It’s Always Sunny on Capitol Hill!

On the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the “Gang” goes through one petty scheme after another. What makes the show so amusing isn’t only that their schemes are so detached from anything recognizable as reality, but that their schemes are so weirdly disinterested — they’re scheming solely for the sake of scheming. I think that something similar is at work among centrist senators. The real goal of holding up the negotiations, making random “moderate” demands, etc., is simply to have an important, king-making role — in short, it’s scheming for its own sake. Even the oft-cited baseline goal of remaining electable is something of a ruse, since incumbent senators usually have a lot of leeway (see Joe Lieberman, from the liberal state of Connecticut). The schemes aren’t aimed at reelection — rather, reelection is aimed at the continued ability to scheme.

This is really the only possible explanation, because it’s painfully clear that they have no principles or values that they’re trying to advance. It’s a difficult conclusion to bear, since it means that our fate is essentially being determined by sociopaths, but I think we sensed that all along anyway.

A typical conservative technique

1. Start with some overly formal principle that conservatives are said to violate.

2. Come up with some contrived reason that liberals actually violate the principle to the same degree, or even more.
3. …
4. Profit!

Conservative social policy

We all know conservatives who are simultaneously very generous with their own time and money in charity work and very suspicious of any government social spending. The reasoning behind this stance seems to be as follows. They start with the position that charitable giving is a moral act. They also recognize the principle that no coerced act can be moral — an act can only be moral if it is done freely.

So far, so good. Then they reason that if the state is forcing people to contribute to charity, via taxation, then their donation is not a moral act. In fact, people are being deprived of the opportunity to behave morally, because they have less money to donate freely. What’s worse, in the hypothetical scenario where the government managed to completely eradicate poverty, an entire class of moral acts would become redundant. Therefore, it’s better to leave dealing with poverty to individual generosity rather than developing a system that deprives people of the chance to act morally.

I leave the assessment of this moral outlook as an exercise for the reader.

A small amount of gratitude

Returning to the topic of Obama’s brainwashing speech tomorrow, a thought occurred to me: it seems likely that schools with large black populations are more likely to show the speech. In fact, it doesn’t strain credulity to assume that Obama knew that and viewed the nationwide speech as a way to especially home in on that audience as a “good role model,” etc. Yet I have not heard of mainstream conservative figures following this chain of reasoning and arguing that Obama is specifically trying to raise up a new generation of black militants.

I was going to say that perhaps we should be grateful that even in this, the stupidest of all stupid right-wing bullshit hissy-fits, they have not stooped to such a low level — but now it occurs to me that it might be coded into the Hitler references, especially in light of the attacks on Sotomayor’s supposed “racism” against white people.

Joking about Obama: Or, A gift to conservatives

By now it’s well-known that conservatives have decided that the way to react to Obama’s speech telling children to stay in school and work hard is to compare him to Hitler. To many people, that reaction seems… exaggerated. For conservatives who want to say something negative about Obama’s completely innocuous speech and yet don’t want to sound stupid, I therefore offer the following joke, based on Obama-as-Chicago-Democrat rather than Obama-as-Nazi: “I’ve heard he’s going to give the kids step-by-step instructions for filling out their absentee ballots.” See, because then he’d be engaging in voter fraud, for which Chicago is famous. Funny!

Death panels

Over at Richard’s blog, I occasionally discuss political issues with well-intentioned individuals whose views unfortunately combine libertarianism and paranoia. I’ve noticed that no matter how often I repeat certain well-known facts — for instance, that literally no one is proposing making it illegal to purchase health care above and beyond what their insurance (public or private) provides — they keep repeating falsehoods.

Thus, I have decided to take the opposite approach. Rather than attempting to disprove their paranoid fantasies, I’ve been pushing them even further. For instance, on the question of “death panels,” I’ve been acting as though of course liberals support this, and in fact claiming that the current “death panel” proposal is a cowardly, watered-down compromise. Here are a couple comments in that vein:

• Personally, I’m upset that they haven’t expanded the death panel program more. [response] Well, what I’m thinking is — why limit the death panels to people who need medical treatment? That’s discrimination.
• The death panels, unfortunately, are not likely to get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to break a fillibuster — something my fellow ultra-liberals are all mourning. I’ve actually started a petition that would require everyone to report to one of the death panels every three years, with those who failed being sent to work camps in North Dakota. I talked to Ezekiel Emmanuel about this, and he thought it was wonderful and awesome and said that Obama had floated the idea to him but thought the American public wasn’t ready for it yet.

My goal is to create a kind of short circuit. In reality, though, they’ll probably just decide that I’m a patronizing asshole — just like when I used a “facts and information”-based approach. I remain convinced, however, that something other than “argument” is needed with people stuck in such paranoid fantasies, some kind of jolt that can wake them up to a point where genuine reasoning becomes possible. Conversion rather than convincing.

Revolution

Every so often, someone will wonder why the American people seem so disinclined to engage in the kind of paralyzing street demonstrations that occur in other countries. I think that to a certain extent, it stems from a recognition that our political institutions are so moribund and non-responsive that the returns would be negligible. Let’s say that peaceful demonstrators shut down every major city for a month — at that point, we might reasonably suspect that one or two “centrist” senators would vote for cloture on a bill they’d otherwise have fillibustered. Armed revolution would only get us as far as the moderate, sensible reforms that everyone has known about for forty years but we never get around to implementing. And somehow even outright Stalinism would fail to get us all the way to single-payer health care.

A question about politics

It’s largely taken for granted that American politicians tend to cozy up with the rich. My question is why. On a lower level, it makes sense as a strategic move, because wealthy benefactors can help you move up the chain. But at higher levels of government, it doesn’t make sense to me. Politics is supposed to be the pursuit of power, right? (Maybe this is the Chicago influence talking, but bear with me.) Once you reach a certain level of power, however, it seems foolish to squander your resources making other people more powerful, which is what the “make the rich richer” policy effectively does. Would you not rather want to deprive people of power?

For instance, with the big banks: the Obama administration had at its disposal the option not simply of going against the wishes of the powerful “big bankster” interest group, but of effectively destroying it through nationalizing the huge troubled firms. Or with single-payer health care: why worry so much about pleasing the insurance companies when you have the option of depriving them of all power or influence by putting them out of business? This question seems especially pertinent in the case of the president, where you can basically say, “Okay, listen, I have control over a fucking army — what do you have? You have a ton of money, do you? Well, I get to hire and fire the guy who prints the money.”

A wise Latina woman

Though Ta-Nehisi Coates disagrees, I think Sotomayor’s Very Controversial Statement here is correct:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Coates objects mainly to the unified concept of whiteness underlying the statement, and that’s fair enough, but I think it misses an important point: non-whites and non-males really are in an advantageous position when it comes to discerning injustice. Everyone from outside the mainstream of culture has to learn to communicate with that mainstream, but they also have a critical distance due to their lack of “belonging” to it. And unless we’re to assume that she’s either an idiot or a straightforward racist, we have to recognize that Sotomayor’s “white male” refers to that mainstream, not to some actual person who’s supposed to fully embody it. Coates is right that no particular white male fully fits into the “white” category — but that’s exactly what makes it so powerful, what makes it a point of identification (rather than automatic identity).

Someone who has to figure out a way to negotiate her existence vis-a-vis an identity she knows for a fact she is never going to be able to fully assume is going to have a richer understanding of that identity than someone who’s anxiously trying to fill that role in the (false) belief that he actually can. On the other side, a white male fighting for justice on behalf of those excluded from the mainstream identity is going to have his work cut out for him fighting against the inertial force of that identity — he can always fall back on white privilege, and so if the fight fails, he will be “fine.” That makes a huge difference, a much more important and powerful difference than the differences in experience among males whose skin color or ethnic origin puts them in the category of “white.”

Gay marriage cap-and-trade

The California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8 but allowed the existing gay marriages to stand. The question that arises is what happens when, as is virtually inevitable, one of the gay married couples decides to divorce. On the one hand, they will, you know, want to get divorced on a personal level. On the other hand, however, they will probably feel like they’re betraying the cause by reducing the number of gay people who are legally married.

For this reason, I propose that the California Supreme Court issue a supplemental ruling implementing a gay marriage cap and trade system. The total number of gay marriages in the state is capped at whatever number happened to exist presently. Once one of those marriages is dissolved, either through death or divorce, it opens up a new slot that can be auctioned off to help California’s budget crisis.