The Newtown parents have recently reminded us that ordinary citizens with a compelling story can move policy, even in Washington. They were able to do what even the President could not: prevent a filibuster by Republican Representatives intent upon blocking action. The filibuster threat wilted in the face of bereaved mothers and fathers–a different kind of lobbyist from the pin-striped suits with whom they are familiar.
There are many lessons we might draw from this episode, but something Dana Milbank wrote in a column about the parents struck me. He noted that “Hockley [one of the mothers] and her peers succeeded precisely because they weren’t the usual actors following the usual script. ‘At the start of the week I didn’t even know what a filibuster was,’ Hockley told me Thursday beneath the cherry blossoms outside the Hart Senate Office Building.”
And therein lies a lesson for us all.
I don’t know how many citizens have no idea what a filibuster is, or how it has been used and abused. We know that only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government; if I had to guess, I’d wager fewer than 10% could explain the filibuster. Could a population that knew the basic structure of our government, a citizenry that actually followed events in the nation’s capital, change the nation’s trajectory? Could they marry righteous wrath to informed participation, and end the petty game-playing and toxic power struggles that increasingly characterize our government?
The Newtown parents had to understand the filibuster in order to prevent one from blocking the action they supported.
Knowledge really is power. No matter how uneven the contest between ordinary citizens and moneyed interests, people armed with information and determination can make a huge difference.
When the only people who understand the system are those who use it to their own advantage, however, it’s no contest.
I have posted previously about ends and means, about the fact that the American constitution is a prescription for process. The central premise of our system is a respect for individuals’ right to have different life goals, different ends–what the Greeks called telos. When citizens are expected to differ on fundamental questions of purpose and belief, what is needed is a set of rules governing their common lives, a process making peaceful and respectful coexistence possible.
The Constitution is thus a structure enabling a “live and let live” philosophy.
This emphasis on process, on means, has been widely acknowledged by political scientists. In the political theory literature, there has been a lively debate on the question whether this emphasis is sufficient to produce “thick” bonds between citizens, but that debate has rested on a shared recognition of the American approach as procedural. We are, as the saying goes, a nation of laws.
In that context, Rick Perlstein makes a point about today’s political parties that is well worth pondering.
We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon…
For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being “principled” means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being “principled” means. ..
as the late New Right founding father Paul Weyrich once put it, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Which was pretty damned brazen, considering he was co-founder of an organization called the Moral Majority.
Now, of course, for over a decade now, the brazenness is institutionalized within the very vitals of one of our two political parties. You just elect yourself a Republican attorney general, and he does his level best to squeeze as many minority voters from the roles as he can force the law to allow. And a conservative state legislature, so they can gerrymander the hell out of their state, such that, as a Texas Republican congressional aid close to Tom Delay wrote in a 2003 email, “This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.” Or you lose the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but win in the electoral college—then declare a mandate to privatize Social Security, like George Bush did.
Which only makes sense, if you’re trying to save civilization from hurtling toward Armageddon. That’s how conservatives think. To quote one Christian right leader, “We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means…If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method.
Okay–further proof that Americans inhabit dramatically different realities.
Last week, a video surfaced showing the Rutger’s basketball coach shoving, hitting and otherwise abusing his players. The physical abuse was accompanied by verbal attacks, and it was all caught on tape. Predictably, there was an uproar. The coach was fired and the athletic director resigned under pressure. Commentary in the wake of the episode raised questions about college athletics, the pressure to win, the focus on the bottom line, and the effect of these on the purported character-and-sportsmanship-building purpose of athletic participation. Shades of Bobby Knight.
Predictable.
What was not predictable–at least, not in the reality I inhabit–was the conservative commentariat’s rush to defend the coach’s behavior.
Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and others described the coach’s firing as another example of political correctness, presumably because the epithets caught on tape were anti-gay slurs. In their view, the whole incident was evidence of America’s loss of backbone, expressed in the “coddling” of young people. We’ve gone soft. Whatever happened to “spare the rod and spoil the child”? Hannity offered the information that he’d been disciplined with a belt as a child and that he’d grown up all right. (As Jon Stewart pointed out, Hannity’s “all-rightness” is a debatable proposition….)
In what reality is the abhorrent behavior displayed on that video an acceptable expression of discipline? Perhaps a more pertinent question is, in what twisted reality is the coach’s dismissal a political statement?
What we saw on that video was an undisciplined bully, someone whose lack of self-control and contempt for the young people for whom he was responsible marked him as anything but a role model. Civilized people do not reward or defend such behavior.
If condemning boorishness and brutality has become a partisan political statement, things are even worse than I thought.
As several readers have reminded me, Indiana’s legislature–while admittedly embarrassing–has lots of competition for the title of “worst.” South Dakota lawmakers recently passed not one, not two, but three (inconsistent) measures to forbid abortions. One of those bills, which defines a fertilized egg as a “person,” would also outlaw most birth control. (Keep those women barefoot and pregnant!)
Lest you assume that South Dakota has wrapped up the competition, Kentucky’s legislature has also proved that it’s a contender!
Although residents of Kentucky, like the rest of us, already have religious liberty under the First Amendment, conservatives in the state legislature decided to craft a new “religious liberty” law. It will allow Kentuckians with “sincerely held” religious beliefs to disregard state laws and regulations. In Kentucky now, if a law conflicts with the tenets of your faith as you interpret them, your conscience will trump your obligation to follow the law.
Suspect that one of your employees been sleeping around? Fire the tramp. A gay couple wants to rent in one of your apartment buildings? Refuse the sinners. Disapprove of birth control? Eliminate coverage under your company’s health insurance.
Kentucky’s Governor had the good sense to veto the bill, but the legislature overruled his veto. So at least until litigation settles the matter, anyone fond of his or her civil rights might want to avoid Kentucky.
It’s hard to believe, but South Dakota and Kentucky actually make Indiana lawmakers look rational by comparison.
My husband was doing the “guy thing,” clicking the remote through a series of channels. He paused for a roundtable discussion on Fox; we were both somewhat startled because the participants were praising a report aired by NPR. Evidently, NPR had been criticized by Media Matters, and they were engaging in the time-honored tactic of “the enemy of my enemy is suddenly my friend.” Those participating in the roundtable used the attack to launch into a group chorus to the effect that “the liberal media” are all hopelessly biased.
With the exception of a kind word for NPR, it was a pretty predictable Fox rant. But then….(drumroll, please)…the discussion turned to CNN and its purported liberal bias. One of the talking heads dismissed the insistence of a CNN executive to the effect that the network was neither Right nor Left– that its mission is simply to report the news. Her “evidence” that CNN was a “liberal” outlet was that they often reported the same news as MSNBC.
It evidently never occurred to her that two descriptions of newsworthy objective reality might turn out to be similar. Or that real journalists report on events even when those events tend to cast doubt on their preferred view of reality.
Or that sometimes, reality itself has a “liberal bias.”
