Republican Follies

Obama is extraordinarily lucky in his selection of opponents this time around. Though hard to believe, the Republican Party is more internally divided than the Democrats, though the individual divisions have more ideological and participatory coherence than their counterparts in the Democratic Party.

Losing My Religion

Arthur has a new post up linking to the new campaign merchandise rolled out by the Obama campaign today. My reaction to all of this is mixed. The Left has been far too facile in its rejection of faith (as Arthur does in the rant that ends the post), which provides the Republicans too much manuevering room in that arena. The attempts to reach out and be inclusive about faith, however, are worse than the original sin, indulging in vacuous pandering and (worse to my mind) reinforcing the American practice of religion as a fashion statement. There doesn't seem to be any recognition that blasting Palin for her faith while selling bumper stickers linking voting for Obama with being an Xtian is the actual expression of hypocrisy.

I look back wryly at posts I made two years ago in defense of Obama, when he was under attacks from the netroots sites that now sing his praises like choirs of angels. They attacked him because he had made a speech about the relationship of religion and public life, pointing to it as sign of his retrograde beliefs and sneering at his DLC connections. Their attacks were also, frankly, racist. It seems that Obama read the reviews and has reimagined himself quite thoroughly.

The attacks on Obama over his speech on religion were of the same temper and in the same mode as the attacks upon Hillary in support of him this year. I discussed these attacks in depth in this post, Adopting the Frames of the Right, where I tried to talk about how the violence of the attacks upon those who are not seen as part of our tribe alienates people who would otherwise be on your side, such as my father. Indeed, as a result of the speech Obama gave, my father decided on him as a candidate and (as far as I know) still supports him. I still think Obama's speech is a good one and for the right reasons, even as he himself has sold that vision short.

Ed Kilgore went into greater detail than I did in analyzing the speech, picking up on elements that I, a secular humanist, overlooked. What struck me most Kilgore's analysis was how thinking about modes of religion can help us think more clearly about modes of politics. I wrote then:

The danger of the rules-bound left is, as I said in an earlier post, that they will not acknowledge that people are divided on progressive issues and consider their religious teachings valid guides for political decisions. I think my father is a great example. I also have friends in a very strict Christian family who are mostly liberal, but who are under enormous social pressure from family and church to conform. Lots and lots of love for toeing the line, lots of ostracism for not. These are people who do require some strong outreach because they will be outcasts.

The anti-religious faction will not or cannot understand the courage it takes to defy the beloved community. Read the Salon article. Understand that this is not religious behavior, per say, but the actions of tradition bound communities for securing order, obedience and stability. ...

This post took on particular resonance as I was reading it immediately after having read the Salon piece. The point that Kilgore (and Obama) make about the danger of "prophetic" activism is both subtle and unsettling, because it is a two edged sword. It warns against the prophetic mode of rule, which is not always a religious stance. If you are a humanist, you understand that the structures of religion are human patterns of thought and interaction, and that secular instiutions and movements too can be afflicted by this mode of power.

As with the fundamentalists who thunder about the certainty of fire and brimstone for those who stray from the path of righteousness, the message about the dangers of conceptual certainty appear to be going right over the heads of the most agitated critics of Obama's speech.

Perhaps Obama should listen to his own words more often. Maybe we all need to watch Pan's Labyrinth and ponder the lure of obedience when wrapped up with desire for belonging and fear of being singled out.

But in response to Arthur's challenge that people send in definitions of God that stand up to analysis, I keep thinking back to my father and his faith which I do not understand but I most certainly perceive as something integral to this person whom I love so deeply. I can only point to Garry Wills' Christ Among the Partisans as an oppositional view, that any attempt to conceptualize this mythic and historical figure from a political perspective (see also Kilgore's arguments), whether from the Left or the Right, whether to praise faith in God or to debunk it, simply uses the wrong language for the argument. Christ-as-Nietzsche, in Wills' forumulation, strikes me as about right, which is probably why, when Obama recast himself as a political messiah, I could not support him as a candidate.

To be political means to lose one's religion, to set it aside and live in the mundane and mortal world upon its terms and for the rewards it offers.

Anglachel

Plus Ca Change

Jeralyn has a post up about Obama promising to make religious outreach a priority in his administration. The comment thread is long and has a bit of atheist ranting, but there are a good number of interesting and cogent comments. This Kmiec guy is very troubling.

The Precious really has a thing for extremist religious types who don't care much for liberal democratic government is all I can say.

Anglachel

Revolution of the Saints

I watch the mass psychosis that has overtaken half of my party and I am left stupefied. While I have had a cynical view of the netroots for several years, what I see now so thoroughly surpasses the worst I had imagined that I am struggling to come up with ways to comprehend the dissolution of what should have been a solidly unified party.

I've spoken in earlier posts about the split between the Stevensonian and Truman contingents in the party, the class splits and the way in which the working class has been demonized as the source of the party's failures, as much philosophical as electoral. The difficulty Yankee liberals have with "The South" is part of the problem as well. I think that misogyny is the solvent that has allowed much of the elite resentment to come out in the open because it is a form of bigotry that is acceptable to voice directly.

What I'm seeing is an amplified, exaggerated perversion of the lessons, biases and attitudes I encountered in my very liberal college education, things that resonate with me in strange ways, playing on the way I learned to see the world as divided into evil whites, good whites and the oppressed Others we good whites had to free from the evil whites. And now, according to my class - and I don't know what other class I could possibly belong to, given my ethnic makeup, education, profession and acculturation - I am one of the evil whites in the world. The themes I have been writing about for years are coalescing into a weird reality.

This is philosophical revolution, one that is at its heart anti-democratic and anti-political. It is rising from a deep well of, for lack of a better term, Yankee Puritanism, something that has fueled great things and without which we would not have this country, democracy or even Democrats. I reach for religious language and examples to explain this, even as a large number of this contingent are functional atheists. At its root, we are looking at the separatism inherent in much Protestant political thought and causes. Instead of confronting difference and coming to an accord, the saints wish to banish the fallen from the world and thus make the world more perfect.

There is a religious element to the Obama campaign, and it takes the form of distinguishing oneself from the fallen political world. It is different than simply "running against Washington" which can be a very pragmatic kind of operation, but is openly hostile to the very purpose of politics, which is to compare, contest and compromise in order to balance interests and needs. From this campaign we have literally heard language of "coming to Obama" and of having faith in the One. There was never much attempt to persuade voters to support the candidate and less with each day that passes. We are exhorted to simply acknowledge truth and surrender to this leader. Step back from the campaign and the leitmotif becomes clear, revealing the fundamentally chiliastic nature of the claim. It is charisma in the oldest sense of following a leader because he has been anointed. This is not simply or merely cynical posturing. This campaign's followers really believe that there is nothing more needed than to be faithful to the messianic leader.

Hillary, in stark contrast, is ministerial in her approach. This is a job, it is the most demanding job in the world, and here are her credentials and body of work to demonstrate that she is the most competent and capable to fulfill the needs of the position. Minister in this sense would be both political and religious - someone who tends to the needs and concerns of the beloved community. It's hands on, sleeves rolled up, get dirty helping raise the barn or negotiate that treaty. Power is present and necessary, wielded for the sake of others, which requires her to explain in as much detail as you want to hear exactly how she will use the authority granted to her. It is straight up attention to material interests.

What I see rising from the other side is clearly of two kinds. Half of Obama's support is simply racial identity voting. The other half is from the faction of the party that is significantly insulated from the stark world of need and want. There is a love of the other-worldly where the beauty of the idea and the ideal matters more than the base. The political "base" is seen as base - low, uncouth, adulterated, impure, unworthy. They are not among the saved and the saints. I honestly cannot remember a previous time when so many people in the party were reviled for doing nothing except vote for a conventional candidate. These are not Naderites or Wallace supporters. They are middle-of-the-road solid Democrats who voted Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, Carter, Carter, and so on down the line. The contempt of the saints for the fallen has always been there, but is emerging without a filter or much in the way of self-consciousness this time. The code we learned to speak in our liberal arts colleges falls to the wayside, and I read claims of being rid of the old evil "white working class" (What of us who are not that thing? What of those of us who are?) in a final conflict to end all conflicts and there will be a purified party to which will flock millions of new, young, untainted followers, ready to be led into the land of Goshen.

As Madison wrote in Federalist 10, the end of political contestation means the end of freedom.

The concrete has no place in Obama's campaign narrative. Speaking too much about material benefit pulls you down into the weeds and you are no longer shiny and new and unifying. You take on interests which incur expectations and interfere with the abstract pursuit of the ideal, a government cleansed of politics, run according to bipartisan, technocratic and efficient methods. Kind of like the 50s, but without all that civil rights and women's rights stuff.

In Obama's speeches and claims, there is the structure of the great humanistic appeals of the 50s and 60s, the form of rhetoric that elicits certain kinds of feelings, and the ideas that inspire people to rise above particularity. But what is missing are the foundations that would provide the justification and ground for what is otherwise an exercise in ego-gratification. Oh, look at me transported by the wonderful grandness of the yak-yak! The reason why the words of MLK and LBJ could move us not just to emotion but to action was because they were fully embedded in the grime of life, the tangible things that we don't notice until we are deprived of them - where can I sit when I am tired, where can I eat when I am hungry, may I slake my thirst at this fountain or use this restroom to relieve myself? Can I open a bank account in my own name? May I visit my partner in the hospital?

Instead of seeking to make ideals of unity and benefit for all concrete, contempt has been mobilized. Those who say "Show me what you've got," are reviled as racist, stupid, retrograde, besmirched and fallen. We don't need no stinkin' working class! We will get new and shiny young voters to replace you, untouched by your peculiar love of solid wages, health care and Hillary. Why would the Democrats want to cast off the heart and soul of the New Deal coalition? Where does the animus come from? These people are acting out a separatist fantasy and make up one half of Obama's support.

I speak of what I know very well. Cultural liberals really do tend to think that people who fit the profile of Clinton voters don't have deeply held principles and are not capable of forming complex opinions of the world, little more than dupes of puppet masters like Karl Rove. They act from false consciousness, not from the rich inner life that the properly educated and worldly claim as their own. The dedication and commitment of Clinton voters is denied because those hicks can't really believe anything, and thus the saints need not take into consideration the desires of the fallen as real, let alone legitimate.

As Chris Bowers put it:

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.

We are watching nothing less than a revolution of the party saints against the tainted and fallen dregs who frighten them.

Anglachel

Stereotypes, Facts and Ideals

Paul Krugman's Friday column is up on the New York Times - Clinging to a Sterotype. He hits all the right notes:

Will Barack Obama’s now famous “bitter” quote turn out to have been a big deal politically? Frankly, I have no idea.

But here’s a different question: was Mr. Obama right?

Mr. Obama’s comments combined assertions about economics, sociology and voting behavior. In each case, his assertion was mostly if not entirely wrong.

Start with the economics. Mr. Obama: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration.”

There are, indeed, towns where the mill closed during the 1980s and nothing has replaced it. But the suggestion that the American heartland suffered equally during the Clinton and Bush years is deeply misleading.

In fact, the Clinton years were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median household income soared before crashing after 2000. (You can see the numbers at my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)

***

Next, the sociology: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

The crucial word here isn’t “bitter,” it’s “cling.” Does economic hardship drive people to seek solace in firearms, God and xenophobia?

It’s true that people in poor states are more likely to attend church regularly than residents of rich states. This might seem to indicate that faith is indeed a response to economic adversity.

But this result largely reflects the fact that southern states are both church-going and poor; some poor states outside the South, like Maine and Montana, are actually less religious than Connecticut. Furthermore, within poor states, people with low incomes are actually less likely to attend church than those with high incomes. (The correlation runs the opposite way in rich states.)

Over all, none of this suggests that people turn to God out of economic frustration.

***

It’s true that Americans who attend church regularly are more likely to vote Republican. But contrary to the stereotype, this relationship is weak at low incomes but strong among high-income voters. That is, to the extent that religion helps the G.O.P., it’s not by convincing the working class to vote against its own interests, but by producing supermajorities among the evangelical affluent.

So why have Republicans won so many elections? In his book, “Unequal Democracy,” Mr. Bartels shows that “the shift of the Solid South from Democratic to Republican control in the wake of the civil rights movement” explains all — literally all — of the Republican success story.

Does it matter that Mr. Obama has embraced an incorrect theory about what motivates working-class voters? His campaign certainly hasn’t been based on Mr. Frank’s book, which calls for a renewed focus on economic issues as a way to win back the working class.

Indeed, the book concludes with a blistering attack on Democrats who cater to “affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues” while “dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans.” Doesn’t this sound a bit like the Obama campaign?

Anyway, the important point is that working-class Americans do vote on economic issues — and can be swayed by a politician who offers real answers to their problems.

And one more thing: let’s hope that once Mr. Obama is no longer running against someone named Clinton, he’ll stop denigrating the very good economic record of the only Democratic administration most Americans remember.

People are not casting their votes for the reasons the Blogger Boyz and The Precious claim. Indeed, if anyone is voting out of ungrounded and consoling beliefs, it is the Obamacans, with no solid platform, on the basis of undefined "hope", in violent emotional reaction to a powerful female mother figure, with enormous amounts of contempt and bile for those who do not view the world through their eyes.

They take solace in a fantasy that Obama will be a liberal, even as he sucks up to Republicans and has conservative, opportunistic advisors. They like to think that their vote for a black guy proves they are not racist, just they way some people think attending church makes them Christians. They attribute to their candidate qualities not in evidence, and project onto anyone who fails to adulate Obama the worst possible motives, even going so far as to invent family members who work for the evil lying bitch. They espouse violence against their fellow Democrats, saying they want to batter Hillary, making death threats to black super delegates who do not declare for Obama, and harassing ordinary travelers who show favor to Hillary.

And now, today, Lord Kos himself, a former Republican, declares that Hillary (and by extension those who support her) isn't really a Democrat, trying to delegitimize the political choice of well over half of the party, just as his former political fellow travelers have tried to do to vast swaths of the American public - gays, feminists, blacks, immigrants, Jews, the working class.

Sorry, Markos. I am a Democrat and my acts support my ideology. It is you who falls short of the Democratic ideal.

Anglachel

No Relation

Rev. Wright is not like some crazy uncle that eveyone in the family tolerates with a wince and a "What can you do about him?" shrug. This isn't Obama's grandmother to whom he is tied by blood and long years of dependence, where he had to come to terms with her very human failings and take lessons from her very human successes. Oddly enough, I am not as offended by his bumbling description of her as a typical white person as others are. She does strike me as a type of person, a white, midwestern woman of a certain era, a type I know pretty well because I have so many in my family.

I understand what he means about Grandma. Both of my grandmothers were dear, frustrating, hateful, generous, racist, liberal, totally maddening and utterly indespensible participants in my youth. It is mostly with a backwards glance that I can appreciate their better qualities and not turn away from their less pleasant aspects. As I get older and grumpier, I find myself saying and doing things that echo them. [And, it's official, I have become my mother...] I cannot disavow these women, or my other relatives, even as I wish that they could somehow have been more perfect versions of themselves. I want for them to not have been so petty or to have held needless fears, as much for my own selfish reasons as for their sake. I can be kind of petty, too, having learned it from them.

But Rev. Wright is a different matter. You can't call upon family ties to excuse a relationship established with a mentor after you have reached adulthood. This isn't a childhood pastor or family friend. This was a relationship chosen by an adult for intellectual and political as well as spiritual reasons. You can and must disavow a person when he says something beyond the pale of civil discourse in such a public manner, and you must do so for the sake of our common world. Anyone can shoot their mouth off in private, or say something untoward in a public venue, but someone who proudly promulgates an entire philosophy of a people divided into the saved and the damned based upon biological characteristics over which they have no control has placed himself outside the civil polity. This is not about manners or being nice-nice. It is about the substance of the arguments themselves. They are powerful words and such words, like acts, have consequences. This is why I shun the Republican Party, for it has allied itself with purveyors of hate, absorbing that creed deep into its damaged heart.

Someone who deliberately joins an organization whose leader and members celebrate their own superiority and scorn their fellow citizens as less than fully human has no relation to me.

Anglachel

Who Are They Trying to Convince?

My own reaction to Rev. Wright I'm going to keep to myself for a while longer.

For a candidate who allegedly has an insurmountable lead and who is all but guaranteed the nomination, Obama's campaign is behaving like an operation in crisis. Probably because it is. The Wright revelations are actually not new, but have finally escaped the right wing email circuit and hit the mainstream. This stuff has been percolating in Greater Wingnuttia for months.

Does everyone remember the flap last year about Robert Novak saying that the Clinton campaign had some deep dreadful oppo research on Obama, and how Obama challenged them to produce it or "retract"? I suspect this is the story Novak was alluding to, and that (given its nature), he hoped he could prod the campaign to let it slip, all to Hillary's detriment. I've always been curious about Obama's belligerent, almost hysterical behavior at that time. What on earth could be so bad (aside from dead girl/live boy) that he'd behave like that? Now we know. What we also know is that everyone in the game knew about this story - all the MSM players, all the Democratic candidates, all the kids in oppo - and everyone was breathlessly waiting for someone to spill the beans.

A veritable Sword of Damocles. (Note - I suggest that y'all go read up on the Sword of Damocles so you understand the full applicability of this anecdote.)

I don't own a TV so I read up on the atrocities via the web. When reading over the accounts of the Sunday talk shows today, what struck me was the way in which the Obama side simultaneously vehemently denied that Wright was a problem and just as aggressively tried to claim that the Hillary campaign was behind it all (just like with the Somali photo) and/or build up Gerry Ferraro as some purveyor of hate crimes. This follows on Obama himself trying to wiggle his way out of acknowledging the relationship on the Friday gab-shows, and is accompanied by an announcement that they are going to attack Hillary on several fronts. Armando/BTD has a good analysis on this here at TalkLeft.

Obama's defenders (Hillary's, too, for that matter) on the shows were really not talking to people like me, people who have already formed an opinion of Wright, who have already cast a primary vote, and who are not super delegates. They aren't talking to supporters or to detractors; the only audience is those who have not yet cast a ballot:

• Voters in the upcoming primaries who will choose a candidate and may change the pledged delegate allocation.
• Undeclared super delegates

To the average voter, the Obama angle is to tamp out the Wright debacle ASAP as a mentionable campaign issue and make it go away, hoping non-AA voters forget about it before Pennsylvania, the Michigan and Florida revotes (yes, I think they will both happen), and Kentucky. The danger here is that the combustible nature of Wright's speeches (and, no, I don't think that they are unrepresentative of the man's thought, though they may not be representative of his average sermon.) will outrage the core Democratic voter, the Reagan Democrat blue collar, "lunch bucket" person who isn't black and who is feeling a little worried about the economy.

The real target, though, was the undeclared super delegates, and the argument there was more like a performative - look, see how we are removing this as an issue from the table? You don't have to worry that this is going to impact us in the general. It was just a dirty campaign trick by Hillary and it will not be used against us by the republicans. Oh, please, pleeease believe us!

The trouble here is that this story has been peddled by FOX News and the Republicans, though at a very low volume, since last summer. It matters that Novak was trying to make HRC be the bagholder on this one, and her campaign is (very wisely) refusing this trap, even when they could probably exploit it in the upcoming primaries.

Watch for Obama's team to try even harder to prevent Michigan and Florida from revoting because then they will be passign judgment on him in light of this news, and their voters are not likely to view it with much favor. I also suspect that the Democrat for a Day schtick is going to backfire badly in Pennsylvania because of the combination of the economy and the offensiveness of Wright. Republicans who don't really support McCain and who are infuriated by the Wright video clips may line up behind Hillary, and in this case I think you will see a new breed of cross-over voter - Hillary Republicans. Unlike Obama's cynical "Dem for a Day," these are voters who will probably stick around, especially the women voters.

This is explosive, campaign ending stuff, and Obama knows it. This is real racism, not the BS jabs at white liberal guilt they've been pushing against Hillary, and is exactly what the Republicans want for the general, something they can use to push up their own turn out and get party members unenthused about McCain all riled up, just like they used the anti-gay measures last time. It is not a mistake that the incendiary ballot issues the Republicans are pushing this year are about affirmative action. The Wright videos are what they need to make it visceral. They won't have much convincing to do.

Obama is trying to convince the super delegates that he isn't a losing proposition in the general election, and his way to do it is to trash Hillary even more.

Anglachel

Dear Religious Right: Give It Up

Courtesy of the Rude Pundit. NOT WORK SAFE:

How many more fuckin' times are we gonna go through this same pathetic charade with presumptive leaders for the religious right? For moral values supporters? How many more men, for indeed, can anyone name a powerful woman brought down in a sex scandal recently? How many hypocritical Ted Haggards and Newt Gingriches and Mark Foleys and David Vitters, all, all, all men that the religious right counted on to lead them to the promised land of political power, to keep those homosexuals down, to punish Bill Clinton, to make abstinence and anti-abortion policies the rule of the country? How many more men who make a show of deep faith who are just assholes who wanna get their rocks off?

When do we get to act like a nation of grown-ups where we can say, "You know, I don't give a fuck if my candidate likes to have his nutsack stomped by a cross-dressed male hooker in stiletto heels as long as he supports my issues"? And where those issues can be shit like war and education and health care and not bullshit like who's fucking who and for what reasons?

Amen. I am sick of the faux morals (and rampant moralism) of the religious right. Their leaders are some of the biggest perverts in the country, blathering on about their love of Jeezus while they are humping hookers and kids on the side. What's worse are the religious fellow travelers who tut-tut ordinary people's foibels, but won't hold their hypocritical fellows responsible for corrupting the very fabric of their faith.

America is so fucked up. We'll impeach a president over a consual blow job but don't have the balls to do it to one who has gutted rule of law and made us into a nation that condones torture. We are the opposite of a Christian nation.

Anglachel