Oratorical Animal

The Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on a key enforcement provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a provision renewed several times by Congress. In fact, in the last effort, Congress carefully researched and collated a series of abuses (hello, Florida!) that justified continuation of the Act. Despite that, the so-called "non-activist," conservative Justices appeared determined to ignore the will of Congress (98-0 in the Senate) and gut the Act. Love those judges who are humble, who refuse to be activists, and who respect the will of legislatures. Sure enough. At any rate, two common sense items have always troubled me about these sorts of debates--voting rights, affirmative action, whatever. But voting rights is a good example.

First, Justice Kennedy was annoyed that some states came under the Act and others did not: “Congress has made a finding that the sovereignty of Georgia is less than the sovereign dignity of Ohio,” Justice Kennedy said. “The sovereignty of Alabama is less than the sovereign dignity of Michigan. And the governments in one are to be trusted less than the governments in the other.”

Tough question, I know, but let's try this answer: Yep. We do trust those governments less. Why? Because they're untrustworthy. Because they held slaves and then they enforced Jim Crow. Because they fought tooth and nail to keep those institutions and killed hundreds of thousands of people along the way. Because, since then, white majorities in those states have consistently voted against every effort for social justice. Because the disparate stats are still very, very clear. When it comes to voting rights and its companion issues, yep, I trust Illinois a lot more than I trust Georgia. And I've lived in both places. Everyone gets to vote in Illinois. Black. White. Alive. Dead...Heck, everyone gets to play here. We don't see black and white. Just green, baby. An f*&^%!# valuable color, green.

Seriously, though, history matters. That leads to... 

Second, when I watched the report on NBC News last night, Chief Justice Roberts was quoted as worrying about the length of the Act--it's been long enough, right? 1965 was a long time ago. It was supposed to be temporary, he fretted. Now, from Florida to Jena, I think one could cite a variety of current examples that would keep the Chief Justice occupied, but let's go to some simple comparisons:

Slavery in the United States: Roughly 250 years. Segregation in the United States: Roughly 90 years. The Voting Rights Act: Roughly 45 years.

The arc of the universe is long, Mr. Chief Justice, and some patience is in order. Some patience is indeed in order.

Thank you, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

The FBI said no. No torture for them. Thank you, FBI. I feel considerably better about the US government. Perhaps the FBI should begin remedial training for CIA agents.

I am that Liberal Dana Cloud Dislikes

(Note: This is a note I put up on Facebook in response to one of Dana's notes, a status update, and some comments. I thought those not on FB might like a look. Plus, I get another blog post out of it!)

 

Well, I hope Dana doesn't dislike me. We've been friends a long time, although I suspect she rues the professional and philosophical paths that my career has taken. In a couple of recent posts/notes, Dana has argued that free speech is a luxury that those interested in social justice cannot afford. Confrontational protest demands that we shout down people like Joe McCarthy and David Horowitz. Wussy liberals like me won't do that; we need to man up and shout down. Yep, I'm aware of the imagery there; others should be as well. Here are some reasons to rethink that position--offered with an inordinate amount of respect to Professor Cloud, as well as an understanding that I do not live her life.

First, hasty generalizations make for bad policy decisions. That's been proven time and again and it's one of the reasons we call this an argument fallacy. I used to work on a faculty that made a new rule for every instance of student misbehavior. Given the imagination of students, that was a bad idea; rules proliferated. We even started naming the rules after the particular students. I honestly don't think we need a Horowitz rule for public debate; he's not normal and his life is a bad basis for policy. In every sense of those terms.

Second, Dana is absolutely right. Confrontation is an invaluable mode of protest and, in my strict understanding of the term, it's not censorship when it's not government or their agents. But we should also remember that confrontation does not = shouting down. Nor is silence consent, despite the lovely bumper sticker. The most affecting protest against the Iraq war in Athens Georgia is, in fact, the silence of Quaker women in front of the arch. Nor did the Boston Tea Party involve anyone being shouted down; the protestors were particularly polite by all accounts, as were the Freedom Riders. That was precisely why they were so effective. One can confront someone with their sins and still allow them to defend themselves.

I also recognize that it is not censorship. But it's not a particularly good idea, I submit, for the community to allow the gagging of various of its members, whether by government consent or not. Shouting people down transforms an argumentative issue ("What are your reasons for that?") into a test of power ("How many people can you put into the streets or into a classroom? How loud are you?"). Violence is the end of this trajectory, as Leland Griffin might point out. Less persuasion and more coercion is not where we want this nation to go; rather the opposite should be the goal. We've tried communally sanctioned, self-imposed gags on particular points of view in the past; 1836 comes to mind. They don't work very well.

Third, as I argued in front of Dana at Madison, a liberal democracy depends on the norm of reciprocity. Minority views survive and someday become majorities (or not) because they know what happens to me can happen to you. Such reciprocity breeds trust; we both know that we can count on a free expression of our views. Thus, we do not fear the results of a policy disagreement or an election. When that norm is violated--when the minority insists it doesn't have to abide by an election in 1860 or when suits riot in 2000, preventing a fair and accurate count of an election--then the trust essential to democracy disappears. This is a bad thing. It's better for Horowitz to have his podium and for Dana to have her classroom than for both to engage in a mutually assured escalation of shouting down. That's a different kind of reciprocity and the trajectory, again, is not a good one.

Finally, we do not fight McCarthy or Horowitz in order to become them. That simple. Sometimes, cliches are true and in this case, that is the case.

Of course, all of this may well be moot. When the happily seceded, newly re-established Republic of Texas takes over UT, I suspect y'all won't have to worry about this pesky liberal democracy. You can match power with the radical right in the streets of Austin and Dallas, College Station and Lubbock. Good luck with that.

Torture

I've spent several days trying to wrap my head around this issue--again--and I'm not sure I have much to add to what has already been said. It's obscene. This is not American. No, I don't need examples of past instances; I know the United States has tortured. But when you read this porn and listen to its purveyors--Cheney especially--it makes you sick to your stomach. These people are proud of their carefully planned, "legally justified," nicely sequenced, Nazi and Commie originated torture program. To read their work is to encounter the "banality of evil" all over again and that's what makes it so awful. No, this is not what we stand for nor is this our identity. This is not the work of the Land of Lincoln.

Amid all of the nastiness, two things really stand out for me. First, I have yet to run across an instance when a CIA operative or an American soldier or whomever said, "No, I will not do this. This violates my conscience." Have I missed an episode? I hope so. It seems to me that someone should have refused to do adopt tactics popular among those who created the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Killing Fields. If they did not, then we need to take a hard look at their training. "I was following orders" did not work for people we prosecuted, but apparently, it's good enough for us. Someone should have said no and walked away, even at risk to his or her career. The fact that none apparently did is deeply disturbing.

Second, there's this. I occasionally think I'm beyond surprise when it comes to the Bush horrors/follies, but I should always remember that there's no place too low. The primary justification for torture is the 24 scenario--there's an imminent attack, a ticking time bomb, or, as a FB interlocutor put it the other day, a kidnapped daughter. One must torture to save the day. My response tends to be empirical--those instances are so rare as to be nonexistent so one should not base policy on them--and ethical--if you feel it necessary, take the punishment. Act as nonviolent civil rights advocates did when they broke the law. If you do the crime, pay the time.

Now, it turns out the whole issue is moot. Cheney and Rumsfeld, that article notes, didn't torture in the face of an imminent threat. They tortured to find links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, in order to provide evidence for their false reason to invade Iraq. They tortured to justify their lies. They tortured for domestic political reasons. They waterboarded people to prove their president right when he was wrong.

We're not prosecuting them for war crimes because....?

It's Called "The Hundred Days"

I think I've figured out why David Brooks drives me crazy. He's historically illiterate. In today's column, he writes, "Obama is taking enormous risks [with his big agenda]. Even F.D. R. decided to concentrate on the banking crisis in his first year and put other issues off until 1934 and beyond." There's simply no excuse for this level of ignorance, on the part of Brooks or the Times itself. Does no one proof columnists for basic errors?

They were called the alphabet agencies. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Agricultural Adjustment Act. The Tennessee Valley Authority. The National Recovery Administration (which pretty much ran the whole economy). The Civilian Conservation Corps. The Public Works Administration. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Most important of all? Beer, of course.

On the second Sunday of the Roosevelt Administration, FDR announced at supper, "I think this would be a good time for beer." The 18th Amendment allowed for 3.2 beer, if the President and the Congress so choose. Oh, they so chose. They did, indeed. On that Sunday, he wrote out a message requesting the legislation. On Monday, the House received it. On Tuesday, they passed 3.2 beer. On Thursday, the Senate passed it. Shortly thereafter, Studs Terkel recalled, "Bars were openiong overnight, with every other beer on the house!"

All of this (and more) happened during the Hundred Days, much less the first year. There are, oh, a couple of books about it, one of which became rather famous when the current president acknowledged reading it. He probably learned something from it. That's one of the nice things about the current president. He learns. By reading history books. Without crayons in his hands.

Upon This Rock

President Obama's economic address is a lovely speech. Yes, I know, that assessment is getting old. But if he keeps giving excellent speeches, then I have to keep giving him As. It's an odd relationship--good product=good evaluation--that many undergraduates never quite grasp. Some highlights:

*This is a speech for adults. It is long, careful, and clear. With one notable exception (see below) it offers good reasons for Obama's policies--reasons rooted in principled and practical concerns. It calls for an adult response. Tea parties won't cut it. Obama has spoken on the day before a temper tantrum to offer his opponents the chance to deliberate. He has represented their arguments with considerably more grace than one might expect, given their vitriol toward him, and he has refuted their claims. It is their time to respond. They need to follow his example by treating Americans--and themselves, for that matter--as adults. It's easier to be a Beck, Hannity, or Limbaugh. It's not so good for democracy.

*Obama nicely uses time as a rhetorical resource. On one level, he uses chronology to structure the speech, thus representing the economic crisis and his response to it as we experienced the economic crisis and his response. As a result of that structure and of his authoritative position as president, he crafts our interpretation of those events. They happen in the speech as we experienced them in the world; that congruency grants authority to his interpretation. He cannot represent events in a speech as fully and completely as they occurred--no one can--but his highlights become our history, at least until someone displaces them. That's the lovely advantage built into chronology. 

On a second level, he shapes his response to these events as timely; that is, he uses the traditional rhetorical principle of kairos--his sensitivity to the moment, the notion of speaking and acting at just the right moment to influence events. Thus, this moment calls for government spending to restore demand because so many families and businesses are doing precisely the opposite at this moment. We're hoarding; the government is spending. If the government joined in the hoarding, disaster would result.

Finally, that last line ties in with a third timing strategy, the locus of the irreparable--the notion that if we do not act now, we reach a tipping point, a moment of no return. Most often seen in environmental arguments (think of global warming arguments), the strategy works particularly well as Obama argues for his long term plans. If we don't act, even in spite of the obstacles, we will have no future. So, just as a family will cut back on luxuries in bad times, but still invest in their child's college education, so, too, will Obama cut back on wasteful defense spending and invest in alternative energy. His analogy, by the by. The guy also makes good use of analogy.

*For the most part, the speech is nicely argued; one could use the Toulmin model (a claim supported by evidence with a warrant, or accepted reasons, connecting the two) to chart these arguments. The one exception is revealing; it concerns his banking plan. Paul Krugman, among others, criticizes Obama's bailout plan as inadequate and argues we need to take over and liquidate zombie banks, much as the FDIC does on a regular basis. Critics have also noted the strong ties the Administration has to Wall Street and claimed that is the reason why Obama hasn't taken over or nationalized some banks. After recounting that argument and denying the undue influence charge, Obama says, "Rather, it is because we believe that preemptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end, and because it is more likely to undermine than to create confidence. Governments should practice the same principle as doctors: first do no harm." A lovely claim supported by a common maxim, but where, pray tell, is the reasoning or evidence? Does the FDIC cost taxpayers too much or undermine confidence? Why? How? If this is the best an orator as skilled as Obama can do with the bailout, it's time for a new bailout plan.

*Obama went for the big finish. I have not watched, only read, the speech, but it's been a while since he's composed a finish comprised of equal parts the Gospels (the house on a rock), King (a vision of America's future in which we're "teeming" and "humming"--its not a Dream, but close. Although the verbs make me feel somewhat like a bee), JFK (We will not finish it in one year or even many--All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days), and, elliptically, FDR--through the Kennedy quotation and through the timing of the speech--a 100 day report card, as it were.

*Finally, note the unity. Everything he has done ties to everything else, from the stimulus to the budget to foreign policy to health care to entitlement reform...Everything has a place and everything is in its place. Which is very reassuring. Particularly to people who looooove structure in their lives. Not that I'd name names. 

Sincerity Matters

David Broder is the latest columnist to worry about the partisan divide in the nation and to proclaim that President Obama's election has not brought about the change he promised. Broder and many others (some of them insincere conservatives) claim that party line votes on major bills reveal a real problem for Obama--if he cannot deliver "change," or govern "from the center," or establish "bi-partisanship," then he will eventually fail. As evidence for his thesis, Broder, for example, points to the enormous gap between Democratic and Republican approval rates for the President, the largest gap in polling history.

I'd like to suggest an alternative interpretation. Initially, it's important to note that the gap identified with such glee exists because hard core Republicans loathe Obama and only committed partisans are identifying as Republican. Their party id rating is falling. Ergo, it's kinda hard for Obama to get the approval of Republicans when those Republicans who like him decide that's reason enough to leave the party.

There's a more important reason here, I think, and one that applies to a variety of arenas. People don't necessarily follow politics closely (contra Broder, I think few people understand or have a commitment on cap and trade), but they get relationships and often (too often) apply those criteria to politics. In the case of Obama and the Republicans (or Iran or Syria or Russia for that matter), this is what they see: Obama tries.

He submitted a stimulus plan that contained more tax cuts than most liberals (well, Paul Krugman and me, anyway) wanted and offered to negotiate. When he found a couple of negotiating partners, he negotiated. He's clearly willing to compromise on the budget. He asks constantly for people's views and has more advisory panels than a president really should have. He's "hitting the reset button" on relations with Iran, Syria, Russia, Turkey, Mexico, etc..

In other words, people give Obama credit because he tries to talk to reasonable and unreasonable people. If the Glenn Becks persist in being Beavis and Butthead, well, it's as if we're friends with somebody in a bad relationship. We can see s/he has tried and tried and the partner is, well, not useful. We urge our friend to get on with life.

Judging from the approval ratings for President Obama/Democratic Congress on the one hand and the Republican Congress on the, um, lower hand, that's what people are doing. It's been a consistent trend; if anything, the Republicans are sinking, not improving, over time. There's not a good relationship between Obama and Boehner. It's pretty clear who's going to get the most friends in this breakup. 

Americans want Obama to get on with his life/agenda. If, as seems a bit likely, the Russians are responding to his sincerity and helping out a little, great. If, as seems more likely, the Republicans prefer teabagging, well, that's fine, too. Sort of. It just means the American people may think about a trial separation from Republicans. Because this sort of thing is not a good time. Which is not good news for a political party.

I Like Good Arguments

David Brooks is not very smart. Hilzoy is very smart. Of course, she's also reading John Rawls's thesis, which is a scary thought.

Obama's Popularity

It's holding up quite well, particularly given the array of problems he inherited. As Matt Yglesias points out, that says something about those Republican Senators who have opposed much of the president's agenda. Like the English cavalry at Balaclava, they may lack brains, but they don't lack courage.

In the House, Obama's mid-60s approval rating doesn't matter all that much. Districts are thoroughly gerrymandered. Rules favor the majority. The Democrats will do well there and few Representatives have any real incentive to change their behavior. In all likelihood, Representative Cantor can continue to astound and continue to be reelected, although I suspect Representative Bachmann may not be long for the Congress.

But on the other side of Capitol Hill, a good many Senators, Republicans and Democrats, are placing a bet. They're betting that national and state races have become so decoupled in recent years that they can defy a popular president with impunity. Democrats like Bayh of Indiana and Lincoln of Arkansas as well as Republicans like Voinovich of Ohio and Specter of Pennsylvania seem to be assuming either 1) he can't hurt them; or 2) by 2010, he'll have failed, so he won't be able to hurt them.

It's hard to believe that the economy will actually be worse by 2010, so Obama is likely to get credit for improvement. Given that polls show relatively few Americans blame him for our current troubles, it seems unlikely that the second choice above will come true. We may not be in great shape, but he'll get credit for better times.

As far as the first option? FDR famously tried to purge conservative Senators in 1938 and failed miserably. So, current Senators may be right. But that was 1938. I would not have wanted to go before the voters in 1934 on a loud record of complete opposition to the Hundred Days--banking, AAA, etc. That would not have been a good choice and virtually no one made it. 

A lot of people are making that choice right now. Dems from conservative states--like Bayh and Lincoln--may be insulated from retribution, simply because a better replacement seems highly unlikely, although one never knows. I don't understand the Republicans from big, suffering states that voted pretty substantially for Barack Obama. I think Senators Specter and Voinovich, for instance, need to start investigating pension plans and retirement savings.  

Your 2012 Republican Presidential Nominee!

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is angry with President Obama. North Korea launched a multistage rocket (which did not work properly) last weekend and Gingrich thought the president should have stopped them. How? With laser beams. 

Of course Gingrich thought that. One of the weirdest things about Republicans of a particular age--Gingrich, Quayle, Kristol--is that they think Tom Clancy's world is real. As geeky teenagers and impressionable adults, they eagerly swallowed every Tom Clancy book that appeared and believed that somewhere, somehow, the federal government actually had all of that wonderful weaponry. And it worked. All we needed was the will to use it. If I recall correctly, Senator Dan Quayle once supported a weapons system on the floor of Congress with the argument that, in Clancy's Red Storm Rising, the system played a critical role in the defense of Western Europe against a Soviet invasion. Of course, Quayle also believed that Murphy Brown was real.  

Perhaps I'm being too hasty. It might not be Clancy. Maybe Gingrich pulls his military strategy from a more reputable source.