Friday Genius Ten: Back at the Helm Edition

As you’ve probably noticed over the past week, I’m back to regular blogging at the United States of Jamerica and to celebrate, I’m going to start this whole gig again.  Enjoy!

Original Song: Yeasayer – “2080″

1. Grizzly Bear – “Two Weeks”
2. TV on the Radio – “Golden Age”
3. The National – “Brainy”
4. Wolf Parade – “Shine a Light”
5. Of Montreal – “Heimsdagate Like a Promethean Curse”
6. Cut Copy – “Out There on Ice”
7. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”
8. Broken Social Scene – “7/4 (Shoreline)”
9. Spoon – “The Ghost of You Lingers”
10. Hercules and Love Affair – “Hercules Theme”

And here are some music videos to close out your day with:

A Three Party Country in a Two Party System

This fact of our institutional structure isn’t given nearly enough weight or consideration in our political discussions (via Matt Yglesias):

Third, there’s weak party discipline. If the House Blue Dogs were subjected to the kind of very tight party discipline that exists in many countries, they would have a strong incentive to try to form some kind of independent political organization. But since US politics features weak discipline, it’s easier to stay within a party coalition and then form an intra-party factional organization.

It’s not just that there’s weak party discipline, it’s that its hard to characterize the Democratic Party as a single party. Rather, as I was explaining to a friend not too long ago, it’s much more accurate to think of the “two-party” system as a “three-party” system with one of those parties in a long-term alliance with the other for electoral reasons.  The United States has three major parties: a medium-sized center-left party, the Democratic Party, that is mostly concentrated on the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, with a few seats in the Rust Belt.  A center-right party, the Blue Dogs, which are concentrated in the West and the Rust Belt, with strongholds in the South.  And a small right-wing party, the Republican Party, which is almost entirely concentrated in the South, with strongholds in the West and the interior of California.

This is a banal point, but it really needs to be made more often: the country isn’t “fundamentally conservative” but it also isn’t terribly friendly to explicitly progressive policies and goals.  The fact that we have a two-party system masks that, and fools us into thinking that we, progressives, have a much larger majority than we actually do.

Why Emperor Palpatine Wasn’t as Wrong as You Think

(Before I even begin, this is all apropos of the fact that I’m rereading a few of the older books in the Expanded Universe)

It’s basically an article of faith among Star Wars fans that the Galactic Empire — as depicted in the original trilogy — is purely evil and the Alliance to Restore the Republic (or Rebel Alliance for short) is unambiguously good.  And there’s a lot of solid evidence for that assessment.  On-screen, we’ve seen the Empire wipe out the Jedi, destroy entire worlds, enslave peaceful peoples, and declare that their ultimate aim is perpetual rule through fear of force alone.  Indeed, the Empire is so evil that it actively rewards cruelty: Grand Moff Tarkin — the commanding officer of the first Death Star — was awarded his title after slaughtering hundreds of anti-Imperial protesters in cold blood.

All of that said, I’m not so certain that the operating philosophy behind the Galactic Empire — that despotism is necessary to maintaining the peaceful cohesion of a galaxy-spanning empire –is entirely wrong.  Especially since we have enough examples of republican forms of galactic government to know that the alternative isn’t that much better.  The previous galaxy-spanning political unit — the Galactic Republic — collapsed largely because it was too large to be effective.  The Republic didn’t even possess the strength or legitimacy to handle a trade dispute on a minor core world, much less an existential threat like the Clone Wars.  On the other end of the timeline is the successor regime to the Rebel Alliance, the New Republic.  The New Republic was, like its namesake, a loose confederation of worlds united by common economic ties and a representative body.  It maintained a large military, for the purpose of defense and peacekeeping, and was firmly committed to respecting the rights of sentient beings.  It was also a complete failure.

For the full 23 years of its existence, the New Republic was beset by division and problems of legitimacy.  Consensus was habitually hard to come by, even in times — like the Thrawn crisis — when it was absolutely necessary.  Indeed, the New Republic fell precisely because it couldn’t muster the cohesion or will to defend itself against the extra-galactic Yuuzhan Vong, despite possessing the combined resources of an entire galaxy.

Now, to me at least, this suggests that a single galactic, representative governing body — no matter how well intentioned — is simply incapable of dealing with such an overwhelming diversity of cultures, viewpoints and agendas (remember, we’re talking about trillions of people and tens of thousands of different lifeforms).  If you’re committed to something vaguely democratic, the only real option is a galactic confederation — not dissimilar to the Federation in the Star Trek continuity — where each member planet or sector has extremely limited ties to a central “governing” body of limited authority.  Of course, there are real threats from within and outside the galaxy, and there is a real need for a centralized authority, if only for collective defense.  In which case, it seems that the only way you could have effective collective defense is by forcing each member planet to provide for a common army and navy, which requires enough force for coercion, which in this context can only be successful if the regime has little respect for rights: i.e. the Empire.

Palpatine was incredibly brutal and evil, but he also understood — correctly — that successful galactic dominion requires the kind of cruelty and brute force that we see on display in the movies.  Otherwise the whole thing will collapse into petty-infighting and jealousy.

Some unfocused thoughts on gendered violence

First, hello to everyone who made their way here via Matthew Yglesias!  I hope you enjoy your stay.  Feel free to poke around a bit (even the embarrassing stuff from when I first started blogging)!

Second, when you get the chance, you should read Cord Jefferson musing at Jezebel about why male-on-male violence is acceptable in ways that no other form of violence is.  Here’s an excerpt:

Yes, domestic violence against women is a serious issue, and much worse than a barroom brawl between two drunken males. But why is it unimaginably worse for an asshole to haul off and hit Snooki than for an asshole to haul off and hit a man Snooki’s size, for no reason whatsoever? Why is random violence—again, not premeditated, protracted violence, like war rapes and domestic abuse—something MTV should consider not showing when against women, but air at will when it’s against men? The government has laws in place to protect America’s most vulnerable victims—battered wives, children, elders, etc.—from calculated attacks, as it should. But attempting to argue that some mindnumbingly stupid bit of violence, like that that befell Snooki, is better than some other stupid bit of violence, even marginally, is a slope slippery with blood.

In the comments, there were a lot of complaints that Cord was trivializing male-on-female violence, or trying to draw an equivalence where there is none.  This was actually pretty typical of the comments, or at the least the couple dozen I read:

It’s pretty breathtakingly privileged to take an incident of violence against women and use it to make a case that what we should really be talking about is a long past episode of violence against a man.

Way to obscure the actual victim.

I understand the reaction, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what Cord was trying to do.  If I read the piece correctly, what Cord was getting at is the fact that violence against men — even when it is illegal — is understood as legitimate.  That is, men’s bodies are considered inherently violent, and so using force against them is acceptable in way that most other forms of targeted violence aren’t.  Here’s long-time Friend of the Blog Mike Meginnis on this dynamic in the context of war and the draft:

As long as war is considered a necessity, men will hurt more men than women. Men will die violent deaths far more often. Men will play their narrow, torturous, smothering roles. Our understanding of war requires that there be a division between acceptable targets and unacceptable targets. As it stands, and for many reasons, this means men and women. We could not go to war so lightly if there were no class of person explicitly responsible for killing and dying. If we had to consider men (and women) as full human beings, war would be more difficult to start and harder still to sustain. The fact that the existence of acceptable targets is consistently used to disguise the cost to the unacceptable targets (collateral damage, which should be called “entirely predictable damage” instead) should be better and more widely understood. The fact that there are any acceptable targets at all is a shame.

I honestly don’t have much to say, because I haven’t thought hard enough about it.  But looking at Cord’s post and the comments that followed, I think it’s unfortunate that the commenters jumped on him for asking such a simple — and necessary — question.  For as far as we’ve gotten in transforming female gender roles, we’ve made very little progress in doing the same for men, and we won’t until we start seriously thinking about issues like these.

Song (and video) of the Day

OutKast – “Ghetto Musick”

I can’t get enough of this song.

Ahead of the Curve

Here’s David Frum on the downside of the GOP’s categorical opposition to any and all Democratic legislation:

Instead of a healthcare reform to slow cost increases, Democrats in the Senate seem to be converging upon an expansion of Medicare to include age 55-64 year-olds and an expansion in Medicaid up to some higher multiple of the poverty limit. You might wonder why they didn’t do this before: expanding existing programs is always easier than creating new ones. So now instead of a new system that attempts to control costs, we’re just going to have a bigger and more expensive version of the old system, with a few tinkers around the edges. Republicans could have been architects of improvement, instead we made ourselves impotent spectators as things get radically worse. Plus – the bad new Democratic proposal will likely be less unpopular with voters than their more promising earlier proposal. Nice work everybody.

Not to brag or anything, but I made this exact point a few months ago:

The huge downside of course, is that if Democrats do pass health care legislation – and that’s looking increasingly likely – then it becomes that much harder to run against them in next year’s elections.  What’s more, and as we’re seeing now, the flip side to obstinacy is that your interests won’t be represented.  Even moderate Republican input into a health care bill would have yielded one significantly more conservative than what we’re likely to see.  Democrats seemed to have genuinely wanted a bipartisan bill, and I’m fairly certain that a right-leaning “compromise” bill would have been quickly shepherded through Congress.  As it stands, not only do Democrats not have any incentive to take Republican input, but the logic of the situation is pushing them in a more liberal direction.

Even though the bill has been watered down considerably, that last point still holds true.

Sanctimony is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Chris Hedges takes some time out of his day to remind liberals how pure he is and condemn us for not doing enough to challenge the man:

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama — I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor — though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

What Hedges doesn’t seem to understand is that the history of progressive change in this country isn’t the history of pure, noble souls fighting for change in the halls of power.  It is the story of ordinary people, passionate activists, and opportunistic politicians working together — often for vastly different reasons — to improve the country.  So what if Barack Obama is the “new face of the corporate state.”  Does that change the fact that health care reform — if passed — will improve tremendously the lives of millions of Americans?  Does that change the fact that Obama, for all of his mistakes and missteps on this front, is the first president to actually acknowledge the dignity of gay and lesbian people?  Does that change the fact that the nation’s corporate interests are firmly aligned against him, because they correctly recognize that he — along with his allies in Congress — are trying to build a more equitable society?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to not like about Obama’s presidency — his refusal to back away from the previous administration’s policies on state secrets, rendition and detainees is particularly galling — but it’s also the case that he’s the best we’ve got.  That isn’t to say that we should be complacent, no,  we should work to pressure and cajole Obama as much as possible.  But we, as progressives and assorted leftists, need to realize that there will never be a moment where the American people wake up, throw off the chains of false consciousness, and establish an anti-corporate worker’s paradise.  Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney types have never had and will never have a real space in American political life, and there will never be a time when corporations recede into the background of public life, content to produce widgets and pay taxes.  Progressive change comes through pressuring, compromising and working with the allies we have, not the allies we want.  And frankly, I don’t have any time for people, like Hedges, who are more concerned with “selling out” than they are with changing this country for the better.

*For what it’s worth though, I really enjoyed War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

The Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Action

I know I’m supposed to show solidarity with my fellow progressives — or at least, something to that effect — but this email from Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake is the most absurd, wrong-headed thing I’ve read all week:

The Senate’s triggered public option is a failure of Barack Obama.  Let him know.  Click here to sign our petition:

Obama is the only one who can save the public option and make these statements more than mere campaign promises. The fight isn’t over, and we need to let Obama know that a failed public option will be his fault. Thanks for all you do.

No.  At the risk of sounding like a shill for Barack Obama, it is really — really — short-sighted to blame Obama for the triggered public option.  It might feel good to say that, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong.  I don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand, but Barack Obama has a laughably small amount of influence on the bills that move through Congress.  At the very most, he can state his priorities and rally public support.  Beyond that, he is at the mercy of Congress, which as an institution is fundamentally incapable of passing legislation of anything approaching the size and scope that progressives would prefer.  And that’s before you consider the Senate’s extra-constitutional 60 vote requirement for any legislation or the lack of accountability that permeates both chambers of Congress.  Obama could give speeches until he was blue in the face, attack and denounce the Republicans as obstructionists, or even champion the public option as the single best policy ever crafted by human hands, and we’d still be in the same shitty place.

The Senate is simply incapable of producing and passing good public policy.  It is hidebound, ridden with veto points, and prone to capture by outside interests.  To pass anything remotely progressive, legislators have to barrel through routine filibusters, prevent holds, and account for the fact that your most valuable votes belong to people — Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman — completely disinterested in anything other than enriching themselves and spiting liberals.  I used to think that this wasn’t exactly hard to understand, but judging by the apoplectic reaction of progressives to every compromise the administration makes, it is.

To steal a phrase from a slightly older generation of liberal pundits, it seems like a lot of liberal activists buy into a “Green Lantern” theory of presidential politics, by which presidential will is all that’s necessary to achieve success.   If the president would just try really hard, then all things are possible.  But President Obama isn’t John Stewart, and he doesn’t have a mystical power ring of awesome.  He is politician — admittedly a very good one — subject to a host of constraints, limitations and competing obligations, and faced with an institutional arrangement that privileges deliberation at the expense of action, and places a premium on cooperation, even when cooperation isn’t possible.

Not even Lyndon Johnson had to deal with something this insane, and if he did, I think he’d be in the same exact place Obama is now.  The fact is that there isn’t a single president — living or dead — strong enough to deal with this shit show.  And while it certainly feels awesome to attack Obama for his failure to bend reality to his will, nothing will change unless we reform the way our institutions work.  Until then, all of this liberal fury is an exercise in futility.

Quick Thoughts on Conservatives and Racism

To piggyback off of blackink12′s post real quick, I think conservative bloggers ought to think real hard about why assorted racists and bigots feel comfortable spouting off at their blogs.  That’s not to say that said bloggers are racist, or even particularly friendly to racists, but that the movement they belong to has established itself as being either A) hostile to minorities or B) dismissive of attempts to acknowledge and address prejudice against racial minorities.  That is, the conservative movement might not be explicitly hostile to minorities — though in the age of Obama, it’s worth revisiting that claim — but it has certainly cultivated an atmosphere in which people that are actually hostile to minorities can feel comfortable. Activist conservative bloggers really shouldn’t be surprised to see that spill over into the blogosphere.

My new phone’s got the clocks, it rocks, but it was obsolete before I opened the box

Time Magazine, in an apparent affront to hordes of Apple fanboys and fangirls, has ranked the Motorola Droid as the number 1 gadget of the year, with the iPhone 3GS dropping to 4th place.  Here’s their reasoning:

“Take the iPhone. Make it faster. There, you’re done. Yes, the 3GS has a better camera — with video. And it has a compass and voice control. Those are all improvements over the original.”

That’s about right.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone.  It has transformed the way I use the internet, consume data, and interact with social networking.  Indeed, at this point in my life, I’m not entirely sure how I would get by without my iPhone.  That said, I’m also a new customer.  The iPhone 3GS came out just as I was in the market for a smartphone, and as a long-time iPod/iPod Touch user, it was a natural fit for me.  However, for those folks who were long-term iPhone users, the 3GS was an extremely disappointing release.  The iPhone’s core problems — poor system for viewing and managing push notifications, inability to multitask, limited Exchange support and mediocre battery life — went completely unaddressed, and as the MMS debacle demonstrated, AT&T completely failed to step up its game as a cellular/wireless network provider.

The Droid certainly isn’t the perfect phone and Android isn’t the perfect mobile operating system, but in terms of hardware design and software functionality, they are the first worthy competitor to the iPhone  and show that there are very real ways to improve upon Apple’s juggernaut of a platform*.  For that reason alone, the Droid deserves its place at the top of Time’s rankings.

*It also helps to link your phone with a provider, Verizon, that isn’t committed to epic failure as a core business principle.