The Next Hurrah

Exiting the kingdom of reason

by emptypockets

The right-wing mot du jour seems to be "socialist." Sometimes, confusingly, it is combined with "communist" or with the communistic honorific "comrade," especially to make use of the appealing internal rhyme in "comrade Obama." All this has left me, as a notoriously poor student of politics and history, wondering, "What is socialism, why is the word popping up now, and how should I react to it?" This post is something of an experiment, a sort of thinking aloud, where I try to work through (hopefully with readers' assistance) some confusing and ambiguous political labels.

First, let me get it out of the way: I know Obama isn't a socialist. If you're here as an Obama rallyist, you can spare me. I got the message. You like Obama. Awesome. I'm with you. Now let's move on, and consider what socialism is, what it isn't, and whether we as progressive Democrats should embrace the label, scorn it, or ignore it. Everything I write here is going to be a summary of things I just googled up. Treat this post as an open thread for thoughts or references on the topic.

My approach was to read, in order, a Democracy Now! interview with Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-described Socialist holding the highest office in US politics today; a brief AFL-CIO biography of Eugene Debs, a Socialist giant back when such a thing could exist, in the early 20th century; and an essay titled "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" written by Frederick Engels in the late 19th century. Again, I knew close to zilch on this topic when I began, and I now feel like I know zilch + 1.

The title of this post comes from a line in Engels's essay, describing earlier Enlightment conceptions of socialism in the late 18th century, particularly around the French Revolution and development of industry. Of these earlier Socialist attempts, Engels wrote:

One thing is common to all three ["Utopians" (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen)]. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.

Engels's underlying beef here, as I read it, is that previous Socialists had attempted to reform society from first principles, using Enlightment ideals of reason conquering all, and basing their plans on their own assumptions about equality, justice, and righteousness. Since few people ever agree on such things, these attempts descended into unresolvable conflicts or else what we would today call watered-down compromises.

A flash of grey flannel, a whiff of BenGay...

by Kagro X

When is an Internet-based, third party organizing effort a Very Serious Idea?

When David "Wild Man" Broder f*cking well tells you it is. That's when. You lowly moron.

Until plans for this meeting were disclosed, the most concrete public move toward any kind of independent candidacy was by Unity08, a group planning an online nominating convention to pick either an independent candidate or a ticket combining a Republican and a Democrat. The sponsors, an eclectic mix of consultants who have worked for candidates including Jimmy Carter (D) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), have not aligned with a specific prospect.

Now, some people with high-level political and governmental credentials are moving to put muscle behind the effort.

What meeting, you ask? Why, the Big Bipartisan Serious Person's Kumbaya Love-In for America, of course.

Imagine there's no telecoms

by emptypockets

This afternoon, on the outskirts of Lima, in a mountain village a mile and a half above sea level, all 46 children and each of their teachers are wired. Their laptops came courtesy of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and a quarter million other Peruvian children will soon be wired as well, as are children in other pilot programs in Abuja, Nigeria; Villa Cardal, Uruguay; Samkha village, Thailand; Porto Alegre, Brazil; and Khairat, India.

(You can be, too, for $200 and a matching tax-deductible donation to give one to a child somewhere. The give-one-get-one program runs until Dec. 31.)

There are several things to say about this remarkable project, but first let me establish the basics. The OLPC laptops are small, power-efficient laptops built to withstand rugged conditions. Each has a microphone, a camera, a screen that can be viewed in bright daylight or in dark, a small amount of flash memory (no hard drive), and innovative wireless networking capabilities that I'll come back to in a minute.

They are open-source, run linux, and are produced, sold, and distributed by a non-profit academic group as a charitable enterprise -- not by a computer company. From what I can tell, the villages that receive them are poor, but children have clothing, access to clean water, limited electricity (the laptops can be charged from a wide range of voltages, solar panels, or a hand pull), and some educational infrastructure. Rather than sprinkle the laptops throughout the population of developing countries, OLPC is targeting individual villages and saturating them, so that every child in the village has his or her own personal computer to use at school and at home.

A number of criticisms have been leveled against the program, including that the money would be better spent on providing more teachers, and that the program seeks to destroy some natural harmony that exists between poor people and the land (for example, here). With regard to the latter, the ads for the give-one-get-one program, showing a black girl with a laptop perched on her head like a bucket of water, leaves itself particularly open to critique, implying as it does -- to me, anyway -- that the program is targeted to Africa (it's not) and that the recipients are supposed to swap basic resources for new technology and smile.

I'll come back to these two topics -- what you can learn from a computer that you don't learn from a teacher, and whether "living in harmony with nature" is a myth -- in a couple of posts down the road. Right now, though, I'd like to overlook the question of all the good that I think will come out of the project in the future... and look instead at some of the good that, perhaps, already has.

Newt Gingrich Told Me To Blog This

by emptypockets

Somtimes, I question my own intentions. Do I really think it's in Americans' interest to pay me to do basic biology research, or do I just like getting paid? Is the NIH anything more than welfare for academics? When such moments strike, I like to turn for advice to a liberal luminary, an advocate of the power of Big Government doing big jobs for the common good. Someone like -- Newt Gingrich?

NIH funding has been flat since 2004, undermining the gains earned through the doubling of the budget and slowing the pace of progress in biomedical research. The Bush administration's proposed fiscal year 2008 budget would cut $329 million from last year's allocation of $28.6 billion. Biomedical inflation significantly compounds the impact of this reduction. This is exactly the wrong course for the country. Investment in the NIH should be expanded, not cut.

[...]

The National Institutes of Health Reform Act, approved by Congress in 2006, contained the authorization of an increase of 8 percent for the agency in 2008. The House Appropriations Committee vote on June 7 calling for a 2.6 percent increase for NIH does not go far enough. The House, Senate and the Bush administration should follow the 8 percent increase authorization, and make a choice now to secure longer, healthier lives for Americans with this as the benchmark for future years.

Those paragraphs, emphases mine, are from an op-ed Gingrich co-authored in the June 24 San Francisco Chronicle. As I recently posted, the current Senate and House plans increase the NIH budget by only 3.5%, compared to an inflation rate in the life sciences of 3.7% (detailed numbers here). The current plans also shift funding obligations around within NIH in a way that leaves most Institutes with increases of less than 2.5%, a stunning real dollar cut relative to inflation. At this point, let me stop and ask, what upside-down, ass-backwards planet am I living on when Gingrich advocates government spending on medical research while the Democratic Congress wants to starve it out?

We Can't Wait for Bipartisan Solutions

by DHinMI

"We need a consensus."

This is what Joe Biden said a little while ago, when asked by Keith Olberman if he would appoint a Republican to head up the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security.  I don’t have the exact language, but he seemed to imply that nothing would work unless it had significant support from Republicans.

I was floored.

If there is anything that has been apparent since the Democratic takeover of Congress, it’s that many and probably most of the current Republican members of Congress will NEVER work with Democrats for the good of the country.  Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country.  Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base. 

It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago.  It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up on progressive blogs, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power. They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public. While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged.  In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II.  Republicans involved in organizing and running elections and selling their policy positions to the press and the talking heads know that the American public is far to their left.  But they conceal their radicalism through clever marketing scams like Frank Luntz’ Contract on America and the pabulum of "compassionate conservatism." 

Libya Frees Foreign Medical Workers

by DemFromCT

Happy ending.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were pardoned by President Georgi Parvanov upon their arrival in Sofia on Tuesday after spending 8 1/2 years in prison in Libya.

The medics, who were sentenced to life in prison for allegedly contaminating children with the AIDS virus, arrived on a plane with French first lady Cecilia Sarkozy and the EU's commissioner for foreign affairs, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

The six came down the steps from the airplane and were welcomed on the tarmac by family members who hugged them, one lifting the Palestinian doctor off the ground.

They were given bouquets of flowers, and Bulgaria's president and prime minister were on hand, greeting the nurses and Sarkozy, who had been part of the delegation that negotiated the group's return.

''I waited so long for this moment,'' nurse Snezhana Dimitrova said before falling in the arms of her loved ones.

Libya accused the six of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV. Fifty of the children died. The medics, jailed since 1999, deny infecting the children and say their confessions were extracted under torture.

These were trumped up charges, and the trial was marked by a refusal on Libya's part to allow scientific data clearing the health care workers. A campaign on their behalf was started by Nature in Sept 2006

Libya's travesty

Six medical workers in Libya face execution. It is not too late for scientists to speak up on their behalf.

picked up by the science blogs (Declan Butler, senior Nature reporter, in particular was tireless on this), and we played a small role in publicizing the issue.

Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six? — innocent medics risking execution in Libya

Major pieces were subsequently published in the NY Times and various medical journals, and Nobel-winning scientists lobbied the Libyan government along with various scientific and medical professional societies.

Letters were written, the story was blogged, pressure was brought to bear, and after years of stalemate, here they are. Kudos to Declan, the science bloggers and everyone who helped reverse this travesty of justice. Activism has its triumphs as well as its frustrations, and today is one of those triumphs.

Thank you all.

Is the GOP Ready For A Free Thinker?

by DemFromCT

Poor Rudy. His flip-flops on the abortion question to appease the religious right in his party (and they all do it, from Romney to McCain to Bush 41 to Reagan) have gotten him in a bit of hot water with his adoring public.

His current posture has left past political allies and abortion rights supporters dismayed over what they regard as his backsliding. At the same time, he has hardly endeared himself to conservative activists who disagree with his overall support for abortion rights.

"I'm ashamed of him," said Fran Reiter, who was New York's deputy mayor for economic development and planning during Giuliani's first administration and was his 1997 reelection campaign manager. Reiter, a strong advocate of abortion rights, added: "I feel a certain betrayal."

Giuliani adviser Jim Dyke countered by saying, "His position doesn't fit into a sound bite or on a bumper sticker." Yesterday's speech, he added, was designed "to let people have a clear understanding of where he stands and what this pro-choice Republican would mean as president."

But there's a problem for Dyke's candidate. Guiliani's party is both intolerant and unforgiving on the issue of choice (sparking this warning from the WSJ). In fact, the contretemps over choice is not going away, and it's even threatening to obscure Rudy's ethical lapses and poor judgment when it comes to Bernie Kerik,  OxyContin,  and the kind of sleazy politics that the GOP never really has a problem with (but the public does).

Charlie Cook, for one, has never thought Rudy had much of a shot at the GOP ticket, because of structural issues like the pro-choice one.

"I'll win the Tour de France before Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination."

The thing is, all the GOP candidates have structural issues, including McCain's bonding with the unpopular Bush on the unpopular war. That's why the party faithful are so depressed, and into pretending that Fred Thompson is presidential material (he'll be the guest speaker at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner in CT, so he gets to persuade New Englanders the way he did Orange County Californians).  But politics being what it is, we can only watch one painful train wreck at a time before we look away.

Do You Believe In Evolution?

by DemFromCT

There are few areas of the culture wars that get rational people more upset than the idea that Intelligent Design is legitimate science (it isn't; see Kansas evolution hearings). But one of the least commented on aspects of the recent Republican debate is this:

On one level the debate can be seen as a polite discussion of political theory among the members of a small group of intellectuals. But the argument also exposes tensions within the Republicans’ "big tent," as could be seen Thursday night when the party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.

Three of ten Republican candidates for President of the United States in 2007 do not believe in evolution.

The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote in Time magazine that to teach intelligent design "as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of a religious authority." George F. Will wrote that Kansas school board officials who favored intelligent design were "the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people."

Well, they are most certainly right about that. It is to the disgrace of conservatism that this is seen as an equal and legitimate point of view to debate. I'm not suggesting they stifle debate... I'm hoping it continues load and clear.

What both sides do agree on is that conservatives who have shied away from these debates should speak up. Mr. Arnhart said that having been so badly burned by social Darwinism, many conservatives today did not want "to get involved in these moral and political debates, and I think that’s evasive."

Yet getting involved is more important than ever, after "the disaster" of "President Bush’s compassionate conservatism," he said, because the only hope for Republicans is a "fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, and Darwinian nature supports that conservative fusion."

Arnhart and Derbyshire were on the non-wingnut side of this discussion. For the sake of our children and our country, I hope they do well in these debates; for the sake of exposing the modern Republican party (and the religious right) as being in the thrall of anti-rational zealots, I hope they keep having them.

Reading and Discussion: Constitutional Hardball

by Kagro X

Whenever I'm looking to put the political plays of the Bush "administration" in long-term context, I point people to "Constitutional Hardball," (PDF) a law review article written by Georgetown now Harvard Law Prof. Mark Tushnet. I think it's a real eye-opener for those who might otherwise advocate simply waiting out the Bush gang, and "fixing" the problems they've created at the ballot box. What is constitutional hardball?

A shorthand sketch of constitutional hardball is this: It consists of political claims and practices -- legislative and executive initiatives -- that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.³ It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents' victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.

----------

³ By this I mean the "go without saying" assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government. They are had to identify outside times of crisis precisely because they go without saying. (An alternative term would be conventions.)

How do you know when it's happening?

One way to distinguish periods of ordinary politics from periods of transformation is that during the former pre-constitutional understandings are taken for granted, whereas during the latter such understandings are brought into question.

And what's really going on when it's happening?

The idea is that the institutional arrangements characteristic of a particular constitutional order -- characteristic, that is, of each specific period of ordinary politics -- are the presuppositions accepted by all politically significant actors in that period, whereas the whole point of constitutional transformation is to alter the previously taken-for-granted institutional arrangements. Of course the proponents of transformation are going to place pre-constitutional understandings in question, because they want to replace those understandings with others.

How does this relate, exactly, to today's situation? Read on after the jump.

A Good Day to Celebrate Protesting Women

By Meteor Blades

Today, March 8, is the 150th anniversary of a protest by garment and textile workers in New York City. Those workers, as you might guess from their jobs, were women. Bad working conditions, a euphemism for the reality of their Dickensian factories - and appallingly low wages - pushed these previously powerless women into the streets.

The cops acted for the plutocrats and their legislative puppets, attacking the protesters and forcing them off the public thoroughfare in a fine example of the bloody reality which so often has accompanied the ideals enshrined in our nation‘s great documents, but has been frequently ignored by state authority right up to the present day.

The protesters responded by forming a union before the end of May.