I stumbled across a new blog this morning: Postmodern Conservative. Here, at last, is someone who frequently expresses something very close to my take on politics.
As a representative sample, I offer The Paleoconservative Mind, which describes almost exactly why I think the wannabe-Chestertonian, everything-sucks-but-it-used-to-be-better, pretensions-to-aristocracy trend in some contemporary observers to be so frustrating: it's "nostalgia masquerading as analysis," and in my mind, it's frequently nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place.
Yes, political problems are caused by a deeper corruption, but the solution to that corruption is not a condescending smirk, smoking jackets, classical literature, and Latin rhetoric. That's an aesthetic masquerading as a plan.
...they've just indicted the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, who just happens to be up for re-election this year.
Yeah, that's got a clear political motive.
The minimum wage is going up.
Seriously, how can anyone possibly think this is supposed to help anyone? First, those not capable of producing $6.55 an hour are going to be out of work. I know quite a few people like that. Then, prices will simply go up, because if you can't pay people less than $6.55, all of a sudden you need to raise everyone else's wages to keep up.
Dumbass.
I've been mulling over an idea for a week or so now, but the article I blogged about earlier today combined with this article from the MeFi comments has finally motivated me to write about it. Additional motivation comes from The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, a book which I'm reading and which Bill Clinton apparently referenced in a recent address.
The basic thesis of The Big Sort is that Americans have been segregating themselves on the basis of ideology--a divide that tracks class and race to some extent--since about the mid-1960s. The primary evidence for this self-sorting is traced to electoral maps from 1976 and 2004, which show a fairly dramatic increase in the number of "landslide" counties, i.e. counties where one presidential candidate won by at least 20% of the vote, a 60%/40% split. The vast majority of counties in the country were Republican landslides, but the few counties that Kerry did take by large margins are all major urban areas, so the number of people living in a landslide county for either side is quite large.
The author then goes on to suggest that we've been segregating ourselves so effectively for so long that the nation is devolving into different cultures that have little contact with other cultures and increasingly find those cultures incomprehensible. Listen to partisan Democrats and Republicans for about five minutes and this should be intuitively correct: it sounds like they aren't even speaking the same language. They're talking right past each other.
Compare the talking points of left and right and you'll see what I mean. They're just completely incompatible. The degree of self-serving fact selection and suppression is just stunning. They don't even live in the same world.
But I've been finding that this isn't just true for politics either. It's also true for religion. The author discusses this as well, but he's only really interested in its effect upon the political landscape, which in my view is a rather trivial exploration of religion. I've been at a Catholic institution for two years now, and I find Catholic thought to be almost impossible to engage. Why? Because the basic assumptions about reality are different than mine. I emphatically don't believe that any two people can simply apply their reason and come up with the same result, and serious Catholics emphatically do believe that. I believe that sin is a disfiguring of human nature whose influence extends to every act; Catholics believe--or at least talk as if they believe--that sin is producing "evil" in the world and though intent is relevant, the category of sin applies to individual acts not to persons. Those who distinctions make discussion on high-level issues like jurisprudence and ethics all but impossible.
But it's not just that either. Fundamentalist Protestants are even harder, as their view of Scripture is so radically different. They seem to approach the Bible as a list of propositions which may be used cookie-cutter style, as ingredients in a recipie designed to give them what they want. I view Scripture as an actual document, written by a actual people, who actually had a concrete purpose for what they were writing, and wrote just as you or I would write. As a result, I believe Scripture should be read as if it fundamentally makes coherent sense. This creates a pretty strong limit on the kinds of conclusions that can be reached from Scripture, a limit fundamentalists simply don't have.
In some sense, I find that same division between myself and both ends of the political spectrum. I believe that people are evil, but by grace aren't as evil as they might be. Both liberals and conservatives believe that people are basically good (conservatives might object here, but their policies belie their protestations), only they differ as to the social policies necessary to bring out the good in people. Liberals think that if given appropriate molly-coddling and social service that everyone will just play nice. It just isn't true. Conservatives believe that if given the opportunity to make choices, people are capable of making the best ones. That isn't true either. So not only can liberals and conservatives not really talk to each other, but I can't talk to either of them.
Why is this happening? There are arguments to be made that it didn't used to be this way, and though partisan politics are certainly nothing new to American history (remember 1861?), this seems to be one of the first times in American history where it has become increasingly difficult to actually get anything done.
This has happened before. A long time ago, actually, and it happened because of another tower. There, the survivors of the Biblical proclaimed their defiance against God by building a tower. Why was this defiant? First of all, God had commanded humanity to disperse and fill the earth, but the rulers of men (probably Gilgamesh) realized that their fame would diminish if humanity was scattered. So the tower was built in part to make a name for them. But also, the culture had just experienced a flood. Where do go in a flood? To high ground. So if you build a tall enough tower, the thinking goes, God won't be able to wipe us out again. Not only is this rank defiance, but it also ignores God's promise not to flood the earth that way again.
What does God do? He frustrates their language. He makes it impossible for them to talk to each other. Many ascribe the origin of differing human languages to this story, but I think that's a superficial reading. I think what it really represents is God's striking the human ability to band together. The real curse of Babel isn't different languages as much as factionalism. Whenever humans band together to set themselves above God, we will always dissolve into factions before we have a chance to succeed.
America has done this. And no, it isn't because we allow gay marriage or because we don't pray in schools or because there are nekkid women in movies. Those may be symptoms, but they're not the problem. The problem is that we, on both sides of the political spectrum, are constantly violating the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. We are, in essence, attempting to do without God, but more to the point, we give the glory due to God to ourselves.
"Before" doesn't just mean "prior to" or "ahead of." It also means "in the presence of," just as one appears before a House subcommittee. We shall have no other gods in His presence. As he's omnipresent, that means anywhere, so basically no other gods at all. The Left's god seems to be man himself. "Just give people enough support and we can do anything! We're all good inside!" The Right's god is man too, though they come about it a different way. Tim Keller has some insight here, as did John Gerstner, who said "The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works." The Right seems to think that by legislating a proper moral society, banning homosexuality, and punishing criminals, God will just have to reward us. He'll just have to love us. We'll play by his rules because that's the name of the game, but we're really what it's all about.
Now Jesus faced the Right and the Left in his day too. The Jewish authorities had divided pretty neatly along lines that are fairly easy to recognize today. The Sadducees were the wealthy, well-educated cultural elites. They took a largely secular view of the world and of their religion: the spiritual aspect was appreciated, but the supernatural was all-but-removed. The Sadducees were collaborators with the Roman occupiers and thus held rather exalted positions of power. The Pharisees were the 1st century equivalent of the Moral Majority: solidly orthodox and conservative Jews who find their ready equivalent in most Evangelical churches today--particularly those of the Baptist stripe. They believed the Bible and were largely correct in their understanding of it. Jesus directs most of his ire against the Pharisees, but that's because they're the ones who were supposed to know better. the Sadducees were just wrong, and he told them so. He wouldn't even engage with them. But the Pharisees, who were in the right about the Bible, had their own problems, in that they viewed the Bible as a way of making God like them, not a way of loving God by loving others.
In short, the Right, just like the Left, just like every other faction and subculture in America today--including no small portion of the church--want God's benefits, but not God. Not a sovereign God who can tell you want to do, who is to be obeyed not because He is rational or because He is loving but because He is God. The Sumerians didn't want God either. And just as God smote their culture, so has ours been stricken. The only answer is the gospel.
This is in part why I'm finding The Big Sort interesting but somewhat unpersuasive. Though it overstates its case in places and has some arguably unremarkable statistical data do an incredible amount of heavy lifting, the authors have latched on to what I believe is a real trend. But they don't speak my language.
I've periodically blogged about the insane arguments that tax protesters make in court. I can't express the degree of disdain and scorn I have for such arguments and the people who make them.
But when a criminal defendant in a capital case offers the same arguments... things get weird. And that's exactly what a handful of criminal defendants are doing in Baltimore. The piece is lengthy, detailed, and incredibly informative. It exposes the origin of most of these arguments: white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and the anti-Civil Rights movement. Black defendants adopting these arguments is hugely ironic, and likely to land them in prison forever.
The prosecution has added a charge of felony obstruction of justice for pursuing this line of argument. I hope it succeeds. I think Congress should pass a law making it a crime to raise such arguments in court.
Well, not totally anyways. Read this story and you're likely to believe that TSA is a complete and utter waste of resources. That may be the case, but the problem is less the rules that the TSA promulgates and more the people they hire to interpret and enforce those rules.
These positions require almost nothing in the way of education, so surprise surprise, the people who fill them have almost nothing in the way of education. There isn't a list of educational qualifications, but there is a lengthy list of disqualifying criminal offenses. Why? Because the people who are likely to apply are likely to have problems with that. Salaries start at $24k/year, full-time. Many positions are part time. Many of the people who pass through airport security--and many who read this blog--probably make more in a month than the screeners do in a year. The highest level supervisor makes less than $60, and there can't be more than one of those per airport. Basically, you're looking at the kind of marginally employable people who occupy a significant percentage of the lower end of the federal payroll. They suck just as much at the local DC police department as they do at the airport, believe you me. And because they're federal employees, they're just about impossible to fire, regardless of their competence.
Any wonder why they're completely incapable of any flexible thinking? Why they go completely buck wild when given a badge and the ability to make the affluent people who frequent airports jump? This is what happens when you put uneducated people on the border of poverty in positions of authority from which they cannot easily be removed.
If your use of a copyrighted work is sufficiently "transformative," it counts as fair use.
If this isn't transformative, nothing is.
Don't believe Obama when he says that most of his money comes from small donors. It's true that a lot of it does, 45% to be exact, and given that that 45% is 45% of over $300 million, that's a huge accomplishment.
But 55% of his money comes from donations that exceed that, particularly highly educated professionals who, as Brooks clearly points out, are as liberal and partisan as they come.
This isn't a new kind of politics. It's the other side of the coin of current politics. It may be different, but it isn't new. So when Obama tells me that he represents a bold new post-partisan future, well, I think that's a bald-faced lie.
Slate has a piece discussing the proposed Spanish legislation which would recognize the personal rights of our "non-human brothers," our "evolutionary comrades," the great apes.
This is a disaster, but an entirely predictable one. Once you've decided that humans are the product of an essentially random chemical reaction, any moral significant disappears. So does any basis for distinguishing between humans and animals. Saletan thinks this is bad because humans are demonstrably different from animals, but I think this is insufficient to prevent the evils such a proposal would engender, because the distinction he draws is one of degree, not of kind and is thus not a particularly hard line.
The real danger here isn't that we'll start extending the respect due to humans to apes. It's that we'll start treating humans like apes. Recognition of "equality" tends not to elevate the "lower" party but denigrate the "higher" one. As an example, I'd point to the "equal rights for women" campaign. Instead of "elevating" women to the "exalted" positions men traditionally occupy, it's simply made it acceptable to treat women like men treat each other, i.e. like shit. Legislating "equality" between humans and apes isn't likely to result in apes being treated better--at least not for long--but it is quite likely to result in humans being treated worse.
The syllogism is something as follows:
1. Humans are not metaphysically special nor distinct from animals.
2. Animals thus be treated as humans.
3. There isn't any reason to treat animals with dignity.
4. Thus, there isn't any reason to treat humans with dignity either.
This can't end well.
There's an article going around the net describing the unmitigated disaster Obama's public housing policies have been in Chicago. While a state senator, Obama coauthored a law which created tax credits for private developers to construct affordable housing. The result was thousands of apartments built with state subsidies--including several hundred in Obama's district--which are now "deteriorated so completely that they [are] no longer habitable."
An example is Grove Parc Plaza, a federally subsidized project with 504 apartments, 99% of which are vacant, in buildings which federal inspectors rated 11 out of 200 for safety. The buildings are apparently scheduled to be demolished.
Interestingly enough, there are number of major developers with personal and/or professional ties to Obama, including:
-- Valerie Jarrett: CEO of a company which managed several of the failed Chicago projects. Senior advisor to Obama's campaign and member of his finance committee.
-- Allison Davis: Developer of a North Side building whose chronic plumbing failures have led to raw sewage spilling into apartments. Major Obama fundraiser,
-- Tony Rezko: Developer who used subsidies to rehab more than 1000 housing units then refused to manage them, leaving them uninhabitable. One of Obama's largest fund-raisers, who helped him purchase a house in 2005.
Six major developers, including the three above, have contributed over $175,000 to the Obama campaign. Rezko alone has raised over $200,000 more. Rezko is also in prison.
Obama wants to spend $500 million in federal money annually on such projects.
Read the whole article. It's incredibly damning. Obama is linked to perhaps a dozen people in the low-income development world, many of whom have received millions in government subsidies that he helped create, the vast majority of which have done almost nothing to help the low-income residents they were allegedly designed to support.
And this is supposed to be a brand new dawn in politics? This is it? I'm supposed to believe this... because?