Politics

Anti-Work is the latest inane idea from left-libertarianism

I call myself a libertarian, but boy do libertarians get on my nerves.

The freedom philosophy used to be about trashing government aggression and poking fun at statism. But thanks to the rise of left-libertarian organizations, the philosophy has been infiltrated by ignorant hacks. Libertarianism is now chock-full of whiners who want smaller government for the wrong ends.

My friend Julie Borowski clued me in on one such specimen. His name is Nick Ford and he is a tad different from your run-of-the-mill leftist-libertarian. Ford backs a novel cause: abolishing work. From what I can determine, he detests working in a typical office setting and finds it stifling to his creative genius, or something.

(more…)

Advertisements

We’re going back to Iraq and boy is it depressing

Mark Twain’s quip about history was wrong; it indeed repeats. Unfortunately the repetition is of bad things, rarely good.

After promising to roll back the folly that was the Iraq War, President Obama is taking us back to the graveyard of empires. He recently presented Congress with an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” to go after the growing Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The president has been using airstrikes on ISIS for 6 months already. Under current law, he’s supposed to request Congress’ imprimatur after 60 days of carrying out military action. But, hey, what’s a little thing like law to get in the way of bombs?

(more…)

Rand Paul and judicial activism

In a recent piece here at The Mitrailleuse, Robert Mariani writes the following crucial sentences:

“Words are useful insofar as they have publicly agreed upon definitions. From definitions, we can have discourse that leads to some sort of useful truth.”

Amen to that.

At the Heritage Foundation’s recent Conservative Policy Summit Senator Rand Paul made the case that conservatives should abandon their preference for “judicial restraint” and embrace a more “activist” Supreme Court. George Washington University Law professor Orin Kerr helpfully attempted to delineate the different meanings people ascribe to the loaded term “judicial activism” a few years ago. He conjures up five distinct possibilities. So what, exactly, does Dr. Paul mean when he implores conservatives to think twice about restrained courts? What definition is he operating on?

First, let me humbly offer mine.

I propose that the charge of judicial activism can be levied wherever judges operate outside of their proper job description. If courts exist to know, interpret, and apply law, then any decision not resulting strictly from a process of interpretation involving general good will toward getting that interpretation correct is an “activist” decision. This does not mean any decision passed under the guise of subjective interpretation counts as whole and good, rather that interpretation had to be deliberated in good faith and free of inappropriate influences.

This may be labeled a procedural definition of activism as opposed to one that focuses on outcome. Professor Kerr offers that a decision itself (to strike down or leave intact a law), its implications for the scope of judicial power, its consistency with precedents, and its subjective accuracy (right/wrong) are all potential reasons people see a ruling as activist. These are outcome-based definitions as they focus on how the decision and its contingent effects help define restraint or activism, and I ultimately see Kerr’s lone remaining explanation (“the decision was motivated by the Justices’ personal policy preferences or was result-oriented.”) as the closest to a true procedural characteristic. 

Outcome-based definitions are inadequate in my view because we require information on how that verdict was reached. Seeing if a decision passes some static test is not enough. Court deliberation is a process and it is here that dubious motivations enter, not after the fact. Noting that a court decision cut against precedent tells us nothing of why it did so and it does nothing to illuminate the purity of intent, or lack thereof, of those deciding. (Admittedly it is in this view of activism as ignoring precedent where my narrow focus on process is most likely to falter, as one may view the application of previous law, regardless of subjective opinion, as part of a court’s “job description” I invoke above.)

It is true that an outcome-oriented definition may simply function as a signaling device for the process itself. For example, if the decision expands judicial power we may condemn it because we infer perverse reasons for why it was reached. But this would only mean these activist definitions collapse into a proper procedural view, however helpful they may be on their own.

(more…)

Jim Webb, Jonathan Chait, and the left’s moment of truth

It remains the most peculiar feature of contemporary liberalism that during these waning years of the Obama era it is still in search of a set of organizing principles.  In practice, of course, appeals to increasingly crude identity politics reigns supreme, with what passes for an overarching narrative being the so-called “coalition of the ascendant.”  The pernicious assumption behind this idea is that everything can be reduced to demographics and that no appeal to common sense or conviction is necessary; the advantage of such intellectual laziness, of course, being the support it lends to the self-satisfaction that to be aligned with the naturally harmonious and enlightened coalition of all racial and sexual/gender minorities is to be on the right side of history, and all critics therefore self-evidently illegitimate.

Jonathan Chait’s much-discussed essay of this past week identifies and deplores this phenomenon with the aged and less than satisfying label “PC culture.”  The responses from the left have ranged from the unbowed dogmatic intersectionalist call to arms to the consensus-liberal denial that Chait has aptly labeled “anti-anti-PC” to the sincere radical who agrees with Chait but still feels a need to shoot the messenger.  The point they all seem to be missing is that Chait’s argument is not so much about free speech in abstract principle but about the mainstreaming of this phenomenon in American liberalism.  Indeed, the nerve that Chait seems to have struck so deeply in many on the left is to have pointed out that what has made radicalism so painfully irrelevant in the post-Cold War era is that virtually without exception, it has been hobbled by the same affliction as liberalism: the idolatry of identity politics.

It is doubtful that Chait intended this, for as his detractors have not tired of pointing out, he is a product of The New Republic in its heyday as a bastion of what leftists have obnoxiously labeled “neoliberalism.”  (Speaking for myself, though I would have still labeled Chait a left-neocon as recently as five or six years ago, he is far from the only alumnus of Marty Peretz’s TNR to have proven thoughtful and worth reading once freed from his grip).  In other words, Chait has historically identified himself with that faction of American liberalism that first elevated cultural appeals at the expense of bread-and-butter economics or any appeal to historical liberal principles.  As Ross Douthat points out in his Sunday column:

What’s interesting about this ambition is that it’s about to intersect with a political campaign in which the champion of liberalism will be a Clinton — when the original Clintonism, in its Sister Souljah-ing, Defense of Marriage Act-signing triangulation on social issues, is a big part of what the new cultural left wants to permanently leave behind. . . . Can Hillary, the young feminist turned cautious establishmentarian, harness the energy of the young and restless left? Or will the excesses associated with that energy end up dividing her coalition, as it has divided liberal journalists of late?

Enter the most likely and formidable alternative to Hillary in the coming primary, Jim Webb.  To begin on a personal note: in 2006, I had just moved to New York and finished college, kicking over the last traces of illusions about the radical left and any prospects for it.  It was first seeing Jim Webb on The Colbert Report that summer that made me think I could in fact stand to be a Democrat again.

(more…)

Shameless self-promotion

I have something very timely and more broadly interesting coming up, but I thought it would be a good idea to make known the following piece I co-wrote, dealing with material from my first book, that went up today as party of Tikkun magazine’s “Open Hillel Dispatches” – just a bit of a shout out to Those Who Lost in American Jewish History, whom I’ve taken on as a torchbearer:

Market panic attack, Greek edition

Never have I seen Wall Street and the stock markets this scared in my life, in anyone’s lifetime. You don’t see it in the numbers or trades, but in the periphery, the things they talk about. They’ve realized that people are starting to notice a detachment between how the markets work and how reality works. You see the paranoia in Greece and Spain. Something’s coming for them, not in the way they wanted to.

Karl Polanyi, that venerable economist, once referred to the economy as merely another social institution. Social institutions last only as long as the people believe in them. What we have seen in the past couple is an indication that people are slowly starting to the realize that the market economy, by default, does not benefit them but benefits from them. When they stop believing in the market, it starts to really panic.

The market economy has become the golden idol of the mainstream left and right since the hammer and sickle fell from the Kremlin, and loyalty to its whims is the truest symbol of elitism there is. There’s a reason the term “caviar socialist” exists, after all. But when the market, in its Molochian chaos, decides to step on a nation, the situation tends to not end very well for it.

Greece will be the first example of this. Today, the general election triggered by the Hellenic Parliament’s refusal to elect Wall Street/World Bank fat cat Stavros Dimas into the sinecure position of President will bring about a massive change. For the first time, a leftist party not directed by a single Marxist idea but rather broad range of thinking will enter government. The Coalition of the Radical Left, known by its Greek shorthand SYRIZA, will win the election. It’s only uncertain just how much.

The handwringing I noticed in the weeks leading up to this election reflects the paranoia of the markets. The Independent, that piece of toilet paper that happily wipes the ass of the market after it shits, called SYRIZA, a legitimate political party that has been in existence for more than two decades and has no militant wing to speak of, “rebels,” and its leader Alexis Tsipras a communist Harry Potter. Some call that “cheeky British humor.” I call that “pissing in your trousers.”

Bloomberg, run by a man who practically played a lapdog to Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan while he was Mayor of New York during Occupy, wasn’t that much better. It has flustered at the thought of SYRIZA winning the election, but at least acknowledged it happening. But it tried to soothe old Dimon and his gang of losers first by saying that former political scion George Papandreou’s new party To Kinima would prevent the markets from being troubled. Once it realized that Papandreou was merely leeching off voters of the sclerotic Panhellenic Socialist Movement/PASOK, it, along with the Financial Times, fawned over Stavros Theodorakis’ To Potami as being a “kingmaker” that will tame SYRIZA’s supposed ambitions. Now they’re saying that Tsipras might find it easier to have a coalition partner, simply because he can backpedal on his rhetoric. As if he has to do that. It’s laughable, really.

What the markets fail to realize is that a lot of this is their doing. Greece is in a mess because the markets begged for them to act like Americans upon joining the Euro, along with taking a sour bet by running a Summer Olympics that will take as much time to pay off as the Vietnam War. Then, when it was clear that this was a terrible idea, they expected the country to turn arch-conservative with its finances.

These efforts at market excess were curried by the elites, led by PASOK and the conservative New Democracy. It is elite by every standard: Papandreou is a member of a dynasty that dates back to the first Prime Minister after liberation from the Germans, and whose father was the first socialist PM in Greece after the end of the junta in the 60s and 70s. His family had emigrated to America before he was born, only to immigrate back when it seemed like a good idea. He was roommates at Amherst with his eventual rival and current Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Both went on to even more elite schools after that: Papandreou to the London School of Economics because they tend to shun foreigners at Oxbridge, Samaras to Harvard. How posh can you get?

So it’s obvious that the power structure, despite looking like there’s some political spectrum, was built entirely on keeping the markets happy. While the Greeks enjoyed somewhat decent economic growth bolstered partly by the Olympic Games, ND cooked the books and PASOK allowed it to happen, creating an illusion of glory. The establishment had it under control, with the only release valves being the Communists under Joseph Stalin and the Popular Orthodox Rally.

Then the banks of Wall Street overcooked their books and screwed everyone over.

When Papandreou came to power in 2009, his lieutenant, the somewhat less posh Evangelios Venezelos, discovered the cooked books. The PM announced the problem and tried to get it under control, but this being the Great Recession, the odds of that happening were similar to finding water in California these days. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, the Greeks became the storied boogeymen that were out to destroy the somehow already haggard European Union, setting off a chain of bailouts on the continental periphery. It was only by imposing severe and draconian austerity measures that supposedly were in the best interests of the Greeks that the continent was saved. The country was expected to become Germany, and suffer while they do so. The markets were relieved.

This latter narrative is what the markets, and the EU, would like to believe. In the country itself, however, we see a different narrative: If you aren’t in the elite, chances are you’re unemployed, or you know a friend who was. Maybe you know some friends who are homeless and are transient, especially if you’re young. If you have a job, you took a massive pay cut back in 2011 if you were lucky enough not to get laid off. You feel worthless. You don’t need to go far to know that, outside of your country, your nationality is now an epithet for sloth and dubiousness.

The markets, symbolized by the Euro, had betrayed you. Economists would say you deserve it, citing the overwrought Summer Olympics and that you have a hard time paying taxes. But those excuses can only last so long. While you don’t hate Europe, you don’t like the fact that it’s stepping on your head for something you don’t entirely control.

More importantly, the establishment betrayed you. PASOK first, then ND. Sure, Samaras put up a nice facade at first, attacking the bailouts and throwing out one of his most significant rivals in the party for daring to support them. But when push came to shove, he turned heel the moment it became clear that his continued control of the country would count on it. So both parties are still shamelessly praying to the golden idol.

The feeling of anti-establishment thinking has never been stronger in Greece. And there are few people who come close to leading that sentiment than Alexis Tsipras. Born mere days after the fascist junta fell, he’s as anti-elite as they come: Local to Athens, his parents were from the countryside. While active in politics, he studied engineering at a great local university and worked in construction for a while.

Tsipras has come to represent a unique strain of leftist thinking: One built on the diversity of opinion rather than a singular agenda. Unlike the American left, overtaken by social radicals intent on squabbling over who is the biggest victim in the room, he’s kept everyone on the same page. After all, everyone in the room is equally in the room is a victim, for they are Greeks beaten down by the bean-counters in Brussels and New York as well as the elites in PASOK and ND.

He cuts himself as young (only 40), charming and cunning. But more importantly, he’s actually competent as a leader: With such strains of thinking as classical Marxism, Trotskyism, feminism, ecosocialism, eurocommunism, even super minor strains of leftist thought like Luxembergism, you would think that SYRIZA wouldn’t last a few weeks as a small group, let alone 10 years as an electoral coalition and political entity. But that is a testament to Tsipras’ leadership.

He’s also a fighter, and that’s what makes him dangerous. Rather simply making a case on being a leftist party, he turned this election and the previous two into a referendum on the euro that has been stepping on them. Just by being that alone and unique in how they handle it was SYRIZA able to take over PASOK as not only the party of the left but also a legitimate alternative to what had been standard European politics.

It’s important to understand this election is not a referendum on the European Union. Outside of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn, the nationalist Independent Greeks and one or two factions of SYRIZA, everyone in Greece wants to stay in Europe. Their problem has never really been with Europe as a whole. The problem is the market economy that seems intent on ensuring the only thing Greece is allowed to do is suffer. It’s just that SYRIZA is more willing to let an exit from the euro be an option than anyone else in the room, and that’s what scares the markets. It means the Greeks don’t believe in them anymore.

Which brings me to To Potami, or The River. The current estimates are saying that SYRIZA will be a few seats short of an absolute majority (though it’s possible that they could still get it, especially if the Independent Greeks don’t get enough votes), meaning they will need to partner with another party to run the government. Golden Dawn is out of the question, the Independent Greeks are bit too rightist for their own good (though they could still join on a patriotic front), and the Communists are still run by Joseph Stalin.

Which leaves To Potami, run by talk show host Theodorakis. People are making them out to be some form of “taming” force because SYRIZA will need the votes, and To Potami would rather stay on the euro. The problem is that they are not taking into account a couple key points:

  1. Theodorakis and Tsipras are closer in belief on the bailout documents that have been harming Greece than most believe,
  2. Theodorakis has no political experience whatsoever.

The last two TV personalities that started a political party and entered a democratic parliament were Beppe Grillo in Italy and Yair Lapid in Israel. The former has let his 5-Star Movement self-immolate due to Occupy-level infighting, while the latter was eating out of Bibi Netanyahu’s hand until he realized the food was shit and called his Yesh Atid out of the Knesset. Both are polling poorly now. The odds are likely that Tsipras could easily outplay Theodorakis. If the former can control a bunch of Trotskyists and feminists with giant egos, what’s one talk show host?

ND will not win reelection this time around, that much is certain despite bailed out Goldman Sachs’ claims to the contrary. They betrayed the populace, and their partners will be either non-existent (the Democratic Left) or close to it (PASOK). They were very close to defeat the last time, and were likely only saved because their friends in Brussels still had some sway over the populace. Not anymore.

So what happens after the election? Things get fun. Over the course of the election campaign, outsiders from Europe, including World Bank snout and EU prez Jean-Claude Juncker, had made the ever ominous elitist threat that they “hope” the Greeks will make the “right decision.” ECB president Mario Draghi has threatened to prevent access to the way-too-late quantitative easing program if SYRIZA dares to try to move the foot off the country’s head.

However, the last time the Greeks were asked to be treated like this, their response was a rather simple one: “όχι!”

No wonder you can smell the markets’ fear.

(Image source)