I just yesterday got around to reading the big Atlantic cover story. Well worth your time–Fallows seems to be buddies with just about every interesting public intellectual in the country and canvasses a wide range of views on what ails us. His overall narrative (American culture–in better shape than you thought; American politics–not so much) is pretty persuasive.
Category: Politics
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The end of the affair
The flirtation between liberals and libertarians that arose out of shared anti-Bush animus is over, according to Ed Kilgore. The causes are an economically interventionist Democratic administration and the rightward pull exerted on libertarians by Tea Partyism.
Not to mention, this Jonathan Chait piece that Kilgore links to seems like the definitive refutation of “liberaltarianism” as a political philosophy. (No ideology with a name that ugly deserves to live anyway.)
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Mavericky!
Interesting spin offered by the WaPo on Sarah Palin’s reported $100,000 speaking fee for her Tea Party speech:
By delivering a paid keynote address at a convention other politicians had avoided because of allegations of profiteering, Palin displayed one of the traits that has electrified her anti-establishment followers: a talent for persistently and defiantly flouting the conventional rules of politics.
Because nothing says "flouting the conventional rules of politics" like raking in big cash.
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“A gimmick that won’t solve our economic problems”
Some on-point reactions to the President’s announced “spending freeze”: Andrew Leonard on the anti-stimulus and Glenn Greenwald on the sanctity of military spending.
UPDATE: More analysis from Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias.
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Free speech and corporate personhood
I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t make an informed comment on the legal aspects of yesterday’s SCOTUS campaign-finance ruling (though I know plenty of lawyers who are likely disgusted with it, including some former Supreme Court clerks). But what I find wrong with it is that it contradicts the heart of one of the most compelling argument for free speech.
J.S. Mill, the grand-daddy of liberalism, argued for freedom of speech on many grounds, but one of the most important was that we can only arrive at the truth if all points of view get a vigorous airing. We need to be able to change course, to correct our views, by being exposed to a variety of competing truth-claims. This is an inherent part of what it means to be a human being realizing our nature as what Mill called “progressive beings.” By engaging in dialogue and argument with competing views, we may come to see that we were mistaken, or that we had overlooked part of the truth. At the very least, we’ll be strengthened in our own views by testing them against counter-arguments.
However, given this view of why free speech matters, the absurdity of treating corporations as “persons” with free speech rights becomes readily apparent. A corporation is not a “progressive being” that can correct its errors and come to a greater comprehension of the truth. It is an entity driven entirely by the profit motive. A corporation will propagate a particular message only to the extent that the message serves that interest: it’s not concerned with the truth.
You might say by way of rejoinder that it doesn’t matter whether corporations are interested in pursuing the truth. All that matters is that people are exposed to the widest possible range of ideas, regardless of their provenance. But this ignores that fact that, with unlimited corporate political “speech” we are no longer working with the model of a conversation aimed at truth, but with an attempt to overwhelm and drown competing points of view with a sheer volume of ads, propaganda, etc. The ideal of rational discussion is pretty much explicitly repudiated by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with whatever “truths” best serve their interests. Free speech, by its very nature, presupposes something like reasoned dialogue; that’s what distinguishes it from propaganda, advertising, and similar endeavors, which are not good-faith arguments, but are aimed at bypassing rational dialogue.
Corporations aren’t persons: they’re money-making enterprises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but their interests should be subordinated to and circumscribed by those of actual persons.
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“I hate the government” is not a coherent ideology
I’m not a libertarian, but libertarians do have some decent ideas, and if they followed the advice in this article they might have a better shot at implementing some of them.
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What’s wrong with the filibuster
The clearest case I’ve seen for why a de facto supermajority requirement for passing ordinary legislation is wrong, undemocratic, and unconstitutional.
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Why health care reform has the shape it does
Paul Krugman, explaining how the various pieces of the health-care reform bill tie together and why splitting it into discrete measures wouldn’t work. (E.g., requiring insurance companies not to deny coverage implies the need for an individual mandate and subsidies.)
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The call strategy
Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart offers a sympathetic, yet not uncritical, analysis of President Obama’s war strategy. For my part, I remain skeptical: I was initially supportive of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which I thought amply justified, but over time the justification for staying on in a nation-building capacity seemed increasingly elusive. Nevertheless, I hope that Stewart is right that a limited mission could yield real benefits for both the US and the Afghan people and that the President is shifting US policy away from “extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine” and toward the “responsible exercise of limted power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty.”
A Thinking Reed 