Fearing Democracy

October 12, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Let’s give Michelle Bachman her due. She speaks her mind. She also speaks the minds of other Republicans who won’t: Her words are what oft was thought but ne’er so outrageously expressed.

Yes, she likened Obamacare to crack.

President Obama can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care.

Some keen-eared liberals detected subtle racist overtones in that metaphor. Heavens no. I’m sure Rep. Bachman’s intentions were pure. But let us ignore the possibly offensive metaphor and look at the substance of what she said.  After all, her idea, even without that metaphor, is something you can hear in many Republican hangouts. 

Taken at face value, her statement is saying that in a democracy, the people cannot be trusted.

 Because, once they enroll millions of more individual Americans it will be virtually impossible for us to pull these benefits back from people.
All they want to do is buy love from people by giving them massive government subsidies.

What she’s saying is this: If the government does something that is overwhelmingly popular with a majority of the people, it will be impossible to undo that policy using democratic means.

It may seem odd, at least to those of us raised on an ideology of democracy, that there’s a danger in the government enacting programs that people like. But that seems to be what Bachman and other Republicans fear.  Their worst nightmare is that once Obamacare is fully implemented, it will be successful; people will like it, and they will vote for the party that created that program. 

That fear about the electoral consequences of a successful Obamacare is overblown if not downright incorrect. But that fear does reveal a deep distrust of democracy and of ordinary voters. 

The Redskins — No Offense

October 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Redskins have been in the news lately  – on the front page of this morning’s Times, for example –  and not for their prowess on the gridiron (they are 1-3 on the season). It’s their name. Many native Americans find it offensive, understandably so.  “Redskins” was not a name they chose. It was a label invented by the European-Americans who took their land and slaughtered them in numbers that today would be considered genocide.

President Obama offered the most tepid hint of criticism of the name. He did not say they should change their name. He said that if he owned the team, he would “think about” changing the name. But that was enough for non-Indians to dismiss the idea as yet one more instance of “political correctness.”

Defenders of the name also argue that the name is not intended to be offensive,* and besides, a survey shows that most Americans are not bothered by it.  I would guess that most Americans also have no problem with the Cleveland Indians logo, another sports emblem that real Indians find offensive.
In response the National Congress of American Indians offers these possibilities.  The Cleveland cap is the real thing. The other two are imagined variations on the same theme.

The pro-Redskins arguments could also apply here. The New York Jews and San Francisco Chinamen and their logos are not intended to offend, and a survey would probably find a majority of Americans untroubled by these names and logos.  And those who do object are just victims of “the tyranny of political correctness.”  This last phrase comes from a tweet by Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III, an African American.  His response seems to make all the more relevant the suggestion of years ago by Russell Means of the AIM: “Why don’t they call them The Washington Niggers?”

HT for the hats: Max

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* Football fans of a certain age may remember Washington’s running back John Riggins, who had a few good seasons but is most remembered for his comment at a 1985 National Press Club dinner. He was seated next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and he was drunk. He passed out, slid to the floor, and slept  through Vice-President’s Bush’s speech. But before that, he told the justice, “Loosen up, Sandy baby. You’re too tight.” I’m sure his remark was not intended to give offense.

Pointless Post in Useless Blog

October 9, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Post this morning had me at hello, or rather, at headline.

It’s an allusion to one of the Post’s most famous headlines, from 1983.

(This was long before the era of the Kristal-pouring, gold-card strip club, with sports stars and hedge-funders tossing out benjamins for lapdances. In 1983, a topless bar was most likely a seedy joint.)

Today’s headline was an homage to Vinnie Musetto, author of the “Headless” headline. He had been freelancing at the Post since his retirement in 2011, but in August, the Post cut him off entirely, claiming budgetary constraints. Among Post headline writers, he’s gone but not forgotten.

The news story (here) has relevance not just for headline writing but for matters of criminal justice, law, and culture as well.

Jessica Krigsman, who had been arrested for being topless in a Brooklyn park back in the summer of 2012, is now suing the city for violating her rights.  Her encounter with New York’s finest wasn’t exactly like “Law and Order.” She knew her rights, and the cops didn’t.

“I’m like, what? Haven’t you heard of People v. Santorelli?” Krigsman said she told the cops. . . . “This has been legal since the ’90s. Call your supervisor!”

One of the cops told her to “stop mouthing off” and threatened her with arrest, court papers say.

The cops put her in pink handcuffs and took her to the precinct.

Krigsman’s knowledge of relevant case law comes with her professional territory. She’s not a lawyer, she’s a stripper – “a burlesque dancer who performs a fire-eating bondage act.”  The Post explains:

She stripteases and eats fire while straddling a man whose hands are tied and is bound to a chair.

A description for the event reads: “Prepare to be strange, prepare to be altered! There will be nudity, blood, vulgarity and many other unspeakable things.”

Even the Post can’t make this stuff up.

It’s Not About Obamacare

October 7, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why are some Republicans willing to shut down the government and to force the US to default on its debts in order to prevent a health care system very much like the one instituted in Massachusetts – a plan designed by a conservative think tank (the Heritage foundation) and instituted by a Republican governor (Mitt Romney)?

Maybe it’s not about health care.

Four years ago, in the early days of the fight against Obamacare, it seemed to me that healthcare was a symbolic issue, a matter of status politics. (That post is here.)  For many of the protesters, the question was not which healthcare policy would be good for who. The question was: whose country is this anyway?

These were Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” – older, white, non-urban – and they had long assumed that it was their country.  And they were right.  But the 2008 election was a rude reminder that they were becoming a minority – less influential, less powerful, less respected. The passage of Obamacare would somehow inscribe that diminished status into a law.  So Obamacare became the decisive battle in the fight to “take back our country.”* If we lose, if Obamacare takes effect, it’s their country.

In this apocalyptic style of thinking, Obama and Obamacare balloon from political opponent into something close to absolute evil.  And if you’re fighting evil, compromise is not an option.

Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto’s recent book, Change They Can’t Believe In, fills out this picture of the adamant Right. The Tea Partistas are not just a more strident versions of traditional conservatives.  Issues that engaged the traditional right – e.g., a muscular foreign policy – are not so important to them.  They are much more likely to emphasize the illegitimacy of the Obama administration. 

Parker and Barreto found differences like these by comparing the postings on Tea Party websites with those of National Review Online. (The National Review has long been the voice of conservatism – and not even “moderate” conservatism – but it’s not Tea Party).  The NRO posts were mostly devoted to policy matters. But on the Tea Party sites, over half the content had a flavor that Parker says is “more in line with Richard Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style in American Politics” – conspiracy theories, and attacks on Obama.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The data come from graphs posted at a WaPo Wonkblog interview with Parker (here). I don’t know what their coding scheme was, and I wonder about some of the absent topics. Immigration is the only domestic policy issue on the charts.  No guns, no healthcare, no taxes, etc. 

When Republicans think about Obama, legitimacy is the overarching issue.  Here is a word cloud of focus groups of Republicans – from Tea Party to moderates – asked about Obama.**

While all saw Obama as a liar, the Tea Partistas and Evangelicals said that what the lies and deceit were hiding was a socialist-Marxist agenda and that Obama himself was a Muslim and a tyrant, a non-citizen, a supporter of terrorism, and a “masonic Devil Illuminati.”  In fact, the word cloud shows devil turning up with the same frequency as dumbass (though for all I know, those could be n = 1).

In sum, the hard-core right views the Obama government as illegitimate and corrupt, and they fear that its success will mean total transformation of American society, a transformation in which they and people like them will lose status and power. That success, they fear, will come from the new health care law. As Andrew Sullivan says, “nothing represents their sense of loss and anger more powerfully than Obamacare.”

So don’t ask why some people are willing to shut down the government and to have the US default on its financial obligations, with all the damage that may bring to the economy of the nation and the world, in order to thwart a change in healthcare policy.  It’s not about Obamacare.

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* In my “Repo Men” post (here), I offered some data showing that his imagery of “taking back our country” is much more a staple of out-of-power Republicans than Democrats.

** A pdf. of the report by Stan Greenberg and James Carville is here .