How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

The only reason for moving the United States toward the universal health care offered by most other prosperous nations is to bribe voters? Let's look at that premise.

Back in 2010 2009 Andrew Sullivan described a good idea:

a healthcare plan that expands access, removes obvious cruelties and inefficiencies, allows more people into the system and can be plausibly described as universal coverage.

In the same year 2010 he wrote:

We now have more public clarity on the critical issue. The Democrats want to provide basic private insurance to the 40m or so working poor who don't have it. The Republicans don't  want to. Both parties want to stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance because they have a pre-existing condition, but if you do only that, then the insurance companies will take a big hit and hike premiums even more, rendering even more people without insurance. So you have to have a way to get the companies to agree to this by giving them 40m more customers to outweigh the costs. Only the Obama plan does that. The Republicans have nothing.

Except Romney didn't want to stop the cruelty, because doing a good thing for the people would reflect favorably on the Democratic party. Romney said he had his own plan, but here he is tacitly admitting that he didn't, because if he had, the American people would have given him credit for it and erased the Demo advantage. 

Here is Sullivan (blogging a Republican primary debate) on conservatives' cruelty:

I was surprised by the ineptness of Perry's attack on Romneycare. But I am more surprised at the cheering of someone dying because he couldn't afford intensive care. Yes, the GOP is now not only cheering executions; they are cheering people dying because they cannot afford any health insurance. Cheering death by poverty. "Yeah!" came the cry at the thought of a twentysomething dying because he didn't have insurance. I didn't think I could be more shocked by the instincts of those in the Republican base, but I just was.

Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts an email sent by a federal judge:

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads.

"His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

Coates writes:

What stuns you about this "joke" is the sheer embrace of cruelty. Here is a woman who lost her life to cancer. And [the judge's take on this] is imagining her son as the product of bestiality.

Though less crudely stated, this embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement.

Andrew Sullivan's comment on the Romney excuse for his loss which begins this post:

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss to the only people he really cared about: his donor base. As usual with Republicans these days, there is no real personal responsibility. They do nothing wrong ever. They confess to no mistakes themselves. And we now kinda know that Romney's "47 percent" remarks were actually what he deeply believes.

A number of newspapers endorsed Romney, just before the election, arguing that the kinder gentler Romney who miraculously appeared just at the end of the campaign was the real Romney, the one we'd see in the Oval Office.

But it wasn't. Romney lied when he said his "47 percent" remarks didn't reflect his actual beliefs. He had no plans to "stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance" because they were poor, because he sees such things solely from the self-aggrandizing politics of political advantage. The enormous contribution to the public good of a health plan which will prevent millions of Americans' needlessly dying from preventable illnesses meant nothing.

This is the mindset that without shame practices the politics of obstruction. This is the cruel worldview which is willing to sabotage the nation's wellbeing for partisan advantage.

If the shoe were on the other foot, if it were the Democrats who were wreaking havoc with our politics, the party that was just repudiated at the polls by the American people would call it treason.

It is not partisan to object to the Republican party as it now stands, because at the present day  it does not represent a viable political alternative. It is not partisan to object to cruelty and heartlessness and destruction. One instead notes that one is dealing with cruelty and heartlessness and destruction, and passes regretfully on.

Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'

In The Liberal Founding this weblog cited Professor Rowley's list of characteristics of liberalism: “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing).” In essaying a definition of liberalism perhaps the first task is to observe that by and large the left disagrees, both in fundamental outlook, and on nearly every point of liberal thought.

I was first directed to this point by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which, though not liberal itself, clearly assumed that to discuss 'liberal' as synonymous with 'left' would be conceptually incoherent. The issue is confused because media discourse generally treats 'liberal' and 'left' as synonymous.

An illustrative example of this fundamental dichotomy is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's My Race Problem—And Ours, published in Atlantic, May 1997. Jim Sleeper analyzed some of Kennedy's arguments in his ironically titled Liberal Racism:

First, Sleeper critiqued the left's rejection of liberal universalism in favor of class—particularly racial class. Sleeper said that [effective crusading against racism originates from] "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group," and quoted Glenn Loury's apt phrase, "... the moral requirements of a humanism which transcends race."

Sleeper cites Kennedy:

... Analogizing race to family is a potent rhetorical move used
  to challenge those, like me, who are animated by a liberal,
  individualistic, and universal ethos which is skeptical of, if
  not hostile to, the particularisms—national, ethnic, religious,
  and racial—which seem to have grown so strong recently.

That is, family, and in particular “brotherhood,” in the political realm is incompatible with the liberal universalism and individualism cited by Rowley above. [Note that while the Founders wholeheartedly embraced the 'liberty' and 'equality' of the Continent's rallying cry, liberté, égalité, fraternité, “brotherhood” is absent from their discourse. In contrast with the left, liberalism is public and civil.]

The reason is that the obligations of family—or racial brotherhood—tend to be “antecedent to choice,” in the artful phrase Kennedy borrows from Michael Sandel. Brotherhood, or in more general terms, 'community,' tends to be coercive in ways that liberalism's equivalent term, The People, is not. [A phrase I grew up with was “put three Americans together and they form a committee.” De Tocqueville noted the tendency of the citizens of the infant American nation to form “voluntary associations.”]

This brings us to a crucial fact. In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that. We carelessly speak of an election as expressing the will of the voters, perhaps because we are influenced by one of Rousseau's terrible errors, the notion that “the general will is always right” (which laid the foundation for the Terror). [As Orwell warned, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”]

'Community' as used by the left means that the group is everything and the individual is nothing (and thus the rejection of the liberal principle that the locus of freedom is the individual and not the group or class). It is because communitarianism rejects justice in favor of class, subjects civil rights to the notionally less selfish claim of “group rights,” that Kennedy objects to racial kinship. "I reject the notion of racial kinship," he wrote. "I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels 'the unencumbered self'."

The harmful effect of treating a person as a representative of a (racial) class, at the expense of justice (the equal civil rights of the single person) can be seen in the treatment of Justice Clarence Thomas. The liberal position is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," but Justice Thomas regularly confronts audiences who take the position that a black man does not have the right to be conservative. This is a double standard as well as a denial of equality, rightly opposed by "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group" (as noted above).

To Summarize:
First, 'liberal' and 'left' are not synonymous.
Second, the left's orientation toward class in the form of racial community cannot be reconciled with the universal justice favored by liberalism.
Third, rulership and its attendant coerciveness is illegitimate in our liberal society. The coercion of a 'general will' (saying "the people rule" instead of saying "the people govern") is implicit in left communitarianism.
 
This is just a beginning. I hope to post further on this topic.

How Fares The Republic: The Post Truth Candidate

In writing the Declaration and the Constitution the Founders delineated an intentional moral order devoted to liberty and, as Thomas Paine wrote, honesty:

The circle of them is not so great as some imagine; the influence of a few have tainted many who are not naturally corrupt. A continual circulation of lies among those who are not much in the way of hearing them contradicted, will in time pass for truth.

Now consider the candidate selected by movement conservatism. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in Five Lies in 30 Seconds:

Kessler looks at the latest post-modern Romney ad: post-modern because truth is completely immaterial to this propagandist dreck. It's one thing to broadcast untruths, or misleading half-facts as obvious truths; it's another to be called out on them, refuse to change them, and intensify their reach. …

Obama is now fighting for his political life. And right now, to my genuine horror, he's losing to a fraud, a war-monger, a liar and a budget-buster.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in It Was Like a Sucker-Punch: Here are two interesting selections from Jan Crawford's rather amazing autopsy of the Romney campaign. First the expectations:

"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something. Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim. 

They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened. "He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.

William Saletan wrote in In The Obama-Romney Showdown Truth Beat Lies:

Rejection of external evidence sealed Romney's fate. ...

“There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," a Romney adviser tells Crawford. "It was like a sucker punch." But when the punch comes from ignored reality, you’re not just the sucker. You’re the one who suckered yourself.

Coates continues, "From Adam Serwer":

Ideology can place blinders on everyone, of course--I don't know how many liberal friends I've tried to talk out of their affinity for rent control--but the incentives for misleading one's audience are not evenly distributed across the left-leaning and right-leaning media. The Romney surge after the first debate didn't translate to a widespread liberal belief about systemic bias among polling firms, for example.

Much of the conservative media is simply far more cozy with the Republican Party than its Democratic counterparts. ... Departing from the party line, particularly if one does so in a manner that seems favorable to Obama, would be to reveal one as an apostate, a tool of liberalism. ...

Conservative media lies to its audience because much of its audience wants to be lied to. Those lies actually have far more drastic consequences for governance (think birthers and death panels) than for elections, where the results can't be, for lack of a better word, "skewed."

To sum up:
First, as the Republican Party looked on, its presidential campaign lied wholesale.
Second, that campaign was revealed, after the election, to have had no conception of the truth of its competitive situation (“A continual circulation of lies ... will in time pass for truth.”).
Third, as movement conservatives the campaign had valorized ideology, which may be described as the substitution of belief for evidence and reason.
Fourth, “Lies actually have far more drastic consequences for governance (think birthers and death panels) than for elections.”
Fifth, the campaign was not only duplicitous but bumbling and inept (Google “Romney ORCA”).
Last, to reiterate Item Four, had this functionally insane outfit achieved the Oval Office, the nation would have endured a reign even more strongly defined by deficiency of competence than the late W. Bush regime.

Paine deserves the last word: “My solemn belief of your cause is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market

First, credit to whom credit is due. In the face of a presidential candidate of the obscenely privileged one percent, and a VP candidate known best for a budget plan to dismantle the humanitarian safety net for the poor, America's minorities, women, and the young rose to the challenge. They marched to the polls in great number to let their choice of a “politics of kindness”* be known.

In the words of Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes!”
________________________________________________________________

Henry Fairlie was an English journalist and author who chose to become an American. In Bite The Hand That Feeds You,  he argued that the realm of the patriot is the political realm, and that the political realm constitutes the public, not the private, sector. “Is it really necessary to reject civic consciousness, of which compassion for one's less fortunate fellow citizens is the ultimate binding cement,” he asked, “in order to be a conservative or neoconservative?”

The Romans insisted, he noted, “on the three great civic virtues: dignitas, gravitas, pietas.” … Otherwise “the idea of citizenship** [is] all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private satisfactions, the private sector.”
 
For those who glorify “the market,” he continued, “the purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the ‘acquisitive instinct.’ ... they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered.”

As for the Romney candidacy, his gracious concession speech deserves tribute in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Nevertheless, I fear that his ascension to the presidency would have represented the triumph of the “economic view,” of the valorization of private gain at the expense of the public good, over the political realm. There is the sense of a narrow escape from a crisis of the republic.
______________________________________________________________

Best line of the day: 
Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” [Emphasis added.]
 
(*) “Democratic politics is the politics of kindness”: Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
(**) For the power of citizenship in Roman justice, note how Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), as recounted in the King James Bible, responds to a provincial ecclesiastical court in Acts 25:11 - 12: “For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar.
Then Festus, when he had conferred with the council, answered, Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? unto Caesar shalt thou go.” [Emphasis added. In Acts 22, Paul is recorded as stating that, in contrast to those who paid a large sum of money to acquire citizenship, he was a Roman by birth.]

Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater

JohnMH127@gmail.com

When it started:
In Thursday's Andrew Sullivan post Dear Barry Goldwater, from George Romney, Mitt Romney's father articulates a passionate plea to Goldwater to disassociate himself, and his party, from the extremism with which the 1964 presidential campaign was beginning to become identified. Sullivan describes its “warnings about the Southern strategy just emerging in Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As to Goldwater's apparent approval of the possible realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties into “conservative” and “liberal” parties, Romney senior wrote:

We need only look at the experience of some ideologically oriented parties in Europe to realize that chaos can result. Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlock, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress. A broad based two party structure produces a degree of political stability and viability not otherwise attainable.

Romney continues:

You were just about to take a position the 1964 Civil Rights Act contrary to that of most elected Republicans in and out of Congress, and there were disturbing indications that your strategists proposed to make an all-out push for the Southern white segregationist vote and to attempt to exploit the so-called "white backlash" in the North. ...

 
With extremists of the right and left preaching and practicing hate, and bearing false witness on the basis of guilt by association and circumstantial rationalization and with such extremists rising to official positions of leadership in the Republican party, we cannot recapture the respect of the nation and lead it to its necessary spiritual, moral, and political rebirth if we hide our heads in the sand and decline to even recognize in our platform that the nation is again beset by modern ‘know nothings.’ ...

The real challenge for us lies in the expansion of voter support for the Republican party in all parts of the country, urban or rural, North or South, colored or white.

The liberal principle is that no party is, or should want to be, a permanent majority; and that a party not in the majority takes a principled stance as the “loyal opposition.” Anything less would fail the Founders' concept of government by consent of the governed.

It seems clear what George Romney would think of his son's tacit, if not explicit, complicity in modern Republicans' practice of a cynical politics of obstruction, and their habit, from President Clinton onward, of treating any Democratic president as illegitimate. As a usurper.

Sullivan's post contains the senior Romney's complete plea to Goldwater. The whole thing is worth reading.

The Liberal Founding (Repost)

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012.

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead.

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

 

The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux

JohnMH127@gmail.com

From andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com [By Andrew Sullivan and others]:

Romney will say things that are completely incompatible with each other.
 
Romney keeps saying that sequestration was Obama's policy. That's an obvious lie.
 
I've never seen any human being up close like this - a mechanical, unstoppable machine of say anything, forget everything in the past, refuse to take any responsibility for anything he has said in the past, and just smile and golly-gee smile his way along.
 
In a sane world, Obama would count as the clear winner.
 
Romney ... just lashed away at Obama without regard to subject or logic.
 
Chris Matthews says Romney should "apologize to America for being a complete cynic."

What does it say about the state of democracy in the United States that the race is considered a tie?

Mendacious Debater Disgraces Self: Media Call Him Victor

JohnMH127@gmail.com

A late comment on the first Obama-Romney debate:

Adam Serwer noted: "Important question about post debate coverage is whether media focuses more on Mitt's superior performance or his dishonesty."

 

An Atlantic Magazine reader from Canada:

 

This election should not be close, Romney and Ryan should not be even in the running to run your great country, a finger on the trigger, the power to start another war, strip millions of their safety net, their rights, their American Dream.

 

Andrew Sullivan: "Romney came across ... as insufferably smug."

Other comments from the web:

He also came off as testy and officious at times, especially when dealing with Lehrer. Rude, like a guy who cuts you online at the DMV and acts like you're out of order for being bothered.

Romney pulls his entitled douchebag crap. Scolds Jim Lehrer, demands last word.

Romney went all out to ‘win’ this round, madly shifting policy positions, making dodgy assertions and committing to specifics that his base abhors. Romney dodged and weaved impressively. But Obama forced him to take stances and policy positions. All these will be fact-checked to death and Romney will have to clarify, rationalize and reverse many of the things he said on stage with millions watching.

What will emerge: a man willing to say anything to get elected.

Romney was smiling that terribly insincere smile of his. ... Shameless liars are more resourceful and bouncy because they have no moral code constraining them.

The underpinnings and foundations of that performance were fundamentally dishonest. ... But don't let that silly problem detract from the performance as a whole.

The Canadian reader ("This election should not be close, Romney and Ryan should not be even in the running") articulated a terrible premonition many of us have had for months. Our media, and possibly a majority of the electorate, are judging an election, in which the fate of the experiment in government "for the people" (in Lincoln's words) may be decided, by the debased mob rule psychology of "Survivor."