Category Archives: Politics

“The Strongest Weapon”

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President Obama addressed the anti-Mohammed hate video yesterday in his speech to the United Nations. I feel that he got the balance just about right.

    [Over] the last two weeks…a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well — for as the city outside these walls [New York] makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion — we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.
    I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech. Here in the United States, countless publications provoke offense. Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs. Moreover, as President of our country, and Commander-in-Chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so. Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views — even views that we disagree with.
    We do so not because we support hateful speech, but because our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can become a tool to silence critics, or oppress minorities. We do so because given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.

Limits to Free Speech?

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When I met last week with two Moroccan friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while, the first thing each of them wanted to talk about (the meetings were separate) was the anti-Mohammed hate film and the controversy it has caused. Both of them were upset, but they are worldly types who know that YouTube is filled with all kinds of trash, so they weren’t thrown into a frenzy by the simple fact that such a film could exist. They know they are haters out there. What they did want to know was how the U.S. government could stand by and do nothing, when the film was clearly designed to insult a whole community of innocent people (Muslim believers), and stir up trouble. Especially once the embassies were attacked and four Americans killed, wasn’t it the government’s obligation to shut the film down — if only to protect their own interests, not to mention prevent further offense? And didn’t their refusal to do so represent some kind of endorsement?

My response was, first of all, to point out that the filmmakers are a bunch of losers, completely unknown before the film went viral and had its stunning “success.” It is beyond the capacities of even the U.S. government to watch every video on YouTube, and estimate the potential for future harm before it happens. My friends were doubtful about this, perhaps because they give too much credit to the power and reach of the U.S. government, and perhaps because they live in a state that keeps a watchful eye on everything its citizens are doing and thinking. But I explained that our government has far more important things to worry about than fringe dwellers on YouTube. They are engaged in wars, overt and covert, in several nations, and are trying to figure out if Iran is preparing a nuclear bomb. They are trying to manage a financial crisis at home, and deal with the consequences of its bastard stepchild in Europe. There is the Chinese leadership transition to think about, and so on. Do they really have the time to notice a video on YouTube which, until the events of last week, only a few thousand people had seen?

My friends accepted this logic, though they still had their doubts. They began to look around for a conspiracy, and insist that there was more to this than met the eye. Surely Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, Steve Klein, and the others hadn’t made this film on their own. Someone had put them up to it — perhaps the Syrians, perhaps the Israelis, perhaps even the U.S. government itself. I mentioned Occam’s Razor, the idea that when trying to decide why something happened, the explanation “that makes the fewest assumptions” is often the best. Sometimes, I said, Oswald really is the lone gunner, the planes that flew into the World Trade Center are the cause of its collapse, and a hate film made by a bunch of nobodies is able to provoke rage in twenty countries. To imagine otherwise is to believe not only that the conspirators can forsee the results of their actions with eerie precision, but that they are able to control everything down to the smallest detail to get the intended result. Sometimes, I insisted, stuff happens — things no one saw coming, that create the illusion of a malign genius pulling the strings.

This left one other question on the table. Once the damage done by the film became known, why did the U.S. government continue to defend its right to exist? Why didn’t they just pull it off the internet, and arrest the filmmakers? This may seem like an outrageous question to many Americans, who put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the mobs who resorted to violence. For an American, a verbal assault never justifies violence — they are two different things, and a person who leaps from one to the other is displaying a moral weakness, a dangerous lack of self-control. (We can argue whether this is really true. What about bar fights? But we do tend to blame the person who threw the first punch, not the first slur.) My friends, who come from a different culture, see things from a different angle. For them, social harmony is more important, and freedom of speech is never the right to insult and defame. They see nothing wrong with expecting people to dress modestly, avoid vulgar language, and keep their carousing out of sight. After all, your grandmother might be offended — it’s a simple question of respect. Even more so for a film whose sole purpose is to offend others. Isn’t that like dumping your garbage on someone’s lawn? What right does that have to be protected speech?

I explained what free speech means in America. Different societies have different standards, I said, and the U.S. has perhaps the broadest standard of all. The only red lines I’m aware of are direct calls to violence, or spreading false information (such as slander or fraud) that does material harm. Even then, a crime must be proven, with evidence of intent and according to law. There is simply no way to remove a film proactively from circulation, on the simple assumption that someone’s feelings might be hurt. So there is nothing illegal about the Mohammed film, no matter how disgusting we may find it — and there’s a reason for that. America was settled by people fleeing from religious or political persecution, and they placed a very high value on the freedom to express their beliefs. In fact, this is the core value on which all our other freedoms are based. To protect that right, we must extend it to everyone. This means that no matter how strange or offensive an opinion may be to the rest of us, we protect it in order to protect our own perhaps equally bizarre opinions. And we accept the consequences of this, namely that we can never expect the government to step in and tell someone he’s wrong. If we find an opinion harmful we need to defeat it in argument, not through the force of the state — or just learn to “live and let live.”

Of course, as I think any American understands, this is the ideal, but the reality is far from perfect. These protections weren’t extended to Communists in the 1950s, who were considered to be agents of an enemy power. Another example is the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were persecuted in the 1940s for refusing military service on religious grounds. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, was martyred in 1844, and from the Wobblies to the Civil Rights movement to the Occupy movement today, the U.S. government has a history of spying on opposition movements. Perhaps to a greater extent than we realize, we pick and choose which opinions to tolerate, which to celebrate, and which to suppress or condemn. The idea of freedom of speech as an incontrovertible right plays a fundamential role in our self-image as Americans, but in practice, we do place limits in the name of protecting ourselves against a greater danger. So the question remains — why is the Mohammed film okay, particularly when it has placed our relations with a large part of the world at risk? Is it possible that this is a symptom of something deeper in the American psyche? Is it possible that hate speech against Muslims is something we are prepared to defend, more so than other forms of hate speech?

Keep in mind, this film didn’t appear in a vacuum. Now, this isn’t the same as saying that the film was made by hidden conspirators, or anyone other than the handful of losers whose names we know. But there does exist an international network of anti-Muslim hate groups, from the English Defence League to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to people like Anders Behring Brevik, the Norweigian mass murderer, that has strong roots in the U.S. as well. Bloggers like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are the “intellectual” leaders of this movement, with Geller currently running ads on buses and subways in American cities that refer to Muslims as “savages.” Politicians like Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, and Peter King have lent their support to this movement as well. Mosques have been burned, referendums have been passed against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law, and an attempt to build a Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan drew national controversy before it was finally approved. Our own president is often accused of being a Muslim — as if that were the deepest insult, a fatal sign of his “otherness.” Fortunately none of these are majority views. But it does show a certain tolerance for anti-Muslim hate speech, a double standard that calls into question our claim to universal rights.

In defending the right to make a film insulting Mohammed, are we merely sticking up for our principles? Or are we picking and choosing? If a group of Hezbollah supporters living in the U.S. were to make a film portraying Jews as pederasts, money-grubbers, and depraved lunatics — which is how Mohammed was portrayed — would our first instinct be to champion their right to free speech? Or would outrage and condemnation rain down from all sides, along with calls to investigate their finances, their network of connections, and even kick them out of the country? Perhaps the viewpoint of my Moroccan friends, which places social harmony first and asks people to use their rights responsibly, is worth hearing. Of course, it’s never okay to storm an embassy by scaling the walls, setting fires, sacking and pillaging. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that millions of people who didn’t do these things — engineers, grandmothers, shopkeepers, schoolchildren — were deeply hurt and offended. Is our message to them that we don’t care, because they’re Muslims and somehow deserve it? Or can we show some respect? If they were our neighbors — which in this world of YouTube and Twitter, we all are — would we toss our garbage on their lawn, or would we strive to be neighborly?

It feels silly to appeal to basic decency, because that’s such an unhip value. It feels silly to say, “Muslims are people too,” but they are. Perhaps the rush of claims and counterclaims in the media makes us lose track of that fact. Muslims aren’t some abstract group of “others.” They get up in the morning and have breakfast, kiss the kids and send them to school, get on the bus to go to work, sell shoes or chop meat or fill out paperwork, study hard because they want to pass the test, have illicit affairs, go drinking with their pals, fall asleep in front of the TV. What are we trying to say to these people, when we claim that it is an American value to insult their religion, their cherished beliefs, and the bonds that tie them together? I support the right of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to make that film — it’s our principle of free speech. But I think there’s a conversation we should be having as Americans, as to whether it’s the right thing to do. After all, we value social harmony as much as Muslims do. We voluntarily place limits on our own freedom. We don’t think it’s okay to walk up to people on the street and start hurling insults — so why do it on YouTube? It may be legal, and it may be protected speech, but a person obesessed with insulting others is not very healthy. Perhaps we should shame them in the same way we shame anti-Black racists, or anti-Semites. If Muslims are the last group in the world whom it’s okay for Americans to insult, that doesn’t reflect very well on us as a culture.

We Are the 47%

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You know, the looters and moochers who are in the tank for Obama no matter what.

Mitt Romney, caught on tape at a fundraiser:

    “All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax…. So my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

The term “looters and moochers” comes from Ayn Rand, the inspiration for Romney running mate Paul Ryan’s political philosophy. In Rand’s alternate universe, uber-capitalist superheroes are the “job creators,” while those of us who want some kind of social safety net are bloodsuckers leading America into a world of collectivist depravity. For an interesting take-down of Rand’s early admiration for serial killer William Edward Hickman, see this piece by Mark Ames.

By the way, Ayn Rand said on a 1979 talk show that Israel is the “advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages,” so she had that part of the modern Republican Party philosophy down too.

“Beware the False Fury”

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Read this now. He gets everything right.

    “The same danger is now looming from Cairo to Benghazi to the rest of the Arab and Muslim world—for militant Salafis or Wahhabis to abuse this ignoramus film to derail a world historic succession of revolutions. … The US has done enough atrocities around the globe to be blamed for just about everything—but this is a different season—this is the season of the Green Movement and the Arab Spring—do not be fooled by these zealotries of the fanatics who are trying to steal the revolution. … President Obama must do absolutely nothing. The true measure of his statesmanship is [to]…let Muslims raise their own voice in condemning both bigotry and violence at one and the time—as indeed we see it happening in both Libya and Egypt…. This is the season of the Arab Spring—binary banalities of fanatics on both sides of the divide cannot derail the course of history anymore.”

Manipulation: A Case Study

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Protests over the film trailer insulting Mohammed have spread from Egypt and Libya to several other countries. The Toronto Star:

    “Just as the video itself was an act of manipulation, U.S. officials are on alert to the likelihood that the reaction will involve further manipulation, as Salafist groups seize upon and stoke the fury.”

Here’s an article from the great Max Blumenthal that reveals the identities and motivations of the men who made the film—radical, anti-Islamist Christians, among them Egyptian Copts living in the U.S. He makes the point that there is an ideological link between these individuals and the Islamophobic network led by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, who are the same people who provided inspiration to Anders Behring Breivik—the Norwegian who murdered 77 people, mostly teenagers, for being “multiculturalists” last year.

It should be noted that virulent hatred of Islam is not the default position of the Coptic community, either inside or outside Egypt. Blumenthal concludes his article by mentioning that one of the collaboratators on the film, Morris Sadek, was recently attacked on the street in Washington by four Coptic women, who were angry with him for endangering the lives of their fellow Copts.

What is troubling to me are the intentions behind this film. Steve Klein, a right-wing Christian activist and militia trainer who was a “consultant” on the film, was quoted as saying, “We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen.” And Sadek, who was banned from Egypt last year for incitement, said, “The violence that it caused in Egypt is further evidence of how violent the religion and people are.” It seems that the filmmakers intended to stir up violence in the Middle East—and not incidentally, make it harder for the U.S. to find common ground with moderate Islamists there.

Blogger Joseph Cannon takes this point a step further, in a series of posts that question the film’s financing, and the network of kooks who created it. Where did Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the purported director of the film—who was convicted in 2010 of bank fraud and owes $790,000 in restitution—get the money? Cannon’s theory is that he was part of an Israeli “psy op” designed to stir up trouble for President Obama in the Middle East and help Mitt Romney get elected. This is of course highly speculative, but Cannon provides useful details on the backgrounds of Klein, Sadek, Nakoula, and pastor Terry Jones—the Qur’an burner who helped promote the film—that go deeper than those in the Blumenthal article.

If the Israelis did order up this film in an attempt to discredit Obama, it makes a perverse kind of sense. Obama now faces a battle on two fronts—first, to calm things down in the Arab world before the protests spiral out of control and reverse the progress of the Arab Spring; and second, to deal with a virulent Islamophobic network at home that is doing all it can to stir up trouble. At the same time, he must face down blatant efforts by Benjamin Netanyahu to get him to commit to an inopportune, ill-considered war with Iran.

This may be the time to consider that despite all Obama’s faults, we have a decent man in the White House. When Muammar Qaddafi threatened Benghazi with extinction, he decided to step in, despite being almost alone among his top advisers to see the moral necessity. It seems obvious now that it was the right thing to do, but at the time it was a huge risk. A new article by Michael Lewis provides an intimate portrait of Obama, with a focus on his decision to help Libya. It’s long, but well worth reading, and timely in this new crisis.

Tragedy All Around

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Source: AFP, via Corriere della Sera

The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, is dead today, along with three other Americans who worked at the embassy, following an attack on the consulate in Benghazi by a group calling themselves the Supporters of Sharia, who were angered by a film circulated on YouTube which portrays the Prophet Mohammed as a sexually depraved lunatic.

Earlier in the night, angered by the same film, members of a crowd outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo scaled the outer wall to pull down the American flag, and replace it briefly with a black flag with an Islamic slogan. Fortunately, Egyptian security forces got control of the situation, and no one was hurt.

The events in Libya took a more serious turn. Apparently, an armed group of Islamists “came out of their military garrison” to attack the consulate, firing rockets into the building and setting it on fire. Ambassador Stevens died from smoke inhalation. A career diplomat, he had been ambassador for only four months, though he was in Libya last year to work with anti-Qaddafi rebels. Tragicallly, he was on a brief visit to Benghazi when he was caught up in the incident.

Photos on the website of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, apparently taken by the attackers themselves, show not an image of hardened fighters but a group of youths, arms raised in triumph and exulting at what they had done. This only adds to the tragedy in my mind. Did they know they were responsible for the death of a man who had been working for their own freedom just a year before?

I’ve watched the film, or more precisely its trailer, and I can say that it is a warped, degrading portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed. The attackers may have been extremists, but the film is extremist in its own way. If there was ever a film designed to insult Islam, this is it. As the New York Times puts it, Mohammed is shown as “a child of uncertain parentage, a buffoon, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child molester and a greedy, bloodthirsty thug.” Besides that, the acting is terrible—”an amateur cast performing a wooden dialogue,” as the Huffington Post says. The filmmaker, Sam Bacile, who is now in hiding, says he raised $5 million to make this travesty. It has been shown only once in its entirety, in a near-empty theatre.

So why did four people have to die for this project, who very likely knew nothing about it? What were the attackers thinking, when they imagined that the Benghazi consulate, or the Cairo embassy, was a fitting target for their rage? Did they believe it was an official project of Washington or Hollywood, when it was neither? Perhaps they think that our government has the power to ban expression it doesn’t approve of, when it does not. More to the point, who cares what this jerk thinks about your religion? He’s an insignificant nobody who you’ve just given a huge boost of publicity—like Terry Jones, the pastor who burned a Qur’an, and who helped to promote this film. I can understand that after being driven to extremes by a murderous dictator, your dignity is all you have left. That’s what you fought for. But in the big world out there, somebody, somewhere will hold your values in contempt. They want to prove you’re savages, and you’ve given them just what they wanted.

So who is responsible for the deaths of the ambassador and three other Americans? Of course, it is the men who attacked the building, and I hope they are brought to justice. But does Sam Bacile feel any regret? After all, if he hadn’t made a film designed to provoke outrage, four innocent people would be alive today. “We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” a consultant on the film said. Sam Bacile claims, “I feel sorry for the embassy,” but then he goes on to make an excuse. “I feel the security system is no good. America should do something to change it.” And he remains defiant. “Islam is a cancer, period. This is a political movie. We’re fighting with ideas.”

Now the aftermath will be politicized, and we’ll hear the usual refrain. Obama is weak on Islam. He thought he could deal with these people, and look what happened. He would rather apologize for America’s values than defend them. Already it’s begun. As Alan West, the right-wing congressman from Florida, said: “The Obama Administration touted the Arab Spring as an awakening of freedom, which we now see is a nightmare of Islamism.” We’ll be hearing more of that soon. For now, let’s mourn four people who did their best to help the cause of freedom, and got caught up in a tragic mistake.

UPDATES:

1) U.S. officials suspect that the attack on the Benghazi consulate may have been planned in advance, using the Mohammed film only as a convenient excuse. One reason for this suspicion is that the Americans were attacked not once, but twice, the second time after retreating to a safe house in a different location. Details are here.

2) Apparently the filmmaker Sam Bacile doesn’t exist, but is rather a pseudonym for the real filmmaker. Early reports said Sam Bacile claimed to be an Israeli-American who raised money for the film from 100 Jewish donors. Fortunately I didn’t fall for that angle—it didn’t feel right. The Associated Press believes it has found “Sam Bacile,” an Egyptian Copt living in California named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who was convicted of bank fraud in 2010. Nakoula admits to managing the production, but denies actually directing the film. Meanwhile, it turns out that the actors didn’t even realize they were in a film insulting Mohammed, because all the references to Mohammed and Islam were dubbed later in the studio. An actress from the film says she was deceived: “Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in. It makes me sick.”

3) I predicted that President Obama’s opponents would use this incident to accuse him of being somehow weak and un-American, and that happened far sooner than I could have imagined. In the middle of the night while events were still unfolding, Republican chairman Reince Priebus tweeted, “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.” The next morning, once all the facts were known, Mitt Romney gave a press conference where he accused the Obama administration of “sending mixed signals to the region” and “standing in apology for our values.” Somewhat to my surprise, he was widely criticized, and many in his own party said he’d made a mistake. Molly Ball argues in The Atlantic that this may even be the moment when “the believability of his whole campaign was deflated” and “voters may decide he doesn’t pass the commander-in-chief test.”

All in all, a complex series of events, whose true significance is still evolving on many fronts.

Netanyahu, Make My Day!

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today:

    “The world tells Israel, ‘Wait, there’s still time’ [to deal with Iran]. And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?'”

Okay then, attack Iran. Get it over with, already! You’ve been yapping about it for months. Just don’t drag President Obama into it.

Netanyahu went on:

    “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

He must be referring to people like General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said recently that an Israeli attack would “probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program” and added, “I don’t want to be complicit if they choose to do it.”

In his usual delicate, subtle fashion, Netanyahu has been trying to inject himself into the American presidential campaign, threatening that Israel will attack Iran between now and November, in an attempt to force Obama’s hand before the election. What he wants, apparently, is a full-throated commitment from Obama to use force against Iran if certain “red lines” are crossed. This while publicly embracing Mitt Romney, who accuses Obama of “throwing Israel under the bus,” and who is bankrolled by Netanyahu’s biggest supporter, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Two days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reaffirmed American policy, saying, “We’re not setting deadlines” and negotiations with Iran remain “the best approach.” Netanyahu’s latest trash talk is his response to that. It has since emerged that President Obama won’t be meeting with Netanyahu while he’s in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly later this month. It was assumed only recently that Netanyahu would make a side trip to Washington to discuss his famous “red lines.” But now, the president says he’s too busy.

Draw your own conclusions!

— • —

In unrelated news, this is the most fun you’ll ever have learning about the effects of Federal Reserve policy on the U.S. economy.

And Mitt Romney has warned that if President Obama is reelected, he will “take God off our coins.”

Do Kings Have “Special Legitimacy”?

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Marc Lynch raises the question, Does Arab Monarchy Matter?

    “What does it mean that no Kings have thus far fallen in the Arab uprisings while four non-monarchical rulers (Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi and Saleh) have toppled from their (non-royal) thrones and a fifth has plunged his country into a brutal civil war? Is there a monarchical exception in the Arab world? …
    “I am particularly unpersuaded by arguments that the Arab monarchies enjoy a distinctive legitimacy. … It is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchical legitimacy with the tightly controlled media, carefully cultivated personality cults, and brutally policed ‘red lines’ which generally characterize such regimes. The alleged unique legitimacy of Arab monarchs strikes me as a carefully cultivated and ruthlessly policed political myth which could dissolve as quickly as did the universal adoration for Bashar al-Assad or Moammar Qaddafi when challenged. …
    “The claim for a unique legitimacy among the Arab monarchies is further undermined by the fact that they have in fact experienced significant political dissent over the last two years, to which they responded through fairly typical (albeit unusually well-resourced) combinations of repression and co-optation. … The resources and capabilities of the Arab monarchies may be different from their non-kingly peers, but the challenges facing them from popular mobilization really were not. …
    “To me, the monarchies look like fairly typical Arab authoritarian regimes, surviving because they enjoy greater financial resources, less demanding international allies, and powerful media assets to perpetuate their legitimation myths.  And that means that they will not likely be spared should those assets lose value…. The monarchs may be on offense around the region right now, but their defense might not be a strong as it appears.”

It is worth mentioning that Lynch is primarily concerned here with describing the Gulf Arab monarchies, with a few remarks about Jordan. Morocco gets only one mention—”Morocco’s monarch diverted popular mobilization through an early offer of limited political reforms”—and one broader, indirect reference—”Saudi and Qatari support for their less wealthy fellow monarchs seems to be more important to [their] survival…than the intrinsic institutional characteristics of a throne.”

That said, the argument about the special legitimacy of kings is one often heard in Morocco, when explaining why Morocco has known comparatively little unrest since the Arab awakening began. In this view, the king has a unique role to play as a “referee” among competiting forces, and as the guarantor of Moroccan unity. He is the sole force, the saying goes, who is respected by everyone, as the inheritor of a tradition that has been at the center of Moroccan life for centuries. However, the recent controversy over the bay’a, or ceremony of allegiance to the king, might be saying something different. In which case, Lynch’s words should serve as a warning regarding castles built on sand.

As James Traub put it recently in Foreign Policy:

    The reforms that Mohammed VI has instituted since assuming the throne in 1999 have succeeded in persuading a significant part of the Moroccan elite…that he is the key to the country’s future. But the elite game has ended: The young and the disenfranchised have stopped accepting the bleak future that stretched before them. … When the crowds denounced corruption and privilege, they were thinking, if not of the king himself—that would be lèse-majesté—than certainly of the makhzen. … Moroccans may increasingly find themselves balancing their reverence for the king with their frustration at their lot. And they won’t keep blaming the government, rather than the palace, forever.

Elections Do Matter

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As a follow-up to my post from three days ago, I want to take stock of all that is at stake in this November’s election.

First, consider this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, Fear of a Black President. It is an impassioned analysis of how President Obama has been constrained throughout his term by the “dying embers” of white racism in America. It is a long, incisive, “angry” (his word) analysis, which deserves to be read carefully as a study of American history and our current discourse from a black perspective. Coates’ main argument is that by the simple fact of his blackness, Obama faces barriers to his legitimacy that a white president with the same politics wouldn’t have. He must always be on his best behavior, or “twice as good,” as Coates puts it. This makes him unable to “speak candidly” on the question of race, or by extension, many of the other issues confronting our nation today.

    “For most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. … The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being ‘clean’ (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. … Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.”

Coates brilliantly teases out the ways in which white supremacy is still alive in America, and how it has informed the obstructionism of Obama’s opponents in Congress, as well as the rise of the Tea Party with its slogan of “taking America back.”

    “Whatever the saintly nonviolent rhetoric used to herald it, racial integration [in the 1950s and 60s] was a brutal assault on whiteness. The American presidency, an unbroken streak of nonblack men, was, until 2008, the greatest symbol of that old order. … At rallies for the nascent Tea Party, people held signs saying things like Obama Plans White Slavery. Steve King, an Iowa congressman and Tea Party favorite, complained that Obama ‘favors the black person.’ … On Fox & Friends, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had exposed himself as a guy ‘who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture…. This guy is, I believe, a racist.’ … More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced ‘birther bills’ demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship as a condition for putting him on the 2012 ballot. Eighteen percent of Republicans believe Obama to be a Muslim. The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.”

This might seem like a way to excuse Obama for not being more effective as president— and in particular, for not going further on issues dear to progressives, among whom he allowed himself to be counted in the early days of the 2008 primary campaign. He hasn’t prosecuted fraudsters on Wall Street because it would look like an attack by a black man on a bastion of white privilege. He’s ramped up the Pakistan drone strikes, and failed to close Guantanamo or reverse the Patriot Act, because he needs to go overboard to show he’s not in cahoots with the terrorists. A president whose loyalty to white privilege was secure would have more room to maneuver. Coates doesn’t make this argument directly, though he strongly implies it. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he says. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.” He gives two examples: Glenn Beck labeled Obama’s health care reforms “reparations,” a term for payments to the descendants of slaves that no one leveled against Bill Clinton’s own health care proposals; and Newt Gingrich referred to Obama as the “food-stamp president.”

A more recent example is the claim by the Romney campaign that Obama is trying to do away with the work requirement in welfare, because he wants to give handouts to people with no desire to work. This claim, aired in TV ads in battleground states and by Rick Santorum at the Republican National Convention, is demonstrably false. David Roberts addresses the question of what journalists should do when they call a campaign out on a lie, but the campaign keeps on doing it. Michael Fournier discusses the racial subtext—lazy black people are taking the money of hard-working whites—and why the Romney campaign has chosen to play the race card. A slew of recent articles describe the demographic calculations underlying this strategy: see Ronald Brownstein, Jonathan Chait, and The Week. In effect, as minority voters become an ever-larger share of the electorate, there are only two ways to win the presidency: either design policies with broad appeal to minorities as well as around 40% of the white vote, or write off minorities and win over 60% of the white vote. The Romney campaign knows it can’t win the first way, given near-zero support among blacks and an immigration policy that alienates Latinos, so they’re trying to win by firing up working-class white resentment. “This is the last time anyone will try to do this,” said a Republican strategist. It’s 2012 or never to win the presidency with the white vote alone.

This ties in nicely with another tactic Republicans are using this year, a campaign to suppress the turnout of young, poor, and minority voters—all likely Obama supporters—under the name of fighting “voter fraud.” Voter suppression was already a favorite tactic of Bush appointees in the previous decade, but it has really picked up steam over the past two years, as many Republican-dominated state legislatures have passed “Voter ID” laws that require a photo ID to vote. Their claim is that this will prevent people from voting under someone else’s name, but this is solving a problem that doesn’t exist. A recent study found only ten cases of voter impersonation nationwide, going back to 2000. Meanwhile, under the new laws, anyone with a driver’s license will be able to vote, but those without one will need to apply for a special ID before voting. This obliges them, first of all, to know about the new law, and second, to get to the office where IDs are given and pay the fee. Isn’t this a bit like the poll tax of Jim Crow days? It places an extra burden on the poor, those without a stable address, and the less well-connected or well-informed, even though voting is a Constitutional right. Fortunately, as Andrew Cohen reports, in every case that has come before a federal judge this year, “Voter ID” laws and similar restrictive measures have been struck down. The issue is still working its way through the courts, but eight federal judges have ruled, and without exception, including Republican appointees, they have all found the voter restrictions to be without merit. As Cohen puts it: “Sometimes, clarity brings justice. And sometimes justice brings clarity.”

The point of all this is that the Romney campaign knows it can’t win without firing up white racial resentment on the one hand, and suppressing the turnout of poor and minority voters on the other. Their policies don’t have the support of the majority of the American people, so they have to tweak that majority. This makes me wonder: if nothing is at stake in this election, then why this willingness to win dirty? Why go to such lengths to game the system? Why not accept the popular will in a sportsmanlike way, and fight again another day? It seems that something big is at stake, maybe the whole nature of the American project. Who has the right to be here, to participate, to be served by our government? White privilege and racial resentment are the common thread of everything I’ve written here. Will this be the America we proclaim to the world in 2012? Or will the “other America” that emerged in 2008 show it endures?

Clearly, the face of America is changing—not just racially, as whites move toward losing their majority around 2040—but also as the pendulum swings back towards greater tolerance on social issues, such as gay and women’s rights; and a new, more progressive generation engages in politics. What we’re experiencing are the death throes of the conservative dominance of politics that began with the “Reagan Revolution” of 1980. I’ll admit that I wasn’t planning to vote at all this year, out of disappointment with Obama for being too cautious, too incremental: I wanted a clean break, and he’s all about continuity and “leading from behind.” I still have these reservations, but when I see the tactics of the other side, I think about those who fought for their right to vote before I was born. Do I want to see that rolled back, in the name of wounded white privilege? Or do I want to keep hope alive that the American discourse will one day reflect all of its people?

2012 isn’t a “change” election for me, but it’s a necessary one. If we want to keep things moving in the right direction, we need to push back against the politics of resentment, defend the rights we already have, and stake a claim for the future. We need to show we are here. This may not be the most inspiring reason to vote, but it’s enough. So it looks like I’ll put my voting boots on once again, and support Obama despite my reservations. He’s our one and only black president, our Kenyan–Muslim “other.” Is it too much too ask that he’ll act a little bit more like this in his second term?

Do Elections Matter?

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I can’t help but follow the ins and outs of the American presidential campaign, which are fascinating to me even though it seems to be more a contest of teams of advisers, marketing strategies, and scripted events than a spontaneous outpouring of democracy “of, by, and for the people,” to use Lincoln’s words. A debate is taking place, but it’s a packaged debate, mediated by the gatekeepers of public opinion: TV pundits, public intellectuals, party officials, professional image managers, and those who script campaign ads paid for by major donors, whose “money is speech” according to the Supreme Court. The result is that the rough edges are smoothed away and we are left with two packages, Brand A and Brand B, both claiming to represent the mainstream of American public opinion. This is expressed as well as anyone by Lambert Strether in a post today on the economic blog Naked Capitalism:

    “The national election campaign so far reminds me of nothing so much as a sports bar: There, up on the teebee screen, are the players on the field. Some wear jerseys labeled R; some wear jerseys labeled D. Announcers hold forth in a rapid stream of technical and statistical information, and proffer color commentary. The managers and the owners are unseen. And down in the bar, we, the ‘voters,’ cheer, or groan, or chant, or sit in white-knuckled silence, or shout advice. But are we, down at the bar, crazy enough to think that our chants and shouted advice actually affect what happens up on the screen?”

After we choose between Brand A and Brand B one of them gets to govern, constrained by all the institutional limits that have built up over time: international commitments, the demands of financial markets, the interests of powerful lobbies such as military contractors or retirees, bureaucratic inertia, and the Constitutional balance of power itself. Invariably, these constraints force any new president to tone down his most ambitious ideas, so that even “transformational” elections like 1980 or 2008 lead to only incremental change.

Perhaps that’s for the best, because we can’t have a revolution every four years, purging programs that people have come to rely on and completely remaking the rules of the game. Only extremists would want a party in power that pushes through its agenda without regard to the balance of interests in American society, and careless of whom it might hurt. All change is bound to hurt someone, and this in itself is a limit on the type of candidates we get, who are sponsored by two major parties that aspire to represent the broad majority of American public opinion. But it does raise the question of whether elections serve any purpose at all. Every election since at least 1992 has been cast by one side or the other as “the most critical election in our lifetime,” and this year is no exception. But after the elections are over, the seeming impossibility of changing anything leads people to wonder what all the fuss was about. Ronald Reagan, the anti-government crusader, raised taxes and expanded the size of government. Bill Clinton’s most enduring legacy may be “ending welfare as we know it,” which was a demand of the opposing party. George W. Bush ran up the deficit and engaged in nation building, two things he said he wouldn’t do. Barack Obama failed to prosecute bank fraud and continued the Bush policies embodied in the Patriot Act. Every four years, it feels like we’re embarking on an exciting romance, only to feel cheated and deceived the morning after. We mistake packaging for substance, and the good-looking stranger we took home turns out to be a cad. This year, the new kids on the block are Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. If elected, they will let us down too. Given this history, we might be forgiven for wishing we could skip the election entirely, and leave the system to run itself.

The same dynamic plays out in other nations. This spring, France saw a shift from the right-of-center Nicolas Sarkozy to the left-of-center François Hollande, but economic realities are putting severe constraints on the new president’s economic policy choices. Even in the foreign policy and domestic security realms, where he might be imagined to have more room to maneuver, his policies are shaping up to be more a continuation than a repudiation of what went before: a willingness to side with the Syrian opposition, much as Sarkozy did for Libya, and a continuation of the deportation of the Roma people begun by Sarkozy. Greece, Italy, and Spain have all seen changes in government since the outbreak of the European financial crisis, but in all cases, the new parties in power have been forced by the demands of financial markets to continue austerity policies begun under the previous administration, only more aggressively and effectively. Opposition movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the U.S. and its counterparts in nations as diverse as Spain, Greece, Argentina, and Israel have so far brought about no change in governing policy. In Morocco, popular protests last year led to constitutional changes and the election of a populist, Islamist party which had never before held power, but the new government finds itself constrained by institutional interests led by the king, and is unable to enact major reforms. Even in Egypt and Tunisia where dictators were overthrown and democratic elections held for the first time in history, change has been limited by military and economic elites, and the state bureaucracy whose interests are well entrenched. Indeed, one lesson of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 is the extent to which the interests of international finance dictate governing policies all over the world, limiting the options for popularly elected leaders.

Still, I tend to believe that elections serve some purpose, if only as a safety valve for popular discontent. In periods when society is in broad agreement that things are going well, elections are boring, party platforms are nearly indistinguishable, and it seems to make little difference who is elected. But as tensions rise in one segment or another of the population, elections heat up and begin to feel like they are really about something. The rise of the Tea Party movement in the U.S. in 2010 is a case in point. In the Congressional elections that year, rhetoric was flying that if change didn’t come to Washington, the only option left would be “Second Amendment remedies,” or taking up arms against the government. But even when the new crop of elected leaders turns out to be just like the last—cautious, pragmatic individuals interested in moving the needle as little as possible once they are in power—I tend to believe that public venting of emotions during the campaign isn’t a bad thing. Would it be better to have a real revolution, with Tea Party militias storming the Capitol, or Occupy activists looting the banks? Some people would say yes, because that’s the only way we’ll have real change, but they should be careful what they wish for. After all, not all radicals want the same thing. Some want a socialist system that takes from the rich to give to the poor, while others want to do away with government entirely so they can keep their money to themselves. In a revolutionary environment, which side will win? Elections smooth out these differences by forcing the extremes to choose among a limited set of options, all of which are palatable to the mainstream; and the mainstream seeks not revolution, but balance and common sense.

Those who feel that elections are a sham will argue that they distract us with illusions of choice, while returning the same elites to power over and over again. For these people, there is little difference between a dictator like Hosni Mubarak, who won elections with 95% of the vote, and institutional parties like the Democrats and Republicans who together chalk up the same score. My response is that elections do make a difference, not so much in November when one of two candidates is elected president, but in the messier, more intimate process of the previous year by which each party chooses its nominee. This is where the battle lines of November are drawn. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was the anointed choice of most of the Democratic Party elite, but Barack Obama came out of nowhere to win broad grassroots support and claim the nomination. One of his selling points was his early opposition to the war in Iraq, which implied a different way of seeing America’s role in the world; another was his ability to energize new groups of voters, particularly young people and minorities. This year has seen a similar process on the Republican side, in which first Michelle Bachman, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum took turns as the favored choice of Christian evangelicals against Mitt Romney. At the same time, Ron Paul’s insurgency gave voice to the strong libertarian strain which has emerged on the American right. Although the party finally settled on Romney as the safest, most mainstream candidate, the issues aired during the campaign played a large role in his choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, since Ryan appeals to both evangelicals and libertarians. So in the case of both Obama in 2008 and Romney in 2012, a party representing about half of the American electorate used the nomination process to better define its identity, and discover the issues that fired up its supporters. However ritualized and mediated this process may be, it played out in living rooms and workplaces across the country, allowing individuals to form their own opinions. I can’t help but think that this is both cathartic and good for democracy.

Shall I close with the line often attributed to Churchill, that “democracy is the worst of all possible systems, except for all the others we’ve tried”? As a long-time resident of Morocco, I have some idea of what it feels like to live in a system where if public officials abuse their positions or don’t deliver on their promises, there is little recourse and nowhere to assign the blame. Is it the king, who is the ultimate “guarantor” of the Moroccan project but who governs mainly from behind the scenes? Or is it the elected government, which likes to excuse its policy failures by claiming it has no real power? At least in the American system, we know we can hold our elected officials responsible for their own mistakes, as typified by Harry Truman’s slogan, “The buck stops here.” It may be that when we replace our president or our representative in Congress, the next guy will be a product of the same system and no better than the last; or that our leaders tend to be self-interested and narrow-minded; or that the choices we get on election day are disappointing compared to the true diversity of popular opinion. But over time, I do feel that our system gives us an approximation of the popular will. It has allowed us to invest in public infrastructure, educate generations of young people, guarantee the rights of women and minorities, improve working conditions, regulate air and water pollution, build the Internet, and begin the reform of our health care system. Above all, it gives us the sense that we have a stake in the decisions that affect our daily lives. This may be an illusion, but without this illusion, we would have nothing but the rule of the powerful over the powerless. Besides, it’s an illusion that we can make real if we take it at its word, and act on it. Not just in elections, of course, but in the full range of our role as citizens: through activism, public expression, volunteer work, involvement in local causes, and staying engaged and informed.