time-capsule out of 1960 or something of a stiff, educated John Birch Society doctor trying to talk friendly to "the Negroes." If he weren't such a jerk, I would almost feel sorry for him in his obvious stiffness and general cluelessness about what he's doing. Like around 30:20 when he forgets the name of the former African-American Massachusetts Senator Edward Brook, who he calls "Edwin Brooks" after the audience tries to help him.

Is it fair for me to label this post as providing an example real-time white racism"? After all, he didn't say "n----r," like Jim Gile.

If you think that white racism is a matter of manners, then, yes, it would be unfair.

But speeches like this were always a part of the defense of segregation. At around 26:00, a questioner raises the real-time issue of voter suppression targeted to African-American and Latino voters. He defends this typical segregationist practice by brushing it off. And he criticizes literacy tests in the Deep South of past times that are not one of the current Republican menu of voter suppression methods. He doesn't criticize any that his Party actually is promoting.

His whole framework of discussing history is typical of the way in which neo-Confederates make up cartoon versions of history. At around 29:45ff, for instance, he refers to "horrible Jim Crow and horrible racism that happened in the 30s, 40s, 50s, it was all Democrats." Kevin Levin writes of the speech, "Paul's collapse of the past 150 years constitutes not only a superficial understanding of American history, but a false Civil War Memory." (Rand Paul's False Civil War Memory Civil War Memory 04/11/2013)

The real history of white racism doesn't interest him. Much less its institutional nature. And he's certainly not willing to acknowledge anything in the current Republican Party programs that could even be legitimately perceived as expressions of white racism, other than inadequate advertising.

I don't think this kind of presentation by Baby Doc is really aimed at African-American audience at all, except possibly those who aspire to be a Herman Cain of the future. His speech could serve as an example of what Republican white people think that "respectable Negroes" should be saying about politics and race.

But his real targets is conservative Republican white base voters, who will be encouraged to see him talking smack to predominantly black audience and informing them what a respectable Republican African-American would sound like, i.e., like a conservative white guy such as Baby Doc Paul.

Jon Stewart skewers Baby Doc's speech here in a perceptive way:

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, rand paul, white racism

The Iron Lady, Frau Fritz and what may be left of the future of the EU

Clive Crook looks at the recently deceased British Prime Minister's one-time criticism of the European Union in Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Prime Euro-Skeptic Bloomberg Businessweek 04/11/2013. He recalls that it was Thatcher's determined opposition to further European political integration that prompted her downfall in 1990, which didn't come as the result of an election but from her rejection by her own party over European policy:

Returning from a European Community meeting in Rome, she gave a speech in Parliament that attacked plans from the European Commission (the Community’s executive branch) for a politically integrated Europe. "No, no, no," she said. Her exasperated deputy prime minister, Geoffrey Howe, decided to quit. Howe, until then a Thatcher loyalist, was one of the most boring speakers the House of Commons ever produced — a former Labour minister once said that facing his criticism was like being "savaged by a dead sheep" — but his resignation statement was electrifying. It dispelled the illusion of Thatcher’s power and sparked the rebellion that brought her down.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Thatcher's passing, Barroso on the death of Margaret Thatcher EUXTV 04/08/2013:

He explains that Thatcher had an unattractive combination of two kinds of Euro-skepticism:

When it came to Europe, Thatcher had an attitude problem, one that other Europeans would recognize as characteristically British. She was right on points of substance but expressed and inflamed a national disdain for the European project that served her country badly.

British euro-skepticism has two strands, and Thatcher exemplified both. The rational strand is pragmatic and liberal (in the European sense). It's fearful of big government and hopes to keep a self-replicating bureaucracy in check. It wants to locate democratic accountability mainly at the national level until a real European political identity has established itself, and it thinks that process shouldn't be rushed. It recognizes Britain’s acute dependence on a thriving European economy, celebrates the gains from trade in Europe's single market, and is open to further integration to serve that purpose, but it rejects political union as a goal in its own right.

There’s also an irrational, illiberal strand. Its core is chauvinistic and attached not just to Britain's history — "We will fight them on the beaches," and all that — but also to the myth of its undiminished geopolitical weight. Britain doesn't need Europe, according to this view. What's Europe ever done for us? [my emphasis]

Crook sees present Prime Minister David Cameron as following in the "rational strand" that he identifies. And he discusses how Cameron is using his Euro-skepticism to threaten a new referendum on EU membership as a way to pressure the other EU members into making more special concessions to Britain.

Crook's article does not give a sense of how drastically EU politics has changed. The "European project" was never primarily about making a big ole free trade zone for the corporations to enjoy at the expense of workers. It was primarily about preventing war and promoting democracy. Thanks in no small part to the position of people like Thatcher and Cameron, the EU project has now degenerated into a German-dominated commercial racket.

The three largest powers in the EU are Germany, France and Britain. Their leadership has been critical in making or breaking the European project. And all three countries have been working hard in recent years on policies that will break it. German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel has done the most harm, of course, using the euro crisis to impose conservative German fiscal policies of the Heinrich Brüning type on the eurozone. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was Frau Fritz' partner in doing so. François Hollande got elected President opposing the Merkel-Brüning policies. But after he was elected, he could scarcely wait to reverse himself and become a loyal supporter of those policies, including proposing austerity policies for France.

Cameron and Britain have been worse than useless to the EU during the euro crisis. Britain looks prescient in not joining the euro. But it was more nationalism and lack of support for EU that led them to stay out rather than any astute economic analysis by the British decision-makers. They certainly haven't had any useful advice or material assistance to the eurozone during the crisis. On the contrary, Cameron has been implementing Merkel-Brüning austerity policies in Britain, with the damage to the economy that comes with it. And he's tried to exploit the eurozone crisis to weaken financial regulations affecting Britain and further distance himself from the EU.

The narrow nationalism of Cameron and Frau Fritz is well along in consigning both their nations to be bit players on the world scene. The only way Britain, France or Germany can continue to be major forces in world politics is through a European Union. And they have failed to pull it off, or so it currently appears.

If the European project is to be resuscitated, one of the things that would have to be done in any case is to exclude Britain from it, so long as its foreign policy is so tightly tied to that of the United States. Under the current world-hegemony foreign policy the US is pursuing and has pursued since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US aims to prevent the rise of any "peer competitor" on the world scene. Before Frau Fritz began her current wrecking operation in 2009, the EU was a candidate for such a status. So US policy since the Clinton Administration has favored a weaker EU without a common foreign policy, so that the US can when it wants play the various EU nations off against one another, as the Cheney-Bush Administration did over the Iraq War and "missile defense." For the EU to achieve its full potential as a global power player, it would need a common foreign policy. And that will not be possible with Britain included so long as the "special relationship" to the US holds.

But with the current Merkel-Brüning austerity policies dominant, all talk about any long future for the EU, much less the euro, seems more and more abstract and speculative. Here's the EU putting the squeeze on Spain and Slovenia for insufficient austerity, EU warns Spain, Slovenia over troubled economies EUXTV 04/11/2013:

And the squeeze on Cyprus. And Protugal. EU helps Cyprus, Portugal and Ireland over bailouts - economy Euronews 04/12/2013:

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, david cameron, eu, euro, european union, france, françois hollande, maggie thatcher

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 13: Real-time white racism, playing somewhere near you (1)

"I just don't believe everyone should be engaged in a conversation [about race]. I strongly believe that people often have disparate interests. White racism is an actual interest held by actual people. Some people should be talked to. Other people must be defeated."

That's Ta-Nahisi Coates in Against the Conversation, Cont. The Atlantic Online 04/10/2013, on of three posts he's made taking off on the theme of the Brad Paisle/LL Cool J song, "Accidental Racist." The other two are Why 'Accidental Racist' Is Actually Just Racist 04/10/2013 and Against the 'Conversation on Race' 04/10/2013.

A different kind of song about race: Peter, Paul and Mary performing a Pete Seeger song, All Mixed Up:

In that post just quoted, Coates is making particular reference to a Kansas County Commissioner, Jim Gile, who attracted national attention by his use of "nigger—rigging" in a public meeting, which he sneeringly corrected to "Afro-Americanized." (Elspeth Reeve, Kansas Politician Is the Latest Accidental Racist After Dropping the N-Word Atlantic Wire 04/10/2013)

Coates argues that it's pointless, if not worse, to reduce white racism to simple subjective ill-will. In fact, the kind of anti-racist appeal Paisley claims to be making in his song in effect assumes there is no ill-will at all between the two sides of the conversation:

I have had conversations with very well-educated people who, with a straight face, have told me that there are Black Confederates. If you ask a very well educated person how the GI Bill exacerbated the wealth gap, or how New Deal housing policy helped create the ghetto they very likely will not know. And they do not know, not because they are ignorant, stupid, or immoral, they do not know because they are part of country that has decided that "not knowing" is in its interest. There's no room for any sort of serious conversation when the basic facts of history are not accessible. It would be like me demanding a conversation on Vichy France--en Français.

So we retreat to mushy, moist talk about who "feelings," "intentions," "good people" and "loving fathers." The great Jay Smooth once said that we need to move from a "what you are" conversation ("you are a racist") to a "what you are doing" conversation. Unfortunately this presumes a groundwork of honesty and good faith. No such good faith exists because we are ignorant, and deep down inside, we know it and are ashamed of it. [my emphasis]

Chauncey DeVega makes his own version of this point in The "Accidental Racist" and How to Write a Post-Racial Pop Song in The Age of Obama WARN 04/11/2013:

... LL Cool J and Brad Paisley's recent song "Accidental Racist" is a product of a confused post-racial America where the "national discourse" on race is moribund, twisted, tired, and empty.

In the post-civil rights era, white folks apparently just want "forgiveness" and to "get past" this race stuff. Black and brown folks want some type of justice and an acknowledgement of how structural inequality along the color line persists into the present. The former want to limit racism to "mean words" and "hurt feelings." The latter would like to discuss substantive efforts at improving live chances and the social inequalities caused by racism, both structural and inter-personal. [my emphasis]

Coates also makes a point along the lines I made in my earlier post on the subject of "Accidental Racist." Coates:

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.

Love the shout-out to Faulkner.

And speaking of Jim Gile, Coates explains how this is a fairly typical performance of white racism:

It is tempting to write this off as the local shenanigans of some unknown politician. Except that Gile's response is fairly typical when people are caught doing racist things. ... Michael Richards once yelled, at the top of his lungs, "He's a nigger! He's a nigger!" made a joke about lynching. When told that this is the sort of thing which, you know, racists tend to do, he said "I'm not a racist" -- and was indignant that someone would call him one -- "that's what's so insane."

This is denial and willful ignorance. And it's fairly endemic. I can't really remember the last time I saw a public figure do something racist and say, "Yes. I am racist. I am sorry and I intend to do something about it." Indeed virtually any "conversation" on race that would take place in this country must -- necessarily -- be premised on there not being any actual living racists, or any actual effects of racism.

We do not know. And we like it that way. [my emphasis]

Chauncey DeVega also makes a point about how Obama both as candidate and President has shaped the current state of our so-called conservation on race in the US:

Then candidate Barack Obama, who is/was an elite opinion leader, played a similar game in his much vaunted Philadelphia speech on race during the 2008 campaign. Obama, in an effort to win the White House by distancing himself from the "political blackness" embodied by Reverend Wright, suggested that African-Americans' justice claims are somehow morally and ethically equivalent to the racial resentment felt by many white Americans towards people of color in their backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement.

I would not expect LL Cool J or Brad Paisley to fully understand the political work done by their song "Accidental Racism."

Barack Obama, the country's first black President, and a constitutional scholar, ought to know better. But then again, Obama's move in 2008 (and since) was both tactically shrewd and intentional: blackness is a liability in almost every area of American public, social, and political life. Consequently, it is a social marker to be avoided at all costs.

Tags: brad paisley, confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Obama's Social Security benefits cut proposal

Peter Coy in Why 'Chained CPI' Rattles the Elderly (and Soon to Be) Bloomberg Businessweek 04/10/2013 explains why the adjustment President Obama just proposed would mean real and significant decreases in Social Security benefits, including for existing recipients. The proposed adjustment would also decrease veterans benefits and also has the effect of increasing taxes on beneficiaries.

Obama's plan for Social Security: Let Grandma eat catfood

Coy writes:

It’s presented as a technical, politically neutral fix, but make no mistake: The Obama administration's proposal to change the basis for Social Security raises to "chained CPI" is all about saving money by slowing the growth rate of benefits. ...

The federal government ties Social Security benefits to measured inflation. Chained CPI gives a lower measure of inflation. So using it would result in slower benefit growth. It’s that simple.

And he is explicit about how the government's own figures for inflation for the elderly is actually higher than for general inflation and how Obama's proposed Social Security benefit cuts would make the adjustments even more inadequate:

Right now, Social Security benefits are tied to CPI-W, the second bar from the right. It’s the CPI for urban wage earners and clerical workers. In other words, to calculate benefits for retirees, the government uses a measure of the inflation felt by working people. Go figure. It’s more generous than chained CPI but still below the government’s estimate of actual inflation for the elderly.

What Obama is proposing is a real cut in Social Security benefits that also affects existing recipients.

It's a really, really bad idea.

Jon Walker addresses what it means politically in Obama Tries to Make Every False GOP Attack True FDL 04/11/2013:

What I find most ironic about President Obama’s budget is that in trying to find "common ground", he became the caricature Republicans created about him. Throughout most of Obama’s first term Republicans attacked him based on what were two false premises.

The first was that Obama raised taxes on the middle class. Republicans would sometimes point to the individual mandate or minor tax changes to justify this broad claim but it was not really true until now.

The other much bigger attack was that Obama was out to hurt seniors. This was the core of the 2010 GOP campaign. They tried to spin cost reductions in Medicare as actual cuts to Medicare benefits. Republicans even falsely claimed Obamacare had "death panels" or was some attempt to pull the plug on grandma.

After years of asking regular Democrats to help refute what were baseless attacks, Obama has gone out of his way to be some kind of Republican self-fulfilling prophecy.

What.A.Disaster.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, grand bargain, social security

Conservative Christians and stigma around mental health issues

The famous conservative evangelical pastor Rick Warren's song Matthew committed suicide recently. (Joseph Serna, Rick Warren son 'probably not' owner of gun in suicide, cops say Los Angeles Times 04/10/2013)

This news brought to public light the reality that many conservative Christians retain a sense of deep shame and denial in relation to mental illness and other clinical psychological problems.

This article from a site called A Holy Experience, What Christians Need to Know about Mental Health 04/08/2013, by Ann Voskamp, who identifies herself as "a plain Ann without even the fanciful 'e', wife to The Farmer, mama to six, and honestly, I'm a bit of a mess."

Her article is about a family, presumably her own, in which the mother suffered severe depression in connection with cancer. She starts off with a "Dear Church" introduction saying, "Cancer can be deadly and so can depression. So can the dark and the shame and the crush of a thousand skeletons, a thousand millstones, a thousand internal infernos."

The mother required in-patient treatment for depression. She writes, "My Dad, he had told me that if I told, it'd slit us all." I really did a double-take on that line. I came up with a benign interpretation that it's probably a typo, and that she meant to say her father was warning that if the kids told people Mom was in a psychiatric ward, it would "split" up the family.

She does reflect how such a charge from a parent can feel to a child:

So much for believing the Truth will set you free. So much weight for a wide-eyed nine-year-old.

So I locked lips and heart hard so no one knew about the locked wards and the psychiatric doctors and why my mama was gone and it’s crazy how the stigma around mental health can drive you right insane."

Her post is apparently to tell people it's all right to recognize that people have psychiatric problems that has nothing to do with some spiritual state of sin:

There are some who take communion and anti-depressants and there are those who think both are a crutch.

Come in close — I'd rather walk tall with a crutch than crawl around insisting like a proud and bloody fool that I didn’t need one. [emphasis in original]

But in that formulation and in the rest of the post, what comes through is a remaining heavy sense of stigma. "the dark and the shame" that she speaks of in his introduction.

Are there things going on in religious communities that promote such attitudes above and beyond ordinary fear and lack of medical understanding?

There are a few obvious things. One is that Christian fundamentalists are by definition anti-science in some important sense, although one of the characteristics of fundamentalism is to argue against science in terms that mimic the techniques of science. Another is that fundamentalist Christianity has a mystical core related to the Pietist tradition that assumes that people can have a direct interaction with God that is in theory is not different than material, "real-world" experience. And that mystical union of the believer with God is generally assumed to produce general happiness in the believer's life, making any chronic disturbance of the kind represented by depression or other clinical conditions a sign of inadequate faith or a damaged relationship with God.

Third, there is a belief in faith-healing. The faith-healing services are particularly associated with the Pentecostal tradition, but Catholics also have faith healers and faith-healing services, which depending on the parish can lean more to the superstitious or to the abstract-spiritual side. But non-Pentecostal fundamentalists and even more mainstream of liberals church-goers generally have some sense that praying for the sick at least may result in a more-or-less supernatural recovery.

Finally, there the Pentecostal (or neo-Pentecostal if you prefer) practice of deliverance, i.e, exorcism of demons. Which can be especially potent in promoting denial and shame when it comes to mental illness. This is largely but not exclusively the province of neo-Pentecostals in the Christian world. The Catholic Church has a relatively discrete but active deliverance ministry, although there are Church rules that put formal constraints on how its practiced. (Though it's not particularly relevant here, the encouragement of exorcism is associated with hardline reactionaries in the Catholic Church.)

Stephen Hunt in Managing the demonic: Some aspects of the neo‐Pentecostal deliverance ministry Journal of Contemporary Religion 13:2 (1998) addressed the deliverance ministries as they were practiced at that time, with particular reference to the British context. (You probably need access to a library database for the link to work.) He does a good job of explaining how in some contexts, "deliverance" can be a relatively benign ritual that owes such to the "encounter group therapy" and he notes that "early exponents were influenced by Carl Roger's work." In a well-managed small group therapy of more of a workshop type, "This can be quite cathartic in the sense that deliverance appears to sometimes marry confession with a rigourous self-directing therapy." And he cites one such example:

For instance, on one occasion at a healing centre, I witnessed Paul (not his real name), a young middle-class Anglican charismatic, stand up before some 70 people and admit to pre-marital sex with his wife. He was subsequently delivered of a spirit of 'guilt' and supported by a long period of counselling.

Leaving aside for a moment whether its really healthy to encourage a sense of guilt about boinking your partner before marriage, that does sound benign and kind of sweet. If he had confessed to have been sleeping with her best friend before their marriage, that might have had more upsetting consequences, I'm guessing. He also mentions that in the deliverance ceremonies, "The concern with the previous sexual behaviour of believers by those advancing deliverance reaches almost the point of obsession."

But then there's the full-blown holy-roller, Linda Blair-in-The Exorcist type of ceremonies. And those are considerably less benign. Where the encounter group context may use the notion of evil spirits mainly as a kind of metaphor for the frustrations and problems of life, the holy-roller version treats demons as kind of parasitic infections in the body and soul of the victim.

No, this is not what a virus or a mental health problem looks like

It's interesting to note here that while non-Pentecostal fundamentalists tend to regard exorcism as something to stay the hell away from - sorry, I couldn't resist! - the "literalist" reading of Scripture to which they adhere, i.e., reading the Christian Bible as though it were a history and science text, pretty much leaves them stuck believing in the reality of demonic possession in some way. That is, as a literal infection by some kind of foreign body, not as a metaphor.

I'll just mention in passing here that the early Christians came to regard the gods of "pagan" religions as evil spirits. The Greek word "daimon" (demon) in the New Testament derived from a Greek word for "divine"; the transformation is a case of a word taking on an opposite meaning, and probably reflects in part the notion of regarding foreign gods as not just foreign and unfriendly but actively evil. More mainstream Christians don't have much trouble in regarding the demon stories in the New Testament as meant to describe a religious outlook rather than as medical texts.

As Hunt describes, in the Pentecostal or "charismatic" religious world, demons are not only viewed as causing mental illness like some kind of germ. He notes that "in the hands of charismatic" there is an emphasis also on "demons as representing negative emotions." And in the fundamentalist/Pentecostal world, all sorts of emotions, including very normal and healthy responses to real conditions, are stigmatized as sinful

If the belief in literal demons seems superstitious, which it certainly is, it may seem that such a belief in itself is a sign of some clinical problem. But presumably for most people who believe it it, it's something that seems creepy and scary and they would shy away from deliverance ceremonies of the more extreme type. However, the literal belief that demons can cause mental illness almost certainly makes it much easier for such believers to fear mental illness as something uniquely evil and frightening. And if you do hold such beliefs and find yourself having serious emotional/mental problems, you not only have to worry about the clinical problems. You have to worry that your body and soul are being inhabited by a malignant spirit that is trying to drag you down to Hell.

These fearful associations are encouraged by the holy-roller deliverance ceremonies, which Hunt notes "can be extremely violent with a great deal of shaking or involve lying on the floor with limbs thrashing about," and also "a great deal of weeping." The ceremonies may also involve those seeking deliverance "screaming, crying, sobbing, belching, laughing, and screeching." Kind of like an episode of American Horror Story Asylum. Hunt observes dryly, "This is particularly unnerving for the outsider to witness." And it undoubtedly has similar effects even though they assimilate the experience in a different way.

Which brings me to this article by Frank Viola, 3 Christian Responses to Mental Illness; Which One Is Most Biblical? Christian Post 04/11/2013, addressing concerns among conservative Christians raised by Matthew Warren's suicide:

Throughout my years of being involved in various and sundry Christian movements and denominations, it seems that Christians understand mental disorders in one of three chief ways:

1. Mental illness is demonic in origin. So the antidote is to cast out the demons that are causing it.
2. Mental illness is psychobabble. There's no such thing as a "mental disorder." All so-called mental illnesses are just sinful behaviors. So the antidote is for person to repent and get right with God.
3. Mental illness is a physiological disorder. The brain is a physical organ just like the heart, the thyroid, the joints, etc. Thus if someone has panic attacks or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or chronic depression or ADHD, they have a chemical imbalance in the brain, not dissimilar to a hyperthyroidism or high blood pressure or arthritis.

I cut my teeth on a movement that promoted #1. I've met many people who believed #2. But I believe #3 is often the case.

The tone of his article is telling. Instead of telling his readers, look, people, don't be conned by some exorcist who wants to hear lurid stories about your sex life and who may be looking to get some nookie out it somehow, recognize that it's the 21st century and there are ways to get help for clinical psychological and psychiatric problems. And if your fellow church members thinks there's something shameful about that, then you can forgive them for their stupidity and superstition after you or your family member get treatment for depression, or alcoholism, or drug addiction, or bulimia, or whatever it is. If your local exorcist drives out a common-cold demon, the cold will probably magically go away in a week or two. But you also might want to get some cough drops and be careful not to let it develop into a pneumonia demon while you're waiting.

But alcoholism or schizophrenia, hey, don't be a fool about it!

Viola doesn't tell his readers that. In fact, he even says explicitly, "Sometimes demons are involved in mental illness, but not always."

No, demons are not involved in mental illness. And you're doing no one but exorcist hucksters any good by promoting that view.

Viola's article is revealing, though, in that he seems to actually be encouraging his readers to recognize that mental health problems are health problems that require medical treatment. Yet he seems to have believed that the conservative Christian audience that the Christian Post serves needed a reassurance that he was down with the fundamentalist belief that demons cause health problems like some kind of virus or germ.

Fundis are always whining that somebody is persecuting them for their Christian beliefs. The truth is in America that people are pretty much free to believe any dang fool thing they want about religion or anything else. But when religious beliefs lead people to neglect real healthy problems out of fear or superstition or shame, that can do real harm. And American Christians who promote such beliefs should expect other Christians to call them on it, both for promoting something dangerous and for giving the religion and bad name in doing so.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, exorcism, pentecostalism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 12: Again with Madison and nullification

The Nullification Controversy (or Nullification Crisis) of 1832-3 was an important moment in the development of the conflict between slave and free states which eventually led to the Civil War.

An older US history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg recalled that it was one of two major events that secured Andrew Jackson's reputation: "Andrew Jackson's high place in history derives from the way he confronted the two great issues of his presidency: the nillification that threated the Union and the war on the Bank of the United States that arrayed the Jacksonians against the 'money power.'"

As to Jackson's Presidency, his successful sponsorship of the Indian Removal Act also counts as one of his major achievements, and certainly serves to qualify his deservedly "high place in history." The two acts that Morison et al mention greatly advanced the cause of democracy and equality; the Indian Removal Act is a blot on the history of American democracy. That Act is a different kind of embarrassment for neo-Confederates, though. It was, even more so than the Nullification Crisis, a case in which the vote split along sectional lines and was not about slavery. However, in this case the Southerners (including Jackson) were supporting a measure that overrode states rights, a irony that the opponents of the bill were more than happy to point out.

James Madison, 4th President of the United States and opponent of secession

But my focus here again is on the Nullification Controversy and James Madison's reaction to it, some of which I discussed in yesterday's post. Morison et al quote Madison at the end of this summary of the nullification theory elaborate by John C. Calhoun, who with this act began his career of treason to the United States:

Calhoun, once an enthusiastic nationalist, now believed that he had made a grave mistake, for protection had turned out to be an instrument of class and sectional plunder. In a document called the South Carolina Exposition, approved in 1828 by the legislature of that state, he set forth a new doctrine - nullification, though his authorship was secret. The Constitution, he asserted, was established not by the American people, but by thirteen sovereign states. Sovereign in 1787, they must still be sovereign in 1828. Since the Federal Government was merely the agent of the states, a state convention, the immediate organ of state sovereignty, could take measures to prevent the enforcement within state limits of any Act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional. Calhoun, however, recognized one constitutional authority superior to the interpretation of a single state, an interpretative federal amendment adopted by three-fourths of the states. Under the nullification doctrine, South Carolina insisted on the right to disobey the laws of the Union while claiming the privileges of the Union. Calhoun's sincerity and intelligence cannot be doubted, but as the aged Madison declared, 'For this preposterous and anarchical pretension there is not a shadow of countenance in the Constitution.' [my emphasis]

In an earlier work, The Oxford History of the American People (1965), Morison had described the Exposition's Calhounian political theory this way: "Nullification was based on two postulates: the common assertion that the Federal Constitution was a compact between states, and the theory of indestructible sovereignty."

The pretext and public justification of South Carolina's act of defiance was the Tariff of 1828, which opponents described as the Tariff of Abominations.

But the underlying theme, the real basis for the nullification attempt of Calhoun's theories to justify it and otherwise defend slaveholders against the will of the democratic majority, was slavery. After Jackson had ended the crisis in early 1833 with the Force Act clearly establishing federal authority to enforce the laws in South Carolina and a compromise tariff more to South Carolina's liking, he predicted that the "next pretext" for such an attempt "will be the Negro, or slavery question."

Madison also recognized that some compromise on the tariff had to be part of the solution, though he was bitterly opposed to the nullification doctrine and South Carolina's backing of it. The tariff had been in part a political ploy, as Morison et al describe it, "It was a politicians' tariff, concerned mainly with the manufacture of a President [in the 1928 election]. Pro-Jackson congressmen had introduced a bill with higher duties on raw materials than on manufactures, hoping that New England votes would help defeat it and the onus fall on [then-President John Quincy] Adams, but the strategy misfired, to the South's chagrin." Proposing something you don't actually want passed can be a tricky business!

As Madison put it it in a letter to Henry Clay of 03/22/1832:

I fear that without alleviations separating the more moderate from the more violent opponents, very serious effects are threatened. Of these the most formidable & not the least probable [would] be a Southern Convention; the avowed object of some, and the unavowed object of others, whose views are, perhaps, still more to be dreaded. The disastrous consequences of disunion, obvious to all will no doubt be a powerful check, on its partisans; but such a Convention, characterized as it [would] be by selected talents, ardent zeal & the confidence of those represented [would] not be easily stopped in its career; especially as many of its members, tho' not carrying with them particular aspirations for the honors, &c &c presented to ambition on a new political theatre, would find them germinating in such a hotbed.

(That and the other excerpts quoted here are from The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed.; 1910.)

Henry Clay would be the sponsor of the compromise tariff that Congress would pass and Jackson sign a year later.

Madison recognized the legitimacy of the right of resistance to unjust authority and the right of revolution, of course. But he emphatically rejected the nullifiers' argument that the Tariff of 1828, their nominal cause, represented anything close to such a jutification:

The idea that a Constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings, and a Union aomitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty and happiness of the people of the States comprizing it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express. It is impossible that this can ever be the deliberate act of the people, if the value of the Union be calculated by the consequences of disunion. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, May 1832))

In a letter to C.E. Haynes of 08/27/1832, Madison argued against Calhoun's theory on the nature of the compact among the states:

And here it must be kept in mind that in a compact like that of the U. S. as in all other compacts, each of the parties has an equal right to decide whether it has or has not been violated and made void. If one contends that it has, the others have an equal right to insist on the validitv and execution of it. ...

It is true that in extreme cases of oppression justifying a resort to original rights, and in which passive obedience & non-resistence cease to be obligatory under any Government, a s1ngle State or any part of a State might rightfully cast off the yoke. What would be the condition of the Union, and the other members of it, if a single member could at will renounce its connexion and erect itself, in the midst of them, into an independent and foreign power; its geographical relations remaining the same, and all the social & political relations, with the others converted into those of aliens and of rivals, not to say enemies, pursuing separate & conflicting interests? Should the seceding State be the only channel of foreign commerce for States having no commercial ports of their own, such as that of Connecticut, N. Jersey, & North Carolina, and now particularly all the inland States, we know what might happen from such a state of things by the effects of it under the old Confederation among States bound as they were in friendly relations by that instrument [i.e., the Articles of Confederation].

And although South Carolina was nominally threatening to nullify federal laws while staying in the Union, Madison knew that secession was implied in the arguments:

I partake of the wonder that the men you name should view secession in the light mentioned. The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, 12/23/1832)

He expanded on that idea in a letter to Alexander Rives of January 1833:

The characteristic distinction between free Governments, and Governments not free is that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved than every other has to deny the fact and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, and nowhere less so than where it is now most contended for.

These arguments Madison is making about the government compact were based in classical liberal theories of government.

Calhoun's idea of indestructible sovereignty made the novel assertion that "sovereignty" was absolute, that if a state was sovereign in its sphere of authority, that no other sovereignty could be above, including that of the federal government. Here in a letter to Sen. William Cabell Rives of 03/12/1833 who had recently given a Senate speech against it, he indicates how little such a notion had occurred to people before, and how patently ridiculous it struck him to be:

[Your speech] takes a very able and enlightening view of its subject. I wish it may have the effect of reclaiming to the doctrine & language held by all from the birth of the Constitution, & till very lately by themselves, those who now Contend that the States have never parted with an Atom of their sovereignty; and consequently that the Constitutional band which holds them together, is a mere league or partnership, without any of the characteristics of sovereignty or nationality.

It seems strange that it should be necessary to disprove this novel and nullifying doctrine; and stranger still that those who deny it should be denounced as Innovators, heretics & Apostates.

And in that letter he states even more clearly how obvious that secessionist tendencies are at work:

The conduct of S. Carolina has called forth not only the question of nullification; but the more formidable one of secession. It is asked whether a State by resuming the sovereign form in which it entered the Union, may not of right withdraw from it at will. As this is a simple question whether a State, more than an individual, has a right to violate its engagements, it would seem that it might be safely left to answer itself. But the countenance given to the claim shows that it cannot be so lightly dismissed. The natural feelings which laudably attach the people composing a State, to its authority and importance, are at present too much excited by the unnatural feelings, with which they have been inspired at' their brethren of other States, not to expose them, to the danger of being misled into erroneous views of the nature of the Union and the interest they have in it. One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned; that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co-States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them!

And in a draft letter from sometime in 1833, he addressed Calhoun's notion that special state conventions - like the ones that endorsed secession in 1860-61 - were a uniquely valid expression of the popular will, using the term "popular assemblages". And he also addressed the secessionists' anti-democracy attacks on government by the majority (which at this time still meant a majority of white men, and as Madison even notes in the draft, there were still property requirements for voting in many places):

You justly take alarm at the new doctrine that a majority [Government] is of all other [Government] the most oppressive. The doctrine strikes at the root of Republicanism, and if pursued into its consequences, must terminate in absolute monarchy, with a standing military force; such alone being impartial between its subjects, and alone capable of overpowering majorities as well as minorities. ...

The history of the ancient Republics, and those of a more modern date, had demonstrated the evils incident to popular assemblages, so quickly formed, so susceptible of contagious passions, so exposed to the misguidance of eloquent & ambitious leaders; and so apt to be tempted by the facility of forming interested majorities, into measures unjust and oppressive to the minor parties.

As odd as it seems now, the idea of a "standing military force" of any significant size in 1833 was considered to be in itself an anti-democratic thing.

Even after the South Carolina controversy was settled, Madison continued to see the secessionist sentiment as a threat to the Constitution and democratic government. In a letter to Edward Coles of 08/29/1834, he wrote, "On the other hand what [could] more dangerous than Nullification, or more evident than the progress it continues to make, either in its original shape or in the disguises it assumes. Nullification has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution & Union, and a match in the hand of every party, to blow them up at pleasure." And he saw where the alignment of the slave states with the Calhounian doctrine could lead:

It is not probable that this offspring of the discontents of S. Carolina, will ever approach success, in a majority of the States. But a susceptibility of the contagion in the Southern States is visible; and the danger is not to be concealed that the sympathies arising from known causes, and the inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility of interests between the South & the North, may put it in the power of popular leaders aspiring to the highest stations, and despairing of success on the Federal theatre, to unite the South, on some critical occasion, in a course that will end in creating a new theatre of great tho' inferior extent. In pursuing this course, the first and most obvious step is nullification; the next secession; & the last, a farewell separation. How near was this course being lately exemplified? and the danger of its recurrence in the same, or some other quarter, may be increased by an increase of restless aspirants, and by the increasing impracticability of retaining in the Union a large & cemented section against its will. [my emphasis]

Madison was annoyed by the kind of criticisms that some opponents of slavery were delivering against the South. But he was clearly unsympathetic, to put it mildly, to the secessionists using it as an excuse. Note here that he identifies slavery as the great dividing issue:

The positive advantages of the Union would alone endear it to those embraced by it; but it ought to be still more endeared by the consequences of disunion, in the jealousies & collisions of Commerce, in the border wars, pregnant with others, and soon to be engendered by animosities between the slaveholding, and other States, in the higher toned [Governments] especially in the Executive branch ["higher toned" here had a positive connotation], in the military establishments provided [against] external danger, but convertible also into instruments of domestic usurpation, in the augmentations of expence, and the abridgment, almost to the exclusion of taxes on consumption (the least unacceptable to the people) by the facility of smuggling among communities locally related as would be the case. Add to all these the prospect of entangling alliances with foreign powers multiplying the evils of internal origin. (Letter to Daniel Drake 01/12/1835) [my emphasis]

Maidson died in 1836 at the age of 85. So we can fairly say that he was very concerned about this issue up until the end of his life. In other words, he went out still fighting against the poisonous slaveowners' ideology of secession.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, john calhoun, nullification controversy

The euro and democracy: divorce in progress

Robert Treichler addresses the anti-democracy methods that the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF) have been using to impose their preferred neoliberal solutions to the euro crisis in Demokratie in Europa: Schnauze, Volk! for the Austrian newsmagazine Profil 11.4.2013.

It's good to see this being addressed in some of the more liberal (in the pro-democracy sense!) publications. He cites a 06.09.2012 article from the liberal German Die Zeit (Ludwig Greven, Draghis Autonomie ist undemokratisch) that critices ECB head Mario Draghi for huddling with German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel and other bigwigs to make decisions that are then imposed on other countries under the cover of democracy.

But even the pretense is now pretty thin, when we look at the actual record in countries like Cyprus, Greece and Italy. Treichler charges, with reason, that the Troika's dealings with Cyprus were "in the highest degree undemocratic." And he quotes European Parliament President Martin Schulz as saying of the Cyprus dealings, "Die Verhandlungen waren nicht transparent, wurden nicht gut kommuniziert, und ihnen fehlte demokratische Kontrolle" ("The negotiations were not transparent, were not well communicated and they lacked democratic controls"). Yep!

And Treichler writes:

Hinter all diesen Tendenzen steckt kein Masterplan von finsteren Anti-Demokraten. Vielmehr setzt sich schleichend die Überzeugung durch, Volk, Volksvertreter und damit die Demokratie an sich seien in Krisenfällen überfordert. Das widerspricht der Überzeugung, wonach gerade in Ausnahmesituationen die Demokratie Stabilität garantiert.

[Behind all these [atni-democratic] tendencies there are no shadowy anti-democrats hiding. {He's being optimistic there!} It's much more that the conviction is insinuating itself that the people, the people's representatives and therefore democracy as such are overwhelmed in crisis situations. That contradicts the conviction according to which that it's precisely in emergency situations that democracy guarantees stability.]

Treichler also points out that the direct threats the Troika recently made to Cyprus' government that if they didn't knuckle under to the Troika's demands they would be kicked out of the eurozone were in themselves precedent-setting. Previously the Troika hadn't officially admitted that a country could leave the eurozone or that the other countries could kick them out.

Meanwhile, also from Die Zeit, things could be going better for the democratic system even in France ( Gero von Randow, Survive la France! 11.04.2013 ) Von Randow even suggests that France could be facing a social and government crisis on the magnitude of 1958, when the Algerian crisis brought Charles de Gaulle back to power as President with dictatorial-style authority. The still-existing Fifth Republic began the following year, and in 1961 had to fend off a serious rebellion within the armed forces over De Gaulle's peace negotiations to end the Algerian War.

He seems to be self-consciously exaggerating. But Socialist President François Hollande's popularity has plummeted since his election not even a full year ago because of his embrace of austerity policies at home and his rolling over for Frau Fritz' in EU politics.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, cyprus, eu, euro, european union,
france, françois hollande, greece

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 11: Madison and the Nullfication Controversy

When John Calhoun and his allies in South Carolina staged their confrontation with the United States and the Jackson Administration over the tariff in 1832-33, the nullificationists pointed to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had promoted during the Adams Administration in opposition to the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts as supporting their cause of nullification and treason.

As it turns out, James Madison himself was still around to comment on the issue in real time. In a letter to Nicholas Trist in December 1831 (based on the date at the Library of Congress site just linked, he wrote:

I cannot see the advantage of this perseverance of South Carolina in claiming the authority of the Virginia proceeding in 93-99, as asserting a right in a single state to nullify an act of the United States. Where indeed is the fairness of attempting to palm on Virginia an intention which is contradicted by such a variety of contemporary proofs: which have, at no intervening period received the lightest countenance from her: and which with one voice she now disclaims. There is the less propriety in this singular effort, since Virginia, if she could, as is implied, disown a doctrine which was her own offspring, would be a bad authority to lean on in any cause. Nor is the imprudence less than the impropriety, of an appeal from the present to a former period. as from a degenerate to a purer state of political orthodoxy: since South Carolina, to be consistent would be obliged to surrender her present nullifying notions to her own higher authority when she declined to concur and co-operate with Virginia at the period of the Alien and Sedition laws. It would be needless to dwell on the contrast of her present nullifying doctrines. [sic] with those maintained by her political champions at subsequent and not very remote dates.

Besides the external and other internal evidence the at the proceeding of Virginia occasioned by the Alien and Sedition law do not maintain the right of a single State, as a party to the Constitution, to arrest the execution of a law of the United States. it [sic] seems to have been overlooked, that in every instance in those proceeding where the ultimate right of the States to interpose rs alluded to, the plural term States, has been used: the term State as a single party being invariably avoided. And if it had been suspected that the term respective in the 3d Resolution would have been misconstrued into such a claim of an individual State or that the language of the 7th Resolution invoking the co-operation of the other States with Virginia * * * * * * [ellipsis in original] would not be a security against the error, a more explicit guard would doubtless have been introduced. But surely there is nothing strange in a concurrence and co-operation of many parties in maintaining the rights of each within itself. [emphasis in original]

That quote are taken from the version published in 1912 as Madison's Famous Original Letter Against Nullification 1832, which title obviously assumed an 1832 date for the letter. The text of a portion of the letter is also available at the Library of Congress. And it is included in The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed. (1910), but it begins with the sixth paragraph of the 1912 edition; the two paragraphs quoted above are the second and third in the letter.

He certainly makes it clear that he did not support the nullification attempt by South Carolina, which was nominally over tariffs but was understood by Calhoun and his supporters as a trial run for nullification and secession in support of slavery. Of the major controversies that led up to the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis was the only one not explicitly about slavery.

The December 1931 letter is also an important document in interpreting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in their own context, with necessary allowance for the fact that here Madison was writing decades after the event.

In an earlier letter to Jared Sparks of 07/27/1831 dealing with South Carolina's nullification claims and the Constitutional arguments advanced to support them, Madison argued that "the nature of the Constitutional compact" precluded "a right in any one of the parties to renounce it at will, by giving to all an equal right to judge of its obligations; and, as the obligations are mutual, a right to enforce correlative with a right to dissolve them." He also said that is would be impossible as well as unjust to execute "the laws of the Union, particularly the laws of commerce, if even a single State be exempt from their operation." (From Writings, Vol. 9)

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, nullification controversy

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 10: Civil War analogy to today's politics

Andrew O'Hehir in Welcome to the new Civil War Salon 01/05/2013 makes a thematic connection between the days of the Civil War and Reconstruction and today's politics:

You can't boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist "Redeemers" controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it's a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We're still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

I hope he's overstating reality here: "But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn't interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war." About the war part, that is. He's basically right about the influence of neo-Confederate ideology. Today's Republican Party is all in with straight-up segregationist practices like voter suppression aimed at African-American and Latino communities.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, segregation, republican party

We need to reduce American jobs ... to protect ourselves against China? (!?!)

"Es geht um Absatzmärkte, Arbeitsplätze und Wachstum" ("It's about foreign markets, jobs and growth"), writes Felix Lill in an article supporting the Trans-Pazifik-Partnerschaft (TPP) and US-EU free trade negotiations. (Demokratien verbünden sich gegen Chinas Macht 10.04.2013)

Indeed it is.

Jeff Faux writes in Where's the Change? American Prospect Online 04/09/2013:

The president has no intention of changing the trade policies that have been undercutting U.S. jobs and wages for more than 30 years. In fact, with the support of congressional Republicans, he wants yet another trade deal—this one with 11 Pacific Rim countries—that will once again bargain away the interests of American workers in favor of the interests of American corporate investors.

Lill uses China as a foil, an enemy against which the EU, the US and Japan need to unite by establishing these two trade treaties to further enforce the anti-labor neoliberal order of financial buccaneering, casino capitalism and low wages.

That same unite-against-China theme appears in Anthony Fensom's article, EU-US Free Trade Agreement: End of the Asian Century? The Diplomat 02/20/2013:

"I'm not very optimistic about the prospects of a Japan-China-Korea FTA given the chilly political relations of those countries lately. FTAs are political and those countries need to listen to domestic public opinion," Devin Stewart, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council, told The Diplomat.

Stewart was more optimistic on agreements being reached between the traditional Northern Hemisphere allies from both the transatlantic and Asia-Pacific regions.

"Both the EU transatlantic agreement and the TPP come from thinking about how to set and promote liberal values through economic activity. Both would serve to set high standards for economic integration as well as encourage non-entrants to adopt higher standards," he said.

He continued, "In that sense, they are aimed in part to balance against China's influence and its state capitalism. These initiatives may serve as a peaceful strategy to promote liberal values ... as long as they do not spark something like another Cold War." [my emphasis]

Tags: neoliberalism, tpp, trans-pacific partnership

Maggie Thatcher (1925-2013)

There was some amount of discussion in Left Blogostan about whether there should be a speak-no-evil rule about recently departed major political leaders, this one occasioned by the passing of former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Glenn Greenwald's Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette Guardian 04/08/2013 makes the case against excessive reverence.

But any decent report on a political leader's career would have to include reasons that people criticized them. This Euronews report dealt with her critics, and included her not-at-all admirable friendship with the Chilean dictator and torture perpetrator Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady who divided a nation 04/09/2013:

Here's Peter Coy recalling Margaret Thatcher's Forgotten Tax Increase Bloomberg Businessweek 04/09/2013.

A short report from Euronews, Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady who divided a nation 04/09/2013:

This is a Spanish-language obituary report from TV Pública argentina, Murió Margaret Thatcher 04/08/2013:

Aljazeera English's Inside Story recaps Thatcher's career, The legacy of the 'Iron Lady' 04/09/2013:

Also from Euronews, Joy not grief as those opposed to Thatcher celebrate her death 04/09/2013:

Here's John Fugelsang: Saying ‘Hateful’ Things About World Leaders On The Day They Die Liberals Unite 04/08/2013:

Hans Hoyng in Eisernes Misstrauen. Thatcher und die Wiedervereinigung Einestages 09.04.2013 recalls Thatcher's opposition to German unification.

Joe Conason looks at her legacy with an unsentimental eye in Her Tea Party: What Margaret Thatcher Really Meant To England And The World National Memo 04/09/2013

Paul Krguman asks, Did Thatcher Turn Britain Around? 04/08/2013

This is an obituary from Argentina's Página 12: Marcelo Justo, Murió la mano de hierro del ultracapitalismo 09.04.2013

The front page of Página 12 for 04/09/2013 gives a hint that Maggie Thatcher isn't universally highly regarded there. Argentina had a war over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands against Britain under Thatcher. Even though it was lead by a much-hated military dictatorship, which fell as a result of losing the war, the war was popular because there's no real disagrement in Argentina over whether the islands are theirs. Also, trials in Argentina are still going on over crimes committed by the military dictatorships. And trials just opened that include Chilean defendents over the international cooperation among military dictators in the early 1980s under what was known as Plan Condor.

The headlines: "Those cruel years"; "Bad memories"; "Galtieri is waiting for her in Hell"; "Thatcher will be remembered but didn't leave anything positive"; "Only Videla and Bush are still alive"; "There are no reasons to cry for her." At least they didn't use, "Don't cry for her, Argentina." [groan]

Yanis Varoufakis in Farewell Mrs Thatcher: In spite of everything, you are being missed already 04/09/2013 writes of her contradictions:

She was the first woman Prime Minister but had little sympathy for the suffragettes (and the women’s movement in general) that broke the barriers to women’s progress, thus allowing her to rise up. She wanted to liberate Britons from the state but ended up granting Whitehall (Britain’s London-based functionaries) hitherto unheard of authoritarian powers. She sought to impose libertarian values, only to discover that she needed an autocratic state in order to do so (which explains nicely her fondness for, and defence of, General Pinochet). She preached judiciousness, on matters economic, and thrift, yet her government built the ‘British Miracle’ on the twin bubbles of real estate and the City created by spivs who worshipped her. She was keen to see the end of the old Etonian ruling circle but, unwittingly, created the conditions for the resurgence of that aristocratic clique (just take a look at the present cabinet). She championed a ‘share owners’ democracy’ but delivered a Britain in which ownership of businesses (and wealth) is more concentrated in the hands of a minority than at the time she became Prime Minister. She campaigned against totalitarianism in Moscow while insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who deserved to languish in gaol. Above all other contradictions, she argued passionately about a return to the Victorian moral life but gave rise to a regime in which it was impossible to imagine anything good being done for its own sake (as opposed to for profit).

Tags: maggie thatcher, neoliberalism

"Karl Marx" in 2013

Every now and then I'm tempted to post something about Karl Marx, just for the heck of it.

But it's always a bit tricky. Because he's still a polarizing image more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. And those who supposedly are drawing directly on his tradition go all different directions with his legacy.

But, hey, if Jerry Brown can quote the old boy to the Financial Times, I can do a blog post about him (The governor of California talks about taxes, Mother Teresa and being back in charge 04/05/2013):

In those intervening years [Brown] studied Zen Buddhism in Japan, worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta and ran for president for a third and final time when he took on Bill Clinton in the 1992 primary race for the Democratic nomination. He was elected mayor of Oakland, on the other side of the bay from San Francisco, and then state attorney-general. And now he is back in his old office – an office which was used by his father before him and, from 1967 to 1975, one Ronald Reagan when he was California governor. I ask Brown if his improbable return disproves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives and he mentions Karl Marx’s maxim about history repeating itself – first as tragedy, then as farce. "Except now I’m thoroughly enjoying it," he says. "Much more than the first time."

So let's just pretend here that I inserted a couple of long paragraphs and the split between Social Democrats and Communists, about how things have changed a lot sense the 19th century, about how theories of revolution and social change more or less stemming from Marx multiplied over the decades, how we've learned a lot from the fall of the Soviet Union and the evolution of China, and something about Cuba, and how it's all very complicated and nothing about real history resembles the crazed rambling of Glenn Beck. Also about how weird I think Slavoj Žižek is.

And so I'll move on to what I wanted to post about, which is this article by Terry Eagleton, author of Why Marx Was Right, in Harper's Apr 2103, called The Revolutionary: Is Marx still relevant?, a review/discussion of Jonathan Sperber's new book Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013).

Since Marx is considered one of the great economists of history, even if grudgingly, along with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes - feel free to add a couple of your own favorites - as well as an important political theorist and philosopher of history, we can usually consider ourselves lucky if we get anything more than cringe-worthy stuff in a popular article, even from a noted scholar like Eagleton. Like this, in Eagleton's article: "Sigmund Freud, no friend of Marxism, held that without the necessity to labor, men and women would just spend their days in various interesting postures of erotic gratifi cation. It was the need for material survival that spurred them to forsake the pleasure principle for their banks and cotton mills."

I wish he had footnoted which of Marx' books was about how without being forced to work, we'd all be boinking all the time. In fact, I've read quite a bit of Freud and I don't really recall his saying that exactly. Hey, it sounds like a nice fantasy to me, but it's more Wilhelm Reich than Freud. Freud was was more of a mind that love and work were the two main sources of human satisfaction. If he had been around cats more, he might have added them to the list.

But I don't think Freud was averse to any realistic and humane social arrangement that would have reduced the amount of work required for the physical support of our bodies, a key concern of Marx. Also the topic of Keynes' famous essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), which is still an important but much-neglected document here 80+ years on.

Eagleton continues, "Communism for Marx was a kind of political love." Ouch! Are we talking about the German Social Democratic leader Karl Marx or some third-rank Romantic philosopher of the same name?

In fact, he even says, "He was a Romantic humanist with a passion for the sensuously specifi c." I guess Marx is so little generally known, and there isn't the academic industry there once was in publishing scholarly refutations of his theories, that lots of people can read this without blinking. In the world of German philosophy in which Marx was immersed and from which his theories emerged, he was definitely not part of the Romantic tradition of Schelling, the Schlegel brothers and Schleiermacher. There was certainly an element of his thought that was humanistic in the vague sense we use it today. But to Kant and Hegel, to whom he was far closer in time and thought than to the general popular assumptions of today, "humanism" meant dogmatic Catholic medieval theology.

It gets dumber, including (of course!) some pop psychology speculation about Marx' love life and that of his patron and collaborator Friedrich Engels. It's the kind of stuff that would be entertaining to cynical frat-boys and their older counterparts.

So this is a good place to insert this video that I recently found on YouTube of "Karl Marx The Massive Dissent" which is Episode 3 of The Age of Uncertainty, the 1977 TV documentary by John Kenneth Galbraith, the companion volume to which I quote fairly often here.

It's not often that I grump about Galbraith's presentations, but when he talks about Hegel starting at around 10:00, he uses a common but incorrect model (thesis-synthesis-antithesis) of Hegel's dialectic. That triad works for the dialectical elements of Kant's thought, but not for Hegel. Hegel worked from a model of the contradictions of opposite which were in the process of development ablated, the English word usually used for the German Aufheben, which means preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level. It doesn't through Galbraith's presentation much off course, but its a chronic irritant for Hegel fans.

Karl Marx in the dramatization there looks a lot like Liam Neeson.

Despite my Hegel gripe, Galbraith's 56 minutes there is orders of magnitude more informative than Terry Anderson's article. Skipping over the rest of the frat-boy cracks, Anderson does get around to making a couple of points about what he sees as two "strikingly original contributions to human thought":

[He broke] with much previous philosophy by viewing individuals primarily as practical agents. ... What would the human narrative look like, he asked himself, if we were to start from men and women not as contemplative spirits but as self-determining individuals who create a history in common, and who need to do so because of the nature of their bodies? Is there a way of getting from the body's needs and capabilities to politics, ethics, and culture? It is not certain that there is; but to imagine so is a vastly exciting enterprise, one that Marx launched at a disgracefully precocious age in his Paris manuscripts and then more or less abandoned under pressure of his economic inquiries.

Marx’s other original move was to identify capitalism as a specific historical system, powered by its own peculiar laws.

Like many before him, Anderson seems to have constructed his own "Marx." It's fashionable in academia these days to talk about bodies in spaces. It has something to do with French literary theories that are derived in some way from some variety of existentialism. But Marx' intellectual project wasn't about updating Kant's observations in his Third Critique about the mutual relationship of humanity to Nature. Marx wasn't even especially interested in the question formulated that way. He was elaborate what he saw as laws of history and social development, not the "exciting enterprise" of imagining "getting from the body's needs and capabilities to politics, ethics, and culture." My head hurts.

And, yes, Marx did describe capitalism systematically in a way that influenced the course of economic and social thought, even among those who despised him and his goals. And, yes, he did embarrassing the system and its defenders by "throwing the workings of the system into stark relief" and disclosing "the disagreeable truth that the system represents one particular way of doing things among a range of other possibilities."

But his more specific thoughts on economics Anderson dismisses here as "some rather esoteric reflections on the forces and relations of production." Then he explains, "Marx may have shown the limits of the capitalist system, but he was by no means a fanatical opponent of it." In fact, the head of the International Workingmen's Association and co-author of The Communist Manifesto took an "admiring view" of capitalism! My head hurts worse. What is this, Marx as an inspirational figure for the Business Roundtable?

If you want clever academic parlor chat about Marx that doesn't particularly worry about, you know, actual history and stuff, Anderson's article is a good quick read. If you actually want to know something about the subject and the man then, like I said, the Galbraith documentary is orders of magnitude more informative.

Picking the relatively serious stuff out of Anderson's piece is an effort. But this one last bit is worth commenting on:

There are those who speak of democratic socialism, but this in Marx’s eyes was a tautology. For Marx, nondemocratic socialism was a contradiction in terms, rather like the phrase "business ethics." Socialism was a matter of taking democracy seriously in everyday life, rather than coming it to a purely formal, governmental set of procedures. Human beings might misuse their freedom in this respect, but they were not fully human without it.

Yikes! Contrasting "taking democracy seriously in everyday life" to "confining it to a purely formal, governmental set of procedures" actually makes some immediate sense in 2013, when apathy, passivity and de-politicization are chronic issues in the context of functioning mass democracies.

But it's a painful anachronism to read those things back into Marx' life and the Social Democratic struggles of which he was a part. As Galbraith's documentary reminds us, Marx himself was dogged for much of his life by Prussian spies. The leading German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was outlawed under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-1888. So the SPD, which operated under a program acceptable to Marx, certainly had to take democracy - specifically the fight for democracy, for a "formal, governmental set of procedures" incorporating democracy - very seriously in their everyday lives. As did Marx himself.

One of the great issues between the Social Democrats and the Communists, the description of which I asked everyone to imagine I gave at the start of this post, was what was meant by democracy. And this is worth more comment than Anderson's frat-boy sharing permitted him in Harper's. What the Social Democrats in Germany and the rest of Europe were fighting for was parliamentary democracy. In Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and most of Europe, parliamentary institutions were either non-existent or a sham. Suffrage was very limited and structured on a class basis in Germany. One-man one-vote was a radical democratic goal in the 19th century, and one-person one-vote even more so. The SPD in Germany and the SPÖ in Austria were the primary parties pushing for democracy, the "formal, governmental set of procedures."

This is a 1920 national election poster by Mihály Biró for the Austrian Social Democrats, featuring Biró's Der Rote Riese (The Red Giant), which became a popular and familiar figure symbolizing the left. The slogan on the poster say, "Against the Unity Front of Capitalism - the United Front of the Working People! Vote Social Democratic"

But Marx and the Social Democrats also were working off a model of revolution largely based in images of the French Revolution of 1789. They preferred to take power non-violently and working worked hard to do so. But they were also aware that revolutions happened in a non-peaceful way, as well. They viewed capitalism as a class dictatorship and they assumed that the capitalist and aristocrats aligned with them against the workers were not attached to democracy nor deeply committed to legal and peaceful means of maintaining their rule. And they were, of course, correct in that assumption.

Which brings us to the Paris Commune of 1871, a violent uprising in France that was violently suppressed by the government with the connivance of Prussian troops that had just beaten them in the Franco-Prussian War; it's discussed from about 48:00 in the Galbraith video. Marx defended the revolt and praised it as a "dictatorship of the proletariat." (Proletariat means "working class"; why the German word was taken over in radical theory to English as it was, I've never known.) Lenin and the Russian Communists took that concept and applied it in the way that made it familiar in its current meaning, which was very different from the parliamentary goals that the Social Democrats continued to follow after 1917.

Since both trends claimed to be heirs to the Marxist heritage, one big question about Marx was which of the two major trends would he have supported, if either. It's genuinely difficult to say. On the one hand, the Social Democrats fought to establish parliamentary democracy and worked through it. In the language of Marx, a popular government devoted to the socialist program supported by a majority in advanced industrial countries like England, France or Germany would be a dictatorship of the working class because in his conception, the state was an instrument of class rule. But the Social Democrats of Marx' lifetime also envisioned that even a seizure of power in the eventuality of an uprising would have to be validated in a democratic process with a "formal, governmental set of procedures." On the other hand, as a student of revolution he certainly knew that a revolutionary party that had just seized power might have to practice some form of emergency rule for a period of time.

The events after the Second World War that brought the enduring Social Democratic/Communist split were not ones that Marx expected in that form. The Social Democrats accepted an invitation from the Imperial government in 1918 to form a new government to replace the de facto military dictatorship that was then running Germany. The Bolshevik government seized power in Russia, a country in which peasants were a majority and the working class a distinct minority.

One thing that was clear about Marx and the Social Democrats of his time who followed his lead is that they favored the radical democratic idea of a unitary government by the parliamentary body. A Madison/Montesquieu notion of separation of powers was not their vision. But the rhetoric of democracy persisted for both Social Democrats and Communists. Mikhail Gorbachev understood himself to be a committed Communist when he tried unsuccessfully to put the Soviet Union on track to establish an elected government that would formally have been more in the social-democratic tradition. Social Democrats in Germany, France and Spain today don't understand themselves as working directly in the Marxist tradition but they do consider themselves democrats even while they embrace the brutal austerity politics demanded by German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel that damage their own base voters and directly dis-empower the working class and the democratic majority.

The 19th century was a long time ago.

Tags: jerry brown, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx