Can we save ourselves from ourselves? E. J. Dionne Jr. hopes so, Ian Welsh is doubtful

If you click on this printed version of the Declaration of Independence, and your eyesight is good, you'll be able to read the start of the list of accusatory "he has"es listing the intolerable "repeated injuries and usurpations" of King George III, and see how far down is the first mention of taxes: "imposing taxes on us without our consent." Do Teabaggers read, do you suppose?


"We praise our Founders annually for revolting against royal rule and for creating . . . a representative form of national authority robust enough to secure the public good. It is still perfectly capable of doing that. But if we pretend we are living in Boston in 1773, we will draw all the wrong conclusions and make some remarkably foolish choices."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"What our Declaration really said"

"[L]ately I find it hard to remember that one good person is worth saving, or that most people are just weak, not evil. The world will burn, in war, and famine, and revolution, and climate change and it will burn because we are so contemptible we refuse to do anything to stop it from burning. . . .

"We have become contemptible. Our leaders, perhaps, are most contemptible of all, but we continue to consent. Oh perhaps polls might say we're not happy, but who cares what polls say? We do nothing, we let our leaders do as they will, and we take on their mores, becoming cruel and debased and uncaring of what happens to our fellows, not even the care of enlightened self interest."

-- Ian Welsh, in his blogpost "Deserve: the deadliest word"

by Ken

I had second thoughts after I wrote the head for my recent piece about Freeman Dyson's NYRB piece about Richard Feynman, "I don't have many heroes, but Richard Feynman is one of them, even though I understand hardly anything about his work in physics." If I think about it, it occurred to me, I actually have lots of heroes. The thing is, they're nearly all lone voices or lone practitioners whose heroic qualities come from the very solitariness of their activities.

Which brings me to the two gentlemen whose recent writings I deferred considering till today, in favor of directing attention back to Howie's recent posts about Arianna Huffington's report on the resiliency she found among all manner of Greeks she found in a recent visit to her native country, in the face of the brutal slapdown being administered by the international lords of "austerity," the greedy financial elites, and Bernie Sanders' recent Senate speech throwing out a challenge to the president to reclaim our basic democratic values.

I'm not sure I can make much clearer than I have (repeatedly) here my esteem for E. J. Dionne Jr., whose unflappably calm and authentically humble voice regularly articulates the sharpest and most articulate cases for those increasingly challenged democratic values. In that sense, this recent column defending the values embodied in the still very much living Declaration of Independence is simply what you'd expect from him. And I guess the same is true of Ian Welsh, whom I depend on for real-world, no-bullshit clarity, and unfortunately that clarity been turning grimmer and grimmer as it becomes clearer how badly Barack Obama has failed at the job of reversing the right-wing model of governance he inherited -- mostly because, as Ian has pointed out numerous times, he never said he was going to, whatever we may have thought we heard from him.

In these pieces E.J. and Ian are sort of looking at the same fucked-up situation, and even sort of asking the same question: On what basis might there be hope for a solution? The difference is that E.J. thinks there might be an answer, and Ian doesn't -- he would be asking the question in the sense, on what basis do we think there might, realistically, given who and what the country has become, be a solution?

In his calm, reasonable way, E.J. makes clear that he has grave fears for the republic because of widespread misreadings of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that falsify both their sense and spirit. He frames this, as you would expect, with exquisite politeness, other people -- me, to pick a random example -- would just say that the present-day Right is made up of people who are either (1) too stupid to know how to read, (2) too lazy to actually read, or (3) too dishonest to accurately represent what they read.

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future that we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe -- or have convinced themselves -- that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

And he suggests that "we are closer to that point than we think," citing the Teabaggers' choice of "naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor."

The Teabagger mythology would have it that we've reached the threshold Jefferson set out in the Declaration for overthrowing the existing government. But this is because the Teabaggers are too stupid, lazy, or fearful (though "fearful," I would argue, because of their stupidity or, more likely, intellectual laziness) to think, and simply mainline right-wing talking points engineered by lying thugs (including their Stalinist clergygoons).

Oh, E.J. doesn't put it that way, of course. What he does is to quite reasonably -- as if these people are reachable by reason! -- run down what the Declaration actually says. On the specific issue that is making the debt-ceiling problem a crisis, the Republicans' acceptance of the "no new taxes" mantra, the liars and morons of the Right have, through a dazzling conflation of stupidity and lies, transformed our quite moderate tax burden (both historically and world-comparatively) into a situation of intolerable tyranny, just like, you know, the Decklerahun of Indypendants says.

E.J. points out:

In the long list of “abuses and usurpations” the Declaration documents, taxes don’t come up until the 17th item, and that item is neither a complaint about tax rates nor an objection to the idea of taxation. Our Founders remonstrated against the British crown “for imposing taxes on us without our consent.” They were concerned about “consent,” i.e. popular rule, not taxes.

Nor, E.J. points out, does the list of abuses "really get to anything that looks like Big Government oppression ('He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance') until grievance No. 10." The first nine points deal exclusively with "how laws were passed or justice was administered.

The very first item on their list condemned the king because he "refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good." Note that the signers wanted to pass laws, not repeal them, and they began by speaking of "the public good," not about individuals or "the private sector." They knew that it takes public action — including effective and responsive government — to secure "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Their second grievance reinforced the first, accusing the king of having "forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance." Again, our forebears wanted to enact laws; they were not anti-government zealots.

Similarly, E.J. points out:

This misunderstanding of our founding document is paralleled by a misunderstanding of our Constitution. "The federal government was created by the states to be an agent for the states, not the other way around," Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said recently.

No, our Constitution begins with the words "We the People" not "We the States." The Constitution's Preamble speaks of promoting "a more perfect Union," "Justice," "the common defense," "the general Welfare" and "the Blessings of Liberty." These were national goals.

Of course the very notion that Rick Perry would have anything serious, or even remotely factual, to say about history (or anything else) is preposterous. How the hell would someone like him know? He has devoted his life to not knowing anything except the good old right-wing mantra of greed and selfishness. No, he's just spewing a right-wing lie he heard somewhere. (These days there's no shortage of places to hear the current Top 10 of right-wing lies -- crafting them and spreading them haves become booming businesses.)

We learned it in elementary school: The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to create a stronger federal government, not a weak confederate government. Perry’s view was rejected in 1787 and again in 1865.

It would appear that Governor Perry had already put his brain on idle by elementary school. E.J. also disposes of the nonsensical "Tenther" argument; he might have wondered where the Tenthers were during the Bush regime, which witnessed far and away the most sweeping, unapologetic expansion of federal-government (specifically executive-branch) power in the nation's history.

Ian Welsh is long past being surprised by any of this. And I suspect that I'm like a lot of DWT in vacillating between E. J. Dionne Jr.'s conviction that there must be something we can do to Ian's growing conviction that we've blown all our chances to do anything, and if we take a hard look at ourselves, why should we be surprised? I encourage you to read the piece in full, but here's enough to give you the flavor:

I hate the word "deserve" because lord save us all from what we "deserve", but lately I find it hard to remember that one good person is worth saving, or that most people are just weak, not evil. The world will burn, in war, and famine, and revolution, and climate change and it will burn because we are so contemptible we refuse to do anything to stop it from burning. And maybe that we now includes me, but I'm so very tired of dealing with stupid, cruel, selfish people. Heck, forget selfish, people who won't even look out after their own self-interest, or even understand what it is. . . .

[W]e have selected, to rule our societies, sociopaths at best and psychopaths at worse. They have contempt for those they rule, do not see them as even truly human, and enjoy hurting them. They feel tough when they make the hard decisions, which are somehow always hard for others, but never for themselves. They encourage cruelty in society, from the ground up, and routinely subject the population to humiliating surveillance, force them to abase themselves to the least appearance of authority, whether legitimately used or not, and condone murder and torture and routine humiliation. They don't do these things to themselves, of course, the rich, for example, don't get groped in airports, but they routinely do it to those below them.

And in so doing they teach those below them, to do it to those below them, and below them, and below them, and so on. The sickness comes from the top, a rotten poison which has altered the character of nations. But it came from the bottom, first. It came from a population who became lazy and complacent and thought they had rights they didn't have to guard like a dog with a bone; who thought they could just live their lives and leave politics to other people except for pulling a lever or marking a ballot every four years. It came from people who felt "I've got mine, who cares what happens to anyone I don't know?" Unable to see themselves in others for longer than the gossamer blink of an eye, they were also unable to understand that what was done to others would also be done to them.

We have become contemptible. Our leaders, perhaps, are most contemptible of all, but we continue to consent. Oh perhaps polls might say we're not happy, but who cares what polls say? We do nothing, we let our leaders do as they will, and we take on their mores, becoming cruel and debased and uncaring of what happens to our fellows, not even the care of enlightened self interest, the clear understanding that what is done unfairly, cruely, to someone else, could, probably will, one day be done to us. We pretend to care most about our children, making such a fetish of it that allowing children to roam unattended is virtually treated as a crime, yet we are creating a world in which they will suffer, unimaginably, a world in which hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of our grandchildren will die.

Lord save us from what we deserve, because what we deserve is what's going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don't understand.

E. J. Dionne Jr. concludes with a paragraph I've quoted most of at the top of this post, in which he warns of the risk of "draw[ing] all the wrong conclusions and mak[ing] some remarkably foolish choices." For a commentator of his calm, collected demeanor, this is practically screeching in alarm, not all that different from foreseeing "war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don't understand."


WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF PERSONAL HEROES WHO
HAVE WRITTEN IMPORTANT STUFF, DON'T FORGET FRANK RICH

Before I had a chance to even take in let alone process Frank Rich's blockbuster New York magazine piece, "Obama's Original Sin," Howie had written about it from Thailand.

Here's where Frank comes to rest:

"A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous," Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There's nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so -- and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it's essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation -- so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope -- would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there's a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

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