What’s the Definition of a Crazy Question?
Over the last few years, plenty of people have attacked Barack Obama using easily disprovable falsehoods and specious reasoning. (I know – I used to watch Glenn Beck for a living.) On Monday, a woman at a Mitt Romney event stood up during a Q&A session and said this:
“We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution. And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country.”
The Huffington Post put up a story about the event that afternoon written by Sam Stein. Stein highlighted the fact that Romney had “remained silent” following the accusation. “Romney didn’t correct the woman,” he wrote, “choosing instead to address the question she posed.” The candidate, he said, appeared stuck between “balancing the anti-Obama sentiments of the party’s base with the need to maintain a civil level of discourse.” Stein contrasted Romney’s behavior with that of John McCain, who during a 2008 town hall had taken the microphone away from a supporter who said she couldn’t “trust” Obama because he was “an Arab.”
That evening, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz presented a piece on the event as well. In a segment entitled “Obama Derangement 2012,” Schultz also criticized Romney for letting the charge pass without comment, and he, too, brought up McCain. “For all his faults,” Schultz said, “at least John McCain had the guts to talk down the crazy.”
I have no desire to allow lies and baseless assaults to pervade our political discourse, and candidates should always reject them – especially (and this goes without saying) when they’re dripping with the racist vitriol McCain faced.
But it’s also worth asking if the question presented to Romney was, as Stein and Shultz suggested, inherently unreasonable. Read more…
Why Separate Church and State?
I’ve written before in this space about the 1780 Constitution of Massachusetts, and the interrelationship it assumed between virtue (how we live, treat one another, and act for the common good) and the “good order and preservation” of the state. “Piety, religion, and morality,” that Constitution averred, are the essence of that virtue, and — here’s where modern readers tend to get exercised — “these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion, and morality.”
I’ll write more in the coming weeks about whether they were right that only institutions of religion can cultivate those ostensibly necessary virtues. But let’s say for now they were right — let’s say, even, that they knew they were right, and that the People of other states knew it, too. Was that sufficient grounds to enshrine religion in law?
Patrick Henry thought so. In 1784, as a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, he introduced a bill “Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion” that would have required a Tax Assessment from all citizens of the state to support religious education. (Read the original text, preserved by the Library of Congress, here.) Every man would be required to pay, but each man could choose which Christian denomination would receive his contribution. The point, it might be said, was not a particular religion, nor even religion itself, but the maintenance of public piety in defense of the nation. Indeed, that’s how the bill framed it:
Whereas the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned teachers, who may be thereby enabled to devote their time and attention to the duty of instructing such citizens, as from their circumstances and want of education, cannot otherwise attain such knowledge; and it is judged that such provision may be made by the Legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre- eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians. . . .
Patrick Henry: firebrand and, apparently, institutionalist. Source: The Library of Congress
What followed was a bloody fight over the distance that should be kept between government and religion, and some of the finest writing on the topic in American history. As was often the case, the first and best statement of the opposition was penned by James Madison. Read more…
Redeeming Radicalism, Part 2: Abortion, Taxation and the Structure of Political Debate
In my first post, I defined radicalism as the attempt to live and act upon a political ideal. I have yet to show, however, how radicalism could operate to the good of society. To do so, I need to first explain how I understand the process of political debate. In particular, I want to examine two questions:
- First, how is the range of the politically reasonable established?
- Second, how does a politician pick a particular position on a contentious political issue?
These questions will help us figure out how radical ideas and radical actors can influence politics.
Question 1: The Range of the Reasonable
We live in a world of conflicting ideas and ideals. These conflicts are evident in real time in our political debates, in arguments over the tax rate, abortion and climate change, to name but a few. These debate moves over a range of possible positions on the particular issue, which we can imagine on a continuum. Some ideas are considered outrageous, outlandish or evil. Some are considered merely politically impossible. Others are considered possible or reasonable:
These political debates are ubiquitous, playing out over nearly all under-determined moral and political issues.
[Students of political debate might notice that this model bears some resemblance to the Overton Window].
Take, for example, abortion. Read more…
Redeeming Radicalism, Part 1: Jefferson’s Honor, Radical Politics and the Value of Single-Minded Pursuit
…And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Our country was founded by political activists pursuing their ideals with absolute commitment. Today, we would call them radicals, but in our day as in theirs such radicals are absolutely essential to social progress. The demonizing of radicalism in our political discourse, therefore, and the associations that have been drawn between radicalism and fundamentalism, impoverish our democratic order.
Over the next few posts, I want to start patching back together the mantle of dignity that should envelop radicalism. As I will argue, radicalism should be understood as the single-minded pursuit of a political idea. If pursued peacefully in the context of a democracy, radicalism represents a brave commitment to ideals over individual needs, to a vision of the good society over the pleasures we experiences in our personal lives.
Origins
From the chemical properties of atoms to the surfboarder’s awesome, we employ the word “radical” in seemingly disparate arenas. The concepts are not as distant as it might seem, however. The word’s origins lie in the concept of the root of a word; overtime, the concept expanded to describe something’s essence. In chemistry, the dominant element in a compound; in surfing, I imagine, the purity of the perfect ride. Radical normally connotes something fundamental, something whole and unitary.
The word has not fared as well in the realm of politics, however. There, as with so many other words, its meaning has drifted along in the wake of partisan affairs. In politics, radicalism is almost exclusively pejorative. It connotes danger, violence and attacks on the established order. The radicals we hear about are Islamic terrorists, Marxists, abortion opponents, or simply those with whom we disagree.
This tendency to equate radicalism with anti-social or evil intent is problematic. Read more…
Citizenship as Office or Virtue?
Cross-Posted at New Deal 2.0.
From the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, to the 2012 campaign trail and the Supreme Court’s consideration of the constitutionality of Affordable Care Act, the central clash in American politics today is over the role of government in the modern economy. If the Great Recession has taught us anything it is that, on the one hand, we need government more than ever as a force for the common good—whether in combating the vicissitudes of the market or in holding private actors like too-big-to-fail firms accountable. But, on the other hand, our faith in government’s ability to do so has been (rightly) shaken. Conservatives have used this distrust to deregulate and dismantle the welfare state. As Jeff Madrick argues in the current issue of The Nation, one of the central challenges for progressive politics is to provide a constructive defense of the role and value of government.
One of the common responses to the declining faith in government is to appeal to individuals’ civic virtue, which could revive government by pushing us to make good faith arguments as advocates, participate as voters, or promote the common good as policymakers. Yet Barack Obama’s own appeal to bipartisanship and civic duty in 2008 now looks naïve in the context of the vitriolic political disputes over government policy in the Great Recession.
Yet Obama was on to something: citizenship does matter for restoring the effectiveness of and faith in government, but not in the way that it is commonly invoked. The deeper root cause of the questionable legitimacy of government today is not policymakers themselves; it is instead the sheer gap between we the people and those policymakers. The workings of government are too often seen as an outside force, driven by individuals who are not responsive or accountable to the people themselves. Ultimately, reviving government requires expanding the opportunities for participation offered to citizens themselves. In other words, restoring government requires rethinking citizenship – not by appealing to virtue but rather by thinking of it as an office, with its own powers and capacities to shape public policy. Read more…
The New Demographic
A chat with a science advisor for the National Institute on Aging gave me several things to chew over:
- There are more people alive right now than have ever died.
- 50% of those born today will live to age 100.
- 65% of 100-year-olds have Alzheimer’s.
- By 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be over the age of 65.
- In the history of the world, no nation has ever had a 65+ population proportion of 1 in 5.
Some of the policy implications leap off the page. Looking at (1), you can see why we’re encountering resource and pollution concerns now that have never before been impressed on the public consciousness. And if we’ve already projected that the year 2050 will see 70% of the world’s population living in cities, what other measures will we have to take to make sure everyone has a place to live, and lives well together? Putting (2) and (3) together, it’s clear that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are about to increase manyfold in prevalence, and now might be the time to shift our research priorities so that we have treatments by the time we need them.
Here’s the kicker: Taking (4) and (5) into account, we need to act now to accommodate the coming demographic changes. Doing so, however, will require those prepping the policy outcomes to act on behalf of a demographic — and therefore a constituency — that has never existed before.
And we thought we had problems reconciling the conflicting interests of today’s demographics! Read more…
On Faith and Citizenship
When Nehemiah, the reformist governor of post-exile Jerusalem, invokes Israel’s greatest king, most celebrated warrior, most gifted poet and musician, he writes simply “David the man of God”.
When Ezra the scribe recalls Israel’s liberation hero, who led his people from bondage to the Promised Land and delivered the Ten Commandments, he refers simply to “Moses the man of God”.
So too when other Old Testament writers describe those priests and prophets whose deeds resound through time: those most worthy of honor were known as people “of God”. The message is clear: the greatness of a woman or man is not measured by kingships established or battles won, by commandments delivered or prophesies fulfilled. In fact, it is not measured by deeds at all.
Rightly understood, human greatness in Biblical times is ascribed to those who humbled themselves and followed God. In no instance, we are told, did their greatness derive from individual action alone: they were participants in something larger than themselves.
Put differently, being good is the necessary foundation for being great, as I attempted to argue in a recent post inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s words, “America is great because America is good”. That the Bible understands being good as being “of God” does not change the basic meaning in my view; a person of God or a person seeking the good is one who humbles herself and sacrifices her self-interest out of reverence for some higher truth and out of love for others. Read more…
Last week, the Supreme Court finished its marathon of oral arguments on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care reform law. I’m no lawyer, so I won’t comment on the legal issues addressed by the court or the predictions about how they will rule (I will, however, direct you to Akhil Reed Amar’s piece on the subject, which handles these issues far better than I ever could). Instead, I want to zero in on one aspect of the argument that took place last week: the contention by the government that its intervention in the health care market was constitutional – and a good idea – because the health care market is unique.
“Unique” had a specific meaning in the context of the court case. But one thing that has frustrated me about the broader health care debate has been our poor understanding of just how deeply and fundamentally unique the health care market really is.
Appeal to Heaven
When John Locke wrote his ”Second Treatise on Government,” he aimed to justify overthrowing a King. In any fundamental dispute between the governed and their governor, he argued, one of two things must happen. Either the state dissolves, and we return to a state of nature in which no law forbids one aggrieved man from striking another, or we must find a corporeal arbiter of the dispute. The only proper arbiter must be the people — and because the King himself derives his power from Heaven, the people, too, must appeal to heaven if they are to make their case on equal terms.
It is for this reason that the most popular banners raised during the American Revolution read, “Appeal to Heaven.”
In part, this argument rests on God’s authority. But it does more than that, too. All agreed that there was an authority higher than the King, and that, whatever their misgivings about crossing the corporeal ruler, its imprimatur was sufficient to legitimize their insurrection. Laying their cause on its altar meant that they served something more than the aggregation of their own self-interest.
It’s an idea with a lot of power: In cases where we disagree, a return to basic, agreed-upon principles may furnish better outcomes than argument at cross purposes. Read more…
Weekly Round-Up: Ideas From Around the Web
Sergeant Bale’s Shame and Ours
By George Packer
Save a Mind, Draft a Body
Several New York Times Contributors debate the merits of a military draft
American Id-eology
by Kathleen Parker
