Kosher Food, Health Care, and Why Conservatives Just Can't Win

“Holocaust survivors who for the first time were forced to eat non-kosher because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for your grandparents to eat kosher . . . . Where is Mitt Romney’s compassion for our seniors?”

—Newt Gingrich Robo-Call on the eve of the Florida Primary

         We learned several important things in Florida this week. First, we learned that Newt Gingrich, along with being a serial adulterer and a megalomaniac, is also a whiney-butt. Second, we learned that Mitt Romney is perfectly willing to pay people to be bastards while he stands on the sidelines smiling. But the most important thing we learned—at least I hope we learned it—is that extreme conservatism just doesn’t work (extreme liberalism doesn’t work either, but we already knew that).

         I refer, of course, to the bizarre robo-call that some Floridians received last night suggesting that Mitt Romney personally shoved pork chops and lobster down people’s throats at the Yad Vashem dinner in downtown Boston. It never happened. Romney took an item out of an appropriation bill that could have eliminated kosher food subsidies, but the legislature overrode his veto. But that’s not the point.

         Much more important to me is what this line of attack says about the extreme conservative position that Gingrich is trying to represent in this election cycle—you know who I mean, people who think that income tax is unconstitutional, that Social Security is a fraud, and that the universal health care bill proves that Obama was born in North Korea. This particular constituency doesn’t think that we should be providing insulin to seniors, much less kosher pastrami. This is exactly the sort of “do-it-for-yourself-but-don’t-expect-the-government-to-do-it-for-you” entitlement that both Gingrich and Romney are supposedly going to end when they get to Washington.

         Both Gingrich and Romney were unwilling to stand behind their own ideologies and say something reasonably consistent like: “This is what ‘tough choices’ are all about. If we are going to balance the budget, we can’t give everybody everything that they want. If we even want to make a dent in the national debt without raising taxes, we are going to have to cut entitlements. This means Social Security. This means the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And this means kosher food.”

         But it will never happen. As long as political power is awarded by popular vote, people are never going to get into power, or stay in power, unless they give people stuff. That’s how the whole voting thing works. People want stuff, and, as long as they hold the reigns of government in their hands, they are going to elect people who will give them stuff.

         This is why conservatives actually never win elections. Oh, people who claim to be conservatives win all the time, but by the time they win the election, they have ceased to be conservatives. And when they actually govern, they normally end up not being conservatives at all. No Republican President in my lifetime—Nixon, Reagan, Bush père, Bush fils—has ever actually taken away anybody’s stuff, nor have conservative presidents come any closer to balanced budgets than liberal ones. Giving people stuff is not about being liberal or conservative; it is about being president or not president.

         But here’s the rub: this might not actually be a bad thing. Maybe Jewish seniors should have kosher meals. Maybe everybody should have health care and security. Maybe, just maybe, these are the sorts of things that government is supposed to do—the reason that people (theoretical people at least) leave the state of nature and form civil societies is so that, through their governments, they can do things on a much grander scale than they could otherwise. Maybe one of the grand purposes of civil government is to give people a mechanism for taking care of the most vulnerable members of society: children, the elderly, the impoverished—the people that Jesus was always hanging around with and telling us to care for.

          And maybe all of this has something to do with what government “by the people, for the people, and of the people” actually means in a modern, post-industrial nation where nobody actually has to starve, to forego lifesaving care, or to eat milk with meat. 

"Class Warfare" is a Stupid Term; Let's Dump It

          It is officially time to retire the phrase “class warfare” from our political vocabulary. 

         Back when words actually meant things, “class warfare” was a pretty scary proposition. Not just anybody could do it; it took a lot of anger and a critical mass of people—always from the lower classes of society—who were willing to, well, have warfare. The French Jacobins certainly fit this description, along with L’ouverture's Haitian slaves and Lenin’s Russian revolutionaries. By the time a society got around to “class warfare,” it was pretty much going to change one way or another.

         Now, however, “class warfare” is the first thing out of a conservative’s mouth when anybody proposes a tax increase. It comes out especially quickly when somebody wants to raise the capital gains tax, or the maximum tax rate, or let the Bush Tax Cuts Expire. We don’t want to have “class warfare,” after all, or Mitt Romney might have to pay the same percentage of his income that I do, and then he will stop creating jobs.

         The tactic of labeling tax increases “class warfare” appears to have worked well in America, mainly because very few Americans perceive themselves as being in a lower class—we are a nation full of people who aren’t millionaires yet. And as long as this is the case, we certainly don’t want to go around doing class warfare things to the people who are millionaires, lest they hold a grudge when we move in next door.

         But it is time to abandon this ridiculous terminology. It was originally designed to convey contempt for the poor, which was bad enough. Now, however, it simply conveys contempt for reality.

Here is some reality to consider:

1.   As long as there is a United States government in any form, somebody is going to have to pay expenses. There will always, therefore, be taxes.


2.   There is no such thing as a tax plan that affects everybody equally. Whatever we do, whatever we tax, there will be winners and losers. In most cases, the winners and losers will each occupy different places on the economic spectrum. Some kinds of taxes are better for people with low incomes, and some kinds are better for people with high incomes. No system can be better for everybody.


3.   Questions about how to structure our tax system are legitimate items for public debate. Talking about who benefits and who does not benefit from a given structure is not “class warfare.” Pointing out that certain tax structures benefit the wealthy more than others is not a hostile act. It is not the same as storming the Bastille. It is, rather, an integral part of the democratic process.

         Criticizing politicians for encouraging rivalries between different social classes is not new in America, of course. It was one of the primary accusations that Hamiltonian Federalists routinely leveled against Jeffersonian Republicans. But Jefferson really deserved the criticism. In his immoderate support for the French Revolution, our third president really did advocate class warfare of the “kill-the-aristocrats-in-their-sleep” variety. And he had plenty of good things to say about early armed rebellions in America (Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion) as well. Jefferson had very little use for the rich, and the rich felt exactly the same about Jefferson.

         But Jefferson was not actually a Jacobin—the writings of Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding. But he did stand firmly on the side of a government that did not transfer the burden of supporting government from the wealthy to the poor. How nice it would be if the self-proclaimed “Modern Jeffersonians”—the acolytes of small government and state sovereignty—would allow a national debate on the Jeffersonian ideals they reject without resorting to the kind of martial terminology that Jefferson himself despised.

Newtpolian of a Hundred Days

"The Democrats are spending millions of dollars running negative ads against Romney as they are hoping that Gingrich will be the nominee which could result in a landslide victory for Obama and a crushing defeat for Republicans from the courthouse to the White House.” –Bob Dole 1/26/12

"With Newt Gingrich, you throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.”—Ann Coulter, 1/23/12

         The Republican mainstream seems to be treating the Newt Gingrich surge the way that the crowned heads of Europe treated Napoleon’s escape from Elba. They thought they had gotten rid of him, they were finally starting to clean up the mess that he made, and they couldn’t believe that it was all about to happen again. Somebody send for that English fellow and let’s end this once and for all.

         Would-be Wellingtons include Bob Dole, who just got in the act today, along with Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Elliott Abrams—and these were the guys friends. The conservative media is not far behind, with Glenn Beck and  Ann Coulter taking turns trashing Gingrich and promoting his rival. And the story they all tell is the same: Gingrich can’t win a general election. If you vote for Gingrich, you will get Obama.
           That is a valid point, but I can’t help thinking that there is more going on—that they are really more afraid that he really could win and become both the President of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party. A large number of mainstream Republicans, I suspect, would rather muddle through four more years of Obama than place an unstable megalomaniac on the throne. Republican strategist David Frum said as much just this week. “Gingrich,” he confides, “has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.”
         Which brings us back to Napoleon. Gingrich shares more with the Corsican general than just a bad haircut. Napoleon was one of the greatest minds of his age and one of the most ambitious men ever to walk the earth. He craved power and could never get enough to satisfy his need. He was willing to throw a half a million of his own soldiers away—as he did in Russia—for no reason beyond his own aggrandizement. And in the end, he was willing to destroy a continent rather than slip quietly away. If he had to go, he was going to take half the world with him.

         If I were a Republican right now, I would be as terrified as the Republicans seem to be that Gingrich would do something similar. I don’t think that he is going to win. The attacks by nearly every Republican that anybody has ever heard of are already driving Newt’s numbers down. But the Gingrich candidacy is exposing a fault line within the Conservative movement that Republicans would rather not expose during an election cycle. On one side of the line are the Tea Party activists; on the other is the Republican Party.

         Tea Party leaders have made it clear that they are only dating, not marrying, Republicans. Last summer, a Gallup Poll indicated that a majority of conservative voters would back a third party if they felt that the Republicans were abandoning conservative principles. With the forces of the right arrayed against him, Newt is now in the unsustainable position of being a former leader of the Republican Party running against the Republican Party for the Republican Party's nomination. And his anti-establishment rhetoric is wildly appealing to the 15-20% of Americans who associate themselves with the Tea Party--without whom the Republican Party would be consigned to perpetual second place in a winner-take-all world. There may be a better scenario for a third-party run, but I can't think of it.

         But, for Republicans, this could get much worse than a single-cycle third-party run. As a Democrat, albeit a moderate one, the idea of a permanent, electorally meaningful third party to the right of the GOP warms my heart cockles. It would virtually guarantee Democratic dominance in government for a generation. But I try not to get too giddy because I know that it would be virtually impossible for a third party to take root in the United States. Our entire political structure is oriented to a two-party system.

         For such a thing to happen, the stars would have to align with almost unreal precision. There would have to be a coherent group of voters that constituted something like (in Madisonian terms) a permanent faction. This group would have to be paired with a leader of rare intelligence and charisma who was also a rudderless megalomaniac. This leader would have to be willing to lead 15-20% of the electorate off of a political cliff with no motive beyond his own aggrandizement. He would have to be willing to turn his back on his own party and throw them out of power for sheer spite. And he would have to see himself as a world-historical figure on an epic scale—with an unshakable conviction that history and destiny were on his side. 

         And all that Democrats have to do is remember Napoleon’s greatest maxim: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Newt Is Not a Slobbering Idiot; Why Is He Playing One on TV?

         I am no fan of Newt Gingrich. I think he is arrogant, ambitious, reckless, solipsistic, and utterly devoid of a moral center. I do not, however, believe that he is stupid. Nor do I consider him insane. Why, then, has he taken one of the stupidest, craziest public positions of any serious presidential candidate in recent history?

         I refer, of course to his statement in last week’s debate that sitting judges should be hauled before Congress to justify their legal opinions, his follow-up opinion that the president and congress should be free to ignore court decisions that they don’t like, and yesterday’s promise that he would send Federal officials—U.S. Capital Police or U.S. Marshals—to arrest members of the judiciary whose opinions he disagreed with.

Gingrich’s attack on the federal judiciary is so far out of the mainstream that it was labeled “outrageous” by Ann Coulter and “frightening” by Bill O’Reilly. Let me say that again: Ann Coulter called Newt Gingrich outrageous. Could this possibly get weirder?

So what’s up? Is a former speaker of the house with a doctorate in history from an actual college really suggesting that America start arresting judges for exercising their judgment? Would he really be willing to risk the biggest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War in order to protect the “right” of religious Texans to say a meaningless, non-denominational prayer once a year at graduation ceremonies? Could he possibly be that stupid or that crazy?

I don't think so. That Gingrich has turned to such rhetoric, I think, tells us a lot about how he views his position in the Republican field. He has a large lead now, but it is the same large lead once held by Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Donald Trump—and this is simply the result of a cause in search of a rebel. To beat the better-funded, better-organized, and more-respected Mitt Romney for real, he absolutely has to consolidate this 35% or so of the Republican electorate behind him. And many of these voters really are crazy.

One of the things that they are the craziest about is the Supreme Court. A brief tour through the la-la land of far-right Constitutional history—via books such as Mark Levin’s Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (2006) and Andrew Napolitano’s The Constitution in Exile (2007)—can show us exactly what the people who control Gingrich’s fate have been taught to believe. They think that

·       the Supreme Court seized the power of judicial review in a “counter-revolution” led by Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, making every subsequent judgment on a law’s constitutionality an illegal act on the court’s part.

·      the Supreme Court has no legitimate power over state laws at all, only over conflicts between states or between the states and the federal government.

·      the court has used the “commerce clause” of Article I to invade—intentionally and with malice aforethought—the civil liberties of all Americans.

·      the entire federal judiciary is made up of atheists who hate God and religion and have eliminated any trace of religion in the public square.

·        since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the Supreme Court has been the declared enemy of the American way of life and is now the most powerful of the three branches of government.

I am not making this stuff up. A substantial portion of the extreme right believes everything on this list (responding to the historical and Constitutional flaws in these books constitutes the penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book That’s Not What They Said!). And while I strongly suspect that these are not the voters that Gingrich would like to be courting right now, they happen to be the only niche not currently being filled by a more attractive, less historically adulterous candidate.

To understand why Newt Gingrich, who is not an idiot, is sounding so much like an idiot, we have to consider the race that he is running right now. He is not yet positioned to run against Barack Obama, or even against Mitt Romney. Those are later games in the series. Right now, he has to finish off Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum to become the only viable “Not Mitt Romney” in the race. 

And in that particular four-way contest, there is simply no such thing as too much crazy. 

Dear Liberals: It's Time to Cut the "Obama Betrayed Us" Crap

Dear Lefties,

I am not quite one of you. I am, rather, a creature of the political center, and sometimes you drive me nuts. However, for the last twelve years or so we have been fellow travelers, as the Democratic Party has been the only safe place for people like me—centrists who view with trepidation the increasing radicalization of the Republican party. So, I speak to you as an ally if not as a soul mate.

            That said: it’s time to stop all of the “I’m-not-ever-voting-for-Obama-again” stuff. It’s just getting silly. Yes, I suppose he has done some things to disappoint you. He has done some things to disappoint me as well. One of the big downsides of a two-party system in a functioning Republic is that nobody ever quite represents anybody’s ideology. This is just how the system works. Get over it.

            Politics is a pragmatic business, and the situation is like this: one of three people is going to be elected president next year. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, or Newt Gingrich will be sworn in at the beginning of 2013, and, for the next four years, will control the reins of government. This person will appoint thousands of like-minded people to executive and judicial offices, including, perhaps, one or more Supreme Court justice. If you are absolutely neutral in this, then go off and support the Peace and Love Party or whatever. But if you even suspect that there might be a difference between a Gingrich government and an Obama government, then, really, it’s time to get behind the one who probably won’t drive the country off a cliff.

            Some time soon, the three candidates will become two candidates, Obama and “the other guy.” At that point, anything that you do to hurt Obama will automatically benefit the other guy. Please don’t equivocate on this. Remember that, had Ralph Nader not been in the 2000 race, Al Gore would have won a few hundred more votes in Florida and become president. Spend a few minutes thinking about how different the world would have been then.

            And then admit to yourselves that you are going to vote for Obama in the end because, whatever you dislike about him, he will be better than the other guy. The sooner you admit this to yourselves, the better chance Obama will have to be re-elected. If you haven’t noticed, his poll numbers are pretty bad. The economy still pretty much sucks, and people are unhappy. The only things that Obama has going for him are 1) the weakness of the Republican field; 2) the fact that he does not have a significant primary challenger; and 3) the absence of any Naderesque third-party general election candidate. If you keep whining, #2 and #3 could disappear.

            So please, I am begging you, let’s end this now. I get that you would like a more ideologically pure liberal, but it isn’t going to happen. And such a candidate would virtually guarantee that the other guy would be President anyway. And if your grousing about a few concessions to conservatives helps that happen, I will probably never forgive you.

Glenn Beck and the "Original Intent" Fallacy

Divining the intent of the Constitution’s framers through the use of extra-Constitutional sources has become a major part of the fringe-conservative position, as we can see in books such as David Barton’s Original Intent (5/e 2008), which examines the religious beliefs of dozens of Founding Fathers in an attempt to prove that the Constitution was never intended to restrict religious expression in the public sphere, and Larry Schweikart’s What Would the Founders Say, which tries to divine the Framer’s opinions on hot-button issues from environmental protection to health care. 

In both books, the original intent argument leads—as it must always led—to the uncritical amalgamation of opinions that we have been discussing. Inherent in the assertion that the Framer’s had an original intent is the assumption that they had the same intent—otherwise there would be no way to use it as an interpretive standard to begin with.     

In his just-released Being George Washington, Glenn Beck spends one chapter discussing the Federal Convention. He insists that “original intent was the only intent” and that we must (like George Washington) bind ourselves to the original purposes of the men who wrote the Constitution. In summing up the convention, Beck tries to put this the original purposes of the Constitution into four succinct statements, the first and last of which illustrate the fallacy of the original intent position more than my own analysis ever could:

(First Principle) The Constitution recognizes the existence of natural law. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson referred to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Natural law recognizes the existence of God and acknowledges that God established a natural order of things for this earth and the people of this earth.

(Fourth Principle) The Constitution was created on the assumption that America would function under a free-market economy, recognizing and protecting property rights. John Adams wrote: “All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of . . . protecting property.”[1]

            Both of these propositions give us a lot to argue about. It is not at all obvious, for example, that the Jeffersonian notion of “natural law” included a God that modern American Christians would recognize as such. As an Enlightenment Deist, Jefferson saw God as something like the sum total of the laws of nature rather than as a personal deity who interacted with the human race. Furthermore, neither Jefferson nor Adams would have even understood the term “free-market economy” as we understand it today. Jefferson in particular saw America as a primarily agrarian economy, and he viewed all kinds of financial markets with suspicion.

            Two facts, however, are beyond dispute: 1) that Jefferson did not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787; and 2) that Adams didn’t attend it either. At the time the two men were ministers to, respectively, France and England, and they knew only as much about the Constitution as they read in letters from home. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of Massachusetts (the source of the Adams quotation) are very different things than the U.S. Constitution, and there is no historically acceptable way to use the words found in one of them to support an originalist interpretation of the others. Such an interpretive strategy only makes sense if we assume absolutely ideological unity among the Founders, which is a really dumb thing to do.

I believe that “original intent” is a spectacularly bad standard for interpreting the supreme law of the land. I do not say this as an America-hating liberal who sees the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” that can mean anything that we want it to mean. I believe that we must interpret the Constitution according to the meaning of its words, with careful attention to how those words were used in their historical context. Words mean things, and those meanings matter. Where the Constitution is concerned, meanings matter very much; if the Constitution does not have fixed meanings, we do not live under the rule of law.

But interpreting the Constitution according to the meaning of its words—the jurisprudential standard known as “originalism”—is very different than interpreting it according to the intentions of its authors. Nobody has drawn this distinction more clearly than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, though often cited as an exemplar of the Framer’s intent standard of interpretation, rejects that standard in no uncertain terms:

It is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than by what the lawgiver promulgated. That seems to me one step worse than the trick the emperor Nero was said to engage in: posting edicts high up on the pillars, so they could not be easily read. Government by unexpressed intent is similarly tyrannical. It is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver.”^[2]

The view of original intent propounded by the fringe conservatives is directly at odds with the democratic principles they espouse, the common sense they advocate, and even the Supreme Court Justice they revere. This difference between “original meaning” and “original intent” may seem slight, but it separates Scalia’s mainstream conservatism from that of the right-wing fringe. Scalia himself alluded to this distinction in a 1997 lecture at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. When asked whether or not he would consider scaling back the application of the Bill of Rights to the states through an originalist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, he replied, “I am an originalist. I am a textualist. I am not a nut.”^[3]

            Unfortunately, many of those driving public opinion and government policy in the era of the Tea Party cannot say the same.

---

[1] Beck, Being George Washington : the indispensable man, as you've never seen him: 240-44.

[2] Antonin Scalia and Amy Gutmann, A matter of interpretation : federal courts and the law : an essay, The University Center for Human Values series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 17.

[3] Antonin Scalia, "On Interpreting the Constitution,"  http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/wl1997.htm.

I Am George Washington and So Can You: A Review of Glenn Beck's BEING GEORGE WASHINGTON

It has finally happened. Glenn Beck has written a whole book in which I can find nothing with which to disagree. Really. I find his newest offering—Being George Washington—to be perfectly innocuous. And what’s more, it is clear that Beck is trying to use his powers for good instead of evil. Gone is his usual stridence and arrogance. Here, he deals generously with those he disagrees with, and he genuinely tries to present George Washington as a suitable model for Americans of all political persuasions. 

That said, it isn't a very good book.

It is hard to say what kind of book this is trying to be. The text fits into three distinct genre categories, any one of which could have made for a promising book about George Washington. The three categories are:

Historical Fiction: About 60% of the book could best be described as a historical novel written on the 5th-8th grade reading level. This novel deals very unevenly with Washington's life, beginning with the French and Indian War and focusing principally on the American Revolution before jumping to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and and the Farewell Speech in 1796. I call this portion a novelization, rather than a biography, because the author goes frequently into the minds of the characters and pulls out thoughts and motivations that go well beyond what any biographer could surmise. Take the first sentence of the book: "The colonel's horse was terrified." It is the novelist, not the biographer, who knows what goes on in the mind of a character's horse.


There is nothing particularly objectionable about the novelization portion of the book, but neither is there anything remarkable. Much the same narrative could be found in any one of dozens of young adult versions of the George Washington story. 


Historical Analysis: A second component of the book--one not clearly delineated from the first--aims to analyze the significance of George Washington's life for the modern reader. Again, there is little to object to here. Most of the analysis fits within the general received wisdom about George Washington’s values: the importance of conviction, the need for fixed principles, an abiding belief in the justness of one's cause--that sort of thing. Much of this analysis comes in somewhat annoying grey boxes plopped in the middle of the novelization with titles like "Thinking Outside the Eighteenth-Century Box" and "What If He Had Been King?" 


Leadership Manual: Beck begins the book with the assertion that all Americans can "be George Washington," which is to say that everybody can, by studying Washington's leadership principles, be the kind of person that Washington was and make a positive difference in the world. To help us along, he pauses the novelized narrative every now and then to point out some aspect of Washington's leadership that we should strive to emulate. Once again, there is nothing earth shaking here--much the same ground has been covered in such books as George Washington on Leadership or George Washington's Leadership Lessons. From Beck, we learn that we should be on time, believe in God, be willing to compromise, and not sweat the small stuff. Pretty basic stuff, really, but its always nice to have reminders.

As I said, any one of these elements could have made for an interesting book. And there are probably ways that they could have been combined together coherently to create something unique and interesting. Beck and his team, however, have simply thrown them together haphazardly with no real thought about how to give coherence to this odd collection of Washingtonian bric-a-brac. Almost everything that the book does is done much better in other (and less expensive) volumes, and the whole thing feels like uncorrelated notes that have been hastily assembled and placed between cardboard covers in time to make a Christmas killing--which, in fact, it is. The credits for Being George Washington list six different people as writers and thirteen more as "contributors & researchers." Beck himself was simply the compiler of random bits of work that other people did. And it shows.

Ultimately, what this book shows us is that Glenn Beck has ceased to be a shrill ideological firebrand and become a factory. Being George Washington was not so much written as produced on an assembly line. "Glenn Beck" (tm) is simply the brand name that guarantees book sales. I fully expect that this franchise will expand--that, in the next few years, we will see similar books on Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers. And from there: cat food, salad dressing, and beer. The good news is that the world has little to fear from Glenn Beck in the future. The bad news is that we have nothing to learn from him either.