The Goal of the Neo-Liberal Consensus Is to Manage the Decline

"578,000 live homeless on any given night" (click to enlarge; source)

by Gaius Publius

If you think of the country as in decline, as most people do, and you think the cause is the predatory behavior of the big-money elites, as most people do, then you must know you have only two choices — acceptance or resistance.

Why do neo-liberal Democrats, like the Clinton campaign, not want you to have big ideas, like single-payer health care? Because having big ideas is resistance to the bipartisan consensus that runs the country, and they want to stave off resistance.

But that's a negative goal; there's one more. They not only have to stave off your resistance, they have to manage your acceptance of their managed decline in the nation's wealth and good fortune.

Again: The goal of the neo-liberal consensus is to manage the decline, and manage your acceptance of it.

I want to turn the keyboard over to one of my favorite left commenters, Avedon Carol, proprietor of Avedon's Sideshow, to explain. Her kickoff point is the identity-fight on the left, or as she calls it, an attempt to "actively divide us by making personal and tribal differences into the main show of the public political arena." She offered her thoughts via email (emphasis hers):

Bernie Sanders wants to do these two important things:

1. Create enough abundance for everyone so that there is far less resentment and bitterness to divide us.
2. Empower us to be better able to fight for ourselves.

Clinton's program for dealing with sexism and racism is ... what?

As far as I can see, she's offering, at best, a kind of paternalistic sympathy that does little to ameliorate the actual problems we face.

And yet, the Clinton campaign is attacking Sanders for some sort of weird and undefined insensitivity to issues of racism and sexism that is "proven" by an inadequacy of photo-ops and the fact that some of his supporters, just like some of her own supporters, say things that are sexist and insensitive.

And she is still talking like the DLC.

Corey Robin says when Clinton tells the truth, believe her:

"Amid all the accusations that Hillary Clinton is not an honest or authentic politician, that she's an endless shape-shifter who says whatever works to get her to the next primary, it's important not to lose sight of the one truth she's been telling, and will continue to tell, the voters: things will not get better. Ever. At first, I thought this was just an electoral ploy against Sanders: don't listen to the guy promising the moon. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. But it goes deeper. The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept (as Alex Gourevitch reminded me tonight) low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal. Clinton's campaign message isn't just for Bernie voters; it's for everyone. Expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing. When the leading candidate of the more left of the two parties is saying that - and getting the majority of its voters to embrace that message - the work of the American ruling class is done."

In Germany after WWI, austerity imposed by outsiders created the conditions for fascism to grow. We knew this. We were even taught this in school. And we certainly know just how good that is for women and minorities.

But in America (and Britain), that austerity is being imposed by our own leaders, and most effectively by leaders of the Democratic Party (and Labour Party) — the supposed "left" party, the party that was understood to support working people.

Clinton, like all of the DLC, talks like this "new economy" of decline is something that just happened, like it's a natural force. They do not admit that it was a political decision to break the power of ordinary working people and put it back into the hands of the aristocracy. They pat us on the head and tell us they will try not to make it as bad as the Republicans will, but it will happen and there is nothing to be done about it.

And they actively divide us by making personal and tribal differences into the main show of the public political arena (only 7% of Americans claim never to have used birth control, so how is it a "Democrat" thing?) while behaving like the really big decisions that are wrecking our lives are none of our business. (Bank bailouts that were opposed 200-1 in calls to the White House from the public! Stopping the prosecutions of fraudulent banksters! HAMP instead of real home-owner relief! Secret TPP talks, for godssakes!)

As a woman and person of funny-color, I know who is being callous and insensitive toward me, and it isn't Bernie Sanders.

To emphasize one of Avedon's last points — bank bailouts — Clinton accused Sanders of being against the auto bailout by voting against a bank bailout bill, which she supported. An excellent piece of misdirection — she puts him on defense, when she should be on defense herself. Deeply dishonest, of course, but well-manipulated. (Seems to have cost her, though, in Michigan, whose voters weren't buying it.)

Again, the main point is this one from Corey Robin (emphasis mine):

The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept (as Alex Gourevitch reminded me tonight) low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal.

All you need to know. Both parties are giving away the store, cleaning out the cash register. Your lives will be very much worse unless you stop them. Yet both parties want you to get used to it, get used to being made poor. The Democrats want to soften the blow more than the Republicans — a kinder, gentler devastation if you will. A softer crash landing.

But either way, the goal of the neo-liberal consensus is to manage the decline, and manage your acceptance of it. And that's what this election is about — on both sides. Acceptance or resistance.

(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you'd like to help out, go here. If you'd like to "phone-bank for Bernie," go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!)

GP
 

Next Week, Will Black Voters In South Carolina Pay Attention To Michelle Alexander-- Or Gregory Meeks?

Corey Robin, a political science professor at Brooklyn College, wrote a phenomenal book I read some years ago-- and talked a lot about here at DWT-- The Reactionary Mind. Musing aloud last month for Salon, Robin let his readers know what Bill and Hillary Clinton mean to him: "Sister Souljah, welfare reform, Ricky Ray Rector and the crime bill." Yeah, not a fan. If that video up top moved you at all, The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters is a must-read. Especially if you're considering voting for Hillary, who brings with her lessons she learned while First Lady of Arkansas, "namely, that in the face of white reactionary intransigence, the best thing to do is nip and tuck, compromise, conciliate, mollify, appease. In other words, be a Clinton. And not a Sanders... Or a Lincoln."

Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.

...Hillary Clinton in 1996 resorted to the worst sort of animal imagery to describe teenage criminals:


Some might prefer to call her pals like Kissinger or the Goldman crew "super-predators"

They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.

As one wag said on Facebook the other night—in response to the question “Bring them to heel? Who says that shit out loud?”-- “Dog trainers.”

What’s more, white people got the message: According to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: Though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20 percent from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20 percent of the vote for him and 10 percent of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15 percent of the vote for him and 8 percent of total turnout).

[Clinton pollster Stanley] Greenberg, for his part, celebrated all these changes in an influential book, arguing that this recalibrated focus “allowed for a Democratic Party that could once again represent people in the broadest sense.” It doesn’t take a close reader to know what that “people in the broadest sense” looked like.

This is what the Clintons were to millions of voters. This is what they will always be to me.

And not just me. As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, which helped galvanize the movement against mass incarceration in this country, posted on Facebook on Thursday night:

If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system (and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can’t believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done-- the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There’s so much more to say on this topic and it’s a shame that more people aren’t saying it. I think it’s time we have that conversation.

Black Agenda Radio editor Brace Dixon: "Bill Clinton offered a half-hearted 'apology' for his 1990s crime bills, which he admitted 'set the stage' for state and federal governments to nearly double the US prison population.

[H]ow come Bill Clinton, fifteen years out of office chose this week to publicly admit that black mass incarceration was maybe not the best public policy?

The short answer is that Hillary Clinton is running for president, and she needs that big black vote. Barack and Bill are working hard to position Hillary as the lesser evil, so that a large black vote, an essential component of what Democratic party consultants call their “base vote” can be mobilized for her.

We shouldn't forget however that despite the posturing of former presidents, that mass black incarceration has been the joint and bipartisan policy of both Republicans and Democrats.

The federal prison budget rose every year but one in the Clinton years, the Bush years, and so far the Obama years look about the same. The First Black President approved new federal supermax solitary prisons in places like Illinois, where citizen action closed the infamous Tamms penitentiary, and his Justice Department went to court to keep thousands who should have been freed when Congress relaxed the crack to powder sentence disparity from 100 to on to 17 to 1 behind the walls to this day.

Why? Why is black mass incarceration the bipartisan policy of America's rulers?

...The America prison state came into fullest flower at the same time as and as the flip side of Bill and Hillary Clinton's so-called “welfare reform.” Whether Republicans or Democrats are in office black mass incarceration serves the vital purpose of morally justifying America's viciously unequal and racist economic and social order. The prison state does this by creating mostly black and brown class of permanently stigmatized and “unworthy” poor who can be portrayed as not deserving decent housing, real educations, affordable health care, dignity or jobs at living wages and whose precarious lives and devastated communities can be blamed on anything except the failure of neoliberal capitalism to provide bread, education, housing dignity or justice.

The more unjust and unequal capitalist America becomes, the more it needs prisons, and that stigmatized class defined by them. Their precarious lives are also a standing lesson to millions more with falling wages and rising debts to shut up and suck it up or this could be you.

Lesser of two evil... it's all she's got to offer besides the fact that America still hasn't had a woman president. But the lesser of two evils is still evil and-- in any case-- is something to be thought about when she faces Trumpf, Cruz, Rubio or Ryan, not now when there's is a non-evil choice. She's running a misleading ad in South Carolina mocking Bernie. I wish DWT had enough money to send the graphic below to every voter in the state. By the way, if you click on this link you can contribute to Bernie's campaign through ActBlue.

Did You Think Ted Cruz Was The Only Candidate Using McCarthyite Tactics In His Campaign?

Corey Robin, author of The Conservative Mind is one of the most credible scholars on the pathology of conservatism and neoconservatism. In the introduction to that book, Robin wrote that "[w]hen the conservative, looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. Witnessing the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Theordore Sedgwick lamented, "The aristocracy of virtue is destroyed; personal influence is at an end."...Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty-- or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force-- the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere." Later in the book, he fleshed outer conservative mind more fully:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom, but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levellers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

I always watch for his writings and this weekend he penned an essay on the presidential campaign for JacobinMag.com. Like many of us, he's worked up about how far the Clinton campaign is already swinging in dark, ugly directions and brought up the orchestrated smear campaign against Bernie, beginning with a few lines from Dan Roberts at The Guardian: "The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to The Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as 'a Democrat,' alleges that Sanders 'sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War' because he went on a trip there to visit a twinned city while he was mayor of Burlington. Similar 'associations with communism' in Cuba are catalogued alongside a list of quotes about countries ranging from China to Nicaragua in a way that supporters regard as bordering on the McCarthyite rather than fairly reflecting his views.

This is becoming a straight-up rerun of the 1948 campaign against Henry Wallace. Except that Clinton is running well to the right of Truman and even, in some respects, Dewey. It seems as if Clinton is campaigning for the vote of my Grandpa Nat. There’s only one problem with this strategy: he’s been dead for nearly a quarter-century.

As was true of McCarthyism, it’s not really Sanders’s communism or his socialism that has got today’s McCarthyites in the Democratic Party worried; it’s actually his liberalism. As this article in the NY Times makes clear:

Some third party will say, ‘This is what the first ad of the general election is going to look like,’” said James Carville, the longtime Clinton adviser, envisioning a commercial savaging Mr. Sanders for supporting tax increases and single-payer health care. “Once you get the nomination, they are not going to play nice.” . . .

A Sanders-led ticket generates two sets of fears among Clinton supporters: that other Democratic candidates could be linked to his staunchly liberal views, particularly his call to raise taxes, even on middle-class families, to help finance his universal health care plan; and that more mainstream Democrats would have to answer to voters uneasy about what it means to be a European-style social democrat.

Raising taxes to pay for popular social programs: that used to be the bread and butter of the Democratic Party liberalism. Now it’s socialism. And that-- now it’s socialism-- used to be the bread and butter of Republican Party revanchism. Now it’s Democratic Party liberalism.

Later in his essay he points to a Bloomberg poll for the Des Moines Register which hasn't gotten a lot of media attention but that shows 43% of likely Democratic caucus participants describe themselves as socialists, including 58% of Sanders’s supporters and about a third of Clinton’s. And it's not because so many Iowa families have roots in Scandinavia.

Senator Bernie Sanders’s speech on Thursday explaining his democratic socialist ideology carried little risk among supporters and other Democrats: A solid majority of them have a positive impression of socialism, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month.

Fifty-six percent of those Democratic primary voters questioned said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view.

Robin's poem, First They Came For..., indicates a certain dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party establishment that is echoed from coast to coast:

First they came for the Revolution
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Revolution.
Then they came for the Parliamentary Socialism
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Parliamentary Socialism.
Then they came for the Third Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Third Party.
Then they came for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
Then they came for the Green Lantern
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Green Lantern.
Then they came for me
but that was cool
because I’m a Democrat.

If you'd like to contribute to Bernie's campaign and/or to the campaigns of any of the congressional candidates who have endorsed him and are running on his platform... here's an ActBlue page for you.

Is Ted Cruz Really The Political Reincarnation Of Joe McCarthy?

Hopefully you remember Corey Robin and his amazing, penetrating book, The Reactionary Mind. Yesterday he was tweeting about a NY Times apologia by Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft's grandson, John G. Taft, The Cry of the True Republican. It starts with an admission: "I am a genetic Republican." And then veers off in an attempt to disassociate his family's heritage-- and identity-- with Ted Cruz and the sociopaths who have captured the once-respectable GOP.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do-- position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”

This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party -- that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit-- which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction”-- to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”

There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.

Corey called him on his historical rewrite on the touchy subject of the relationship between the Republican Party and the ugly McCarthyism it has been identified with. "Let’s turn," he writes, "to the Wayback Machine, shall we?"

First, it’s important to remember that in 1946, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate, Taft was the leader of the conservative Senate Republicans who were eager to use redbaiting to help Republicans get elected. Taft had no compunction about claiming that the legislative agenda of Democrats in Congress “bordered on Communism.” That kind of talk helped put the entire Congress back in Republican hands for the first time since 1930. So forceful-- and out there, ideologically speaking-- was Taft’s leadership that after the election the New Republic editorialized that “Congress… now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.”

Second, Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, one of the most infamous rollbacks in twentieth century American history. (Far from being a genteel defender or “steward” of tradition, as Taft the grandson suggests, Taft the grandfather aggressively sought to counter the New Deal. When he ran against Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952, Taft was the candidate of domestic rollback, not accommodation, including rollback of such policies as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which required companies receiving government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race.)

Among Taft-Hartley’s many provisions was the prohibition of closed or union shops, which paved the way for states to pass “right to work” laws and other anti-union legislation of the sort that we’ve seen many right-wing state legislators pushing since 2010-- particularly in those states where both elected branches of government were suddenly in the hands of the Republicans, thanks in no small part to support from the Tea Party.

In addition, the anticommunist provision of Taft-Hartley was one of the more potent pieces of legislation contributing to the developing atmosphere of Cold War hysteria around communism. That provision mandated that all unions seeking the protections of the Wagner Act had to have their leaders take an oath affirming that they were neither members nor supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking the overthrow of the United States government. That provision provoked a wave of red-baiting and red-hunting within and around the labor movement, which proved to be a kind of social corollary to what the government was doing in and around the executive branch.

Taft was not the opponent or even just the helpmate of this repression; he was a leading agent of it. More than three years before anyone outside of Wisconsin had even heard of Joseph McCarthy.

But on the question of McCarthy himself, the record is clear: Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged, and supported him and it at every turn.

As early as March 23, 1950-- four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia-- Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech-- no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”-- Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)

While the Tydings Committee conducted its hearings about Communists in the State Department, Taft denounced the hearings as a “farce” and a “whitewash,” and pushed for even more aggressive inquisitions into subversion of the executive branch. As late as 1952 Taft would be harping on the issue of Communists in the State Department. He claimed that Dean Acheson had welcomed the Communist takeover of China because “in the State Department there’s been a strong Communist sympathy, as far as the Chinese Communists are concerned.” Sensing a major political opportunity in the coming presidential election of 1952, Taft said, “The only way to get rid of Communists in the State Department is to change the head of the government.”

…Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy-- despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft… This was the man they once called “Mr. Conservative” who is now being held up as the paragon of moderation. To paraphrase Woody Allen: a moderate Republican is a right-wing reactionary plus time.

I'll just add one small point that was made very well in Predisposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford, who are grappling with what makes someone a liberal or a conservative.

To get an idea of how a set of predispositions toward these bedrock dilemmas can provide a constant anchor underneath shifting issues and labels, consider contemporary attitudes on military intervention, an issue much fought over by the left and right in the United States. Generally speaking, it has been the right--Republicans-- that has been more supportive of this sort of thing, while the long hairs on the left are more opposed. Military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama and Grenada was launched by Republican presidential administrations, and a big chunk of the public support for those operations was provided by rank-and-file Republicans. Vietnam was fought primarily under Democratic administrations, but the war was strongly supported by many Republicans. The domino theory that communism, if not stopped in Saigon, would spread to the rest of Southeast Asia, then Honolulu, and then Berkeley was widely advocated by the G.O.P. Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater criticized his Democratic opponent, Lyndon Johnson, for not doing enough to defeat the communists in Vietnam and Johnson responded by portraying Goldwater as someone who was ready to start a nuclear war over Southeast Asia. Republicans similarly supported Korean operations when Democrat Harry Truman was president, and often bashed him for not doing more-- in particular for his refusal to drop nukes on China as suggested by that sensible General MacArthur. What’s interesting is that the aggressive and interventionist streak of the Republican Party in the last half of the 20th century is in fairly strong contrast with its record during the first half of that century.

If you go back to the late 1930s, powerful Republicans-- with plenty of support from the rank and file-- were among the strongest voices arguing for an isolationist stand to keep the United States out of a spreading European conflict. One of the biggest organizations pushing the isolationist message was the American First Committee (AFC), which had international icon Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent and visible spokesman. Lindbergh gave nationally broadcast radio addresses urging American to avoid involvement in the “European War,” the basic pitch being that if the Old Countries wanted to go another round that was their business. America, on the other hand, should sit this one out. Lindbergh’s words struck a chord. At its height, the AFC attracted nearly a million members. Though it drew considerable strength from merging with the more left-leaning Keep America Out of the War Committee, the AFC was primary a product of the American right, particularly the Republican Party (it was founded by a Yale Law School student, Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr., heir to the Quaker Oats Company, who in the 1980s would be appointed by Ronald Reagan as ambassador to Norway).

This isolationist stance was not surprising-- Republicans had taken this as the party line for decades. Twenty years earlier, just after World War I, Republicans played a key role in keeping the United States out of the League of Nations. Powerful Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feared the prospect of future European entanglements and wanted no constraints on American sovereignty. Two decades on, many Republicans were singing the same isolationist tune. United States Senator Robert Taft, for example, one of the most powerful and best known Republican Party figures of the 20th century, adamantly opposed supporting the allies even as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe.

That decades-long isolationism of the Republican Party went out the window with PearlHarbor and never really came back. Senator Taft, who in 1939 favored avoiding any involvement at all in spreading a war in Europe was, in 1951, in favor of bombing China in support of a mainland invasion by Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist forces.17 In the decades sinceWorld War II, interventionist policies consistently received higher support from Republicans-- sometimes, as we have seen, even from the same Republicans who had once been strict isolationists. Fortress America isolationists becoming Cold Warrior interventionists; where is the unifying thread in that?

I suppose it would be unkind to point out that the isolationists-- Taft and Lindberg particularly-- strongly identified with Europe's right-wing regimes and were apologists for the fascism they saw as so very kindred to the "ideal" Republican Party. So, of course they opposed U.S. involvement on behalf of the democracies they despised fighting Hitker and the Nazis they admired. And the turn around… a psychological overreaction to how wrong they had been, made far easier because their militancy was directed against the left-wing and "Commies." Some things really never do change.

When Former Guatemala President Efrain Ríos Montt Gets Out Of Prison, He'll Be 166 Years Old

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them

We've mentioned Ríos Montt before-- first in 2007, when crooked Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller (now retired) married the former dictator's daughter and absconded to Guatemala with all his loot. More recently we looked at Reactionary Mind author Corey Robin's review of a book by Greg Granlin, Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How, I wondered, could any serious examination of the reactionary mind-- particularly the American reactionary mind-- not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind-- albeit an extraordinarily weak one-- would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan's?

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity... totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow-- or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall-- does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country’s small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the ‘disappearances’ that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end-- in the same place it had begun-- making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.

And then there was the report almost exactly a year ago that the ex-Presidente was in custody, along with a This American Life program about one particular Guatemalan massacre. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of, and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria, I wrote at the time, until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

This weekend, the American media is reporting-- without much of the grisly background material or the U.S. role-- the guilty verdict in Ríos Montt's genocide trial. I haven't seen many in the mainstream media asking when it will be Dick Cheney's turn or Henry Kissinger's turn.

A Guatemalan court on Friday found Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during one of the bloodiest periods of its long civil war, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Judge Yasmín Barrios sentenced General Ríos Montt, 86, to 80 years in prison. His co-defendant, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, who served as the director of intelligence under the general, was acquitted of the same two charges.

“We are completely convinced of the intent to destroy the Ixil ethnic group,” Judge Barrios said as she read the hourlong summary of the ruling by the three-judge panel. Over five weeks, the tribunal heard more than 100 witnesses, including psychologists, military experts and Maya Ixil Indian survivors who told how General Ríos Montt’s soldiers had killed their families and wiped out their villages.

The judge said that as the commander in chief of Guatemala’s armed forces, the general knew about the systematic massacres of Ixil villagers living in hillside hamlets in El Quiché department and did nothing to stop them or the aerial bombardment of the refugees who had fled to nearby mountains.

The crowd packed into the courtroom was quiet for much of Judge Barrios’s reading. But cries of “Justicia! Justicia!” erupted when she pronounced the lengthy sentence and ordered General Ríos Montt to begin serving it immediately.

As the general tried to walk out a side door, Judge Barrios shouted at him to stay where he was and called for security forces. An hour after the verdict and sentence were read, General Ríos Montt was escorted from the courtroom by a dozen police officers. He said he was ready to go to prison.

How long he will stay there is less clear than the verdict. His lawyers said they would appeal, and injunctions filed during the case still await rulings.

...For international human rights organizations, the trial took on a significance beyond Guatemala’s own history.

Adama Dieng, the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, said last month that the case was the first in which a former head of state had been indicted by a national tribunal on charges of genocide.

The “historical precedent,” and especially a guilty verdict, he said, could serve as an example to other countries “that have failed to hold accountable those individuals responsible for serious and massive human rights violations.”

Don't get excited; they're talking about Assad, not Cheney, Bush or Kissinger.

"The Lavender Scare"-- An Integral Part Of Conservatism

The film based on this book should be out soon

I was born just as a wave of paranoia swept the United States that gay people were a threat to national security. The idea was that gays, forced to stay in the closet and petrified about exposure, could be blackmailed by the country's enemies. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy-- who employed vicious right-wing closet queen Roy Cohn on his staff-- was more obsessed with gays (almost as much as Santorum or Bachmann or Foxx is today) than he was with Communists.

Today life in the closet is fading; it would fade even faster if conservatives didn't see it as a rich field to mine in terms of demagoguery. Democratic politicians-- from Barney Frank and Kyrsten Sinema to Tammy Baldwin and Ed Potosnak-- can't be blackmailed. They're not in any closets. Whereas Republican politicians when outed are always politically ruined. Today dozens of them-- from Patrick McHenry, Mark Kirk, Aaron Schock and Adrian Smith to Larry Craig, Rick Perry, David Dreier and Lindsey Graham-- are cowering in closets even though it is widely known in Washington that they're obsessed with secret and dangerous, thrilling sex with young men.

In October 2006, Corey Robin reviewed David Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government in the London Review of Books, a piece he turned into a chapter of his amazing new book, The Reactionary Mind.

[I]n 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.

The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.

The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria’s top spy to force him to work for them.

The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn’t resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’.

How could a nation confronting so many foreign threats allow itself to be sidetracked like this? (This is not just a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic speakers for being gay; the most recent was uncovered after investigators asked him if he had ever participated in community theatre.) With the Soviets in possession of the bomb and Korea on the march, why was Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, dispatched to Congress to defend his heterosexuality and that of his ‘powder puff diplomats’? Didn’t he have more important things to do than host rowdy gatherings of politicians and journalists that were reminiscent of ‘stag parties’, featuring copious amounts of Scotch and bourbon, and smiling women ‘whose identity remained undisclosed’. As one senator remarked, ‘It reminded me somewhat of the fraternity rushing season at college.’ Dean Acheson tried to appear as ‘one of the boys’, slapping senators on the back. A journalist reported that ‘his hair was rumpled, his tie awry. The stiff and precise manner and speech which have antagonised many of us had disappeared. He even seemed to have removed the wax from his moustache.’

Johnson’s book is one of the most instructive histories of the domestic Cold War to have appeared in years, but its reach extends beyond its immediate subject to the question, which vexes us today, of achieving the right balance between freedom and security. The book suggests not only that we seldom strike the right balance but that the concept of "balance" may itself be deeply flawed. "The synergy between national security and conservative anxiety is hardly new," he writes.

[T]he Lavender Scare reflected a general backlash against the loosening of sexual mores and gender roles that resulted from the New Deal and the Second World War. Roosevelt’s welfare state, conservatives argued, sapped the nation’s energy, drained away patriarchal vigour. Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and female social workers were now running the show. World War Two exacerbated the problem: with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded. Citing these ‘social and family upheavals’, J. Edgar Hoover argued that ‘the wartime spirit of abandon and “anything goes” led to a decline of morals among people of all ages.’

Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous sexuality, he was not happy about these changes.

After the war conservatives stirred a panic about gender roles-- ‘A great emphasis,’ according to Cheever, ‘by way of defence, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever?’-- and deftly turned the public against a government bent on making everyone gay. The New Deal, they claimed, was a Queer Deal; America was run by ‘fairies and Fair Dealers’ (Truman called his domestic programme the Fair Deal). Because of this ungodly union of Democrats, Communists and fags, the United States was now vulnerable to the Soviet Union.

Today’s conservatives believe that decades of domestic reform, driven this time by an excessive tenderness about the constitution, have created a devitalised society that lacks the will and wherewithal to face down foreign threats. That is why Bush promised after 9/11 that there would be ‘no yielding. No equivocation. No lawyering this thing to death.’ It’s also why Ashcroft bridled at the notion that the US government should read al-Qaida ‘the Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defence lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV’. It’s not clear who, if anyone, was recommending such a policy, but that Ashcroft felt compelled to denounce it gives an indication of what he thinks is at issue when he talks about security. Conservatives certainly believe that the Patriot Act and other restrictions on civil liberties will protect the American people: whether or not it’s from terrorism that they’re being protected is another question.

....The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will be distributed equally among all members of society. Cole and Dempsey point out that some members of society, often the most marginalised and despised-- gays and leftists during the Cold War, Arabs and Muslims (and gays and leftists to a lesser degree) today-- are always forced to give up their freedoms so that the rest can enjoy their security. Indeed, it is precisely because these groups are powerless, and not because they are dangerous, that the powerful can require them to bear the cost. (Two per cent of American men aged between 18 and 21 are arrested for drunk driving, yet the Supreme Court has ruled that that does not justify denying men of that age the right to buy alcohol. Many fewer than 2 per cent of Arabs and Muslims in the United States are engaged in terrorist activity but the US government has denied these groups far more fundamental rights.) What the metaphor of balance between freedom and security conceals is the fundamental imbalance of power between groups in society; unequal costs are paid in return for unequal gains.

In No Equal Justice (1999), David Cole turned a commonplace-- that white and/or wealthy Americans get better treatment from the cops and courts than black and/ or poor citizens-- into a startling theorisation of the dual justice system that prevails in America. Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: it formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor. White, wealthy America gets maximal freedom and maximal safety, and ‘sidesteps the difficult question of how much constitutional protection we could afford if we were willing to ensure that it was enjoyed equally by all people’.

In Enemy Aliens and Terrorism and the Constitution, Cole extends this argument to non-citizens in wartime. Ever since the Alien Act of 1798, America’s first impulse when faced with a foreign threat has been to restrict the rights of immigrants. Cole argues that the appeal of such measures is similar to the appeal of the dual system of criminal justice. It is a ‘politically tempting way to mediate the tension between liberty and security. Citizens need not forgo their rights’ in order to be-- or to feel-- protected. Non-citizens forgo theirs, and because they ‘have no direct voice in the democratic process by which to register their objections’, few people complain.

After 9/11, Cole points out, security measures that would have affected all citizens-- such as Operation TIPS, in which utility employees, delivery men and other individuals were to spy on their fellow citizens, or the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness programme, a massive surveillance project of public and private computer records – were quickly blocked, even by leading Republicans. But measures affecting non-citizens, particularly Muslims and Arabs, received overwhelming public support. Perhaps that is why, a year after 9/11, believed themselves to have sacrificed basic rights and liberties.

But there is one difference between the treatment of aliens in wartime and the treatment of blacks and the poor in peacetime. As Cole argues, wartime measures inflicted on non-citizens eventually influence measures against US citizens, especially liberals or progressives, or those with the wrong skin colour. In 1942, the federal government put Japanese non-citizens and Japanese-Americans in internment camps (on the assumption that even if they were citizens, their racial heritage made them aliens). Several years later, the FBI compiled a secret list of 12,000 citizens to be detained in the event of a national emergency-- an initiative ratified in 1950 by the passage of the Internal Security Act, which remained on the books until 1971. Whether or not a similar mutation will occur in the war on terror is anyone’s guess, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

When we speak about a balance beteeen freedom and security what we really mean is a balance between power and powerlessness. It makes perfect sense for conservatives to use the metaphor, for it conceals and protects their natural constituency. The real question is: why do liberals oblige them?

It was liberals who first argued that individuals should be free to say and do whatever they wish, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. Liberal democracies should use coercion only to punish acts or attempted acts of harm, including threats to the security of the nation. One can see variants of this argument in Locke’s account of religious toleration, which could be sacrificed only for ‘the safety and security of the commonwealth’; Mill’s theory of liberty, which could be limited only to avert harm; and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s defence of freedom of speech, which could be abridged only to thwart ‘a clear and present danger’.

The problem with these arguments is that it is nearly impossible to define harm-- or danger, threat, menace-- in a neutral way. Every definition of harm and its national security cognates rests on ideological assumptions about human nature, morality and the good life. And in this regard, liberals are as guilty as conservatives. The only difference is that they have less power to act on their convictions-- and to stop their opponents from acting on theirs.

In 1957, while the US was conducting its purge of homosexuals, the Wolfenden Committee in the UK recommended, among other things, that gay sex between consenting adults in private be decriminalised. Speaking at the British Academy in March 1959, the conservative jurist Patrick Devlin bridled at the committee’s contention that there is ‘a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’ and that only concrete acts of injury or harm should be prosecuted and punished by law. Not so, Devlin said: ‘What makes a society of any sort is community of ideas, not only political ideas but also ideas about the way its members should behave and govern their lives.’ Any challenge to those ideas-- no matter how private, incidental or symbolic-- undermined social cohesion and posed as great a threat to the civic order as treason. In the same way that treason could lead to the overthrow of a government, homosexuality could produce a ‘loosening of moral bonds’, which ‘is often the first stage of disintegration’. Thus, ‘the suppression of vice is as much the law’s business as the suppression of subversive activities.’

The liberal philosopher H.L.A. Hart’s response was fast, and furious. ‘It is grotesque,’ he declared, ‘to think of the homosexual behaviour of two adults in private as in any way like treason or sedition.’ Not just grotesque but obtuse: Devlin mistakenly assumed ‘that deviation from a general moral code is bound to affect that code, and to lead not merely to its modification but to its destruction.’ If one man’s private acts did alter a society’s beliefs-- a big if, Hart insisted-- such a shift would constitute not a collapse but a transformation of social morality. The proper political analogue to gay sex, then, was not treason but ‘a peaceful change’ in a form of government.

Critics tend to think that Hart got the better of Devlin. But I wonder. Hart, after all, never defined harm with any precision or persuasiveness, and it’s not clear that he could have. So what was to stop Devlin from claiming that homosexuality was as harmful as treason-- or, as his American counterparts claimed, that homosexuality was treason? Very little, it seems, either politically or philosophically. For when harm comes in shades of grey, someone, somewhere, will inevitably see it in lavender and pink-- or some other disfavoured colour of the rainbow.

By the way, if you've come this far, please consider clicking on this link, and helping Blue America replace Congress' most homophobic members with supporters of equality. As the Guardian pointed out this morning, "frustrated American conservatives are exploiting gay paranoia to make up for a drought of ideas on how to fix the economy." It's not just horribly divisive, it's very dangerous.

You may have heard some pious bologna from Rick Santorum at the GOP debate this morning about how he's not a bigot. But when Bill Clinton appointed James Hormel to be the first openly gay U.S. ambassador, it was the homophobic Santorum who screeched loudest, insisting that it was was “a complete insult to Catholics.”

Scaling Back The Pentagon Behemoth?

Yesterday USAToday reported that Obama "is putting his personal stamp on a rejiggered Pentagon strategy for absorbing hundreds of billions of dollars in defense budget cuts, marking a turning point in U.S. security policy after a decade of war." Too good to be true?

At basically the same time that Obama was at the Pentagon talking about streamlining the military in an era of tighter budgets and reassessing defense priorities in light of China's rise, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was meeting with his new British counterpart, Philip Hammond, to discuss scaling down their military capability and backing "away from the kind of armed intervention they have enthusiastically supported in recent decades." This isn't about kumbaya or idealism... it's the bottom line.

As the US plans to withdraw more troops from Europe in what is building up to be a turning point in transatlantic relations, Hammond will also lambast European members of Nato for not pulling their weight.

With Panetta expected to announce sweeping cuts in his defence budget, Hammond will point to similarities in the US and UK economic situations, according to officials. "Without strong economies and stable public finances it is impossible to build and sustain, in the long-term, the military capability required to project power and maintain defence," he is expected to tell the Atlantic Council thinktank.

He will add: "That is why today the debt crisis should be considered the greatest strategic threat to the future security of our nations. The fact is, in this era of austerity... not even the United States can afford the astronomical resource commitment required to deal with every threat from every source."

On Thursday, Panetta is expected to announce the results of a Pentagon strategic review, recommending that the US abandon its traditional goal of being able to fight, and win, two wars at the same time. The Pentagon has been asked for cuts of $400bn.

British defence officials are worried that pressures on the US budget will further encourage Washington to turn its back on Europe as it concentrates on potential threats in the Pacific.

Libya showed that while the US took a back seat-- its aircraft were not involved in the air strikes-- the Europeans nevertheless relied on US planes for refuelling and intelligence-gathering operations.

"Libya and Afghanistan have highlighted the significant difficulties we face in ensuring Nato continues to serve the needs of collective security," Hammond will say. "Too many countries are failing to meet their financial responsibilities to Nato, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities. Too many are opting out of operations, or contributing but a fraction of what they should be capable of.

"This is a European problem, not an American one. And it is a political problem, not a military one."

The defence secretary is not expected to name names, though officials make it clear that he has Germany and Poland (neither of which played a part in the Libyan conflict) in mind, as well as Spain.

With Republicans already carping and attacking him for being weak on defense, plus trying to drum up a war on Iran, Obama is moving pretty deliberately towards a somewhat more realistic reallocation of military funding-- less concentration on Russians tanks heading for Berlin or for a ground war in Korea and more concentration on more immediate threats like cyberwarfare and terrorism.

The administration and Congress already are trimming defense spending to reflect the closeout of the Iraq war and the drawdown in Afghanistan. The massive $662 billion defense budget planned for next year is $27 billion less than Obama wanted and $43 billion less than Congress gave the Pentagon this year.

...Factors guiding the Obama administration's approach to reducing the defense budget are not limited to war-fighting strategy. They also include judgments about how to contain the growing cost of military health care, pay and retirement benefits. The administration is expected to form a commission to study the issue of retirement benefits, possibly led by a prominent retired military officer.

The administration is in the final stages of deciding specific cuts in the 2013 budget, which Obama will submit to Congress next month. The strategy to be announced by Panetta and Dempsey is meant to accommodate about $489 billion in defense cuts over the coming 10 years, as called for in a budget deal with Congress last summer. An additional $500 billion in cuts may be required starting in January 2013.

A prominent theme of the Pentagon's new strategy is expected to be what Panetta has called a renewed commitment to security in the Asia-Pacific region.

On a trip to Asia last fall, Panetta made clear that the region will be central to American security strategy.

"Today we are at a turning point after a decade of war," Panetta said in Japan. Al-Qaeda is among a range of concerns that will keep the military busy, but as a traditional Pacific power the United States needs to build a wider and deeper network of alliances and partnerships in that region, he said.

"Most importantly, we have the opportunity to strengthen our presence in the Pacific-- and we will," he said.

The administration is not anticipating military conflict in Asia, but Panetta believes the U.S. got so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 that it missed chances to improve its position in other regions.

China is a particular worry because of its economic dynamism and rapid defense buildup. A more immediate concern is Iran, not only for its threats to disrupt the flow of international oil but also for its nuclear ambitions.

Looming large over the defense budget debate is the prospect of reducing spending on nuclear weapons.

Thomas Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, believes the U.S. nuclear program can cut $45 billion over the coming decade without weakening the force. He estimates that reducing the U.S. strategic nuclear submarine force from 12 subs to eight could save $27 billion over 10 years. A further $18 billion could be saved by delaying the building of a new fleet of nuclear-capable bomber aircraft, he says.

If you follow this blog, you know that Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind was one of my favorite reads of 2011. In 2005 he wrote an essay for the London Review of Books, Protocols of Machismo, a review of three books: Arguing About War by Michael Walzer, Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh, and Torture: A Collection by Sanford Levinson. He repurposed it for The Reactionary Mind, and I want to quote a few pages, for reasons that should quickly become obvious.

The 20th century, it’s said, taught us a simple lesson about politics: of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard.

Although liberal-minded intellectuals have repeatedly mobilised some version of this argument against the isms of right and left, they have seldom mustered a comparable scepticism about that other idée fixe of the 20th century: national security. Some liberals will criticise this war, others that one, but no one has ever written a book entitled The End of National Security. This despite the millions killed in the name of security, and even though Stalin and Hitler claimed to be protecting their populations from mortal threats.

There are fewer than six degrees of separation between the idea of national security and the lurid crimes of Abu Ghraib. First, each of the reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war against Iraq-- the threat of WMD, Saddam’s alleged links to al-Qaida, even the promotion of democracy in the Middle East-- referred in some way to protecting America. Second, everyone agrees that getting good intelligence from Iraqi informers is a critical element in defeating the insurgency. Third, US military intelligence believes that sexual humiliation is an especially forceful instrument for extracting information from recalcitrant Muslim prisoners.

Many critics have protested against Abu Ghraib, but none has traced it back to the idea of national security. Perhaps they believe such an investigation is unnecessary. After all, many of them opposed the war on the grounds that US security was not threatened by Iraq. And some of national security’s most accomplished practitioners, such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea routinely accompanies, if not induces, atrocities-- Abu Ghraib was certainly not the first instance of the United States committing or sponsoring torture in the name of security-- second thoughts would seem to be in order. Unless, of course, defenders of the idea wish to join that company of ideologues they so roundly condemn, affirming their commitment to an ideal version of national security while disowning its ‘actually existing’ variant.

In its ideal version, national security requires a clear-eyed understanding of a nation’s interests and a sober assessment of the threats to them. Force, a counsellor might say to his prince, is a tool a leader may use in response to those threats, but he should use it prudently and without emotion. Just as he should not trouble himself with questions of human rights or international law – though analysts might add these to a leader’s toolkit, they are quick to point out, as Joseph Nye does in The Paradox of American Power (2002), that international norms may have to give way to ‘vital survival interests’, that ‘at times we will have to go it alone’-- he should not be excited by his use of violence. National security demands a monkish self-denial, where officials forego the comforts of conscience and the pleasures of impulse in order to inflict when necessary the most brutal force and abstain from or abandon that force whenever it becomes counter-productive. It’s an ethos that bears all the marks of a creed, requiring a mortification of self no less demanding than that expected of the truest Christian.

The first article of this creed, the national interest, gives leaders great wiggle room in determining what constitutes a threat. What, after all, is the national interest? According to Nye, ‘the national interest is simply what citizens, after proper deliberation, say it is.’ Even if we assume that citizens are routinely given the opportunity to ponder the national interest, the fact is that they seldom, if ever, reach a conclusion about it. As Nye points out, Peter Trubowitz’s exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national interest throughout the 20th century concluded that ‘there is no single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should determine its relations with other nations are unable to explain the failure to achieve domestic consensus on international objectives.’ And this makes a good deal of sense: if an individual finds it difficult to determine her own interest, why should we expect a mass of individuals to do any better?

But if a people cannot decide on its collective interest, how can it know when that interest is threatened? Faced with such confusion, leaders often fall back on what seems the most obvious definition of a threat: imminent, violent assault from an enemy, promising to end the independent life of the nation. Leaders focus on cataclysmic futures, if for no other reason than that these are a convenient measure of what is or is not a threat, what is or is not security. But that ultimate threat often turns out to be no less illusory than the errant definition inspiring the invocation of the threat in the first place.

Hovering about every discussion of war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’-- its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed down’ from its ancestors-- threatened. But at moments of what Walzer, following Winston Churchill, calls ‘supreme emergency’, a leader may have to commit the most obscene crimes in order to avert catastrophe. The deliberate murder of innocents, the use of torture: the measures taken will be as many and almost as terrible as the evils a nation hopes to thwart.

For obvious reasons, Walzer insists that leaders should be wary of invoking the supreme emergency, that they must have real evidence before they start speaking Churchillese. But a casual reading of the history of national security suggests not only that in practice the rules of evidence will be ignored or flouted, but that the notion of catastrophe encourages, even insists on, the flouting.

‘In normal affairs,’ Richelieu declared at the dawn of the modern state system, ‘the administration of justice requires authentic proofs; but it is not the same in affairs of state . . . There, urgent conjecture must sometimes take the place of proof; the loss of the particular is not comparable with the salvation of the state.’ As we ascend the ladder of threats from petty crime to the destruction of the state, we require less and less proof that those threats are real. The consequences of underestimating serious threats are so great we may have no choice but to overestimate them. Three centuries later, the American jurist Learned Hand invoked a version of this rule, claiming that ‘the gravity of the “evil”’ should be ‘discounted by its improbability’. The graver the evil, the higher the degree of improbability we demand in order not to worry about it. The graver the evil, the lower the degree of probability that authorises-- or permits-- us to take pre-emptive action against it.

"Freedom" Is Just Another Word For...

Isaiah Berlin by Pietro Ruffo

As Corey Robin wants to get across in The Reactionary Mind, contemporary politics divides along a line that pits "freedom" against "equality." And as George Monbiot pointed out Monday in the Guardian, bastardized libertarianism makes "freedom" an instrument of oppression.

That's the way the Republican Party has perverted the noble word. We saw it yesterday when hereditary multimillionaire Willard "Mitt" Romney was whining about how the very rich should be allowed to buy all the politicians they can afford with no restrictions and no regulation. Most Americans understand that too much money coursing through politics is what is bringing the country to ruin. But not Willard.

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

..."My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign."

...Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

That's Republican "freedom," and it's what Monbiot was decrying in the Guardian. He calls that kind of freedom "the disguise used by those who wish to exploit without restraint, denying the need for the state to protect the 99%."

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom-- freedom from regulation-- the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

...The great political conflict of our age-- between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other-- has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it's the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality, the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted: "No man's activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. 'Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows'." So, he argued, some people's freedom must sometimes be curtailed "to secure the freedom of others". In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude on other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. "If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral." It follows that the state should impose legal restraints on freedoms that interfere with other people's freedoms-- or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.

These conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of the 19th century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home. "Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be. / Thou'st heard the knave, abusing those in power, / Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free."

The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding on Clare's freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an impediment to freedom-- his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree with further intrusions on his liberty. "Such was thy ruin, music-making elm; / The right of freedom was to injure thine: / As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm / In freedom's name the little that is mine."

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare's landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even-- among the gun nuts-- to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

Funny, gut Monbiot never explicitly calls these people what they are: sociopaths. They're clearly a danger to the health and well-being of society in general.