January 6, 2005
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Musing of the day:
Underlying the superficial differences between political philosophies, are differing views of life. Marxists, anarchists, liberals, greens, etc. I would argue see a world with a glass half empty. They see injustice everywhere. They find fault in almost every step of US government. Those on the political right, conservatives, Republicans, capitalists, view the world glass as half full. “Things are going well.” Life is better for us and others today than in any other period in history, and only looks to improve.
The left looks at the right with disdain. “How can you be at peace with yourself while the glass is only half full. What about those who cannot drink the water from your glass? When you speak of your glass as half full, you completely ignore and fail to have compassion for those who are not included. What about the often means of violence in which your glass has become full?”
The right looks at the left with disdain. “You talk so much about means, but fail to appreciate just how much is in the glass. You would rather spill the entire glass out than have a glass so full. In fact, your hatred for what we have is so extreme that you are a threat to our glass. You throw rocks and try to shatter our glass.”
I think this plays itself out in foreign policy.
The left looks at the right with disdain: ”You are nothing but a bunch of imperialists. Your aims are not genuine. Whatever freedom and democracy you bring, are second to your primary goals of filling your glass even more. Oil is your primary goal, freedom and democracy are not your true motives, nor will you bring them about.”
The right looks at the left with disdain: “How can you deny that the world would be better if we had not gone to war to topple the oppressive regimes in Afghanastan and Iraq? How can you not support US victory in its wars? How can you not view the US as a boy scout?”
Dan looks at the right with disdain: “That’s the one point that will not sit right with me. I can see somewhat through the eyes of the right, but, here I cannot understand how their minds work. It has become the mindset of the right that opposition to the war, amounts to support for the Hussein regime. The right have framed the thinking so that opposition to controversial wars, means opposition to the values of freedom and democracy that they are claiming to bring. There is little that I see as genuine in that sort of framing. The right, in order to justify their half-full glass, needs to see themselves as Boy Scouts, always doing the right thing. But, their picking and choosing of what countries deserve US support for freedom (why then, have we not toppled the ruthless Mugabe in Zimbabwe?) flat-out discredits their Boy Scout image that they have of themselves. Their claims that “we give so much,” fall short when analyzed not comparatively, but in terms of possibility. The possibility for the US to do so much more is unquestioned. To some extent, the thinking of the right has led them to become delusional, which I do not mean in a condecending way. I mean they have created an incomplete reality to satisfy their half-full view of the world.
The right says with disdain: “The left does not want the US to “win” their wars. They support Islamic fundamentalism. They support terrorist states.”
The left says with disdain: “We feel the wars were unjust to begin with, and only through failure on the battle-field will public opinion shift against the war. We prefer peace to war, and do not support deaths on either side. However, we can see how acts of violence, while unacceptable, can help to highlight non-violent yet equally unacceptable situations. For example, all deaths on the US and Iraqi sides are both unfortunate, but they amount to evidence that the war was a bad decision. The terrorist acts of 9/11 were unacceptable, but serve as evidence of US actions that have upset the Muslim world.”
The right says with disdain: “Here’s where you’re wrong. The terrorist acts of 9/11 serve as evidence of Muslim fundamentalism which must be defeated and replaced with democratic principles.”
So…to summarize:
left = glass half empty, US is no Boy Scout, US is partially responsible for acts of terror
right = glass half full, US is a Boy Scout, US was an innocent victim of evil acts of terror
How does this model sound?
Topic: State politics (cont’d)
What would a dream government look like in the eyes of a Republican, with a natural tendency to distrust the ability of government to provide services, and a preference for individuals and charities to create a healthier community. Well…it would begin with the passing of a law called the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which sounds friendly enough, and is in fact a constitutionally imposed limit on taxation. This is what passed in Colorado, and is known there as TABOR.
The TABOR ammendment is the most stringent tax and expenditure limitation that American voters have ever imposed on their state and local governments. It passed in ’92 to limit the growth of gov’t. The law sets a budget cap on state spending. Revenue up to that cap is known as “allowed collections,” revenue above is known as, “the TABOR surplus,” and must be refunded.
Douglas Bruce is the author of the tax-limitation measure. It is his believe that government should not fund programs like higher education or Medicaid. Instead, they should be left to the market or churches. “We could cut half or more of government spending and 95% of the people wouldn’t miss it. They wouldn’t notice the impact on their lives.”
The Dems responded with Amendment 23, which requires annual spending increases in k-12 education. You can see already how the two philosophies, and the two laws, run head into each other. The budget is limited in revenue growth, while simultaneously required to expand expenditures. In order to balance the budget, lawmakers have to cut back on public colleges and universities, and Medicaid. Just what Douglas Bruce intended.
Several college presidents in Colorado have warned that state funding for higher ed would be so insiginificant by 2009 that institutions would be forced to privatize or close their doors. Again, depending on your political philosophies, this can either be seen as a good or bad thing.
The way TABOR works is to limit spending to a formula that includes population growth plus inflation. The revenues from one year are used in the formula to build a budget for the following year. However, should there be an economic downturn, followed by an upturn, the surplus from the recovery must be returned to the taxpayers. This is like a reservoir that falls by half during a drought. The rain returns, but the basin is limited to drought capacity, not pre-drought capacity.
None of this inherently supports anything accept highlighting the philosophical differences between those who believe in the role of the government in providing services such as Medicaid, K-12 education, higher education, parks and recreation, state police, information technology, environment, economic development and arts programs, and those who believe individuals in a free-market will take care of these things.
So…the argument becomes more focussed on the value-added of these services. We cannot simply have an debate whether ”Republicans are bad for the people because they oppose public services,” we need to also have an argument why public services are necessary, and require a certain amount of government spending.
Bush’s views on the tsunami relief efforts highlight this view. We were quick to criticize Bush for not spending enough, but it was his belief that private donations were the way to go. Clearly, some combination of the two is best. Tapping into the good-will of individual donations, coupled with the collective power of a national government to help out. I don’t have figures, but I’m assuming we received large amounts of government aid from other countries as well as individual donations, but without government financial support, along with the symbolic support that comes with a government choosing to spend money to help others, we’d be a lot worse off. The Times article from my last post also describes how small individual efforts are compared to what governments can do, and highlights how problems worse than the tsunami, such as malaria and AIDS, kill more people and deserve equal government support that the US is now beginning to give to the tsunami victims (because of public pressure). Perhaps that is another lesson to be learned. How the media and individual statements have the power to spotlight the nature of government, and can serve to force them to do good.
Comments (9)
I’d guess I’d say that you’re talking about a couple of different “left-right” scales here:
On the economic scale, “market capitalism” as Republicans preach it is such a new concept on the planet. Before the late 18th Century no one would have imagined an economic theory which separated the success of the many from the success of the few. If peasants, after all, were starving, the likelihood was that the nobles and most of the merchants were as well. Thus, from our earliest evidences of civilization, economic balancing has been seen as essential: sabbatical debt relief shows up 6,000 years ago in Sumeria, legally enforced redistribution of income is all through the Old Testament. Four things changed that offered the possibility of right-wing economic theory: (a) the idea of surplus population that could thus both hold “wages” down and find quick replacement for destroyed workers, (b) a change in the importance of time – previously the idea that you’d die and “leave a mess” was too destructive to offspring, and so, unacceptable, but beginning in the late 18th Century the “Adam Smiths” started figuring out “what they could get away with in the short run.” (c) a “shrinking world” which let production (and thus production workers) slip out of site. (d) the loss of primacy of Catholic ideology with it’s insistence on “good works.”
So that’s not a question of whether “the glass” is half empty or half full. It’s a question for the right of: “is my glass full?” and for the left, the much older question, “is everyone ok?” Modern governments and armies have made the persistence of right-wing economic theory possible. Before expensive machine weapons a ruler who let the income distribution scale get too far out of whack: from Byzantine Emperors to French kings and Russian Emperors, were simply deposed by mobs.
The next scale is the Imperialism scale: This has been going on forever. Not left or right, just a world view. European culture, beginning with the Greeks, has believed that “a superior culture” has the absolute right to seize “an inferior culture” and remake it to look/act/seem “superior.” In fact, in December, we’ve celebrated two 2,000 year-old duplicates of the Iraq War: Both Hanukah (middle eastern terrorist/rebels attempting to drive out advanced Greek culture) and the birth of Jesus (middle-eastern terrorist/rebels attempting to drive out advanced Latin culture) celebrate our inherent understanding that this is wrong.
Still, America is as Imperial a nation as the world has known, starting with the seizure of the Continent from it’s inhabitants, and the slaughter of the native population (say what you will about the Afrikaaners, they got into trouble in South Africa because they didn’t kill the natives with nearly the same effectiveness as we did), to the seizure of Mexico, to our refusal to let those who wanted to separate leave, to our grab for Spain’s colonial empire to our long-standing Colonial Wars in the Caribbean, in Panama, in Vietnam. It’s in our blood, so to speak. If Iraq has oil and we want the oil, why shouldn’t we take it over? It’s no different than Hawaii in 1897 or Texas in 1842 or Alaska in 1868 or Okinawa in 1945. But remember, just as even Bismarck knew that seizing Alsace was wrong in 1870, everyone of those decisions was controversial in its time. There’ve always been anti-imperialists.
Finally, there’s the political morality scale, a more slippery slope. There’s a degree to which disinformation is acceptable in public debate. If, as McKinley said: We needed Hawaii, Midway, Guam as coaling stations for our trade, that’s an issue that can be debated. You can discuss it because you have a real question. If you say “Saddam is the world’s worst dictator and it is our humanitarian neccessity to remove him” again, that’s a debatable theory: But if you say “Saddam threatens the US” or “Saddam was behind 9/11″ or “Everyone waits for all Medical Care in Canada,” or “Rich people pay all the taxes,” those are simply outright lies. You can’t have a debate on them because there are no facts to debate. This is not either left-or-right, but simply a question of desperation to hold onto power. Right now the evidence is that the right is more desperate, possibly because if they lose power, they, like Pinochet, are likely to experience unfortunate endings in court and then jail.
I was starting to formulate a response, but thenarrator covered most of what I wanted to.
The half-full/half-empty and Boy Scout rhetoric is waaaay simplistic and has essentially no bearing on reality. ‘The left’ isn’t about pessimism, any more than ‘the right’ is about optimism. The two poles of the American political spectrum are, in fact, merely punching bags for the other end.
Framing your understanding of this spectrum in terms of optimism and pessimism and Boy Scout idealism ignores the reality of the situation. One could argue that the left is the optimistic end, because they believe that society can make things better for everyone, while the right is pessimistic, because they believe that’s not possible. I don’t want to make that argument; I just want to point out that one reality of politics is spinning the other guy as the pessimist.
ryquestion: (1) If you get your news from the Wall Street Journal you’re getting the Fortune 500 CEO’s opinion of what the world should be like. Unless that’s balanced by an actual news source, you’re in worse shape than if you depend solely on FoxNews. (2) Anything might happen 40 years from now in the Middle East – obviously, 40 years from now Saddam would be out of power no matter what, so if that’s the time frame we’re working in, the war makes less sense than ever. (3) We forget that vast areas of Iraq were not under Saddam’s control before the invasion – both north and south, and we probably forget that it’s the kind of “we know better than everybody else” hubris that has led the US to disaster after disaster for a century (ask Europe how well Woodrow Wilson’s map-making worked for them 20 years after Versailles). So, I find Christian fundamentalists to be every bit the threat to world peace that Islamic fundamentalists are: Can European nations thus march in to overthrow our government? Your friend’s doctrine is the simple, Stalinist, “might makes right.” My question for the Wall Street Journal is this: If might makes right in international law, why isn’t domestic law the same? If I am stronger than you, or have a bigger weapon, why can’t I simply take what you have and/or make you do what I want you to do?
(4) The Israel thing is a hopeless mess, but lets include some history: Imagine a large influx of people moving into, say, North Carolina in 1945 from, say, Poland, who not only decided they wanted to live there but insisted that they had a right to create their own nation there. (Yes, I know this is how America was settled, but stick with me) Would there likely be some resentment among those who already lived in North Carolina? Would there likely be a fight? Now, suppose they succeeded in founding their own government, and through a series of wars, they managed to seize all of North Carolina. But after seizing it they chose to treat those who had not come from Poland as non-citizens forever, denying them the vote, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly. Would that create some problems? Of course it would. Israel’s problem is the “South Africa” problem. They are a minority that controls a majority through military force. And they’re a whiny minority. They use all their weapons but protest immediately if the Palestinians use weapons. They sound (and I say this knowing how bad it sounds) exactly like the Nazi communiques under the General Government of Poland in the 1940s. Anyone who fights them “is a terrorist.” The fact that they are fighting them “proves them to be inferior and incapable of punishment.” I’ll argue this: Had Israel ever offered to pull back to the pre-1967 “green line” (even if they didn’t give back all of old Jerusalem) they would have had peace immediately. If Israel doesn’t want to retreat to that line, then I’ll argue that they should be forced back to the 1948 UN Partition Line, the only internationally recognized boundaries for that nation.
Finally: Why do Islamic Fundamentalists hate the US? Jeez, can we look in the mirror? I know Americans know ZERO history, but c’mon. Start with our Brit allies: the entire Middle Eastern geo-political mess is their invention. Add in the long term exploitation of their region by our oil companies. Add to that our blind support for Israel no matter what Israel does, then pile on the leaders we’ve put in power: from the Shah of Iranto the Taliban to Saddam Hussein, plus the constant disparaging remarks hurled at Moslems by leading Americans. Add in the very slow response to the Bosnia crisis (Bush Jr of course opposed us doing that at all) and now our “oh, that’s fine” response to Abu Ghraib. Why are they terrorists? Because we haven’t bought them enough tanks, jets, and uniforms to allow them to fight us the “traditional” way.
This is reposted from my comment to my own blog:
Dan, I understand your argument, and I understood it on your ‘blog, too. It’s just that you’re wrong.
No, seriously. The pessimist-versus-Boy-Scouts model just doesn’t fit. ‘The right’ doesn’t see itself as making the world a better place. ‘The right’ has adopted a sort of self-delusion, where it can tell itself a fantasy story about democracy in the middle east (currently) or fighting communism (in the past), when what’s really going on is a power (economic, financial, and geopolitical) grab. Everybody knows it. No one denies it. They just tell themselves that it’s a good thing the world is rid of Saddam Hussein and their internal dialogue stops there. Conveniently. (Forgetting for the moment that supporting Hussein in the past meant fighting communism, whereas fighting Hussein in the present means supporting democracy.)
‘The left’ is, at this moment in American history, everyone who isn’t telling themselves this kind of delusional story. That’s the simplest taxonomy, and it’s the one ‘the right’ has set up for itself. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are mostly meaningless in their general useage, so it doesn’t mean much to even try and define them. My gripe is with anyone even trying to say that the Iraq war was somehow as morally defensible as anything having to do with Boy Scout idealism.
I have to go with Homer on this. The right has crafted a delusional tale to encourage theft. We got rid of Saddam for the same reason we “brought civilization” to the Hawaiians, seized 1/3 of Mexico, killed the Sioux, slaughtered Filipinos. If that’s a boy scout metaphor, it’s the same as “I stole his wallet because it was too heavy for him to carry.” But “left” and “right” aren’t the question: Napolean and Napolean III were “left” by all measurements on these issues, but their prime motivation was not bringing democracy to the Rhine or Moscow or Mexico City. Teddy Roosevelt was clearly “left” domestically but the best interests of the Panamanians wasn’t what drove him.
The “Boy Scout” diplomacy model might have been Carter’s intention (not in execution though), the idea that our foreign policy would be predicated on what was best for the people of other countries. That’s rare: FDR on Iran and telling the French to get out of Indochina, Eisenhower on Egypt, Carter on Panama. Not many other examples.
The idea that wealth is less distributed now than in the Middle Ages is just laughable. Peasants used to work as serfs (slaves) on noble lands. Talk about your outright lies. And it’s funny, but I can only recall of maybe one or two capitalist economies that have fell to mob rule, and those were incredibly corrupt. It seems to me it has been the monarchs, dictators, and the collectivists who have had much more of a problem with this phenomenon than capitalism ever has. And it’s because most people realize that in capitalist economies, no one is holding them down. No one is constantly ordering them around at gunpoint. Everyone has a chance, some better chances than others, to do well for themselves.
And perhaps I’ve been asleep, and this really is imperialism we’re practicing in Iraq, but if so, it has to be worst, most inefficient spectacle I’ve ever seen. What are these hundreds of billions for “infrastructure,” for schools, government. Why on earth are we trying build up an Iraqi army? How does the question of prisoners even come up, why have we not simply summarily executed all who have opposed us? Why didn’t we bomb the hell out of Fallujah? Forget guided missiles, let’s use some unguided ones and do as much damage as possible. Oh wait, we aren’t really doing any of that are we. Calling Iraq imperialism is like saying what we did in Germany and Japan after WWII is imperialism.
The only thing anyone has a right to ask of us is that we leave it in a better state than when we came. I agree that the Boy Scout model isn’t a good one, only because it assumes we are doing good works for the sake of being good. This is not true, nor should it be true. When I want to donate to charity, I’ll do it myself. We, as well as the Iraqis, benefit from a stable democratic Iraq. When was the last time you saw a Japanese suicide bomber? Or one from South Korea?
“They just tell themselves that it’s a good thing the world is rid of Saddam Hussein and their internal dialogue stops there. Conveniently. (Forgetting for the moment that supporting Hussein in the past meant fighting communism, whereas fighting Hussein in the present means supporting democracy.)”
I don’t understand this argument at all. Are you saying it’s a bad thing the world is without Saddam? Does our former relationship with Saddam change that? Was Saddam not better than a Communist Iraq? Does fighting Saddam at present not mean supporting ademocracy? To me the answer is quite clear on all counts, and I have yet to see anyone make an argument otherwise, aside from the kind of general insults of behaving in our own self interests, as if we should instead ignore our own interests and behave in someone else’s interests.
Regarding Muslim hatred of the US, to cite Middle Eastern scholar Amir Taheri, there are currently 22 conflicts around the world involving Muslims, most of which are barely known because they do not provide any opportunity to foment anti-US hatreds.
thatliberalmedia is completely asleep. Of course colonialism is stupid and inefficient. Gee, what did the Brits spend all that money on in India? Why did they blow their treasury defending a bunch of little North American colonies from the French in 1750s? Just because the US government spent a ton of money in the Philipines didn’t make them less of a colony. Nor did the fact that the Romans built roads in Britain make that any less a part of their Empire.
It’s also funny how thatliberalmedia, who endlessly rails against all those socialist states around the world, can’t figure out how they became socialist. My guess? They dumped capitalism: In Germany, in France, in Italy, across Scandanavia. Over the past 130 years the movement of the planet has been fairly steadily toward “German-style” socialism.
In order to dump capitalism, one must be capitalist in the first place, something certainly not true of Scandinavia for one, and arguably not true of either France or Italy. While Old Europe may be moving towards socialism and decline, East Asia is thriving by adopting capitalist policies.
France wasn’t capitalist in 1900? Not in 1925? Sweden wasn’t in the heyday of Alfred Nobel? Wow, with every post my disappointment with the Johns Hopkins education grows. I was sure that was a decent college, but I guess…