The intersection of faith and politics

Religion and Politics seem to be about where all my interests overlap. I've more experience in church governance than anything else outside of school. At school, I'm most fascinated studying Turkey and Iran, which are both outliers for the role of religion within their government. My advisor has made his work studying Western Europe, and the consensus state that failed tom emerge in 1918 but came about after 1945; a consensus marked clearly by the inclusion of religious parties in many mixed-confessional nations. The role of confessional political parties in post-war Europe is significant enough that a case has been made attributing the rise of fascism to a lack of meaningful participation in politics by the deeply religious. It is an intersection so rich that I go from idle musing to wonkish details in seconds.

In academia, this works out well: comparing the struggles that led Europe to its mostly secular public sphere coexisting with the occasional state-sponsored church is a valuable reference point for understanding similar the church and state relations happening elsewhere in the world today. Very good, but very niche.

The more immediate intersection of religion and politics, and the impetus behind this post, was their role in the politics of the US today. On twitter, many friends of mine, whose opinions I value, argued that if churches take political stances, they should lose their non-profit status. I mentioned that churches can lose tax-exemption for endorsing candidates, but this only slightly dodged the issue. What matters is not so much that a tax-exempt organization doesn't support specific people - it matters that they both get to be tax-exempt and engage so actively in the public sphere.

At the core of my friends' distaste for politically-vocal religion are images like this one:


From Overcompensating: "Here is a picture of a group of Americans who just found out they have successfully denied equal rights to another group of Americans." That is, to put it lightly, disgusting. The categorical denial of rights to a group of people is something abhorrent to the ideals of most Americans'.

It's deplorable activity, for which the correct response is disgust, distaste, and shaming. But these people should never be forcibly excluded from politics. If we exclude them, we exclude the very idea the morality can be based on religious experiences/teachings, and we are left with secularism alone to inform our collective values. There's an argument to be made for that - secularism is the shared values of everyone sans religion, and in a world where multiple religious interpretations exist, removing religion altogether has a lot to say for it. Another large part of the European consensus involves having a forcibly secular public sphere.

But there are problems with that. In France, the secular public sphere has invaded the realm of personal choice and religious practice, where most notably muslim women are forbidden from wearing veils in public. Rather than allowing for a shared society of shared values, that's oppressive. And in England, there has been controversy over the relation between the country's historic legal system and the values of some of its residents. This lead the Archbishop of Canterbury to claim that Shari'a law in the UK will be inevitable, and led a Tory shadow minister to say in response:

"We must ensure people of all backgrounds and religions are treated equally before the law. Freedom under the law allows respect for some religious practices. But let's be clear: all British citizens must be subject to British laws developed through parliament and the courts."

While the debate is framed as between religious law and secular law, the religious context and values that formed and informed british law go unmentioned. What is ostensibly secular law tends to reflect the values of protestants fairly closely. In this case, trying to keep the religious out in the name of secularism is similar to the nativists of the 1890s-1920s trying to keep southern Europeans out of the USA in the name of "Nativism". It can be done, sure, but it's hypocritical, and it assumes as normal a state that was itself the result of centuries of change.

But even more important than the implicit religious values that informed secularism to the inclusion and protection of religious institutions as tax exempt is the role of religious activism. The easy example here is the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and it's one of the most meaningful as well. Nationwide religious associations motivated and coordinated activists on an issue that was as explicitly political as it was anything else. Religious groups also protested and argued against civil right in the South, too; even my Unitarian church suffered a split thanks to disagreement over the civil rights movement. But the civil rights movement could not have acted as it did, and had the success it did, if it did so without the religious values that enabled it to both challenge the status quo and to call upon the US to live up to its own ideals.

And then there is today, where the appearance of religious activism is of one march to quash rights after another. Certainly, that religious activism is happening, but it is happening because conservative religion is generally about quashing rights anyway, and while I can accept individuals voluntarily taking on religious restrictions on behavior, it will always be hard for me to accept forcing such restrictions on others in the name of religion. But today's religious activism is not exclusively activism on behalf of the right.

Today, at All Souls Church in DC, Mayor Fenty signed into law a bill granting marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples. This is the second-to-last step (a confirmation by the national legislature is next) of a long campaign, spearheaded by the religious community of DC and helped by the Unitarian Universalist Association's Standing on the Side of Love campaign. Here was religion acting inconcert with secular society to better secure the rights of all citizens, and this was the result of seeing marriage equality as not just a secular concern, but as one with a religious mandate behind it. This activism in specific is crucial to the purpose of our nation, and having religious activism as a valid means of expression, as a protected means of expression, is vital the vibrancy of our democracy. And crucial to all of this: we must let religious organizations be invested in this world. If we take that away, if we make it hard for religious groups to engage with the nation in which they exist, we lose the participation of part of the population (itself a problem in democracy), and we lose the ability for religion to remind us of our higher values and nobler virtues.

The problem has nothing to do with the religious being active in politics. The problem has everything to do with *which* religious are active in politics, and I for one prefer the participation of all to the exclusion of any.

Why UUs Are Political at Church

Editor's Note: This piece is a rough draft or part of the rough draft of a sermon, intended to be given at either First Unitarian Universalist in New Orleans or First Unitarian in Albuquerque. It is written with that kind of audience in mind, and is also in part a response to Rev. Davidson Loehr's piece on "Why Unitarian Universalism is Dying"

We are a people always on the verge. For many years, it was at the forefront of religious liberalism, that jargon-filled term which we so often use to say we are theologically diverse, and are comfortable being theologically diverse. And for many years, we have prided ourselves on being at the front of many social movements on the political left. For many Unitarian Universalists, there is a tacit agreement that political liberality and religious liberality go hand in hand. After all, if everyone is free to have their innermost religious beliefs, why won't they think just like us?

It is an easy trap to fall into. There is an ever-present vocal minority in our congregations that reminds us of our hypocrisy, constantly chiding us for being overtly political, and being so consistently political one-sided. Remember, we set out to embrace a diversity of beliefs. Politics is filled with division. Why is it that, for so many of us, church has become the place where we are comfortable politically?

A good political scientist would tell you that the last 50 years, and especially the last 25, have seen a rise in the use of religious language in politics, and the explicit use of religious sentiment for political gain. I am not going to say that. Well, I'm not going to say that any more than I already have. We do not need such a cynical perspective for why religion has been involved in politics.

What I will say is this: people care about politics in a religious way. We say that we have faith in our candidates. When we vote, we say we vote our values, and religion does nothing if not help us reaffirm our values. And when our candidates' lose an election, we become apocalyptic. Politics can shape our external world in ways that often seems remote and all-powerful. And this effects us, as religious people.

When we see a piece of discriminatory legislation get passed, that hits us. We take it as a challenge to the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and that is as much a political position as it is a theological one. We feel for it religiously. Environmental legislation affects us because we care so deeply for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. And for many UUs, it is hard to see how military action can possible help us be part of a world community with peace and justice for all. These things are not just politically upsetting, they are spiritually disturbing. We are a political people precisely because we are a religious people.

We are not excused for being so one-sided politically. My vision of inherent worth and dignity may include universal healthcare, but another vision may just as easily see the first principle only meaning the equal right to choose to buy insurance. The principles leave a lot unsaid, and that is for the best. For me, and I suspect for at least a few of you, they form a core around which we have built our own beliefs, and while we may share the same core, we are not in any way obliged to share the same body.

That doesn't mean some political action won't shake us all to the core. And it doesn't mean we cannot share in our profound distress just because our bodies of belief are so different. What it means, for me at least, is that rather than replacing religion with politics, we are more honest than most in how closely the two are fused.

~

Coming in part II: Why our Universalist heritage in particular lends theological weight to a closer religious relationship to politics.

Bonus thought-provoking statement I wish I could write more about: How does the political/religious relationship in Black Liberation Theology serve as a counterpoint to the desire of many for UUism to be apolitical?

~

Edit # 2: There's been some discussion in the internets! Lots of back-and-forth here, and then some responses here and here.

Obama the Dictator? Part 3: Conclusions

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.


Obama is not fascist: a mere definitional examination of the term is enough to easily rule that out. Nor is he a dictator: he won in a popular election, as well as in the electoral college. Dictators rarely, if ever, come into power through fair or open elections. And his presidential power is not unique or unprecedented; we just had 8 years of expansion of executive power, so it should come as no surprise that the current president enjoys many of the powers awarded his predecessor. This is all unexpected.

The disappointment in the conclusion, then, is that many similar abuses remain. Some of the targets of these abuses have changed (or, more correctly, some of the perceived victims may have changed), but the power remains, and has not been dismantled. We have a president in the United States with serious power. No surprise there. That some of it is unconstitutional is a bit disappointing, and that's the fun part of being a citizen.

Caring about politics means perpetual stewardship.

Even with the president you wanted, just as much as with the president you didn't. As Americans, with our peculiar form of democracy, we have to constantly work to secure the rights we should already have, to secure the ones we are wrongfully denied, and to make sure that our government accurately reflects us as people. The only things outright damaging to this system are apathy (which allows others more invested to dictate all decisions), and powerlessness/rage (which themselves see the destruction of existing institutions as the only way to freedom). I don't feel that either of those are viable, but they both offer the easy moral shortcut of wiping one's hands clean of this nation. To care, to be invested in this nation, one has to accept the existence some terrible things while one works to make them right. I'm a bit of a statist, so my default position is always that change can come gradually, and can come from within. And partisan though I am, this is true across administrations. Very little will change that, while very little will convince the apathetic/powerless/angry that this is possible.

Obama the Dictator? Part 2: Supporting Arguments Examined, Debunked

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.

Specific Claim:

1. A controlled media, for example the fact that the press corps is rigged (just one example)

Counter:

1. The press is rigged? The press always shows a bias a) to those in power, and b) to folk that get them good ratings. Bush was an exceedingly popular president in his first term, and I was kind of appalled by how networks could be fawning over him. I'm still appalled by Fox news, but that's because my bias is elsewhere. I don't like MSNBC for it's blatant pandering either, really. And CNN is gimmicky bullshit. I get my news from sources that aren't television. Television is awful. But that fact that it is ratings-minded and lowest-common-denominator doesn't mean that it's rigged. It means that it is flawed.
ALSO - oftentimes, the media is dependent on the White House for the release of important information. In the case of the Iraq War, the Bush administration was free to control most of the flow of information to the media. So it's not good, but it is hardly a unique crime.

Specific Claim

2. The fact that the government is putting in legislation pushed by close friends of the President which will severely limit the civil liberties of some groups (ie Christians, Veterans, and others that have been labeled more dangerous than the Islamic Jihad by Homeland security)

Counter

2. Inside the US, as inside any nation, the biggest threat to domestic stability comes from the armed, unemployed, and disenfranchised. In the US, the relatively small Muslim community is one that largely came here by choice, came with means, and on average is living the American Dream quite well, having a higher income on average than other demographics. Inside the US, Muslims have no reason to be labeled a threat.
However, the last great act of terrorism perpetrated against the US before 9/11, and the largest act of US domestic terrorism, came from a christian and a veteran. It's a damn ugly fact, but the militia movement that arose in the 90s was made because it was a democrat in office, someone to the left of what they wanted. Had this protest been purely ideological, the militia would have been active for the past 8 years resisting Bush. They weren't. This is partisan.
Last summer, an out of work white man opened fire on Unitarians because liberals were ruining this country. Same with the young man who shot up Pittsburgh police. Same with the old Nazi who shot up the DC Holocaust museum. Same with the man who shot George Tiller. This is rightist violence, not anti-authoritarian violence. The DHS didn't label those groups threats because they are political opposition. They labeled them threats because they have, over the past 20 years, consistently proven themselves to be threats when Democrats are in power.
Internationally, Muslim extremists are more of a threat. Domestically, not so much.

Specific Claim

3. His Chicago style elimination of people he sees as a threat ie: Sarah Palin

Counter

3. Palin's role on the national stage as much as anything led to her resignation. That Obama benefits from it is clear. But that he caused it? That's a claim with little supporting evidence beyond her own personal sentiments

Specific Claim

4. His installation of Czars which have no accountability to either the people or the legislature.

Counter

4. We've had Czar's in office since the 1970s (conspiracy theorists note the prominence of Biden's name in this article.) ALL MODERN PRESIDENTS DO THIS. To make an exception for Obama is really to dislike him for other means, and be frustrated that he's making the decisions. If you're upset about the power itself existing, then protest it in every administration since Nixon. Don't single out one guy.

Specific Claim

5. He socialized corporations AND banks

Counter

5. This isn't socializing the banks or any other corporation. That would mean the federal government would assume permanent ownership, or that the public would assume permanent ownership through the government. That isn't happening. The US populace hates it when the government owns anything, and government here isn't set up to run these institutions. The strict capitalist thing to do would be to let them all fail, but that didn't work in the depression, and I'd rather go through temporary stewardship than risk global economic collapse.

Specific Claim

6. He practices misinformation, and has supported hate mongering legislation in congress. Also, he's criminalized Christianity

Counter

6. All governments practice media manipulation. It's the role of the citizenry to hold the media accountable for honesty. There's been no hate mongering legislation, unless you count the president's support of DOMA. Homeland security is an executive branch body, and so doesn't legislate to get its will done. I don't actually know what bills you're referring to, so I can't counter with specifics. Being involved in the economy is what government does, ever since the 1930s, and even before, really. I wouldn't call any of this fascist. I'd call it government.
6b. The groups criminalized are those that urge murder, like the Army of God abortion clinic bombers. That's not a religious group, in the way that al-Qaeda isn't a religious group. Religion is a shared identity, but the purpose is different. That's not criminalizing religion; that's criminalizing terrorism.

Specific Claim

7. I'm sick of "Well we inherited this mess": put on your big boy pants and quit lying to people; or "why are you still blaming the past - if you're in power, can't you fix it?"

Counter

7. And you're right, it's been almost 6 months with Obama in the Whitehouse. He should have done a lot more to dismantle the police state he inherited. But to say that you can fix every thing that went wrong over the past 8 years in 6 months is really just to ask the president to fail. That's unrealistic, and it's absurd.
New Orleans still has fields where in August 2005 it had neighborhoods. It's been almost 4 years, in the richest nation on earth. You'd think we'd have this done by now, but we haven't. Why? Remaking is incredibly hard work. It takes time and sustained effort.
I'm not asking you to pass the buck back to the Bush Administration. I'm just asking you to acknowledge the role they had in making possible this present government you so despise. Obama did not spring into office fully formed from the mind of Keynes. The past *matters*.

Specific Claim

8. Fascists always come in under a different name and there are different types, George Bush was a militarist, Obama's more of a Machiavelli type
8a. Czars are creepy-powerful; I am upset about the Czars, i understand that they've existed but it makes me nervous to watch people being put in charge of huge areas of our day to day life as a nation and being answerable to one person and one person only.

Counter

8. Fascists come in explicitly under the fascist name. Franco was explicit, Hitler was explicit, Mussolini coined the word to describe his party.

8a.And yeah, I don't like it too, but that's a different issue. That's not about the person of Obama; that's about the nature of US government. The difference is important.

Specific Claim

9. I just don't understand how more government is the answer to big government that was promised on the campaign, or how spending more money will get us out of debt.

Counter

9. The reason that we are currently spending more money is because depressions are caused by an absolute lack of spending. The brilliance of Keynesian economics is that the great depression was a perfectly functioning laissez faire state: all savings were invested as capital. The problem is that it was a balance of zero - no savings mean no investment. The way out of the depression, the spending in times of scarcity, is to get money circulating. Ideally, leaving a depression money flows fast enough so that tax revenue on the recovery compensates for spending at the lowest point. Governments are weird, and one of the few institutions that can spend money on the promise that they'll exist to repay it. It's weird, certainly, but it is doable by nations in a way that it isn't by personal finance.

9a. Big government is always a tricky proposition. I certainly enjoy roads, schools, and the presence of law enforcement. I also like that my home is protected militarily. Those are more or less given baselines, rights made possible by government. I would really like the certainty of lifelong healthcare not tied to my employer - that'd be a right and a freedom I could enjoy if we had a public healthcare option or a universal healthcare system. Government would make the possible, and can do it in a much better way than our system currently unfolds. At present, as soon as I graduate college and am off my parent's plan, I have no guarantee of health, and won't until I find stable, salaried employment. If I freelance, my costs for healthcare go way up. If I work part time or in many hourly jobs, I wouldn't have an affordable option for healthcare. So that's a problem that big government can solve, by taking over with universal (unlikely) or introducing a public option. And then there is regulation. I'm pretty happy having not played with lead toys as a kid. I enjoy the safety provided by speed limits. I like that zoning prevents a factory being built next to my house. I'm in favor of requiring minimum standards for how companies treat their workers. And I like that companies have to pay attention to their ... environmental impact, because I enjoy a livable world. That's government that is kind of big, but provides a lot of immediate benefits.
Also, I like that we have a justice department and a state department, to conduct our internal and external affairs with professionalism. Those are large, executive branches that benefit this nation as a whole, but individually its much harder to see. Or the FDA, which though sometimes iffy at least means there is a place that can prevent poison being sold as medicine. Or FEMA, so that when shit hits the fan we have someone to respond or a place for blame. That's all big - we're a nation of 300 million. The only big government I outright have a problem with are things like the department of homeland security, which is a scary police-state apparatus thing. It shouldn't exist, and their are serious problems with the current forms of the CIA and FBI. And, oddly enough, the FCC which let telecommunications companies doing spying work on ordinary ... citizens without warrants. That scares me, because it is big and ignores constitutional rights. That is what I hoped Obama would get rid of, and again, he's lagging on this.

Specific Claim

10. I cannot say with any fibre of my being that Barack Obama sits well with me. I believe our President is morally bankrupt and lacking in any real understand of what's going on.

Counter

10. I have seen nothing in Obama to suggest an immorality - though Chicago breeds fear he's Hawaiian by birth, and that's a very different sort of multicultural upbringing from every US president ever. But that's a different ethnic perspective and national context; that doesn't strike me as ... immoral. And yes, he's admitted this nation is flawed. We certainly are - our constitution declares certain people both less than human and property. That's a flaw, and while we've amended it away, the past does not die with legislation. Things are certainly better now than they ever have been, but that doesn't mean they are perfect or that their isn't work to be done. But again, that's a perspective. That isn't immorality.
As for lacking in real understanding, I was first drawn to Obama because he, of all things, understood the internet. That seemed to me to be relevant understanding, and was something Hillary lacked or didn't care to publicize. And I voted for Obama on the basis of Foreign Policy, because he saw a way for the US to function in the world that was ... still strong but did not require belligerence or demonization. He is willing to try diplomacy first, and I think that shows a profound understanding for the dignity of other nations and for the US's role on the international stage.
As for his economics, I think he gets it. You govern differently in a recession than in a boom time, and he's doing that. But look. I like Obama because his policies resonate well with me. There are many Americans that don't go online, or live in cities, or trust other nations, and to them he may look foolish. While he is many things, incompetent is not one of them.

Obama the Dictator? Part 1: the Claim itself

Note: this series of posts is distilled from a conversation I had online, in which my responses were so over-long and verbose that I realized they'd make better blog posts. Some slight changes have been made to style, but the content is the same.

Claim: Obama is fascist, or close to it

Rebuttal:

1. Crying "Fascism" is a lazy talking point made by whoever is out of power in US politics.

2. Distinguishing between Obama and Fascists:

2a. Popularity: Obama is charismatic; so were fascists, but the similarities more or less stop there.

2b. Civil Rights violations: I'm a bit disappointed that he hasn't done more immediately for civil rights, but he wasn't in office when Bush and the legislature passed the Patriot Act, from which most rights violations stem. And it was the Bush justice department that allowed for the label of "enemy combatant" to be a loophole out of the law. I believe that current policy is under review, but at any rate it didn't start with Obama (counterpoint: continuing a flawed policy is jsut as bad as creating it)

2c. Involvement in the National Economy is a Fascist Characteristic: Involvement in the national economy, it is no different than that of many, long-standing democratic governments. England, for example, went further and nationalized *as a democracy*. France for decades supported "national champions" on subsidies. But neither of those were fascist moves, in the same way that injecting money into the banks or assuming control of GM isn't fascist. It's statist, but that is the nature of government

3. Defining Fascism
Fascism has a huge component of nationalism and militarism, historically coming from an alliance of the unemployed, veterans, and conservative politically/religiously, and historically all against communist or leftist governments. Obama has no new militarism; he made his name by being anti-war. And while he is certainly on the left, totalitarianism on the left is not fascism; it's communist, it's socialist, or it's totalitarian, but it is decidedly not *fascist*. And most totalitarian features of leftist government are missing here - there have been no nationalizations, and the government is only holding companies temporarily until it can inject taxpayer dollars into stable private institutions. Bush did the same in October, and it's a fundamentally capitalist/centrist move.

4. Being angry about the President when your party is out of power You can disagree with the president. Lord knows every American does it at least half the time. But being charismatic != being fascist, and being the executive does != being a dictator.

Why I'm still for Team Obama

As someone who plays with nuance all the time, the actual effect of rhetoric on politics means a lot to me. Specifically, though, it isn't just the content of a speech but the tone that is important; very rarely in US politics will I support a statement that draws its inspiration from anger or an US vs. Them mentality. That was awful during the Bush years and the Clinton years, and does not seem terribly worthwhile now.

Of course, I'm still playing for a team here. Broadly, it's the left, and more specifically it is the policy of a sane left. Not a compromising, mid-90s centrist left, but a left that is both self-assured in the correctness of its view while not being overbearing about it. It is nice to see these sentiments echoed in an analysis of Obama:

Democratic partisans think the enemy is vicious and must be met with uncompromising force. That's exactly how conservative foreign policy hawks feel about the world. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing foreign policy critique of Obama today sounds eerily like the partisan Democratic critique of Obama during the primary...

This is a perfect summation of Obama's strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries' constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.

The full article is here, and is about 10 paragraphs. Well worth reading, and a welcome break from the angry echo chamber that is most politics on the internet.

How to Dissassemble an Obamic Bomb

I've mentioned several times on this blog that I think Ron Paul is the new face of the Republican party, and I've also said that I favor a libertarian-minded opposition. I think that an emphasis on checking power and maintaining civil liberties is vital in this nation; it's why I prefer libertarian opposition to, say, religious right opposition. That doesn't mean I actually want libertarian rule; it is my intended least-bad alternative.

I think the libertarians will be competitive in the Mountain West. Former New Mexico Gary Johnson has considered a 2012 presidential run, as a "antiwar, anti-Fed, pro-personal liberties, slash-government-spending candidate"; this is a far cry from the big-government, freedom-restrictionist era of Bush, and it will still satisfy fiscal conservatives the nation over. The challenge for candidates like this nationally is incorporating the religious right/social conservatives, and the general category of security conservatives. Nationally, it may not work in 2012.

The Mountain West plays differently, and New Mexico piles on peculiarities. With it's large catholic and Hispanic voting blocks, NM democrats skew statist center-left. Progressive economically much more so than socially. And the right in New Mexico, while having the standard components of the religious right, economic conservatives, and the very security-minded, has a very, very, very strong libertarian component. (Or at least it can - Jim Scarantino played the paranoid libertarian to Bush, but now plays the generic Rightist to Obama).

It is this climate that produced Gary Johnson. And it is this climate that may allow a bit of national spotlight for Adam Kokesh. Running in NM's 1st congressional (bluest of the blue) districts, Kokesh is anti-statist in the most profound way. He cites the founders, the Bill of Rights, and moral obligations in his call against the current "march towards fascism". His goal is an end to both American imperialism and the police state; 12 months ago, on this alone, he'd be casually grouped with the Democratic left. But now, parties in power have changed, and his tune is consistent.

Much will be made of him in the local media soon. My collegue FBIHOP is already casually dismissing him. I'm hesitant to be so straightforward with that dimissal - support from Ron Paul and viable anti-war cred makes him, this far from the actual campaign, seem competitive. He could well be the local face of the new Libertarian right that I'm anticipating. That's less important than the lesson his very existence has for the Democratic Party:

If the Democrats become the police state party, we have lost the coalition that swept Obama into power. And we've probably lost the Mountain West

Violence is Silence

“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though, despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any US soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice." -- David Faherty

There are few things to me more disturbing then that above sentence. It's a sentiment wholly alien to my being. I like social order. Alienated though my views can be from the general electorate, I think that social order is at least a worthy aim, an understood and accepting thing. For all the fears people built around "Change", change is an incredibly modest, statist word. It isn't arguing for an overthrow. It isn't calling for a sweeping realignment of social organs. It isn't challenging the very notions of statehood. It is, really, a slight adjusting of the rudder. It's not transforming the boat into a helicopter. "Change" likes the general contours f the system, and just hates a lot of the specifics. It's really surprising that people could must up such fervor for as modest a concept, and perhaps the fervor is what was reacted to. And hopefully, once the presidency is well under way, we'll see people calm down and accept it as the modest, statist thing it is.

And hopefully comments like this will stop happening. I mean, fine, private conversation, or choir-preachy websites. Free speech is well and good; I'm not opposed to that, and don't seek to stop it.

But what I would like to see wane, if not disappear, is this notion that the response to something moderately disagreeable is implied murder, or justified violent agrny outbursts. As harmless as that may be intended, it's terrifying. The implication - that members of the US armed forces are universally assumed to prefer the death of a domestic politician they dislike than the death of a man responsible for killing 3,000+ innocents boggles.

And I get that this is an attention-grabbing statement. And that, by acknowledging it, I'm only feeding the problem, giving the guy a larger audience for his soapbox. And this post is probably unnecessary - there will be better and more numerous deconstructions online, and in most media outlets. The statement deserves to be deconstructed, if there is any real sentiment behind it. Because that sentiment is profoundly opposed to social order, and seeks a world of platonic absolutes instead of this messy land of disagreement and compromise. It's the same motivation that fuels international jihadist violence - if the center is undesireable, the center is untenable. And if the center (broadly speaking, functioning democracy) is untenable (say, Pelosi dead), then extremists (the hypothetical US soldier, or bin Laden) get to just go at it, in a violent world of conflicting absolutes. And to get to that point you have to stifle dissent, alienate all those on your side who disagree. You have to not only call for the death of elected leaders, who are inherently moderate beings, having accepted the social order and the system in which they exist, but you have to make it impossible for such moderate leaders to speak against the excessed of their friends and allies. Once that happens, civilization becomes an angry little suicide pact.

The statement itself is only half the reason I'm upset. What bothers me more is that a friend of mine from college, a moderate Republican from Colorado, who was the most diehard supporter of McCain I've ever met, loves this quote. He gives reasons - the detachment of Pelosi's ideals from that of the rest of the US, say, but reasons don't matter. We can't, as a nation, have our ongoing experiment (one of a democracy that doesn't kill itself) if we think calling for the death of elected leaders we disagree with is acceptable. It just doesn't work that way.

There are few things, ever, that chip away at my faith in humanity. My friend's endorsement of this statement was one.

Ron Paul as Backdrop

My friend JR is a big fan of Ron Paul. I expressed my thoughts about Ron Paul once before on this blog, but JR convinced me to give him a look. So I read a speech by Representative Paul, given before the House on the 29th of November, 2001. Here's the link.

It'll take a while to read (an hour, for me). And parts of it ring of conspiracy. But keep reading, because this man is the hopeful godfather of the New Right in this country, and this is where he stands.

I disagree on many points; I don't think that 9/11 was an inside job. I don't think that the UN is an evil plot. I don't support militias. And I think his comments on FDR can go from careful and thoughtful to ideological cheap shots.

However.

He takes his fear of government power and turns it into one of the best defenses of civil liberties ever spoken. It's Brutus level patriotism, and that's partly the problem with it - it seems stuck in a past that cannot be returned to. Ignore that bit, though, because it's really based on restoring the constitution as intended. And a Right mobilized around keeping government in check (not destroying government, and not wishing it away into a taxless oblivion) is the best opposition party that can be hoped for in an "age of Obama". If we can make it to the next century with our civil liberties not only intact but expanded, we will have succeeded as a nation. It may only be possible with the freedom-concerned Right working alongside the freedom-loving left.

Gaza

Christine at iMinister has a much more thoughtful piece up about being a bystander to a conflict that goes against ones values. It's much more diplomatic than my post, and it avoids the word "annihilationist", so please read her post if you think that this one will be unsavory.

My thoughts on Gaza have been scattered in many places across the Internet this week. In an exercise of demonstrating exactly what twitter isn't for, a friend and I have had banter going back and forth all week in 140 character increments. Snappy, but not the space for thoughts to become thoughtful. It was an especially weird conversation because my friend was advocating on behalf of Israel, and I was advocating on behalf of Gazans. My role in that conversation was to distinguish the terrorists from the innocents, and his role was to find the innocents complicit. In the abstract, it was a fascinating thought experiment. In reality, it was among the most unpleasant experiences of political discourse I have engaged in. The stakes in conversation about this are high, and the ability of one to convince another of the rightness of their opinion is very low. Following my advice, I wouldn't have this conversation.

The problem with a conversation treated as a war is that it lingers. It's not a pleasant place to dwell, but like all optimistic Generals, it's easy to look at a fixed row of trenches, aim for a weak spot, and make a push to remove the stalemate. It doesn't work for two reasons. One: while it is incredibly hard for one side to 'win' a conversation like this, it is really easy for someone acting in opposition to restore it to stalemate status. Two: conversations aren't battles, discussion topics aren't wars, and while the metaphors are at times handy, treating this as a tooth-and-nail battle to fight isn't helping.

My discussion on twitter swung in interesting directions in the attempt to break through. My central conceit, which made discussion possible, was that while Israel was justified in the right of response. their response was both unjust and disproportionate. Disproportionate is an interesting word here. In a letter to the editor in Albuquerque's Weekly Alibi, political scientist Brandon Curtis argues that the term itself is meaningless and a cheap shot from people who don't understand the issue. I respectfully disagree, but I think it's easy to understand why the word seems inappropriate.

In October 2001, NATO went to war in Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack by a group that country hosted. In 2003, the American public (and, more importantly, it's elected officials) felt it was appropriate to overthrow and destroy the government of Iraq based on the possibility that it might be fostering future terrorists, or giving them weapons, or was itself a terrorististic state. Recent memory serves that no degree of force is too little to adequately protect a nation from terrorism. We forget, then, other responses. In October 2000, in response to the bombing of the USS Cole by terrorists, Clinton sent out legal experts to track down and arrest the specific culprits. In October* 1983, the US marine barracks (which also housed French troops) was bombed in Beirut. The response was a small punitive bombing of alleged terrorists by France, followed by a quiet retreat of US forces in February. And, as popularized in the film Munich, it is assumed that Israel responded to the kidnapping and murder of it's Olympic Athletes by hunting down people assumed to be connected.

All these responses, at the time, have been justified as proportionate. Since that list includes everything from abandonment to assassination, and from legal action to pre-emptive war, the field of declaring proportionality is wide open. So, while I think that Israel has a right to respond to attacks against its citizens, I don't think that the method of response (bombing, followed by a ground invasion) is proportionate. Israel is responding to terrorism by treating it as a war, and that greatly complicates the issue.

If this is a war, one has to assume that Hamas itself, as the government of Gaza, is marshaling the terrorists as a formal army. While I'm more toward ambivalent about Hamas belligerance in this conflict, I am inclined to suspect that they have little choice besides acting in control or being seen as even more powerless than they are. In conversation with my friend, I argued disproportionality because, while the terrorists targeted civilians, the correct response of a government is to target terrorists. Yes, this is holding Israel to a higher standard. They are a western democracy, and that means we are allowed to expect better of them. But suppose that Hamas itself is directing the attacks, is responsible for them, feels no qualms over the death of it's own citizens, and that they are fighting this war in the same way that European nations fought WWI. In that case, it makes more sense that Israel is responding with a war of annihilation - it's unjust as all hell, but at the very least it makes sense.

Because if Israel isn't fighting a war of annihilation against another nation that would do the same, they are certainly acting like it. In my conversation over twitter, I argued with the friend that the majority of Gazans are in fact innocents, and not complicit in the attacks. He responded by claiming that if they were not in complicit in the attacks, why weren't they doing anything to stop them. I think they don't have the resources necessary to stop the attacks, and I'm inclined to think that all the former Gazans with resources have left. People with means tend not to remain in ghettoized nations. Hamas, whether or not it actively encouraged the terrorists who started this conflict, has very little choice but to support them now. They are, after all, the ones with the weapons, and despite the relatively calm two-year ceasefire, Hamas is well aware that no Israeli operation in the area would be complete without an attempt to remove Hamas from power. Hamas has had to very quickly move itself into the role of fighting against Israel, because the only thing worse than a government that fails to prevent war is a government that fails to effectively fight it.

And this, here, is the tragedy. Before the conflict broke out, Hamas wanted a new ceasefire. Hamas is an organization whose main appeal is their unequivocal call for the eradication of Israel, and yet by advocating for a new ceasefire they had shown that they were willing to accept the two state solution, at least temporarily. Skeptics can throw this off as an attempt to keep things calm before the war itself broke out, but they are missing the potential inherent in that ceasefire. Hamas wanted, at least temporarily, a ceasefire. This is a militant party that came to power democratically, and whose future as a party of rule depends upon public opinion. Most war-mongering parties in history go to war as soon as they are elected, else the public change its mind and elect others. Hamas didn't want this, and I cannot fathom why the opportunity to forge a slightly less imperfect peace was not seized upon, especially if it is Israel's goal to prevent Palestinian terrorism, rather than to wipe Gaza out.

There are two broad categories of eliminating terrorism, and they are the same broad categories categories people use to deal with crime. One: kill/capture/disable all those who would commit terrorism. Two: make sure other options exist for people who would otherwise turn to terrorism. The first response is the one that militaries can do, to some extent. It was fortunate for the US in the early stages of its operations in Afghanistan that many al Qaeda fighters were willing to straightforwardly fight against the US - that makes the work much, much easier. In Iraq, of course, the terrorists didn't emerge until after the war, and being terrorists, they weren't interested in fighting set-piece battles. Instead, they formed militias (for defensive purposes) and acted anonymously amidst the population when attacking US troops. Iraq is large - with ~ 170,000 square miles and a population of 29 million, it is easy for people to hide and it is hard to kill them all. Gaza, on the other hand, is tiny - 139 square miles, and 1.5 million people in that little area. For a more relevant size comparison, the city of Albuquerque is 181 square miles, and about a third the population of Gaza. Gaza is a place where approach one, kill everyone who might be terrorists, could work.

To even have that on the table is ridiculous. And yet, Israel seeks punitive attacks with overwhelming force against terrorists operating within the area. Not that some attacks wouldn't work, and not that some retaliation doesn't make sense, but the scale and the manner of the tactics, if they aren't annihilationist, are beyond excessive, and if they are annihilationist, then they are patently immoral.

Option two for fighting terrorism is the one that I think has the most promise for Gaza, and had it been adopted as part of a renewed ceasefire, I think it would have eventually had the effect that Israel's attack aims to achieve. When Gazans (and Palestinians more generally) know that they are safe in Palestine, that their rights are respected, and that Israeli invasion is a distant (if not non-existent) possibility, they will be able to concentrate on issues other than injustices visited upon them by Israel.

But I don't think that's what the response to this attack will be, and the time for wishful thinking about ceasefires has passed and is not yet at hand again. Instead, I predict that the same will always happen in Gaza as has tended to happen - punitive strikes by Israel, followed by calm, followed by stagnation and oppression in Gaza, followed by terrorist attacks originating in Gaza, followed by punitive attacks on behalf of Israel, rinse, repeat.

There are two ways out of this mess, out of this most vicious and petty of cycles. The first, the annihilationist war, is patently immoral, and I don't imagine that Israel will actually do it. The second, the long slow development of Gaza into a safe and stable place, with terms negotiated over years that slowly grant better and better conditions for Palestine, is the option I'm holding out for. It's also an option that will take a willingness on behalf of Israel to keep working, even in the face of terrorist attacks. And it will take an effort reciprocated by Gazans, to go from an attitude that, though not complicit, is indifferent to terrorism, towards an attitude that condemns terrorism as much as it condemns injustice visited upon Palestinians. When the people have other options, they will use them. Bombing people into non-existence doesn't do that, and in fact is a very active way of removing options from people.

Our 43rd president intended to make his legacy one of fighting terrorism and of nation building. That's an entirely compatible goal set, but it's impossible to do in a flashy way - people remember wars. People don't remember long, gradual movements towards peace and stability. They just wake up one day and realize how happy they are that they haven't experienced a war in decades. That's the goal, and that's the possibility that existed in Hamas offer of extending the ceasefire. It's a possibility that remains, and its one well worth keeping in mind for the next time.



*Seriously, what is with October showing up so much. Did al qaeda watch Red October, and misinterpret that Americans were scared of October when they were really scared of Reds?

Editor's Note:The easy way to avoid this conversation is to say something like "these issues go back to biblical times, why discuss them?". My other big Internet conversation about this before my post was on facebook, and after someone replied with the 'biblical times' comment, I responded with this:

I think we're terribly mistaken to pass this off as going back to biblical times - the modern conflict isn't Jews versus Palestinians, it started Israelis versus Arabs; the Arabs in question have, post 1968, become Palestinian by virtue of abandonment of by the rest of the Arab world. Israel still sees Palestinian action as an attempt by Arab states to remove Israel from existence, while Palestine is largely on it's own, despite moves by Iran-affiliated Hezbollah in Lebanon and posturing on behalf of other Arab leaders. And now we're even past issues of Israel's right to exist - Hamas at least temporarily accepts a two-state solution. The trick is figuring out modern terms, and how Palestine will negotiate itself into a position less asymmetrical than the one it currently enjoys. The conflict has involved into a very modern form, and while historical legacy plays a role, it's much more recent history than millennial or even centuries old.

So, yeah, no this isn't an old issue. A much better way to avoid the conversation would be to say "lets ride bikes".

Living the Dialog

Editors Note: I wrote this piece as a pulpit editorial for delivery today at First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, where it was delivered for both first and second service. I'm posting it up here because I think it's worthy writing, but keep in mind that it is even more targeted at Unitarians than is usual.

Hello Congregation. I'm Kelsey Atherton, and earlier this fall I was the political advisor to Christine on her inspired if ill-fated presidential campaign.

I meant to write this pulpit editorial about my roommate and me- randomly assigned to live together in college housing, we disagree fundamentally on every political issue that has ever come up. And it was my intent to examine how before the election our interactions were all arguments, and how after the election it's become an oppressive silence. This pulpit editorial, as I envisioned it, was to be a parable of the dangers of partisan living, and a reminder of the strength of the divisions that persist in this nation.

The problem with that idea is that it doesn't really offer anything positive or useful, and I know that I for one don't come to church to feel powerless in the face of bad things. The other problem with that anecdote is that it is more or less the exact opposite of living the dialog - my roommate and I engaged in conversation when the stakes were high, and now that the election has concluded we sit around silently being contemptuous of each other. It's kind of a terrible example of how to live ones values.

There is, however, an essence of living the dialog in that. It's important to know where the dialog can be helpful, and where the dialog will amount to a lot of effort and frustration without any meaningful change. This isn't about "cutting ones losses" or "picking ones' battles" - this is about moving beyond war metaphors because this isn't, you know, war. And I think that's really what I learned from my experiences with my roommate - we treated this as a war, and now that the election is over, we're entrenched in a forced no-man's land, waiting for the next outbreak of hostilities.

That is no way to live. And while the situation with my roommate is looking irreparable, it's motivated me to find better ways to live the dialog with other people in my life. My conversations with friends about political issues are no longer winner-take-all debates, where personal attacks fly furiously, or where I discredit an issue because I doubt a given politicians' intelligence. Much as I'd like to say "your guy is an idiot, and you're an idiot for liking him", that's out of the picture. Talking like that is the exact opposite of productive. Every conversation, I strive to remove the petty from my politics. And yeah, I'm still met with the occasional "secret Muslim" comment. But it becomes rare, and it gets to be irrelevant.

More importantly than the lack of ad hominem attacks is the new found common ground - while I still argue tooth and nail for the right to choose, my pro-life friends and I come close to agreeing on "safe, legal, and rare." While I am sorely disappointed by the passage of proposition 8 in California, I can sympathize with the desire to settle the issue of marriage equality through voting and not judicial fiat. That is to say, in a way that respects "the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within...our society at large". And while I am dismayed at insensitive and intolerant remarks expressed by some religious leaders, I can share with them the common ground of good works and a desire to lead a purpose-driven life.

Christine, in her post election sermon about Living in Purple America, quoted this from my blog: "But that doesn’t entitle us to inflict any of the same scorn and contempt on the losers that we’ve had to suffer through. Because if we do that, then it was all for nothing.". I wrote it hours after an electoral success I'd waited 8 years for, and I wrote it not so much because I needed to know it then, but because I knew I'd need to be reminded of it now. In the coming weeks, as the Christmas spirit wanes and the inauguration looms closer and closer, it's important that we continue the work of living the dialog of Purple America. Without it, we exist as bitterly divided armed camps. With the dialog, and the conscious effort to engage people in serious and rational discussion, we can begin to do away with battles against each other. Because there isn't an enemy here - just fellow Americans. We have to appreciate and understand where they're coming from in order to join them in fellowship.

The piece ends there, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include the following image:
The image comes from the excellent from52to48withlove, which is the site that best informed this pulpit editorial, and my post-election sentiments. The above image I found particularly moving, and while I tried I was unable to include it in my speech before the church. Here it is for you, faithful readers.

Rule of Law

This post is inspired by three separate occurrences, two of them fairly recent. They are: 1, the riots in Greece following the shooting of a 15 year old. 2, the questionable value of a life sentence for Texas inmate Son Tran. 3, the 11th hour move by the Bush Administration to allow doctors and other healthcare service providers the right to refuse health services (meaning birth control and abortion). These all strike me as diverse symptoms of a situation in which the rule of law is seen less as a desirable practice and more as a totalitarian imposition. To clarify for naysayers: I'm not in any way opposed to the rule of law; I take issue with laws that are unjust, and laws that work against the interest of most everyone involved. I think these are all examples of law falling into the later two categories.


1. I'll start with the latter. Bush's action will be debated constantly in the coming week (with bonus Baby-Jesus-themed comments), and will most likely be opposed and somewhat overturned by the incoming Obama administration. The move represents several things: a "thank you" to longstanding Bush supporters, another play in decades-old culture wars, and a decision made by an unaccountable elected official. For all of these reasons, despite public sentiment, it strikes me as a profoundly undemocratic move. My intellectual-sparring-partner JR will side with me on the specific issue of rights concerning access to birth control and abortion services, but he will argue against the constitutionality of Roe v Wade. Ignoring the actual impact of changing that decision as it concerns personal rights, there's a democratic sentiment behind it that is worth examining. The case of Roe v Wade is implicitly about abortion rights, but it is explicitly about privacy, and states rights. If there is no constitutional right to privacy, than abortion is an issue left to the states. States, when making the decision, varied much more widely than a simple "legal or illegal", and the decision was localized to small constituencies. Say what you will about the potential for denial of rights that this entails (and don't get me wrong - there is some serious loss of rights going on), it does allow for a more democratic decision to be made, and such decisions have a legitimacy that feels undermined by judicial fiat. The reaction we'll be seeing in the media, the blogosphere, and political action listservs is a very real sense of powerlessness, of an invalidity of the decision made, and a general disagreement with the new ordering of the law. And that's because this is not a change made with political legitimacy. It's worth noting, however, that the whole of the national abortion debate feels that way to many folk, and has produced an incredible wariness in the American public to accept such top-down detached legal rulings. Esteemed legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, when faced with the passage of similar culture-warsy Prop 8, says this

But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.

It's worth noting that a legal scholar, a man whose life has revolved around various interesting and new arenas for legal battles (code and other laws of cyberspace, copyright), is arguing against a straightforward legal solution and is instead pushing for a solution that has democratic legitimacy.

2. Charles Platt's piece on Son Tran is one I'm going to examine in more depth elsewhere (it is part of an in-process post about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). It's a fascinating story (in that weird, bleak way more common in dystopic fiction), and what stands out from all of it is that, no matter the actual crimes committed by the individual (or, indeed, if they were committed), the punishment seems to be something profoundly useless to society. Confounding this situation is the nature of the person who committed the crime - at the time he was sentenced, Son Tran was 17 years old. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling concerning minors sentenced to death, he was moved from death row to life imprisonment. Depending on where you fall with your perspective of redemption, rehabilitation, and the changeable nature of humans, the 40 years he is now serving will make perfect sense, seem too short, or strike you as a gross waste of a human life, to say nothing of human potential. Charles Platt is upset by both this individual waste, and by the intended value of deterrence that sentences like this are supposed to have. He writes:

Let’s start with the concept of deterrence. I’ll ignore the death penalty, since the Supreme Court has already eliminated it for people under 18. Thus, we are left with incarceration. Has any study ever proved that the prospect of forty years without parole is a better deterrent than, say, thirty years, or even twenty years? It seems utterly implausible to me that the actions of a teenager in an inner-city gang will be affected by such a distinction. In fact I don’t believe that deterrence is either the effect or the purpose of the long, mandatory sentences that have become endemic in the United States during the past two decades.

The facts laid out are very few in the favor of Son Tran: gang member, confessed to murder, received a reprieve because of a supreme court ruling, not new evidence in his trial. But the gross failure and abuse of the criminal justice system (especially in Texas) are enough to make one doubt the whole validity of criminal justice in the United States. Platt's post at this point descends into a fairly typical "Reagan + Fear + Power + Money + Scared White People = Gross Human Rights Abuses that Shame America" argument, and it says something that this argument can have a standard form. It also poses a very real challenge to the acceptance of the rule of law in America, and it hits upon it from an entirely different angle that the Bush decision. The Bush decision is very much another move in decisions removed from democratic consensus - Platt's argument is that Son Tran's imprisonment is no social good (as imprisonment weirdly is supposed to be) but is instead the result of a poorly-framed democratic consensus. People have been pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime for at least 20-30 years now; what people haven't realized is that as a consequence of this:

Among the adult population of the United States, 1 person out of every 100 is now behind bars. Thus the unweighted odds of going to jail are greater than the odds of being a crime victim.

One could write a separate essay on how the people pushing for politicians to be tougher on crime are different than the people who are more likely to be persecuted by vigilant police forces (white & wealthy versus the poor, nonwhite, and disenfranchised) - I'm not going to comment on it anymore here than to say that, for a worryingly large percentage of the US population, law is seen either as "something to protect myself imposed on other people" or "illegitimate decisions made beyond my own personal control that will get me anyway, and so have no bearing on how I act." That's a breakdown in the very purpose of the rule of law, and of a democratic construction of society - laws have to apply equally, and laws have to be understood as threatening not just "those people", but everyone - especially the people who advocate for the law to be passed.

3. Lastly, we come to the Greek Riots. Others more skilled and/or better paid than I will make their conclusions about such serious anti-police riots in the birthplace of the World's first great democracy. The riots started as anti-police, but as they have continued they have done what all great riots do - become chaotic, divisive attempts to reinvent a status quo. The rioters are unemployed, upset with corruption, and think that the police forces have gotten out of hand - to express this discontent, they have attacked police and alienated their countrymen by destroying the property and threatening the livelihood of many small shopkeepers and business owners. It has all the hints of simmering class war, and rather than doing the democratic thing and siding with small owners as an upset middle class, the rioters are very much in the classical (or is it archaic?) mode of students, working class, and the unemployed so upset with the higher-ups that they willingly endanger and alienate those less outraged than themselves. This is not so much an issue of the nature of the rule of law as an example of a remarkable collapse. And yet, law itself hasn't entirely collapsed - the police exist, are a visible presence in Greece, and the government still stands. But the police are hesitant to act - one of their own is being tried for murder while on duty (the counterclaim is that he was provoked and responded appropriately), and so we have the potential for the rule of law, the semblance of a rule of law, and either a government or a police force unwilling to impose that law on the citizens it exists to protect. As law collapses on the national level, it re-imposes itself interestingly.

The shooting prompted parents all over the country to examine the liberties they have been permitting their children.

“My 12-year-old daughter has been getting text messages inviting her to join demonstrations,” said Constantine Michalos, president of the Greek chamber of commerce. “One of the messages said, ‘Don’t go to school today. We need to show our power on the street.’ I had to lay down the law.”

The riots will not, as many fear, have the effect of the French riots two centuries prior or the Russian riots all of 90 years ago. What they will do, however, is allow for a reforming of society around the rule of law - laws to protect against some of what inspired the riots (police carelessness and political corruption; it's hard to get laws passed against the economy), as well as against the actions taken by the rioters. Chaos like this is curious for it's ability to reforge society - France's Fifth Republic arose as a center-right forced the imposition of the rule of law over both the military and striking students and workers. And violence like this polarizes - while prior to the riots, many were discontent with the status quo in Greece, the value of the rule of law comes to the fore as people gravitate away from the dangers of the chaos and back towards the assurances of stability, becoming increasingly more willing to overlook injustices inherent in that stability as long as it means they have property, livelihood, and are guaranteed some freedom from molotov cocktails. The trick with any society structured around the rule of law, and especially that of democracies, is to balance freedoms with controls.

Stratis Stratigis, former chairman of the Athens Olympics organising committee, suggested he might have an answer. “Our democracy is destroying itself because it misrepresented the right to liberty and equality,” says an e-mail circulating his friends. “It taught the citizens to regard disrespect as a right, lawlessness as liberty, impertinence as equality and anarchy as enjoyment.”

This is a quote from Socrates, the ancient philosopher who ended up being sentenced to death for voicing truths that nobody wanted to hear.

“It’s funny,” said Stratigis. “Those words have a ring about them today.”

O Canada

I have saved (in draft form) three separate posts about the possibility of a McCain presidency, about the need for action here at home, and about how even if everything goes to hell I will stay in this nation working to make things better. The implicit point behind all of these posts was to argue that moving to Canada will solve nothing.

Fortunately, I have no need for those posts:

That blue column? Seats awarded to the conservative party.

Deliberate Community and Social Contracts

Obnoxious as it may sound, I want to spend a good part of this summer analyzing social contract theory. Step one in doing that involves strange travel advice as a dancing lesson from God.

Two weeks ago, I was standing outside Z'ots, a sort-of 245 hour coffee shop within walking distance of Tulane. While standing with my drink, a man in his young 30s came up and started a conversation. He was all about Burning Man, with a sort of evangelical fervor. He runs a bar in Black Rock City, and upon finding out I was studying political science, he tailored he summation of the experience towards the ear of a political observer.

His important points:

• Burning Man, as a money-less society, runs on an
• "economy of personality", where interactions with other people overshadow the movement of goods and services
• The city is a spontaneous creation
  
• Black Rock City is an autonomous community of roughly 30,000 people that exists for one week out of every year...The city is constructed anew at the beginning of the week by the returning residents, and torn down entirely, leaving not a single trace that human beings were ever there, at the end of the week
• The city, as an independent organic entity, self-corrects
• BURNING MAN CHANGES FROM YEAR TO YEAR. Here are some of the changes that have warranted complaints from the folks who attended Burning Man when it was 100 people on a beach in the Bay Area: You can no longer bring guns and fire them off into the sky. You can no longer detonate explosives without warning to your neighbors. You can no longer drive your car at high speeds through the city. The city now has roads allowing citizens and Emergency Services to find things.

That's the gist of what made Black Rock City a politically fascinating entity for him to observe, but it wasn't the main point of politics in his conversation. The politics he talked about and felt a part of were the politics of running his camp/bar.

The camp is nominally run by an oligarchic council, of which Ari is the head. This is a position similar to whatever name Russia's autocrat* holds, where the other organ of power offers suggestions and gives consent to policy, but really has no say in ultimately deciding how things are run. He described a power struggle with other oligarchs; two of them wanted to change the system into a formal and not de facto monarchy, and another wanted Ari to allocate funding differently and would gladly change governments to do this. The nature of the power struggle was complaints through a free and open listserv that the camp using to communicate when not in Nevada, and the nature of the struggle was one where the people at the top battled, with the revolting leaders claiming a mandate from the disaffected masses while Ari knew that the disaffected masses didn't care so long as there was a government. Ari, in describing this, said he felt like Stalin as he gave those revolting the choice of leaving his camp or falling in line. Ari elaborated, claiming that had the scale been a nation of millions instead of a camp of 60, the result would have been to order executions. (It is worth noting tat someone who knew Ari was skeptical of this fact as he related it). The end result of the struggle was those revolting quit the camp, rather than go along with Ari.

The point is not the details of this internal struggle - what matters is that in a deliberate community (the camp), which has established its own governing board (Ari and the oligarchy), a struggle over resources (the funds people contribute to be part of the camp) was resolved by having people simply leave the community. This is the first time in recent memory I've heard of a situation where "love it or leave it" actually counts as a valid choice.

Ari went on to say that he is avowedly anti-democracy, that his anarcho-libertarian philosophies don't allow him to trust the masses to think for him, and that democracy is an organ (especially in Louisiana, he made sure to point out) for collective disenfranchisement. His camp, temporary as it is and dependent upon outside factors for its existence, functions as a voluntarily entered into governed body, where people can opt out or make a stab (through the economy of personality) of influencing the autocrat. This was a social contract consented to, not by necessity, but because that is how people would prefer things. Ari's cynicism attributes his perpetual rule to the fact that people don't really care about whose governing them, but I think it has more to do with the fact the people would rather care about other things. For many, politics are something they only think about when terrible things are happening or when they are upset. It's not quiet cynicism, but I think that people don't care about how government functions when they are content with it. One of the tricks with democracy is that it makes people have to think about government fairly regularly, and not everyone wants that.

That's a side note - what matters is that there are situations where people can willingly enter into governance, establish and codify social contracts, and then chose to leave society when the feel the social contract isn't to their benefit. I've written about deliberate communities before, often UU affiliated - YRUU, Church Camp, and in general UU congregations all function as groups people willing enter, and leave or work to change when discontent.

Nations, however, are different. This is a bigger issue, and this is why Social Contract theories exist. People are born into social contracts with their nations of residence, and people have an elaborate series of obstacles in their place when they want to change the relationship between themselves and their government. Emigration is perhaps the simplest, but it requires another nation consent to housing the emigrant, and that can be quite tricky, as US/Mexico relations show. The more challenging but still civil procedure is to run for government offices, to support candidates and to actually try to enter into and change a political system. Reform has, at its heart, the idea of renegotiating the social contract. Lastly, there is open revolt, in the form of either succession or revolution, and that is contentious and violent and has the most uncertain results of all.

Just leaving, finding a new place, and starting a new thing, as valid an option as it is for small deliberate communities, stopped being a valid technique for nations over a century ago, when the Boers went into the African interior, trying to displace the Africans and be free of the British. Now, the nationless spots on earth are international waters and the Western Sahara. It's fitting that Black Rock City, too, finds itself existing in inhospitable conditions. This winds itself back to Frontier theory, where in the US the option was tolerate the rules of the cities or go off into the hinterland. A dual social contract existed then within the same nation, and the choice was available. Today, the option is gone, more or less.

The only exception I can see is the internet.**


*Tsar and easily-dismissed Duma, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, Stalin and the Communist Party Congress, Putin and modern Russia's Duma. The mold is the same, and Ari presented his camp oligarchy using specifically the Stalin metaphor.
** Expect a post on that soon, inspired in part by this.

War Between Democracies

That democracies do not wage war against one another is a point often brought up in talking about the overthrow of dictators, and in conversations concerning war in general. I've always found the notion of no wars between democracies seem somewhat off, and may well have devoted time to mapping out wars and determining how democratic their governments were. This being the age of the internet, someone else has already done it.

The whole site is interesting, but the part that makes it really valuable is the discussion following the examples. But Kelsey, you ask, can I just get a simple answer? Have democracies ever gone to war against each other? Well, using entirely someone else's logic, I can tell you simply that it depends entirely on how you define democracy.

Want a more valid, more thorough examination? Go to the site. It's well done to the point that I'd be jealous if it hadn't saved me time.