He was 90 at the time of his death

It cannot be said that McGovern’s star-crossed 1972 Presidential campaign signaled the death of American liberalism (America’s version of social democracy). That death would finally come when Ronald Reagan demolished the politically conservative Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. What his 1972 campaign managed to accomplish was the creation of a potent and enduring symbol, one which encapsulated the political impossibility of liberal reform in the United States. It did not matter a jot that McGovern was not a radical in any way at all; his defeat at Richard Nixon’s dirty hands, America’s last liberal President (Chomsky), was so decisive that it suggested Americans in general would not accept the political implementation of a just social order, a project which informed national politics in the prior decade. In this sense it can be said that McGovern’s defeat in 1972 ushered in the Age of Reaction in American politics. It was the watershed moment for this reactionary turn. Even the Watergate Scandal — which one might have expected to affirm completely and strongly the leftwing of the Democratic Party and which destroyed the corrupt Nixon Administration as well as the Party-man Gerald Ford — failed to deter the hard right turn made by the American elite after the 1960s. Militarism, predatory economics and social reaction would dominate American politics thereafter.

The significance of McGovern’s defeat is such that echoes of it could be heard in Scott Walker’s decisive victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin Governor’s Recall Election of 2012 and in the public and private despair felt by the Democratic Party left over Barack Obama’s reactionary politics. Both situations reflect the political weakness of a center-left politics in the United States, a weakness revealed by the 1972 Presidential Election. A Heideggerian might consider this despair to be Uncle Sam anticipating his very death

George McGovern was considered to be a decent man. I did not know him and cannot confirm this observation from my personal experience. But, if McGovern had been a decent man during his long life, we who remain alive might appreciate the fact that his name will always remain associated with the effort to turn the country away from its self-selected destruction. This will be his posterity.

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Richard Trumka, leader of that political black hole the AFL-CIO, had this to say about Scott Walker’s decisive victory in the recent Wisconsin recall election:

We wanted a different outcome, but Wisconsin forced the governor to answer for his efforts to divide the state and punish hard-working people.

Their resolve has inspired a nation to follow their lead and stand up for the values of hard work, unity, and decency that we believe in. We hope Scott Walker heard Wisconsin: Nobody wants divisive policies.

Yes, Trumka wanted to elect the Democrat in this election. We know this because the AFL-CIO always wants to elect Democrats. The Democratic Party and ‘big labor’ have a special relationship. Trumka wanted ‘big labor’ to have a seat at the table. After all, AFL-CIO unions would need to be at the table in order to ‘negotiate’ the concessions the political and economic elite want unions to make. What Trumka did not want was the elimination of that furniture which never includes the majority of Americans. He thus wanted ‘big labor’ to have more political power than it now has, but not so much political power that that power would threaten to eliminate its seat at the table.

Actually, the election and the campaign beforehand hardly made Walker answer for his class politics. In fact, the outcome legitimized Walker’s class politics. Wisconsin voters affirmed a victory by the political reactionaries in America’s class war. Moreover, Walker’s easy victory made it clear to anyone with eyes that the left cannot challenge the party duopoly that governs America. The labor movement in America lost this election. Left populists lost this election. The system ‘worked.’

Finally, despite Trumka’s claim to the contrary, many Americans want divisive politics. The left especially wants divisive politics. The left wants to improve the lot of the poor, the working and middle classes; it wants to increase political accountability and democratic participation. These goals are inevitably divisive in the United States today. The Trumkas of the world do not want a divisive politics. They are, in a word, complacent. Gomperism lives. Complacency, unfortunately, produces system affirmative outcomes such as we have recently seen in Wisconsin and saw in 2008.

All for the love of liberty

Pam and Russ Martens have made exposing the dubious methods of the Koch brothers and libertarian icon Ayn Rand their personal project (see this and this). During one of their reports, which detailed the dispute between the Kochs and the other owners (!) of the non-profit Cato Institute, they made the following observation:

The original Cato Five, who signed a “Shareholders Agreement” on January 26, 1977 were: Charles Koch, George Pearson, Roger MacBride, Murray Rothbard, and Edward Crane.

Pearson became an employee of Koch Industries; MacBride was the Presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party in 1976; Rothbard became a libertarian icon. A 1981 issue of The Libertarian Forum, a newsletter  edited by Rothbard, charged Crane and Charles Koch with illegally grabbing his shares of Cato and barring him from attending future Board meetings in order to consolidate their control. The details of Cato having owners and the extent of their control over the nonprofit has not found its way into mainstream media until now.

Rothbard, who died in 1995, summed up the episode as follows: “Let each and every one of you, dear readers, consider this crucial question: How many fellow libertarians would you trust to guard your back in an ambush?… As a friend and long-time libertarian observed in reply: ‘Ambush, hell. How many libertarians would you allow in the same room with you and trust not to poison your food?’”

Humpty Dumpty/wikimedia

In a speech he recently made to the Ohio Christian Alliance, Rick Santorum, a former Senator from Pennsylvania and a Republican candidate for President, recently accused President Obama of having a “phony theology,” one that does not derive from The Bible and which the President has imposed on the citizens of the United States.

Although Santorum later admitted that Obama is a Christian — Santorum: “I wasn’t suggesting the president was not a Christian. I accept the fact that the president’s a Christian….” — it remains the case that the President’s theology is a secular belief system.

Speaking for myself, I find it difficult to glean the mediating concepts Santorum needs to use in order to logically reconcile his claim that Obama is a Christian (as is Santorum and the citizens to which he directs his propaganda) and the claim that Obama believes and wishes to impose a phony theology on America? Amazingly enough, claims of this sort are shaky ground for a Catholic politician in the United States, the Catholic’s Church being the Whore of Babylon and the Pope the Antichrist for some of protestant America. One might wonder why Santorum makes these claims given the history of anti-Catholicism in the United States.

Be that as it may, Santorum did eventually clarify his position on Obama’s theology. Santorum believes Obama is an environmentalist. That is Obama’s theology! Moreover, environmentalism is not only a theology, it is a belief system based on the misuse of scientific evidence. The abuse: Claims which assert the existence of anthropocentric global warming are a “hoax,” according to Santorum. The evidence does not support the anthropocentric global warming position. (The anthropocentric global warming thesis is the consensus opinion among the experts.) And Obama, for his part, has been an industry-friendly advocate of green energy proposals. Because he is such, Obama wants to impose his “phony theology,” environmentalism, on the United States.

The crux of the matter: Are climate science, ecology and biology theological belief systems? Is environmentalism, the practical use of these sciences, a theology? Not at all if by theology one means a discourse (logos) about the nature of the divine (theos being the Greek word for God). One can be an atheist, a practicing scientist and an environmentalist without contradiction. These are not mutually exclusive terms. Nor does scientific practice entail the enchantment of nature. A scientist can practice her craft believing the universe to be nothing more than a consciousless, intentionless, aimless set of mechanisms. But historical semantics does not concern an obscurantist thinker like Santorum. He only needs to label environmentalism a theology because it is a belief system, and it, like every belief system, allegedly has a theological core and even a theodicy. Read the rest of this entry →

Last year I compiled an incomplete but long bibliography of the internet-available sources that discussed and reported on the reactionary union-busting project which first appeared in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. The lastly updated version was 27 pages long (.pdf). Yet I stopped adding new entries in March, 2011 doing so even though the conflict remained active. The reason: Few accessed the document and it took much of my time to find and read each of the documents included in the bibliography. It seemed then that I was wasting my time.

Alas, I noticed that the bibliography has drawn new, albeit modest, interest from the public — that is, page hits are modestly higher than normal. I now wish I had continued with the work I abandoned last March….

For those interested in the early phase of the battle for Wisconsin and the post-election offensive of the GOP right, my webpage with the bibliography can be found here.

Writing for Der Spiegel, Jakob Augstein paints a dismal but accurate picture of the United States today:

The word “West” used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word — along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence — should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

How so?

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically — in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

America’s national disintegration sits aside the disintegration of the west.

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest 1 percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total wealth, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

Economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, has written that America’s path is leading it down the road to “banana-republic status.” The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark. This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good. When a company like Apple, which with €76 billion in the bank has greater reserves at its disposal than the government in Washington, a European can only shake his head over the Republican resistance to tax increases. We see it as self-destructive.

Political disintegration sits aside social disintegration.

The same applies to America’s broken political culture. The name “United States” seems increasingly less appropriate. Something has become routine in American political culture that has been absent in Germany since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policies of rapprochement with East Germany and the Soviet Bloc (in the 1960s and ‘70s): hate. At the same time, reason has been replaced by delusion. The notion of tax cuts has taken on a cult-like status, and the limited role of the state a leading ideology. In this new American civil war, respect for the country’s highest office was sacrificed long ago. The fexact that Barack Obama is the country’s first African-American president may have played a role there, too.

Augstein concludes his article with a call for Germans and Europeans to avoid America’s fate, a sentiment that would shock many Americans were they to know of it but which is all too appropriate given the circumstances of the day. America, we need to remind ourselves, is now a low-growth, high-unemployment economy. Its economic and political elite prey on the “lesser people,” and the lessers have nary a jot of political clout within America’s rigid and unresponsive polity. This powerlessness exist by design. Indeed, the Constitution was written to secure this outcome. Moreover, every level of government in the United States today is committed to participating in a security-surveillance system that is utterly lacking in external and internal military threats. This system exists as a tool to be used by the government for political and social control. Because of these facts, that is, because of America’s elitism, militarism, economic decline, etc., one may rightly fear the direction in which the United States now travels. I would not find it surprising if the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” were to end with the creation of a novel form of authoritarian government. I believe this kind of government is the telos present within current political and economic trends. The many will be economically, socially and politically disenfranchised.

It is ironic that the “greater people” in the United States may have learned one lesson from the support they long gave to dictators like the Samozas, Pinochet and Shah, namely, they learned that they do not need the support of their subjects. The irony, I believe, issues from the fact that so many of these dictators were ruined by their unruly subjects. They just would not tolerate tyranny forever.

After Barack Obama’s meeting today with Republican leaders — during which they discussed the pain they would spread around the country and when they also agreed that they could live with the pain they will cause if they go through with their plans — it was left to Treasury Secretary Geithner to whip up Congressional support for the latest austerity budget. In this matter, the New York Times reports:

Mr. Geithner appeared to be playing a role not unlike that of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who warned lawmakers in the fall of 2008 that unless Congress voted to bail out the banking system, the credit crisis threatened to plunge the United States into a depression. Stunned by Mr. Bernanke’s dire depiction, the lawmakers undertook measures that were until then unthinkable.

Lest his warnings go unheeded,

…Mr. Geithner told the lawmakers the White House did not believe it had the authority, under the Constitution, to continue issuing debt if it reached the debt ceiling. Nobody in the room disputed Mr. Geithner’s bleak assessment, the officials said.

Naturally, this President, a man of principle and a Constitutional scholar, would not want to exceed the authority given to his office by the Constitution. Never would he choose a path marked by political excess and legal impropriety. He would not act unconstitutionally even though his acting thusly would spare so many Americans the pain the emerging austerity budget will inflict upon them. It is just not in his nature. He will not flinch when forced by circumstances to look deeply into the abyss; nor would he refuse to throw the “lesser people” into this nothingness when Constitutional duty demands that he do so. He, like President Kennedy, would ask the “lesser people” what they can do for their country. The Constitution, as we have been told, is sacred and enduring, the Demos, on the other hand, is profane and transient.

Way too much is just enough for them

While doing so he criticized his usual targets, which he grouped under the name he recently gave them, the Liberal Class. When developing his criticism with respect to the events in Wisconsin, Hedges makes what amounts to an implicit call for an American liberation theology.

The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society — look at the new Newt Gingrich — always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for?

Atheists like me sometimes forget that the teachings Jesus left to posterity are vastly superior to the teachings of the religious institutions which loudly carry his flag. We forget that Jesus would make his way to the side of Wisconsin’s public employees, to the homes of the illegal immigrants in America, to the poor loafing about in America’s cities, and so on. And he surely would find his way to these people just as he had during his lifetime. Why, therefore, have America’s religious leaders remained silent about the battle for Wisconsin (and much else besides)? Why do they emulate the Pharisees of Jesus’ time? I ask because I know that their silence is a fact that is as rare as it would be welcomed in so many other cases.

As for me, I will not waste my time waiting for the Christian right to stand with the poor, weak and threatened. The institutional churches, well….

Update

Peter Laarman addressed the issue raised by Chris Hedges in his essay “Will the Religious Side with Workers?,” which recently appeared in Religion Dispatches. Here are a few passages from his essay:

At this moment, when the embattled US labor movement urgently needs strong community-based allies and much greater moral legitimation, there ought to be no better place to find both than among the faithful. Yet broad-based strategic and moral support from the religious side has been slow to materialize.

In saying this, I do not disparage or minimize the importance of the religious support that public sector workers, in my home state of Wisconsin in particular, have been able to marshal.

However:

I want to ask why many more of the faithful never took sides during the long war against unions and union workers that’s been raging since the mid-1970s — even prior to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 firing of the Air Traffic Controllers.

And:

Where were the vast majority of American religious leaders during these decades of attacks on workers and their organizations? It’s not that labor’s gospel of gaining a fair share of the economic productivity that workers help create is so very different from religion’s stated interest in shared prosperity. And it’s not that no religious figures ever took the side of unions in earlier U.S. history.

Cross-posted to All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

According to E.J. Dionne, the House Republicans are now seeking to reprise and play two past Republican strategies. On the one hand, Dionne assumes they want to blackmail a Democratic President by threatening to shut-down the Federal government. It is, of course, obvious the House Republicans adopted this tactic. Their choice might seem surprising to observers today since the use of it did not favor the Republican Party the last time a reactionary upsurge helped the Republican Party to gain control of the House. As we know, President Clinton soundly defeated Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans he led in a political battle over the budget, a conflict which ultimately destroyed Gingrich’s House career.

But choose it they did.

On the other hand, Dionne asserts the House Republicans are also drawing upon a tactic used by another disgraced Republican — Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in Friday’s Wall Street Journal by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.

Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.

This is the perverse genius of what the House Republicans are up to: Nobody really thinks that anything like their $57 billion in remaining proposed budget cuts can pass. It’s unlikely that all of their own members are confident about all of the cuts they have voted for. But by taking such a large collection of programs hostage, the GOP can be quite certain to win many more fights than it would if each reduction were considered separately.

Does Dionne’s madman claim make sense in this case? Yes, I believe it does, for we may safely assume members of the recent Freshman Republican class do need a leash, newspaper on the floor when their master is otherwise occupied and rabies shots. The Tea Party Freshman class is, when evaluated with less facetious terms, composed of true believers of the reactionary line. It is unsurprising, then, that they largely ran on an anti-Obama platform while also challenging the Republican Party establishment, which they believed to be inauthentic in a decisive way.

That said, House Speaker Boehner, a co-author of the Contract with America, hardly provides a politically healthy alternative to the reactionaries. Dionne suggests as much when he states that “Boehner can just sit back and smile benignly as Democrats battle over which concessions they should give him.” Boehner can smile because he only wants to use the intransigence of reactionary freshman to blackmail President Obama just as Gingrich tried to blackmail Clinton years ago.

Why, we might now ask, would Boehner and the ‘sensible’ and ‘moderate’ House Republicans take the risk by using this dangerous tactic in 2011 given the known outcome it produced in 1995-1996? Why would Boehner wish to court Gingrich’s fate? The answer, I believe, can be gleaned in the fact that Obama is hardly a friend of Federal budget deficits, that he is committed to political compromise with the rightwing and that he has already gone on record as supporting austere budget goals. Consequently, Boehner and his followers can depend on Obama and the Congressional Democrats to reach a favorable agreement with them. They have bent to the will of the Republican Party before and can be expected to do so again.

And it is because Obama is a neoliberal opportunist that the reactionaries and their leaders in Washington can and will perform once more a chore for which they are well-suited, namely, serving as an origin of a political gravity that pulls the Federal Government and the national public political discourse to the right. America’s reactionaries — the black hole in American politics, an oblivion into which everything plunges.

The workings of this mechanism are well-known. It was, of course, working quite effectively during the Health Care Debate, and served, as we know, to pull Washington away from policy choices favored by the majority of the country while simultaneously pushing Washington towards those policies favored by the Health Care Industry.

In sum, then, the Federal budget battle and a possible government shut-down provide little more than evidence showing that the duopoly party system is functioning normally. By working normally I mean to say that the reactionaries will merely provide coverage for Washington’s ‘sensible’ politicians while they rid the country of the remnants of the New Deal.

Fortunately, common Americans — the “lesser people” — now have a political alternative to complying with the machinations of the duopoly parties. This alternative emerged in Madison, Wisconsin. It began when the “lesser people” refused the fate Scott Walker wished to give to them. It then proceeded to motivate the soft-liners in the Democratic Party to risk their careers by supporting a non-partisan social movement. While the Battle for Wisconsin has not been won, Americans can use these events to relearn what it means to be a citizen.

Cross-posted at All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go

Writing for the Nation, Ilyse Hogue succinctly makes a point that, to my mind, cannot be repeated or reemphasized often enough:

For the past two weeks, all eyes have been glued to Madison, Wisconsin. The collective and joyful resistance to Governor Scott Walker’s power-grabbing budget bill has inspired the demoralized progressive base and put the corporate-backed assault on working people front and center in the national conversation.

But while it’s obvious that the right wing is out to break the back of the progressive movement, it’s easy to miss the strategy that guides their selection of specific targets. Their attacks are all carefully aimed at the same critical juncture: institutions that work for people in their daily lives and in the political arena, those that connect people’s personal struggles across the country to the political struggle in Washington. Once we recognize the critical role these progressive service organizations play in building progressive politics, the right’s broader strategy in Wisconsin and elsewhere becomes clear. Scott Walker is a soldier in the same army as James O’ Keefe and Lila Rose, the right-wing video pranksters who tried to smear ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

The rightwing in America, Ms. Hogue suggests, does not merely want to defeat the progressives, to win this or that battle or destroy just one or two organizations. Rather, the goal pursued by the reactionary right in the United States targets those social institutions which produce social goods and a popular politics meant to serve the interests specific to every America citizen. This is the gist of Ms. Hogue’s article. She expresses it by identifying the rightwing attack on two forms of solidarity: Social solidarity and political solidarity.

1.      Social solidarity refers to the provisions of those services and goods individuals need because America’s system of markets has failed to provide for those needs.

2.      Political solidarity refers to those institutions meant to represent the interests of the individuals whom are unable to pursue and defend effectively their interests whether as individuals or as members of a group.

The right, then, wants to reduce its opponents to a needy, voiceless and powerless mass. And it is the nature of this very project that reveals the radical and reactionary character of the right in the United States today. Sadly, the evils of totalitarianism can be found in this reactionary project, a project which begins with the dehumanization of the ‘other’ and ends with….

As Kevin Zeese put the matter moments ago: “Wisconsin is ground zero for the race to the bottom.” At this time, contesting the rightwing project begins there. But the Wisconsin conflict will not be the only skirmish in this struggle.

Cross-posted at All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go