Sunday, January 8, 2017

Weekend Roundup

After a couple weeks I had enough open tabs to think I should hack out another links-plus-comments column. Nothing systematic here, just a few things that caught my fancy.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Jamelle Bouie: The Most Extreme Party Coalition Since the Civil War: The first book I read on alternative politics back in the 1960s was called The New Radicals, a survey of various thinkers and activists on the New Left. In it, radicals were people who looked for root causes and core principles, as opposed to those who casually wandered from one compromise to another. While it's certainly true that radicals can be wrong, and that they can become obsessed by their insights and oblivious to consequences, the problem there is picking bad principles, not radical ones. In fact, the only other time when "radical" was commonly used to describe politics was after the Civil War, when the GOP was dominated by so-called radicals like Thaddeus Stevens who advocated a deep-seated reconstruction of the former Slave South. Bouie is right that today's GOP is chock full of folks who hold very dangerous views, but those people are not radicals -- they're just wrong. Indeed, in terms of their eagerness to impose their ideology on a world that has moved way past it, they share much more than attitude with pro-slavery activists like John Calhoun than with Republicans like Stevens. But as Corey Robin has pointed out, the proper term for Calhoun and his ilk isn't radical -- it's conservative. The first thing Bouie must do to get smarter is to disabuse himself of the notion that conservatism is a respectable political philosophy. Leftists learned this lesson long ago, which is why they readily identify people who are willing to wreck the world to save the rich -- people like Trump, Pence, and Ryan -- as fascists. That may seem reflexive and excessive, but it serves us well.

  • Gorbachev: US Was Short-Sighted After Soviet Collapse: So true, but America's effective policy toward the former Soviet Union was to rub their faces in the dirt. We helped turn their collectivist economy into a Mafia-run kleptocracy. The result was near-total economic collapse -- so severe that even life expectancy dipped by as much as a decade. And to add insult to injury, the US started picking off former satellite nations and SSRs that formerly propped up the Russian economy and turned them westward, hugely expanding both NATO and the EU. This produced a huge backlash in Russia, and its face is Vladimir Putin, a guy we fear and loathe as a nationalist strongman, but who Russians flock to precisely because he doesn't look like as an American flunky. Sure, it's not clear why the US didn't handle the situation more adroitly, but from the start American Cold Warriors did everything they could to prevent any form of free/open/humane socialism from securing a foothold anywhere. Americans always preferred to work through corrupt strongmen, and even if Yeltsin didn't qualify as strong, he more than made it up as corrupt. Those who complain so much about Putin today should bear this history in mind, but the lesson they draw is inevitably wrong, because we are incapable of considering what would be good for the welfare of people in other nations -- Republicans, especially, don't even care about people living here. And the only thing the foreign policy mandarins consider is whether foreign leaders follow or challenge America's power dictates.

  • Bradley Klapper/Josef Federman/Edith M Lederer: US Rebukes and Allows UN Condemnation of Settlements: Widely interpreted as a "parting shot" rebuke of Netanyahu by the Obama administration, the fact is that it's been US policy since 1967 that Israel must retreat to its pre-1967 armistice borders as part of a "land-for-peace" deal, a scheme which later came to be described as "the two-state solution." That was, after all, the basis for George Mitchell's mission to restart final status talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and before that was the official expectation for Bush's Roadmap, for the Clinton-era Oslo Accords, and for Carter's peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Mitchell himself spent most of his mission time trying to convince Israel to halt settlement construction, and his complete failure to limit Israel destroyed any hope for an American-brokered peace. In past years, the intransigence of an Israeli PM like Yitzhak Shamir would have led to a breach with the US, rectified by Israel electing a more flexible leader (Yitzhak Rabin). Even GW Bush was able to put pressure on Israel, at the time led by Ariel Sharon (not a pushover), to dismantle settlements as part of his poisoned Gaza withdrawal. But Obama never did anything like that, and over eight years Netanyahu discovered he could walk all over Obama, ensuring that the US would never challenge Israel in an international forum. Given that the UNSCR resolution does nothing more than reiterate four decades of US policy, the real question isn't why Obama didn't veto it. It's why Obama didn't direct his ambassador to vote for it, indeed why he didn't sponsor the resolution eight years ago, when it might have been more effective -- when at least it would have served notice that the US is serious about peace and justice in the Middle East. Rather, Obama wasted eight years digging ever deeper holes in the region, obliterating any doubts that the US could ever be a force for peace, security, and equitable prosperity.

    Of course, Netanyahu and his American political lackeys and allies have gone ballistic over Obama's affront to Israeli power, but that is less to punish him than to threaten Trump, who despite his vaguer "America first" rhetoric has promised to be the most servile American president ever. The vote stands, and hopefully will help Palestinians seek justice in the international courts system, but the intensity of the political rebuke that Obama's belated gesture has raised, along with the imminent inauguration of Trump, only goes to show how far the United States has strayed from the ideals of international law and order, and cooperation, that were once our best hope for world peace and prosperity. Trump has, for instance, vowed to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, in flagrant disregard for international law -- although that's pretty minor compared to the practices Jeremy Scahill documents in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield -- his big book on how Bush and Obama ran roughshod over international law to prosecute their misguided "war on terror." The significance of the 14-0 UNSCR vote isn't just that it shows how isolated and delegitimized Israel has become in the eyes of the world. It also shows how marginal the US has become after decades pursuing policies Israel has pioneered. One clear conclusion must be that any notion the US might once have had of being an "honest broker" for peace have vanished. If Europe, Russia, China, etc., really want to do something to bring peace and justice to Israel-Palestine, they're going to start with the recognition that the US is a big part of the problem and no or little part of the solution. Obama, Trump, and Netanyahu, each in his own way, have helped clarify that point.

    Also see: Richard Silverstein: Kerry's Speech: America Lost in Two-State Ether, Israel Spied on Nations Supporting UN Vote.

  • Dennis Laumann: The first genocide of the 20th century happened in Namibia: The party responsible was Germany, the time 1904-07, the territory South-West Africa, the target the Herero, a tribe of herders who got on the colonial power's wrong side mostly by just being in the way. Laumann describes the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians in 1915 as "indisputable" but it was nowhere near as clear cut as Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha's Vernichtungsbefehl, which specified: "Within the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, shall be shot." Oddly enough, I first learned about this event from a novel, Thomas Pynchon's V., where it appears as a key link in a chain of increasingly mechanized slaughter. Also worth seeking out is Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, which puts the Herero genocide into the broader context of European colonial brutality, making it more the culmination of the 19th century than a harbinger of the 20th.

  • Reihan Salam: Will Donald Trump Be FDR or Jimmy Carter? Sub-hed: "We're on the cusp of either a transformative presidency or a party-killing failure" -- oddly conflating Ronald Reagan with the former and Herbert Hoover with the latter. I've never doubted that it's important to know of and learn from history, but this sort of muddying makes me wonder. The pairings suggest that Salam is uncertain whether Trump will be seen as a winner (like Roosevelt-Reagan) or a loser (Hoover-Carter), so that's one level of ignorance he brings to the table. Another is that while Roosevelt is properly viewed as "transformational" that status is rooted in his unique time period (the depression, which forced the state to become a major economic factor, and the war, which transformed the state into empire). On the other hand, there was nothing distinctive about the Carter-Reagan years, and the myth of Reagan's success was largely based on ignoring reality and engaging in fantasy -- the bankruptcy of which would have long been obvious had not Democrats like Clinton, Gore, and Obama not built their own careers on indulging that same fantasy. At most, this article might have exposed the hollowness of this PoliSci paradigm, but Salam rarely offers more than lines like "Trump will put a candy-covered nationalist shell over Reaganism's chocolate-covered peanut." Peanut? Wasn't Carter the peanut guy? Wasn't Reagan more into jelly beans?

    Actually, Salam does try to make a case that some sort of Trumpian nationalism might be politically successful enough to move Trump into the winners column, but this would involve building on ideas from the center-left, including embracing and defending the safety net. Whether even such a hypothetical program might work isn't analyzed, but the more obvious problems are touched on: that Republican regulars would sabotage any gestures he might make toward the center, and that Trump himself isn't really serious about the platform he ran on (as evidenced, for instance, by his cabinet). Of course, someone who knows a little history might help out here. One might argue that Hoover, for instance, would actually have preferred to move toward what became the New Deal but that he was checked at every step by the dead-enders within his own administration (e.g., Andrew Mellon). One might equally argue that Carter wanted to move toward what eventually became Reaganism -- he did in fact start the recession that broke the back of the American labor movement, and his anti-regulation schemes and anti-communist militancy paved the way for Reagan, but he too faced a debilitating revolt from his own party. Whatever people thought when they voted for Trump, what they wound up with was a politician deep in hock to his party and the insatiable greed of their donors, and that's more or less the only thing he'll ever be able to deliver. If you think that's going to be some kind of booming, transformational success, well, you're fucking nuts.

  • Steven Waldman: The Strangest Winner on Election Night Was Not Trump: He means the Republican Congress, enjoying an approval rating of just 15%, yet they only lost two Senate and six House seats, retaining a thin but anomalous and ominous majority.

    And yet the Republican Party has more power now than it has in decades, and is acting as if the party received a tidal-wave mandate.

    How did this happen? While Trump occasionally clashed with Republican leaders during the campaign -- leading to the impression that he was at war with the GOP establishment -- it was always over lack of fealty more than policy. The main exception was trade but so as long as the Republican's are "saying nice things" to Trump, he was perfectly happy to embrace almost all of their policies. The rift with the GOP establishment was always less than advertised.

    Second, as has been often noted, Trump's lack of knowledge and curiosity about policy has meant he is totally reliant on the people who have the plans -- who are congressional republicans, K street lobbyists and industry groups. There is no shadow world of public policy centers crafting a Trumpian alternative to Republican orthodoxy. With the exception of trade and immigration, Trump's views are standard issue Republican policies, albeit sprinkled with extra bile.

    Finally, because so much of the GOP power is safeguarded by gerrymandering, congressional Republicans can act like they have a mandate without much fear that swing voters will punish them.

    All in all, it adds up to an odd situation: the Republican party is less popular than its been in ages -- and has more power.

    One part of why this happened was that the GOP donor network focused on down-ballot races, which had the effect of lifting Trump up without having to bear all his dead weight. Indeed, all they needed to close the deal was to convince their voters that Hillary was a tad worse, or that they had nothing to lose by giving Trump a chance. Indeed, they seemed to understand that in the end Trump would turn into the party toady he's since become. The other part is that the Democrats focused on supporting Hillary over, and free from, their party -- all those appeals to "moderate suburban Republican housewives" and neocons and other chimerical groups. The biggest gripe I've had against Obama and the Clintons is how they've neglected building a party to compete with the Republicans, instead usurping the party apparatus for their own cult of personality (and appeals to elite donors).

Also, a few links very briefly noted:

Laura Tillem forwarded one of those Facebook image/memes that I can't share anywhere else due to devious Facebook programming, but it's all text so I'll just retype it (originally from The Other 98%):

TOP 10 REASONS FOR SINGLE PAYER

  1. Everybody in, nobody out
  2. Portability: Change jobs, get divorced, lose your job, etc. - won't lose coverage
  3. Uniform benefits for everyone
  4. Enhance Prevention
  5. Choose your physician
  6. Ends insurance industry interference with care
  7. Reduces administrative waste
  8. Saves money
  9. Common Sense Budgeting - set fair reimbursements and apply them equally
  10. Public oversight, public ownership

This could be spelled out a little better, but is all basically true, and for sound reasons. However, single-payer only gets at part of the problem -- basically the easy one, as insurance companies are mostly parasitical, hence it's easy to imagine a scenario where everything is better once they're gone. The bigger piece of the problem is for-profit health care providers, and dealing with their conflicts of interest and inefficiencies is more complex.

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