fund raising

USA today has reported that "Obama releases his list of fundraisers every three months, but Romney has refused to do so."  As they go on to point out, "Romney is not required to name his bundlers, with the exception of those who work as federal lobbyists.  Presidential nominees, however, have voluntarily disclosed the names of their top fundraisers for a dozen years, starting with Republican George W. Bush."  Many have noted that Romney has been secretive about many things, to include his tax returns, among other things, and one wonders why such secrecy is necessary.

It could be, of course, that he feels as my wife feels about such things in our private life -- that it's nobody's business but his own -- but then too, once when I suggested running for public office with some seriousness, she ... well, let us say, she was not receptive to the idea.  That by way of saying, there is a diminished expectation of privacy when one holds public office, and the expectation diminishes the further up the food chain one climbs.  Romney, as a presidential candidate, should know that there is virtually no expectation of privacy, so even on that score his secrecy is troubling.

It could be, of course, that he feels disclosure would be more politically damaging than his secrecy, but then one needs to wonder about his own wisdom.  Secrets have a way of coming out, and one doesn't need a secret on the order of Sandusky's for it to have significant implications, and a certain part of Romney's secret has emerged through the sleuthing of USA TODAY, which reports that "more than 300 people" or about 25% of the total 1,200 fundraisers "come from the world of finance, more than any other sector," and more than a dozen come from Goldman Sachs.  Of course, there's not much that's surprising in this, insofar as Romney toes the Republican line and has "pledged to dismantle financial-industry regulations enacted during the Obama administration."

In fairness, President Obama has his financial sector fundraisers as well (77 of  532 to be exact) but one suspects that Obama will not have the success in the sector that his rival, and the real success will not be within the boundaries of campaign finance.  As the article also points out, "Romney's most prolific supporters also have performed double duty -- writing large checks to Restore our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC that can raise unlimited amounts to aid his White House bid as long as it operates independently of his campaign."  The question -- how independent is independent -- has not received an adequate answer, but it may be moot regardless.  Ninety of Romney's fundraisers have "donated nearly $18.4 million to the group, which has spent more than $53 million to promote Romney and attack his rivals."

Altogether, this comes to the point of my previous entry.  The chicken egg question of whether the financial industry has bought Romney's support, or whether Romney's position has garnered the financial industry's support, is irrelevant so long as the alignment is clear, unmistakable, and mutually reinforcing.  There is nothing new in this, except that the supreme court decision around Citizens United, by allowing unlimited contributions to super PACS, have significantly magnified the influence of corporate interests, like Goldman Sachs.

Individual citizens can still make up their own minds, and vote accordingly, but if we honest with ourselves, really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that advertising works, and a good deal of the money spent by either political camp does little to promote dialogue around the best solutions for the problems facing America today, certainly not the continuing problem that the financial sector poses for the vast majority of Americans, and does a whole lot more to reinforce existing attitudes, not all of them pretty.  Romney spoke before the NAACP, for example, not because he expected a warm welcome, or to convert the black community to his vision, but to demonstrate and reinforce the worst racial attitudes and stereotypes.  The ploy is so transparent as to be laughable, except that, I suspect, it will work with those voters who turn out to his rallies.

The money, in short, not only magnifies the influence of certain sectors who want a receptive face in the oval office, and their methods for putting him there are perhaps rhetorically effective, picking the scabs of the deepest wounds in the American psyche, but most are a diversion from what is actually at stake.  We have, in effect, almost fully commodified our electoral process within a largely unregulated market.  To a greater and greater extent, those who own America are running American, if not directly, then by proxy, and it is not surprising that fewer and fewer people are owning more and more of America.  The real danger to American democracy is not socialism, certainly not communism -- those are the bogey men of the past.  The real danger is oligarchy, and perhaps that is the secret Romney wants most to keep.  He is emergent type of the emergent oligarchy.

Citizens United

I have been meaning for some time to comment on Citizen's United, or perhaps more precisely, the 2010 Supreme Court decision rendered in Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission.  It is reasonably clear that the decision was ideologically motivated, and insofar as it removed restrictions on the liberty of corporations to use their money as they pleased, the decision represents an advance for liberty and liberalism.  It seems oddly counter-intuitive to say as much, because clearly the decision is more celebrated than  reviled among the conservative wing of our party politics, so it perhaps bears pointing out that Citizens United is not so much an advance for individual liberty, more an advance for corporate and economic liberty.  It perhaps also bears pointing out that liberty, as such, is neither ubiquitous nor uniform, and liberty itself is bestowed unequally between people.  We know intuitively that some are more free than others to do as they please, and that increasing liberty for some might well mean a decrease in liberty for others.  We need a more nuanced understanding of liberty, but there is a considerable fog that obscures both nuance and understanding, much less a nuanced understanding, and Citizens United has done much to underwrite the cost of bigger and better fog machines to enhance the spectacle of election year politics.

Let me make the first nuanced distinction, one that has been made before (though in honesty, I can't remember by whom, so must leave it unattributed) but one that is crucial -- the distinction between freedom and liberty.  In certain crucial respects, as a sentient being, endowed by nature, or by God, or by nature's God with free will, I am free to do whatever I can do.  I am not, however, at liberty to do whatever I can do.  There are legal restrictions within the state that prevent me from doing all that I might want to do and all that I could do. If we imagine for a moment the worst possible circumstances for human beings -- let me call it the prison state -- where there is a person in charge, with minions to assist him, and the remainder of the population are held as if in prison.  The closest analog to the prison state might well be North Korea, but for certain populations, the realized fascist and communist states came close.  In the prison state, the person in charge has both the greatest possible freedom and, insofar as the law is coincident with his whim, he also has the greatest possible liberty.  His citizens, however, feel the distinction between freedom and liberty.  In even the most repressive regimes, one suspects, the citizens know their own mind, are perfectly capable of speaking their mind, and in some absolute sense are perfectly free to speak their own mind.  In much the same way, I am perfectly free at the instant to find the tallest building and jump off.  Prudence prevents me from doing so, and prudence would prevent the citizen of a police state from speaking their mind, not because they lack the freedom to do so, but because they don't want to invite the consequences of having done so.

Having said that, of course, the consequences of jumping off a tall building and speaking one's mind in a prison state stem from different sources.  In the one instance, it's just natural law and its operative enforcement through gravity.  In the other instance, it's political law and the enforcement of that law through the minions.  They are free to speak their mind, and there are no "natural" consequences for doing so, but they are not free to speak their mind because there are consequences for doing so.  The latter consequences stem, if not from natural law, then something very closely akin to it, the ability of the strong to impose their will on the weak through one form of violence or another.  

We do not exist in a prison state.  We exist in a free nation, but not because we have a paucity of legal restrictions on our behavior.  If one were to collect the municipal, the county, the state, and the federal statutes under one cover, I suspect it would be a rather lengthy tome, and all of them -- and I emphasize ALL of them -- place consequential restrictions on our behavior.  I suspect we may have even more consequential legal restrictions on our behavior, per se, than the most virulent of prison states, and in the way of paradoxical statements, we are a free people because of those legal restrictions.  Our founding fathers were quite aware of this, and as Hamilton put it in what has come to be known as the Federalist Papers, "nothing is more certain that the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers."  All governments -- and I emphasize, ALL governments -- are coercive, the question is not whether, but how they are coercive.  We are a free people, because we have ceded our natural rights, our freedom, to an absolute legal authority.  We are an absolute dictatorship, not of the prison warden and his whim, but of the law.

I am splitting hairs here, and then splitting the split ends, but it is important to do so.  I could have made the equally paradoxical statement that the prison state, in one respect, represents an absolutely free state.  I would be making a Hobbesian or Darwinian argument, one that sees a "state of nature" as a competition for survival and dominance.  Within nature, the "fittest" survive and dominate, and if one extends that metaphor to the state, the "fittest" survive the climb to the top and dominate.  If everyone is absolutely free to compete for survival and dominance, with no restrictions on that competition, then the result is one or another version of the prison state.  One hears this argument most often within the economic sphere.  We should remove restrictions on competition, and safety nets for failure, so the "fittest" of the bunch can survive and thrive.  You will note, however, that this is just a way of saying "might is right," and I hope I would not need to argue long that it says little or nothing about compassionate or moral behavior.  If lions suddenly developed a communal conscience around the suffering of antelope, lions would not be long among us, and our intuition tells us that the least compassionate, the least ethical, the least moral beings are the one's that, in the absence of consequential restrictions on our behavior, rise to the top.  I am always surprised that people are surprised when it is discovered that people on the top actively advocated, or willfully ignored, the harm they were doing to others in their ascendency.  When Hamilton reminds us of the "indispensable necessity of government," he is reminding us of its inevitability.  Unless you are the one with the biggest club, you will be governed.  He is reminding us as well that "good" government is to be desired, in the multiple senses of the word good -- efficient government, compassionate government, moral government.        

If all governments are coercive, if all governments proceed through consequential restrictions on our behavior, then what we want is a government that is coercive in a "good"way.  The genius of our founding fathers resides within the articulation of our constitution.  In the parlance of the day, it is a meta-document, one that governs the government and, as such, transcends the particular actors within the government.  It articulates the fundamental law of the land, and all citizens, including those who serve in political office, especially those who hold political office, are subject to the restrictions it lays out.  There are, of course, many restrictions on the behavior of our lawmakers, and I cannot begin to deal with them all here, but one is of particular interest to the Citizens United decision, and that is the first amendment to the constitution:  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  We are both free, and at liberty, to practice religion, to speak our mind, and in particular to speak our mind about the "goodness" of our government.  We are a free people, in short, because the government itself is subject to the rule of law, and it is in that sense that I make the somewhat paradoxical claim that we are a free people, that we are not subjects within a prison state, not for paucity of law, but for the existence of specific laws that place consequential restrictions on the government itself.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the First Amendment does not read, "yo! Chris!  You can say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, to whomever you want, and you will suffer no consequences if you do so."  In the first place, while we are free to speak our mind, and have the legal liberty to speak our mind, most of us recognize that the constitution does not, and really cannot, wholly protect us from the consequences of our own ill-advised speech.  I cannot, in other words, tell my boss that she is a pig-headed idiot and expect to remain long employed, and most employers, as a condition of employment, regulate and restrict speech in any number of ways, not least rather strict regulation about who can (and who cannot) speak to the press.  One cannot violate company policy and expect to remain long employed.  While in some absolute sense, I might be free to speak my mind, nearly all of us exist with consequential restrictions, whose point of origins are outside the government, where prudence might nevertheless suggest we say, "I am not at liberty to comment."

This is important to keep in mind for a couple of reasons.  Corporate structures have sway over individuals that exceed the powers of government and are, in many respects more immediately consequential.  Corporate structures are not in the least democratic.  They are autocratic.  The monetary contributions of a corporate structure to the war chest of a candidate, their corporate lobbying efforts, do not reflect the opinion of the people in any rational way, but rather the opinion and the economic interests of the narrow monied elite who control the corporation.  Neither the people generally employed by a corporation, nor the people at large, have much say in how that influence is applied to the political process, but the influence is nevertheless real.  A modern political campaign is hugely expensive, and a good deal of the expense goes into offensive advertising -- offensive often in the petty virulence of its content, but offensive too in the way that it attacks the opponent.  There are any number of things that render one vulnerable to attack, but all candidates are vulnerable to attack, and despite our objections, our desire for a more issue focused politics, more solution-based party platforms, the number and repetition of offensive ads counts has enormous sway.  The larger one's war chest, all the more offensive ads fill the public media, and all the more influence one has.   While I would not go so far as to say that the monied elite have bought and paid for our politicians, the fewer the restrictions on the gathering and use of campaign money, the more the interests of the politician and the monied elite are aligned.                                        

One wants to say this alignment between the interests of the politician and the monied elite is both real and corrupting, but it is corrupting only if you suppose the politician has moral and ethical obligations that extend beyond the economic interests of the monied elite, and that the politician would have pursued those moral obligations had it not been for the enormous expenses associated with the modern political campaign and the corrupting influence of the big donor, a corrupting influence extended by the Citizens United decision that opens the flood gates on campaign donations.  I want to make a somewhat subtler point, one that I have made elsewhere.  In the economic sphere, contrary to the social sphere, American conservatism would have us dismantle regulatory structures.  The argument, of course, is that excessive regulation impedes economic growth, and there may be some truth to that claim, but regulation also represents the moral and ethical interests of the people.  The fewer consequential legal regulations we have, the fewer the enforceable restrictions on the behavior of the actors, the more economic and other activity comes to resemble a Hobbesian war of all on all, a Darwinian survival of the fittest, where immediate individual interest trumps any on-going social interest, where the ends justify the means.  It is a world, not so much immoral as amoral, and its inevitable result is not so much the triumph of virtue, but the triumph of power within an autocratic, or perhaps oligarchic, prison state.  The demise of democracy will not come from an excess of regulation, but an excess of freedom, which will allow those with the means to exercise power over those without.  The demise of democracy will not come from deliberate and reasonable constraints on electoral politics, but the exaggerated influence that comes with wealth, the greater alignment of the interests of the monied elite and the politician.

The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is not so much the disease, but a symptom of the disease that will bring our representative republic into decline.  I doubt that Hamilton and the framers of the constitution could foresee modern media and the influence it would exercise on the tastes and habits and opinions of the populace.  When they prohibited government's ability to regulate or control speech, one suspects they had individual, in the proper sense of individual, speech in mind.  When they prohibited government's ability to regulate or control the press, one suspects they had something more like Tom Paine's pamphlets, not Fox News, in mind.  out of time .... more later ...                

Orin Hatch

Of late, I have become interested (obsessed I hope is too strong a word) with American conservatism, in part because I simply can't believe that rational human beings could believe what they believe with such sincerity.  The Salt Lake Tribune recently published (June 29) an editorial by Senator Orin Hatch marking the Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutionality of the so-called Obamacare.  It can be found at http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54397092-82/health-law-president-care.html.csp) so I won't repeat it entirely here, but it is representative of a style of argumentation that I find, well, distressing.  It piles assertion on top of assertion with nothing to warrant or evidence to support the arguments.

The opening paragraph is indicative.  It begins, "over two years again, I stood on the floor of the Senate and warned the president that he'd regret jamming his massive $2.6 trillion health spending bill through Congress on a party-line vote.  He'd regret his signature policy achievement that undermines personal liberty and the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  There are so many implications here that one doesn't know where to begin unpacking them, but let me say first, OK, it presents a number of arguable assertions, one for which evidence could be found and should be found. One assertion is that the President would regret "jamming" the bill through congress on a "party line vote."  Jammed, of course, is a loaded verb, but we'll look the other way on that, but the implication, of course, is that there's something terribly wrong with "party-line votes," and that they are an object of regret as opposed to what?  More consensual votes across party lines.  It's convenient for Hatch to accuse the President of "party-line votes," in part because the Republican party has become famous for strict ideological alignment and refusing to compromise unless its a crises and the 11th hour -- famous enough that two moderate, but right leaning scholars felt it necessary to write a book about the ideological extremism of the Republican party and their insistence on "party line votes" .  Mann and Ornstein's title, It's Even Worse than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, says it all.  Because they make the argument there, I won't make it here, and suffice it to point out the irony of Hatch's assertion later in the editorial that the President behaved "arrogantly -- ignoring or attacking th legitimate concerns of those who disagree with him."  At the very least, it seems, that ball bounces between two courts.

Another assertion is that the President would regret "his signature policy that undermines personal liberty and the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  I think the President would agree that the health care law is his signature policy, but one implication of Hatch's statement, of course, is that the President considers it his signature policy, not because it extends health care to hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans, but specifically because it "undermines personal liberty" and "limits on the powers of the federal government."  I suspect that the President's intention was more the former, and that he gave not one nano-second of thought to how he could "undermine personal liberty."  In fairness, Hatch is not making that claim, but rather a factual or descriptive claim -- that the health care law, regardless of its motivating intent, has the effect of "undermining personal liberty" and "the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  Let me take each in turn.

On the first, it probably wouldn't surprise my one reader that I find the whole question of personal liberty fraught with difficulty, as did the founders and everyone since.  Short of no government, any government is an infringement on my personal liberty.  The restrictions on my "personal liberty" range from the ridiculous to the sublime, and there are altogether too many to list.  A big one, of course, is the governments imposition on my income, in the form of taxes, and the government has imposed a positive obligation, a positive responsibility on me.  Hatch does not say how the law is an infringement on my personal liberty, but I suspect he is referring to the individual mandate.  To suggest that the individual mandate is an infringement on my liberty is true, but trivial.  Of course it is.  So is the requirement that I drive on the right side of the road, that I throw my trash in the trash receptacle, that I pay my sales tax, that I refrain from smoking at the mall, shoplifting, killing my neighbors dog, or raping his wife.  The  question before us is not whether the individual mandate or other provisions of the law are an infringement on our liberty, but whether the infringement on our liberty, the mutual obligations it creates as a tax, is ethically and morally responsible.  A good deal of ingenuity goes into avoiding precisely those questions because we would have to decide, as human beings, what our obligations are to others in a civil and moral society, and as Americans we want to believe we have few if any obligations to provide others with anything, and certainly not something as expensive as health care.  As one wag famously yelled, referencing the uninsured, "let them die."

On the second, I am not a constitutional scholar, and so would not really want to comment in depth on the "constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government."  The Supreme Court, by definition, are constitutional scholars, so I am confused.  The editorial was occasioned, or so it would seem, by the Supreme Court decision.  A majority of the court decided that the law was constitutional, so again, by definition, it did not undermine the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government.  That Scalia side-stepped the presented arguments, declaring the individual mandate a tax, strikes me as interesting, in part because I believe it to be a tax (and would have appreciated a more cogent argument from Scalia in that regard) and in part because I thought the "not-a-tax" argument on the part of the democrats was in some measure a misguided appeasement of conservative anit-tax sentiment.   It is misguided because the Republicans are not to be appeased.  That the Republican pundits were so outraged by his decision, that he had not voted with his appointed purpose along ideological (or rather party) lines and struck down the law, is deeply ironic.  The individual mandate itself was an appeasement of private insurance providers, which originated in a Republican health care proposal, and now that it is a "tax," of course, it is open to attack as a tax.  Hatch writes that "families earning under $250,000 a year will bear most of the burden of this tax," and factually he may well be correct, but what he doesn't say, and won't say, is that families earning under $250,000 already bear the greatest burden of taxation in this nation, and that every Republican tax proposal will exacerbate the disproportionate share of that burden while decreasing the services and security of middle America.          

Having said all that, the fundamental difficulty with Hatch's position, such as it is, comes in the last paragraph.  He writes, "before we can even undertake these much-needed reforms, we have to scrap ObamaCare and start over.  Then we can move forward with real, step-by-step reforms to give the American people the health care they deserve from the doctor they want at a price they can afford."  Even if I were to concede every point made by Hatch, and it would be difficult because there are few points to concede, my response to the last paragraph would need to be something along the order of "yes, and what would those step by step reforms be exactly?"  It is also deeply ironic that the Republican contender for the White House must repudiate his own step by step approach, the one he implemented as Governor, to appease his party base.  When Hatch tells us that "when Mitt Romney becomes president, he'll scrap it is in its entirety and move forward with common-sense health reforms the American people deserve," I suspect Mitt Romney will learn the lesson that Obama (and probably every occupant of the White House) has learned.  It is one thing to run for president, quite another thing to be president.

The occupant of the White House must make  positive proposals of the "do this" variety.  Any positive action is open to a wide-ranging critique, in part because any positive action will have greater consequences for some, lesser consequences for others, but it is unlikely any change within a domain as complex and as fraught with competing interests as health care will have positive consequences across the board -- not for any one individual, and certainly not for the larger society.  Anyone undertaking a change will encounter those who, to quote Hamilton in the first of the federalist papers, will "resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the officers they hold" -- or in the current vernacular, those who will be negatively impacted by the change.  Mitt Romney, and those like Hatch who are his campaign minions, have it easy.  There is much in the health care proposal that can be critiqued, that has been critiqued, but to say that, "over two years later, this law is as unpopular as it was then," is to say virtually nothing unless one is willing to specify, unpopular with whom?  and why?  -- to say that what people "want is a different approach that addresses their number one concern: skyrocketing health care costs that are eating away at every family's pocketbook," is again to say virtually nothing unless one is willing to specify just what that different approach might entail and how it might be implemented.  

If Mitt becomes the occupant of the White House, and God forbid that he should, the one positive proposal is the repeal of the existing health care reforms.  That action too will be subject to a wide-ranging critique.  I am not entirely convinced that the number one concern among the American people are the "skyrocketing health care costs."  I would agree, however, that it might well be a signature concern among employers and employees who find themselves in a double bind.  As the costs of health care escalate, along with the costs of health care coverage, they must either diminish the amount of coverage for their employees or defer the escalating cost of that coverage to the employees or as is more often the case some combination of decreased coverage and increased cost to the employee.  There is, of course, another option.  The employer can continue coverage at the same level and accept diminished profits, but I would concede that, given the rapidly escalating costs, for many small to medium sized employers, to do so would mean no profit and ultimately no business.  So, for that faction, the "skyrocketing health care costs" are of concern, but even so that does not address the needs of those who are unemployed, those who are under-employed in contingent or part time positions, those who are of age and attending school full time -- the millions of Americans who are uninsured.  I suspect their number one concern is not the cost of health care, but their access to health care.  On the questionable assumption that we are a moral society, when the crises comes, we will not turn them away, and they will access the health care systems, but they do so in ways that are guaranteed to have  the greatest impact on the escalating health care costs.  It is, in every respect, a vicious cycle.

If the Obama health care reforms should be critiqued, and they should if we are to improve upon them, I would suggest that they are not enough Democratic health care reforms -- that they are too much step-by-step reforms of the sort advocated by Hatch -- that they are too much the RomneyCare compromises that attempt to rescue the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between private insurers and private employers and private providers.  The expansion of medicaid is a teeny-weeny step in the right direction, but on that point Hatch might be right, if altogether too hyperbolic, in that it is a "gun to the head of the states."  It simply substitutes the state for the employer and maintains the same employer-employee imbroglio, which is, I believe, at the core of the problem.  Hatch tells us that "before we can even under-take these much needed [entitlement] reforms, we have to scrap ObamaCare and start over."  Mitt Romney, as president, might well scrap his resurrected Massachusetts legacy of health care reform, but I doubt seriously that he will "start over."  Health care reform is fraught with difficulty, not least the money.  A good deal of money flows around and through health care, and I strongly suspect that those who benefit most from the status quo are those who are most likely to make the right kind of contribution to the Republican war chest. I don't want to pander to the same sorts of ad hominem arguments that rife within political rhetoric, so just saying, if one wants to know where the real resistance to health care reform originates, "follow the money."                    

conservatism

We don't pay much attention.  Whether we ever did, I really can't say, but there are many trends in the political arena today that works against the interests of the vast majority of Americans.  The alliance of economic conservatism and social conservatism strikes me as one such trend.  I can understand both, and there may even be some legitimacy to the arguments advanced on behalf of economic conservatism and social conservatism, but there seems to be a deep cynicism in the republican party, one whose true interests lie in economic conservatism, the fundamental principles of which benefit only the wealthiest of individuals, not in social conservatism, which has a broader appeal and serves as a cover for the former.  The intersections between the two are uneasy at best.  The cry against big government in the economic sphere is carried over into the social sphere, but only when it suits a particular argument -- the use of tax subsidies to fund elective abortions or contraception when all that is needed is an aspirin locked tightly between the knees.  Of course social conservatives want to ban abortion, and a certain segment want to ban contraception.  They want big government to regulate our sexual behavior, usually to the disadvantage of women, but not our economic behavior.  Of course, within a wholly free market, often thought of as a holy free market, big government must intrude on our boudoirs, else the market for child pornography, say, get out of hand.

We don't pay much attention, and we lack a sense of irony, probably because we are poorly educated in the humanities.  I wanted to write an essay entitled "A Modest Proposal," where the poverty across the globe, to include the poverty in our country could be solved through a free market solution -- just offer up the children of the poor to the sex trade.  The use of abortion and contraceptions would go down, the children would likely be quickly used up and their life expectancies short so they would not be a continuous burden, and the needs of those who could afford it would be satisfied.  I didn't write the essay because, frankly, too many would take me seriously and would miss the point.  Liberty and morality are fundamentally linked and just as fundamentally opposed.  We are moral creatures because we can choose between moral and immoral actions, but to choose morality, whether individually or socially, is to choose a restriction on our liberty.  Though it happens, the idea of selling children into the sex trade is so deeply repugnant to most that we feel, regardless of individual predilections, it should be banned.  Though I don't share their repugnance, I get the idea that homosexuality might be so repugnant to some that they feel, regardless of individual predilection, it should be banned.  Social conservatism has its place in the free market of ideas.  They can argue their position, and if their arguments are persuasive enough, one can imagine moral regulation that enforces their position, an infringement on liberty that insures we are not only moral individuals but a moral society as well.

I should point out that, to my way of thinking, there are differences between the market place of ideas and the free market per se.  The language of one crosses over into the language of the other, and we talk about things like "buy in" to an idea as if it were popular commodity, and then too rights to "intellectual property" can be protected and commodified facilitating their trade within the market place, but there remain a fundamental differences that are recognizable even if fraught with difficulties.  It is one thing for me to make a "Modest Proposal," quite another to realize the elements of that proposal within the market place, and we can allow for the much greater liberty in the market place of ideas than the market place per se, in part because great latitude in the former is a necessary (if not wholly sufficient) condition for the moral regulation of the latter.  I say this because "moral regulation" emerges within a social consensus and a social consensus emerges within the market place of ideas.  Even if one believes, fundamentally, that morality is tied to the revealed word of god, or his emissaries, it remains that there must be a genuine social consensus around the validity of the revelation.

I distract myself a bit, because I really wanted to talk about the nature of American conservatism, particularly the relation between economic conservatism and social conservatism, which in many respects hasn't changed much since Andrew Carnegie wrote "Wealth" for the North American Review.  In it, he wrote, "the problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth," and if we are not so much concerned that "the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship," we perhaps should be.  Carnegie, of course, was quite willing to accept great disparities in wealth, and he justified that disparity on free market principles.  As he put it, "much better this great irregularity than universal squalor," in part because the great advances, the "highest and best in literature and the arts," as well as "all the refinements of civilization,"as he saw it, were contingent upon this great irregularity.  At the core of the justification was an argument around liberty, and "the law of competition."  There must be, again as he saw it, "great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale," in part because "this talent for organization and management is rare among men," and the possession of those rare talents "invariable secures for its possessor enormous rewards."  Great scope, or great liberty must be allowed for "the law of competition" to have it salutary effect in the provision of "our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train."

This is essentially the argument that economic conservatism advances today.  We should reduce, even eliminate, anything that would limit the "great scope" or the great liberty of those captains of industry.  Although there are great disparities in the wealth, and those disparities are likely to continue, nevertheless through the law of competition and the refinements it brings, the condition of all has improved, and today "the poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford."   There is, of course, a certain truth to this argument, and the grand 20th century experiments with controlled markets proved to be wholly disastrous for all concerned.  Carnegie may have been prescient in suggesting that no substitutes for the law of competition have been found, and in lieu of effective substitutes for the law of competition, that same law is "best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."  It perhaps bears pointing out that his law of competition is social darwinism writ large, and self-justifying -- those who are at the top of the heap are inherently superior to those at the bottom of the heap, and their position at the top of the heap is sufficient proof of the same -- those who are in control of the resources are inherently those best capable of controlling the resources, and their being in a position to control the resources is sufficient proof of the same -- et cetera.  It perhaps bears pointing out as well that social darwinism is inherently anti-democratic.  One must be attentive to note that the law of competition prevails, not among the masses, but only among the fittest.  The masses have already been subjugated, and "we accept and welcome, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race."

As most would recognize, Carnegie's argument, and the argument of economic conservatism generally, is one of utilitarian resignation, not a moral argument.  I don't need to point out that great wealth can be accumulated by means not altogether moral or ethical, and being at the top of the economic heap, being among the "fittest," says nothing whatsoever about one's moral probity either for good or for ill, though there are religious arguments that might suggest otherwise, that those attributes rendering one "fittest" in the economic sphere might well render one least fit for the moral sphere, it being easier, after all, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, and the like.  We do, however, defer to power, and with wealth comes power and the deference it demands, but we should not mistake the deference it demands with the reverence it desires.  We say things like, "the ends do not justify the means," in part to capture this distinction.  While the "future progress of the race" may well be a desirable end, even the material progress of the race, no one should have complete latitude in the means of effectuating that progress, and great scope is not complete scope, great liberty is not complete liberty to do as one damn well pleases.  Even though there may be a well developed demand, even though the satisfaction of that demand may be highly remunerative and may ease the squalor of the poor, we nevertheless do not not allow the consumption of children, whether at table or in the boudoir, and we do not allow it because it is morally repugnant.            

Economic conservatism, then, needs social conservatism to keep it in line, to define the moral limitations on its necessary and its social darwinist conception of liberty.  The difficulty of course is this:  social conservatism too is anti-democratic.  Consider, for example, the on-going malaise surrounding contraception and abortion.  On the one side is the argument to liberty -- that women should be free to engage in sexual activity, and should that activity result in a unwanted pregnancy, they should be free to terminate that pregnancy.  Even those who support abortion typically have moral limitations on that liberty -- at what point, for example, does a fetus become "viable" or "human," and its termination a matter of infanticide?  That is not so much a scientific as a moral question, and different societies have come to differing social consensus around that question, but the idea of a developing social consensus is anathema to the social conservative position, in part because they see the social consensus going in the wrong direction.  Indeed, it is the developing social consensus that must be arrested.  Contraception, at least contraception outside of wedlock, is fraught because it does allow women a greater liberty to engage in sexual activity for the sheer pleasure of it without consideration of the natural consequence of that activity.  Abortion is fraught at any number of levels, but at least in part because pregnancy and birth is the comeuppance for the sense of disobedience and lost innocence associated with sexual pleasure -- I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.  There are different arguments to advance here, and I needn't enumerate them all, but there does seem to be a social consensus around contraception (there being a strong market for contraception even among Catholic women) and the social consensus around abortion is "under construction" (there being a question whether a market for abortion itself should even be permitted).

I am suggesting, of course, that social conservatism is always a reaction to a social consensus that is developing, or so it is perceived, in the wrong direction.  It is one thing to say, I am aghast, quite another to say, I am in power, and the social conservative in power will use those means necessary to repress the developing social consensus -- to repress, in short, the democratic impulse, particularly the free speech rights that fuel the developing consensus.  If we consider, for example, the Texas approach to text books, you have some sense of how those free speech rights might be abridged, particularly when you consider that paternalism knows no boundaries.  The connect between economic conservatism and social conservation is not in the mutual respect for liberty, but in the anti-democratic impulse.  At its most benign it is the far-reaching paternalism of the sort that Carnegie endorses on what might be called platonic grounds -- that the best, those merchants and manufacturers that have acquired great fortune, should rule because they have demonstrated a rare "talent for organization and management," on the one side, and on the other, the possession of wealth is the possession of the "highest and best in literature and the arts" and "all the refinements of civilization."  The acquisition and  disposal of wealth has displaced the philosophy of the philosopher king, but the implies is the same.  The best should govern, and there echoes of the Carnegie's attitude in Romney's assertions that his business success uniquely qualifies him for the presidency, even perhaps, if one is listening closely, entitles him to, the presidency.

There is, of course, another darker sense of paternalism, and the notion that the best should govern, the obligation to provide moral leadership to "those people."  I would call it the "white man's burden," though that colonial phrase has been rendered quaint, and too easily dismissed, and Charles Murray has taken great pains to demonstrate that race and ethnicity are secondary factors in the alignment of wealth and what might be taken as the core American virtues of "industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity."  If one works backward through Murray's list of virtues, beginning with religiosity, which in many minds includes "defense of marriage," and certainly the protestant virtues of honesty and industriousness, one ends up with the attitudes and values of the white evangelical.  The point of Marray's latest tome, Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010, as he professes, is to provide what might be called empirical evidence for a moral position -- that the demonstrable attitudes and values of the wealthy, regardless of race or ethnicity, represent what is best about America -- that the attitudes and values of the wealthy represent "our kind of people" over against the demonstrable attitudes and values of "those people" -- and from there of course it is easy enough to determine who should govern.  It is easy enough to see as well the point of departure to which Murray is reacting, the social consensus of the 50s that began unraveling in the 60s, and have continued unraveling since.  Whether or not Murray is correct in his assertions, and there is much to argue, if we are becoming a minority majority country, whether in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of our society, or in terms of income distribution with an ever greater numbers of people falling away into Murray's own category of "those people," if we are to preserve (or turn back the clock to) what is "best" about America, then "our kind of people" should govern.

So my point really is simple.  Liberty, or freedom, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of morality.  One must be free to choose the moral course of action over the immoral, but liberty alone is insufficient to either individual or social morality.  On either the individual or the social scale, we know that our behavior is not always in line with our own sense of morality, and so liberty, in and of itself, is insufficient to morality.  Something more is needed, and the something more always comes in the form of a restriction on our liberty.  One would like to add "comes in the form of a principled restriction on our liberty," or perhaps "comes in the form of a revealed restriction on our liberty," but both the principled and the revealed turn out to be somewhat troublesome.  "Thou shalt not kill," for example, seems clear enough both in principle and as the revealed word of god, but we immediately create contextualized exceptions -- the soldier, self-defense, the police, and the like.  It is not merely that we seek exceptions to excuse bad behavior -- the soldier may well resort to violence to prevent violence to his village -- the police may well rest to violence to prevent the sale of addictive drugs to minors or minors to sex-trafficers -- but rather that it proves impossible, or nearly impossible, to articulate unambiguous and universally applicable restrictions on our behavior.

I am suggesting, in other words, that while useful, the law is an insufficient guide to moral behavior, and that would include the law of god.  We can be in-compliance with the law and behaving reprehensibly, and equally we can be out-of-compliance and behaving morally.  There are too many examples of both to list them all, but one need only think of the CEO of Lehman Brothers, who apparently acted within the law to help send hundreds of thousands into financial crises, or Rosa Parks, who apparently acted outside the law to help enfranchise hundreds of thousands of Americans, and one has some sense that we cannot do without the voice of conscience.  I will set aside individual conscience for the moment.  It can be what it will be, but I  simply suggest that our social conscience resides in the on-going development of our social consensus, one that transcends any particular religion or any particular version of a particular religion -- one that transcends any particular ideology, or any particular version of a particular ideology.  With one possible exception (guns) the framers were correct in protecting the individual liberties that they protected, the freedom to worship and the freedom to speak. They set the on-going development of our social consensus, our social conscience outside (not the influence, but the control) of any particular demagogue.  The conservative impulse, even in its most benignly paternalistic forms, is the impulse to curtail the on-going in the on-going development of the social conscience.      

the individual mandate

The New Yorker had an interesting article in the current edition.  Ezra Klein is the author, and the sub titular question, "why do politicians reverse their positions?" pinpoints the content.  The answer is psychological -- that is to say, in-group loyalty leads us to use what has been called "motivated reasoning."  I suspect all reasoning is motivated, but nevertheless, it does help explain why the Republicans can attack with such vehemence what was originally and essentially a Republican idea -- the individual mandate.

I won't touch on the actual constitutionality of the individual mandate under the commerce clause -- that is for legal scholars and the Supreme Court to debate -- but the premise of the argument against it is simple.  It is an infringement on our liberties, not of the negative sort where government tells us what we cannot do, but of the positive sort where government tells us what we must do.  We are slightly more tolerant of infringements of the negative sort, and for most morality consists of obedience to infringements of the negative sorts -- that shalt not commit adultery or homosexual acts or the like.  We are slightly less tolerant of infringement of the positive sort, and it might in some psychological sense have something to do with being bullied as a child.  Its someone making us do something, by force, that we do not particularly want to do -- like pay taxes -- even though, at some fundamental level, the more meaningful moral imperatives -- thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is cast as a positive infringement on our liberties.

I make this distinction for a couple of reasons, but mostly just to point out that morality is demonstrated not only by what we might refrain from doing, but what we actually do, and then not only individually, but collectively.  First, as a premise, I should point out that I think health care is not a commodity, but a moral right.  If I cannot afford an iPad, and Apple refuses to provide me with one, I don't necessarily want to accuse Apple of immoral behavior.  On the other hand, if I cannot afford health care, and say Intermountain Health refuses to provide me with care, I do want to accuse them of immoral behavior.  It is one thing to deprive me of a toy, another thing to deprive me of care.  The market treats both equally as a commodity, which is why the invisible hand of the market might be a fine thing for commodities, but not for moralities.  If I am a hospital, or care giver, your inability to pay does not relieve me of my moral responsibility to do what I can and must to save your life, even though that positive obligation is an infringement on my liberty and comes at a cost to me.            

Second, as a premise I do not particularly believe in redistributive justice, if by that we simply mean "taking from the rich to give to the poor."  I do, however, believe that each of us individually and that governments collectively have moral responsibilities, and that others have the right to expect moral behavior of each of us individually and governments collectively.  A fundamental moral right is the right to life, and we have the moral obligation not only to refrain from murder, but the obligation to preserve life the life of others if we can.  Individually, we may not be able to do much.  I am not a caregiver, nor do I work at a hospital.  As a member of a collective, however, I have an obligation to do what I can, and for the most part that means paying taxes that go to pay for the care of those who cannot afford care.

We have, in short, a moral obligation to do what we can to preserve the right to life, and in the case of most Americans that means the moral obligation to pay taxes to support a health care plan.  We can, and should, of course, debate the efficacy of a plan, but the inefficacy of any particular plan does not relieve us of the moral obligation to have a plan.  It seems clear enough that the so-called private option of employer-based insurance isn't working well.  We have heard the numbers of Americans that fall outside the employer-based system, and it's reasonably clear why they would.  Not all Americans are employed, and not all employers, even very large employers, offer health benefits.  Consequently, we have medicare and medicaid to cover those who fall outside the employer-based system.  As it stands, we are meeting our moral obligation, but the general consensus has us doing it rather poorly.  If we dismantle medicare and medicaid, we would fail to meet our positive moral obligation to do something unless there is something better -- that is to say, something more efficient -- to replace it.  The question is not "whether we should" -- we should -- but rather "how to do it better."    

This brings me back to the individual mandate.  It is a tax.  It is a particular type of tax, but it is a tax none-the-less.  I pay a similar tax for the right to drive my automobile -- the mandate that I carry liability insurance in order to operate a motor vehicle on the roads of my state.  There are of course differences in the justification for the mandate and the universality of the mandate -- I can forego the privilege of driving on public roads and thereby forego the obligation to purchase automobile insurance -- but the premise is roughly the same.  If I carry insurance and you do not, I also carry a disproportionate share of the risk and the cost of my insurance goes up.  It is, in effect, unfair unless we all carry insurance and share more or less equally in the the risk.

A crucial difference, however, lies in the up-front moral obligation.  I do not feel the same moral obligation toward your "right to drive" as I feel toward your "right to live."  There is a not-so-subtle difference between "I cannot afford car insurance and so cannot drive" and "I cannot afford health insurance and so cannot live."  The former might elicit sympathy.  It might even elicit some tax-supported subsidy for public transportation.  But it is unlikely to elicit the purchase of a Mercedes on your behalf.  I cannot forego the need to access health care in quite the same way that I can forego the privilege of driving on public roads.  I will access the health care system, and there is a public benefit in my doing so, if for no other reason than helping curtail the spread of infectious disease.  Moreover, when accessed, if it takes a Mercedes-level effort to cure you, a Mercedes-level effort will be made on your behalf.  Anything less would be unconscionable.

I have the expectation that every effort will be made on your behalf in part because I have the expectation that every effort will be made on my behalf.  I can be sanguine about your inability to afford care, but cannot be equally sanguine about my inability to afford care.  I can stand in the crowd and shout "let them die!" but the one who did that, in the throes of the moment, might not be quite so quick to shout "let me die!" if he were having a heart attack and his insurance couldn't be verified, or if he were to find himself unemployed and uninsured, and in reality the vast majority of us are a pink slip away from being without coverage.  If I bear that expectation, however, then I should bear my proportionate share of the risk.  I have an obligation to you because you have that obligation to me -- an individual mandate to do my share, an individual mandate that infringes on my liberty to ignore your needs, just as your individual mandate infringes on your liberty to ignore my needs -- and it is ultimately this reciprocity of individual mandates through mutual obligation that makes of us a moral society.    



           

Rational Secular State -- Introduction Continued

I have used the term willful obversity to avoid, on the one hand, the hob-goblin of evil that Bloom's satanic impulse conjures up, though his analysis of the romantic stems from Milton's own extended (and obversely sympathetic) analysis of the Edenic myth, or the elevation of academic snarkiness that 'ironist' seems to justify, though there too one could argue that American moral and political discourse is irony deficient.  Nevertheless, the romantic impulse is clear enough -- the rebellion against conventional mores, against settled senses of the good, particularly when that settled good is not good for me.  The use of 'conventional,' however, can pass by too easily.  It is a term used in modern discourse almost as a pejorative.  The conventional is set not only against the trivially unconventional -- the one who thinks, to use the current cliche, outside the box, improvising improved means to unimproved ends.  If one finds the conventional truly and deeply limiting, and one must find the conventional limiting if one is to assert and be recognized as an individual qua individual, then too the conventional is set not only against the trivially unconventional, but against that which is more authentic at least for me, against my own private perfection. 

A deeper irony emerges, and it stems from the close examination of language as an epistemological impediment brought it to the fore.  We use language to point at reality, but language itself is conventional through and through.  If one begins using unfamiliar words in unfamiliar ways, one becomes not only unconventional, but incomprehensible to others.  Moreover, Chinese is not an oddly translated form of English, but a way of speaking about the world whole unto itself, with its own lexicon and its own grammar, a lexicon and grammar to varying degrees incommensurate with English -- part and parcel of a Chinese, as opposed to English, form of life.  The same holds true, or so it seems, for most socially constructed human activities, for most forms of life.  They are, to use the linguist's term, coherent, but arbitrary.  There is no direct correspondence between the words we use to describe reality and reality, divine or otherwise, and insofar as our ways of talking about reality are conventional through and through, fraught with conventions that have developed over time in response to emergent historical contingencies, they could well have been otherwise and could well become otherwise.  

An even deeper irony emerges, and it stems from the predicating assumptions.  If there is nothing but what we have constructed for ourselves, if our private perfection is to have any public meaning, it must not only free itself from an over-arching convention that has gone somehow awry, but must communicate itself.  Therein lies the rub.  The governing intentionality of the romantic project is to create a "private perfection," but to do so the individual must differentiate itself from other individuals qua individuals, and the more thoroughly one differentiates one's self, the more thoroughly one speaks and acts outside the conventional, the more incomprehensible and alienated one becomes.  Much madness might be divinest sense, but it is still much madness.  If one is to assert and be recognized as an individual qua individual, and to do so comprehensibly, one cannot escape the question of "human solidarity" and one's contingent place within a form of life that must be reformed -- not tweaked, but reformed whole cloth.  The romantic project is essentially revolutionary.  The existing form of life must be destroyed, and a new form of life placed in its stead, and one must become not only an individual qua individual, but to use Emerson's term, a representative man, and what the representative man represents is the zeit-geist of a new human potential, becomes the catalyst for a new human solidarity.

Rational Secular State -- Introduction Continued

In some respects, I hear myself arguing that the Marxist state represents a reducto ad absurdem culmination of the 18th century enlightenment project with its valorization of science and the importation of its basic assumptions and methods into the social sphere -- a wholly secular state and, insofar as the conclusions of science seemed to trump and transcend the truths of religion in their immediate material utility, a wholly rational state.  The difficulties with the Marxist project have been well detailed, and conservative thinkers like Hayek are, I think, essentially correct when they tell us that "the uncritical transfer to the problems of society of habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer" tended to "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate," and those ideals of organization all required the willing sublimation of the individual subjectivity within the state, a willingness that would come of its own accord with with well planned and executed changes in the material contingencies of existence.  That it did not come of its own accord, that physical forms of persuasion were needed to help along the willingness of the populace, that it itself became an ersatz religion willing to use immoral means against individuals to achieve the moral transformation of the state, gives some credence to Hayek and others insistence on "respect for the individual man qua man," and the romantic notion that puts the private above the public, that for the individual man "the recognition of his own views and tastes [are] supreme in his own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed."  Romanticism emerged as a response to the same 18th century project, and if Marxism represented a reducto ad absurdem culmination of its progressive assumptions, Nietzsche perhaps represents the culmination of the romantic thought.  In broad strokes, romanticism might be described as a reactionary response to science and its sublimation of the human spirit to the material, the individual to the social.  Romanticism in its various iterations has sought to recover divinity in man, not in the traditional sense (though often the romantics, as they aged beyond adolescent rebelliousness, lapsed into one form or another of traditionalism) but rather as a response to the same conditions of existence, the same historical contingencies that had animated Marx.  It was, in part, a reaction to industrial capitalism that to all appearances had suborned the majority of mankind to the condition of a machine, a condition that alienated them not only from themselves, but in its clacking and coal smoke surround, more natural forms of existence, more organic ways of being in the world.  The romantic project, no less than the Marxist project, wished to recreate man, but unlike the Marxist project, the reformation of man would not come from without, but from within -- from what Harold Bloom might call the satanic impulse -- or in the diminished key of a latter day Nietzsche what Rorty might call irony -- the "means to private perfection rather than human solidarity" -- or in Hayek's terms "the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents."

To be continued.