Half Changed World

Let me start with full disclosure: I went to college with Peter Beinart, the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win The War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  We were friendly acquaintances, but not close, and I didn’t stay in touch with him.  I heard about him, of course, when he was named editor at the New Republic just six years after graduation and have followed his career from afar with a combination of wonder, admiration and envy.  And then last week, with his book in my bag, I ran into him waiting for an elevator.  Go figure.

The Good Fight is a frustrating book.  In the acknowledgements, Beinart thanks Marty Peretz who "saved me from an unpromising academic career."  In the first third of the book, he seems to have disinterred all the research he had done and tried to put it to good use.  He argues that liberals need to reclaim the strong international outlook they had in the late 1940s and 50s, the legacy of the anti-communist Democrats who founded Americans for Democratic Action.  Unfortunately, these chapters are pretty dull going.  Beinart tells the story of the founding of the ADA, how its values came to dominate the Democratic party and then declined, in chronological order, getting bogged down in more detail than is needed, but not enough to bring the huge cast of characters to life. 

What makes this frustrating is that I think Beinart’s basic idea is right.  He argues that Democrats need to articulate a vision for foreign policy that is neither knee-jerk isolationist nor Republican-lite.  Without such a vision, what we wind up with is muddled messes like Kerry’s attempt to explain why he voted for the war before he voted against it (or was it the other way around)?  The anti-war wing of the party has an easier job articulating its position, but doesn’t stand up effectively against the evil of the world.  Beinart argues that Democrats are so (justifiably) furious about the way that Bush has abused the idea of a war on terror that they often seem to forget that there really is a terrorist threat that needs to be combated.

I’m not entirely convinced by Beinart’s overall theory of the righteous war (his ideal war seems to be a cross between the first Iraq war and the intervention in Kosovo) but his articulation of what’s wrong with the Bush approach — and how we could do better — is far better than I’ve heard from any elected official:

"George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project.  He has strippped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak.  And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak.  He has denied America’s capacity for evil, in an effort to bolster America’s faith in itself.  And, in the process, America has committed terrible misdeeds, which have sapped the world’s faith in us — and ultimately, our faith in ourslelves."

This post started bouncing around in my head in response to Andrea’s comments on my post about Eating local and the environment.  And then she posted a long piece today in which she amplified her frustration at with the idea that we’re going to change the world through consumer activism.  So you might want to stop over there first.  But the key paragraph (I think) in her essay is this:

Being a good consumer is a minuscule part of the overall puzzle. Helping to make the world a better place, if that’s something you want to do, is not something you can buy. (I find it so depressing that even activism these days has become a shopping spree, something you do so you can get the t-shirt or the mug or the plastic bracelet, another opportunity to aquire more meaningless stuff we don’t need, as if the whole idea of doing something that won’t add to our collections is simply incomprehensible. Do we really need to be bought off with another cotton shopping bag?) You have to be a citizen.

I think Andrea’s over-emphasizing the contrast between being a citizen and a consumer, and under-emphasizing the contrast between acting on your own and trying to engage others, regardless of whether you’re acting as a citizen or a consumer.  Going by yourself into the voting booth on election day and voting for the candidate of your choice is as symbolic — and practically ineffective — as choosing to buy a locally grown heirloom tomato instead of one that’s been genetically engineered for pest resistance and durability and shipped across the country.  Except that the locally grown tomato probably tastes good.  Both activities are only likely to change the world if you convince a bunch of other people to do them too.

Without dismissing the importance of political action, I actually think collective consumer action is more likely to have an impact, at least in the short-run, and at least in the U.S.  Because having 20 percent of the public support the environment in the voting booth gets you a lot of speeches in the Congressional Record, and that’s about it.  The system is so winner-take-all that even a substantial minority has very little opportunity to move public policy.  But if you changed the consumption patterns of 20 percent of the public, that’s a pretty big niche market.

And I believe that shifts in demand do change what’s available, even in the housing market.  At least in the Washington DC area, they’re literally pulling down small older houses to put up bigger ones — McMansions, as they’re not so fondly referred to.  And, from everything I’ve read, the consumer pressure on McDonalds to improve the way the cows/beef it buys was treated had a dramatic impact on the entire slaughterhouse industry in the US. 

A while back, landismom had a post in which she explained that the essence of political organizing is giving people Anger, Hope, and a Plan.  Andrea’s worried that people aren’t angry enough.  I think there’s a real risk of pushing people right past anger and into despair, which is as much the enemy of action as indifference.

How do I put this?  If Andrea is right, and a sustainable environment really requires North Americans to voluntarily (either as individuals, or by voting in governments that would mandate it) reduce our consumption by more than 50 percent before we have no choice about it, then I hope the cockroaches learn to write poetry.  I recognize that pretty much everything that we can do as consumers is an exercise in slowing down our race to the brink, rather than in changing the overall trajectory.  But if it buys us just a few more decades between when we (as a society) recognize that our current path is unsustainable and when it’s too late to do anything about it, that could make all the difference.

I’ve got one week to go before I leave my job.  I’m going to miss the people I work with, but I’ll admit that it’s with great delight that I’ve been deleting, unread, all the emails about the training on the new financial management system that’s going to be rolled out this summer.

In general, the news this week has made it easy to walk away from my job without regret.  From the Secretary of HUD bragging about illegally denying a contract on the basis of the CEO’s political choices (via Brad DeLong), to Agriculture Department politicos being instructed to work positive references to Iraq into all their speeches (via the NYTimes), it’s pretty appalling.  I can’t tell you how demoralizing all this crap is to federal workers.  I guess that I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t been asked to cross any lines that would have made me unable to face myself in the mirror.

Today’s book is Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos).  It’s their breezy take on why the Democrats can’t win elections, in spite of being demonstrably better at governing.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in the NY Times, Jerome and Kos deliberately don’t discuss "message" — they argue that we need to stop trying to achieve the perfect platform, and start focusing on winning some elections.  (Peter, of course, has a book coming out this summer in which he argues that Democrats should be talking about a liberal foreign policy agenda.)

Parts of their analysis are totally on target — the incestuous relationship between the party committees that control the money and don’t take candidates seriously unless they hire the "right" (insider) consulting firms, the failure of progressive organizations to pay their employees enough to make them a career path for all but the most dedicated (or independently wealthy).  And I liked their argument that campaign dollars don’t have to be a limited resource that need to be hoarded for the most competitive races — by running serious candidates in even less competitive districts, more people are energized to participate and contribute, expanding the pot.

But the heart of the book is, I think, their claim that the biggest problem of the Democratic party is single-interest groups like environmentalists, the labor movement, and pro-choice activists.  They argue that these groups give Republicans easy targets, and hold candidates hostage to ideological purity.  The explicit comparision is to the Religious Right, which has used its power to support Republicans for the long-term benefits, even when their issues weren’t front and center in a given campaign.  They are particularly angry at pro-choice groups which have mobilized against pro-life Democrats. 

The irony of the argument is that Jerome and Kos are generally opposed to the DNC and other party insiders coming down from above and trying to annoint a candidate.  And, my reading of the situation is that NOW and NARAL have only really dug in their heels against candidates when they feel like the Democratic party leadership is trying to annoint a anti-choice candidate before the primary (cf Pennsylvania).  Obviously, they’re not happy when a pro-life Democrat wins the primary, but they generally just quietly look away, and recognize that the Democrat is usually still the better candidate on their issues.  But they’re trying to draw a line in the sand and say that they’re not going to acquiese when someone else tries to play kingmaker and expects them to fall quietly in line.  In other words, they’re not going to be the labor movement, which has loyally provided the muscle for Democratic campaigns for decades and gotten essentially bupkes in return. (Jerome and Kos also don’t seem to notice the irony when they proudly recount how bloggers knocked Tim Roemer out of contention for DNC chair because of his pro-life stance.)

The conventional wisdom seems to be that contested primaries are a bad thing, by draining resources from the general election, and causing the victor to be tarnished.  I’m not entirely convinced of that, for some of the same reasons that Jerome and Kos argue that Dems ought to be fighting in more districts.  I think primaries can draw more attention to campaigns, expand the pool of interested people and reduce public cynicism about elections.  The key is to figure out how to have real primaries and then still be able to talk to each other at the end of the day.

The Republicans seem to be better at this than Democrats these days, but I don’t think it’s because they have a magic strategy that the Dems are missing.  I think it’s something about being the majority party.  When you’re in charge and control the goodies, people fall into line even if they’re furious.  When you don’t have goodies to give out, the backbiting begins.

Other interesting reviews of the book:

• Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly
• Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise (particularly addressing the abortion issue)

My favorite quote in this morning’s Washington Post article on the politics of immigration is the one from Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza:  "I’m not sure anybody totally understands this phenomenon. . . . But we are happily stunned."  NCLR is the biggest Latino advocacy organization in the country, and I’m sure they’d love to claim credit for the mass demonstrations against the House’s harsh anti-immigrant bill, but they can’t.  It seems to be a combination of Spanish-language radio, churches (and the Church), charitable organizations, and genuine grassroots activism.

Meanwhile one of my friends is wondering whether her Irish-Jewish son is going to fail 8th grade because he’s been joining in the mass student protests.  (Arlington schools have been taking a hard line, saying that absences will be treated as unexcused even with parental permission.)   She’s simultaneously worried about him and proud as can be that he’s standing up for what he believes in.  And, by all accounts, these protests were totally student-organized, by IM, mySpace, and cell phones, with no adult involvement.

I’ll be looking closely at the deal that Senate leaders cut today to see what I think of it.  I think there are a lot of valid competing desires — wanting to be a land of opportunity, but not wanting to depress low-skilled workers wages’, wanting to minimize disruption in people’s lives, but not wanting to penalize those who played by the rules.

And I’m thinking about trying to juggle my schedule for Monday afternoon so I can join the march on the mall.

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Today’s book is a collection of essays by Marjorie Williams, called The Woman at the Washington Zoo (after a poem by Randall Jarrell).  The subtitle is "Writings on politics, family, and fate" and the book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the three topics — political profiles, columns that appeared in the Washington Post and in Slate, and a set of essays about her diagnosis (in her mid 40s) with terminal liver cancer and how she lived with the disease and the knowledge of her impending death.

The political profiles are elegantly written, but seem like period pieces at this point, full of references that need to be footnoted to explain them to contemporary readers.  Even the joint profile of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, written just after the 2000 election, seems like a postcard from long ago. 

In her essays and columns, Williams writes about many of the issues that I cover in this blog.  She calls feminists to task for letting Bill Clinton off the hook for his pattern of sexual harassment, writes about the decline of the "political wife," and is dismayed by the inclusion of a makeup "advertorial" in Ms Magazine.  She reviews books likeThe Nuture Assumption, The Baby Boon, and The Marriage Sabbatical.  She is equally scornful of Real Simple and politicians’ false apologies.

Williams is not a soothing writer. In a review of I Don’t Know How She Does It (which she liked a lot more than I did), she writes:

"American women — can-do daughters of their country’s optimism — still secretly nourish a poignant hope that there is An Answer to the dilemna of work and family.  On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

But unlike Caitlin Flanagan, Williams is never smug.  She never conveys any sense that she thinks she’s got things any more figured out than anyone else, or that her choices are superior to yours.  She admits that as the mother of young children, she enjoyed the time to herself that she got when she was commuting back and forth from Washington to New Jersey to visit her dying mother.

I think my favorite essay from the book is her previously unpublished memoir of her mother.  She unblinkingly writes about the joys and costs of her mother’s traditionally female path of service and reflected glory, and of her own ambivalence toward it:

"I never knew which would be worse: to be right or wrong in my hunch that her life was an unhappy one.  I suppose I will always wonder if it is self-justification that makes me see tragedy in the perfection of her kitchen.  I only know that, frozen in the passage between my mother’s mooon and my father’s sun, I made my choice many years ago.  but, although I always craved the gaudy satisfaction of my father’s sun, it is my mother’s life that fascinates me now.  And it is my love for her that both comforts and pains me more.  In life, I shrank from what I took (rightly, I still think) to be her judgments of me, her anger at my repudiation of the bargains she made.  Now, I dream about her often, and usually I wake from them with delight….

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear."

Today’s book is Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  He wrote it shortly after he graduated from law school, when he attracted attention as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and it was reprinted in 2004 after his stunning keynote address at the Democratic Convention. 

I was a big fan of Obama before reading this book (see here and here), and it confirmed my enthusiasm for him.  He writes eloquently of the contradictions of his life — a black man whose only family as a child was white (he only met his father once, when he was 10, and didn’t meet the Kenyan side of his family until he was an adult), a community organizer who had instant credibility in inner city Chicago because of the color of his skin, but who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.  And he recognizes the contradictions of others’ lives, but points them out without judgement.  He’s capable of both acknowledging how important Harold Washington’s election as Mayor of Chicago was to many African-Americans and of pointing out how little business as usual changed as a result.

The American Prospect has a cover story on Obama this month.  It notes that he has been — deliberately — low profile in the Senate over the past year, but that he clearly dreams big.  The part I found most interesting was about his ability to disagree with people, to vote against them, and still leave them feeling respected and listened to.  That’s a rare, and powerful, talent.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Obama does when he’s no longer worrying about stepping on his colleagues’ toes.

This evening, NPR had a story with the headline "Strange Bedfellows Join Forces on Immigration Bill," on how SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) is joining with the Chamber of Commerce to support a "guest worker" program — a program that would allow non-citizens to come the US to work legally without putting them on the path toward citizenship.  Think H1B visas, but for low-skilled workers.

This made my jaw drop.  As NPR noted, unions have traditionally looked with suspicion on immigrants, fearing that they would impose downward pressure on wages.  (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on two obscure 19th century labor activists, and it was amazing how modern their concerns about immigration and about technological displacement sounded.)  More recently, unions have recognized that cracking down on illegal immigrants once they’re in the country (as opposed to stopping them from entering in the first place) mostly serves to make them even less able to stand up to unscrupulous employers than they’d be otherwise.  As the Drum Major Institute notes in its recent report on immigration policy:

"Because undocumented workers are under constant threat of deportation, they cannot effectively assert their rights in the marketplace… So U.S.-born workers are left to either accept the same diminished wages and degraded working conditions as immigrants living under threat of deportation or be shut out of whole industries… The solution is to eliminate the second-class labor market in this two-tiered system and allow immigrants and U.S.-born workers to compete on an even playing field by allowing immigrants — including undocumented workers — equal labor rights."

Unions have usually looked with great suspicion on guest worker programs, fearing that they will institutionalize a two-tier labor market.  I’d love to hear more about what made SEIU decide to sign on.

I will admit to feeling gleeful at the fall of Jack Abramoff, and the likelihood that he’s going to take Tom DeLay down with him.  But the extent of the corruption that is being revealed is appalling.  You know things are screwed up when I’m agreeing with Newt Gingrich:

"You can’t have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member (of Congress) or a corrupt staff. This was a team effort."

Maybe I’m naive, but I’m actually surprised by the number of people who had their faces in the trough.  The charges on which DeLay was indicted in Texas were about gaining political power — laundering contributions to influence state elections in order to control the redistricting process — not about lining his individual pockets.  I wouldn’t put anything past this crowd in terms of doing what it takes to stay in power, but I didn’t think they were this blatantly and personally greedy.

And, no, I don’t consider all those sweetheart deals with Halliburton to be evidence of the contrary.  Those are what Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would have called "honest graft" — someone’s going to get the contract, so it might as well be your friends.  Without defending that practice, for me at least, there’s something qualitatively different — and worse — about trading favors for legislation. 

As a federal employee, one of the most frustrating thing about this corruption is that the federal government is deliberately inefficient in order to avoid patronage.  The goal of procurement isn’t just to get a good product at a decent price, but to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to be the one to provide it.  Businesses routinely go back to the same contractors again and again, building relationships over time — we have to recompete our contracts and start from scratch every couple of years.  And don’t get me started on the hiring process. 

On December 29th, I was one of the few people at work in my office.  My boss asked me to return a call to someone who had left a message asking about eligibility standards for heating assistance programs.  I wound up listening to her for 20 minutes as she ranted about unresponsive politicians and how do we change these policies.  I pretty much had to say "uh huh" and "I hear you" and "I have some personal opinions on that, Ma’am, but I don’t think it’s my job to share them."

Today was not a good day.

The Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill.  It was so close they had to fly Cheney back from Pakistan to cast the tie-breaking vote, but it passed.  And the Dems have been able to delay it by a parliamentary maneuver that forces the House to vote on it again, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the miracle that stops it from being enacted.

The bill has some pretty lousy welfare provisions — a few of them better than what Congress has been talking about, but some of them worse.  And, from my selfish point of view, it’s incredibly frustrating to have Congress throw out everything that we’ve painstakingly tried to improve over the past four years, and stick in some language that no one has ever seen before.  It really feels like the main thing I’ve spent my time at work on over the past several years has just been a total waste.

We got a panicked call this afternoon from a Senate staffer because the lobbying office from her state was calling furious about the TANF section and she wanted talking points.  All of our reaction (which we didn’t say out loud) was "And you didn’t realize that this was going to piss the states off?"

And then I got home and opened up a rejection letter from a job that I had pinned high hopes on.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  For our ancestors, who didn’t have electric lights, it was a terrible time, "the dark midwinter." But it’s also a season of hope, because the days are finally going to start getting longer.  You can understand why almost every northern hemisphere culture has a festival that involves lots of lights

But today, I’m thinking of Frontier House, and the huge pile of wood that the families chopped preparing for the winter.  And the expert took one look at it, and said "it might last until January."  I know there are seasons and cycles to everything, and that the darkness won’t last forever.  But I’m feeling like I don’t have enough wood stocked to make it through until spring.

Ok, that’s way too dramatic.  I have a terrific family.  I don’t have any health issues more serious than a runny nose.  I have a job that doesn’t eat my life, that pays well enough for T. to stay home, with great colleagues who appreciate me.  I have a wonderful group of readers of this blog.  (According to Typepad’s stats, I got my 100,000th hit today.  Statcounter’s numbers are higher — I’m not sure which to believe.)  But I’m feeling pretty darn down.