 by Chris HayesStory of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes |
ABC's Martha Raddatz did, I thought, on the whole, a pretty good job moderating Thursday night's vice presidential debate, particularly when asking questions on her area of expertise, foreign policy. But her final question of the night, about the negativity and sordidness of electoral politics, really bothered me.
Here's what she asked:
I recently spoke to a highly decorated soldier who said that this presidential campaign has left him dismayed. He told me, quote, "the ads are so negative and they are all tearing down each other rather than building up the country." What would you say to that American hero about this campaign? And at the end of the day, are you ever embarrassed by the tone?
That soldier, of course, isn't alone: Lots of Americans feel the same way. I've heard the same thing from random voters I've interviewed in every campaign I've covered. And it's a recurring theme among the political press paid to cover politics to bemoan the nastiness and negativity of the thrust and parry of electoral politics. But it's an impulse we should collectively resist, because it contains the kernel of an insidious view of the value of democracy and diplomacy and bureaucracy and the manifold ways that we as human beings channel and resolve conflict in a non-violent fashion.
The same distaste for the plodding, clunky, at times flat-out ugliness of process in Raddatz's question was also on display in Paul Ryan's repeated attacks on the administration's UN-based diplomacy on Iran.
It's true that the UN can be maddeningly dysfunctional, that the constitution of the security council is an accident of history and that Russia's objections to any and all US proposals can seem to Americans truculent and spiteful, but what, exactly is the alternative? The answer is violence, war, death, bloodshed.
Which brings us to the announcement yesterday from the Nobel Prize Committee of a somewhat unconventional choice for this year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize: the European Union. The announcement occasioned a whole lot of snark stateside. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post tweeted, "Not a good sign if the EU asks that its Nobel Prize be paid in some currency other than the Euro." Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic tweeted, "Next year, the Nobel committee should consider awarding the peace prize to puppies." Slate's Dave Weigel tweeted, "You know who else has gone several decades without committing genocide? This guy right here. Nobel me." And the team over at FOX and Friends also mocked the committee's decision.
Gretchen Carlson: The Nobel committee praised the EU for its six decades of efforts to promote peace and democracy in Europe.
Brian Kilmeade: Really?
Carlson: …and those are Kilmeade: fantastic. [crosstalk] we should have the sportswriters do it, theyre better at picking the cy young
Steve Doocy: The EU can only hope there's a cash reward with that they could use some money right now
And it's true that the Europe isn't in the best of shape right now. The limitations of its governing structure are causing institutional dysfunction, widespread misery and threatening to terminate the entire project. Greece, submerged in the misery of austerity, is seeing fascists gain traction, administering brutally violent beatings to political enemies in a fashion horrifyingly reminiscent of Weimar Germany.
But to mock the EU is to lose sight of what a tremendous accomplishment it has been on a small patch of earth that was the site of some of the most horrifying war, violence, brutality, sadism and genocide in the history of the planet. In a span of 6 years, at least 40 million perished on Europe's soil, and the EU was constructed as a means of bringing peace and stability to a continent that had more or less known only war. The European Union doesn't have a whole lot of defenders at this moment in its history, but mockery of the EU rests on the same impulse we see in the laments of the nastiness of our presidential campaign and the huffing and puffing at the inadequacy of Iran diplomacy.
In each case, the process may be messy and ugly and torturous, but it's almost always better than the alternative. Conflict is part of the human condition: there are limited resources, there are differing interests and cultures and tribes and value systems, with different conceptions of the good, vastly different priorities and first principles. Democracy is the system we've come up with to resolve those inevitable conflicts, but there is no such thing as a placid equilibrium in which those conflicts somehow disappear, or are only articulated in the gentlest fashion. That's the point. Conflict is the underlying constant of human society. The question is what we do with it. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that either we have people killing each other in the streets like dogs, or we have people running attack ads against each other. Bureaucracy, parliamentary procedure, extended multi-lateral talks, the back and forth of campaign ads, are largely glory-less enterprises, in the grand sweep of history, they are beautiful, sublime achievements, they represent nearly unthinkable progress and point the way towards a future of full human flourishing.
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The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. President Obama won it within a few months of his election after doing precisely ... nothing. And the reason Europeans are protesting austerity measures and Fascists are rearing their heads in Greece is that politicians in many EU member countries have tried to buy their citizens' loyalty by promising them social benefits without considering the ultimate price of those benefits -- someone ultimately has to pay.
Liar forget what they say,also telling lies all the time you accept and regard as true or real.
Good point about Biden but you may want to check your grammar next time.
John Cassidy's column in the 10/13 Financial Times is superbly troubling for Obama supporters. #axzz29ByXE5dT . Two closing arguments for Obama to blunt the Mitt rebranding project are these: Mitt wants more war; Mitt wants to kill Social Security. Both are fact-based, considering Mitt's advisers, and urgent for American voters, who overwhelmingly oppose both ideas. On war, there is no alternative in Mitt's camp to Obama's foreign policy vs. Muslim extremists except direct U.S. hostile action. Obama must ask Mitt, do you favor a military draft? How else can Mitt staff the military build-up and interventions he apparently advocates? On Social Security, just quote Ryan's record. And don't let Mitt weasel out of a direct answer -- privatize or not?
Why on earth are current Greek fascists reminiscent of "Weimar Germany" rather than of, um, Greek fascists of the 20th century? Or should we assume that Mr. Hayes, like 99% of the US commentariat, doesn't have the slightest clue about the history of modern Greece?
I'm not even gonna get started on how attack ads are just like the UN.
Sigh.
There is an important follow-on to the commitment to process: voting. It is through the process of voting that those of us who are not engaged in the actual process of government come to feel that we have been heard, that we are involved at a personally committed level. If you interfere with the ability to vote, as seems to be a common state activity these days, then you sever that connection. If the public begins to think that its voice is not being heard, that it has no opportunity to enter the governing process, then it appears that only one approach remains. And that is when you get violence, war, death, bloodshed.
The decision regarding the Nobel Peace Prize is mocked by many Europeans, too. However, the Nobel Peace Prize had already lost its meaning when Mr. Drone Strike was awarded one.
The short answer is that politics is not a war of ideas but fundamentally a war for votes. If a 4 year program by a news organisation run by a GOP operative of tearing down the President delivers a percentage of voters very close to 50%, then that looks like a pretty effective strategy. Sure, it is propaganda and represents an profound assault on the institution of the function of a free an independent press.
But it works.
Radditz may as well have asked the question, why are the campaign professionals using tactics that have been shown to be effective? There are plenty of Vets with bumper stickers for Dem candidates, and there are plenty of other vets and self identified Patriotic Americans who drive around listening to blowhards like Limbaugh and Savage tear down the President and mock him at every step. There was no corresponding huge audiences of talk radio programs listening to endless streams of contempt for Bush. The reason for this is that there is no market for it.
The sentiment among a substantial segment of consumers of information is that there is something unsatisfactory about information that does not leave them with a satisfied experience of unity and certainty. I'm not just picking on llunatics who refuse to gather information outside the Fox news/ Drudge / RushBo bubble world. Honestly, many liberals read HuffPo and watch Democracy Now because they are looking for the pleasure of confirmation of their existing perspectives.
This cuts to a question of pragmatics-- what function we expect communication to serve in our lives. We saw it written large in the hours following both of the debates. As Steve Schmidt pointed out, undecided voters wait for a harmonious narrative to emerge on the debate, then as momentum starts in one direction, they pile on to emergent view. After this point, the audience has a pass not to think hard about the issues actually discussed. They have a pass not to exercise their duty as citizens to rationally evaluate whether or not each candidates argument was factually and logically persuasive.
Don't dismiss this style of thinking about communication as escapist. The job of consciousness is to resolve ambiguous information into coherent narratives upon which the animal can construct coping strategies. The most primitive forms of communication do not create a chaotic cacophony of noise in a jungle. The participants are from multiple species but are forced to modulate their contributions by shifting their frequencies and timing. This harmonisation is not done for altruistic or aesthetic reasons. Survival pressure forces it, otherwise their mating or warning messages go unheard due to being drowned out by an utterance from a species who already staked out that interval of the emergent jungle rhythm.
The Neuroscience of this is that our minds resemble the jungle rhythms of a multitude of pattern matching entities struggling to make their message heard in the din of competing interpretations of sense input. ....
Rats. Soccer practice. I'll wrap later.
There are some opportunities to go hyperbolic on this, to tie Hayes' theme of Europe, to the cognitive wars that take place in the mind of a single individual. Waves of interpretative fundamentalism seek to bring new order to the chaos Europe from the bloodbaths at the point of Roman short swords to the decisive drama of Napoleonic and Wehrmacht maneuvers on the plains of Europe.
Just as in the individual undertaking a fundamentalist squelching of internal dissident voices hinting to them of alternative perspectives on the truth of a situation, the tool of coercion through force is ultimately a futile approach. I'd like to go beyond Hayes' theme of the choice between verbal and physical warfare to get at the idea of what harmony looks like. Because what is in conflict is in two divergent models of healthy styles of consciousness, and the corresponding healthy style of interaction between members of a heterogeneous society. We are emerging from a RomneyWorld of June and Ward Cleavers with white picket fences and a homogeneous set of cultural norms. We are emerging from the mistaken equating of peace with tranquility with freedom from the chaos of cognitive dissonance. It is the equivalency of dissonant voices with disharmony in society that is at the heart of the pitch made by those drawing masses to them in a fundamentalist appeal to return to a harmony that once existed prior to the rise of heterogeneous voices now not just divergent, but pejoratively described as "perverse" or apostasy.
There are to be no more "chaos" of the jungle rhythm where each community of like minded creatures march to their own drummers. The projectors of certainty whether they are fundamentalist atheists. Muslims or Christians want everybody singing the same tune.
The trouble is with how we understand the nature of harmonization. Some portray orchestrated dynamic orders as chaos and cacophony which must be silenced by an elite conductor who does not apologize for the aesthetic choices he enforces on the players in the harmony he directs.
The alternate view recognizes the multiplicity of being- the society as a superorganism of collective consciousness singing a complex interwoven song where broadly divergent elements of kaleidoscopic perspectives on the world naturally achieve a harmonization and the capability for collective action. This is not a Hobbesian view of the body politic where the elites are the heads. Consciousness is not the exclusive dominion of the monarchy or elite representatives of a polyarchy of representatives like Obama who see their role as an elected mediator between dissonant activist voices. Though mediators will be needed for an extended time, we are moving inexorably away from a society orchestrated by elites to a harmony more akin to Durkheim's view of decentralized, self directed jazz of a society of shared, collective consciousness. With this movement we shall see greater movement towards plebiscitary direct democracy enabled by social media and spontaneous mass actions like the Occupy demonstrations.
To my mind, this expresses a beautiful process.
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Notes-
When the Iranian reformist former President Khatami came to speak at Harvard, it is worth considering how Romney treated diplomatic security and courtesies (Harvard Crimson story). Alexander Edelman of the Progressive Jewish Alliance acknowledged Khatami's hostility towards Israel but supported the need for all voices to be heard stating, ""Khatami is a reformer, and although he wasn’t ultimately successful, that doesn't change that he's been a force for good in a country that has a pretty extremist, right wing government.”
Like Romney, Egyptian President Morsi felt from a moral standpoint that it was improper to protect representatives of a government that many of his followers regard as criminal.
Romney does not see much point in shielding those who have opposing views, ultimately believing that coercion not dialog is the proper response to opposing views. This is a meme repeated in the tacit support for repressive Middle Eastern regimes of Mubarak and in the Arab kingdoms, and the horror at the threatening chaos they perceive has been unleashed by the Arab Spring. As I attempted to diagram yesterday, this top down coercive solution is symptomatic of the style of consciousness that manifested itself in the seemingly interminable wars of Europe.
And we see it expressed in America.
Those holding viewpoints displayed by Sharron Angle referring to "2nd amendment remedies" ought to consider what daylight there is between this view and those of the Benghazi religious fundamentalists who also see remaining heavily armed as critical to maintaining social order, and not as a dangerous threat to it. These advocates would prefer that their views squelch all others, and reserve the right of armed action to impose their beliefs on others- and silence those who advocate peaceful mediation with those with extreme views. The outcome is the killings of emissaries of peace in Benghazi and Tuscon. Such representatives of violently coercive thought ought to consider what daylight there is between their advocacy of armed solutions and the Taliban shooting of Malala Yousufzai, the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller, the shots fired at the Denver Obama campaign office, or the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Romney's instinct to use coercive means to squelch expression of viewpoints in conflict with his own is the same impulse of cognitive repression of alternative frames used for organizing alternate political viewpoints. As was pointed out in Sunday's show, Ryan misunderstands the mission of Marines at diplomatic compounds. Security of foreign dignitaries is the responsibility not of the military of the foreign government, but the obligation of the host government. Providing this security is essential so that we may communicate our viewpoints and build bridges of mutual understanding with in Egypt.
Romney demonstrated as Massachusetts governor towards Khatami his instincts for how to engage the world of opposing viewpoints. Khatami was all too familiar with Romney's political stance towards communication. He fought a losing battle against such self appointed "enforcers of the truth" in Iran.
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Notes-
A country that refers to contract killers and torturers as "heroes" clearly doesn't appreciate peace.
Such a classic commentary by Chris Hayes. He discusses a soldier who is embarrassed about the tone of the election advertisements but forgets to mention which side he is embarrassed about. Then he attacks Fox News for their commentary. It seems the MSNBC pundits spend more time criticizing their competitors than they do dissecting what is really going on with their Democratic heroes. If MSNBC wants any credibility they should try to find commentators that at least are past puberty.
Kindly direct me to any Fox news shows of the caliber of that of Hayes, Terry Gross, Charlie Rose or Bill Moyers that explores widely divergent views on anything- Even on important differences within conservatism- for example an examination of Ron Paul's views on defense or the drug war. Ask yourself why there is no show like Bill Buckley's Firing line. Fox news has demonstrated that it is disinterested in presenting divergent, or rigorously intellectual viewpoints. What Roger Ailes is interested in is a propaganda machine, so you will never see shows like Bill Buckley's on his network.
The problem I would suggest that for those on you side of the pond is to realise that the EU has advanced and enlarged messily. For many years Charles De Gaulle refused to allow the UK into the EU due to prejudice, despite the UK being his base during World War II. To describe some of the history it was originally a way to channel Economics but now has become a great force for good despite its faults. A historical perspective is required as well the French and German is alien to each other that it is as though New Yorkers and Los Angelers have got together not just to talk but to be friends with benefits. The word that best describes the European Union though is one that is alien in the States that word is `Solidarity`. This for many is a socialist view I would imagine for the US but in Europe its a truism. It actually emerges from Catholic Social Teaching, remind Paul Ryan when anyone has a chance. Solidarity is a concept that we are all brothers and sisters together in a world where eventually national boundaries do not matter if you have riches you share those without it does not matter if they are not from your country. There is a reason in the end the Nation State is an outdated concept and that those in Europe we care and help our brother and sister who ever they are. This mains there are fundamental principals to life, liberty and pursuit of a good life. A question I would like to ask on that the EU has won the Nobel Peace Prize, when will the USA win it for the same reasons I hope and pray it will but with a Romney/Ryan Presidency I would not be holding my breath.
I agree.
Well, Obama isn't exactly a pacifist either.
Anyway, I think that peace is nothing award-worthy. In a modern country, peace should be considered a given, a minimum standard, not a special achievement. By the way, it wasn't European history that made me a pacifist. It were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Thanks. That questioned bothered me too. Sounded like a mom guilt trippin her kids. A 'castrating' gesture, esp when delivered to the Vice President of the United States! Not appropriate debate material. Set women back quite a bit...
Drone attacks will lead to inevitable blowback in Pakistan
“I will never forget what the American soldiers did to my country, my tribe and my family. They violated our national sovereignty and our Islamic laws. They killed my son and my younger brother. They destroyed my home. If I see the soldiers who are responsible for this – if I have the opportunity -- I will kill them.” [...]
“Tell your president he must stop using drones to kill innocent people, and tell your fellow Americans they must join you in protesting,” pleaded Kareem Khan. “We are proud of our culture and our way of life, and you are destroying it.”
mondoweiss.net/2012/10/drone-attacks-will-lead-to-inevitable-blowback-in-pakistan.html
Pakistan is caught between two evils – US drones and the Taliban they help prop up
Throughout my stay in Pakistan, I have been noting similarities in the challenges faced by the people in the frontier regions here and in Gaza. Both populations are under daily threat by foreign drones (U.S. vs. Israel), the movement of both groups is tightly controlled, and both peoples are judged by the world based on internal factions branded as “extremist.” [...]
“I interviewed 16 youth from Waziristan, all under the age of 21, who are now sentenced to Pakistani prisons for becoming attackers for the Taliban,” explained Anum Abbasi, an associate with the Research Society of International Law (RSIL) in Islamabad. “What became clear from this empirical research (not yet published) is that a primary motivator is the U.S. drone strikes. They breed anger, hatred and desperation.” And most certainly, anti-American sentiment.
mondoweiss.net/2012/10/pakistan-is-caught-between-two-evils-us-drones-and-the-taliban-they-help-prop-up.html
Americans first learned of the Taliban right after they had taken over Afghanistan and had set about destroying all of Afghan culture. When next we heard from them, they had refused to allow our government to arrest al Qaeda after the 9/11 bombing. When we sent in our military to take out al Qaeda, the Taliban, along with al Qaeda, sought and found refuge in Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan is where we found and killed Osama bin Laden. If Pakistan doesn't want the war in their country, they should quit harboring our enemy, the Taliban.
@ mrz190
So, you are justifying the killing of innocent civilians in Pakistan!? Makes you sound like a terrorist.
Besides, the USA is merely one of very many countries in the world. The USA has no authority over any other sovereign state. Stop breaking international law.
The point that is made of a population bulge being the primary cause of a waning SS fund hardly ever goes on to consider the fact that this bulge will be fast eroding over the coming years. I would venture that a 20 year span will see a significant lessening of the population imbalance and, therefore, a significant re-balancing of the fund.
I dont understand the Social Security conversation. Hard to make sense of it. Richard Kim says that its never going to have a problem as its self-sustaining. I don't understand why anyone on the panel didnt' question him on that. There will always be more and more people using less and less funds. And that is the theoretical case.
The reality is that the gov't has been using the Soc. Security money to pay its bill - of which it can NEVER pay back. Why no one questioned Mr. Kim on this is strange.
Mrz - perhaps you are correct that the population bulge is temporary - but i just don't see it. With greater medical technology increasing life spans expanding OUT the number of yrs that people require their Social Security COUPLED with the fact that there WILL BE LESS EMPL0YED in the future - i think we are in deep need of tweaking the Soc Security system.
Seems to me there needs to be money paid back to it and it being tweaked so greater amount of funds are collected each yr. A good way to start would be to remove the CAP on the social security payments so the wealthy pay more. But 'tweaking' or more 'regulation' seems to be in the future in my opinion.
Chris Hayes, John Messerly ~
I agree that the integrity of the political process is determined by the conscious participation of the voters. As long as the electorate rewards style over substance while neglecting research and analysis, we will continue to enjoy massively expensive (ergo utterly corrupted) campaigns, in which it is not in any candidate's interest to speak the truth, lest it clash with the splendid fiction erected by the image teams.
It follows that the state has an interest in promoting rational citizenship among the electorate. Right and left both have wrestled this challenge from their own perspectives since colonial times. In early America, voting rights were granted only to male property owners, presumably a value statement about the competence implied in landholding and gender oppression. We see remnants of this deference to the landed class today in the Republican trope of the "job creator."
But it's not at all clear that wealth bestows wisdom, and the obvious drawback to restricting the electorate to the landed is the entrenchment of class privilege in governance. The progressive response has been to expand suffrage and invest in public education.
So how's that working out for us? There's no disputing Chris's conclusion that the maddening pace and pusillanimity of the political process are preferable to riot and ruin, but that's a pretty low bar. Not to mention, our political process routinely brings murder and mayhem to other societies, because our electorate is largely manipulated rather than persuaded.
Humankind is faced with a core paradigm challenge: competition or cooperation. We have to take our evolution into our own hands now, fire the blind watchmaker and seize the tiller of our own consciousness. With a burgeoning population grasping for finite global resources, the competitive paradigm no longer serves. "Global terror" has more visible roots in class suppression than religious belief systems. They don't hate us because we are free. They hate us because we are dominant, insensitive and in their territory.
The challenges we face as a people now will better be resolved in empathy not independence, curiosity not fear, openness not paranoia, respect not insult. To the right, this is all anathema to the long-inculcated and perpetually exploited myth of the American Individual. But they are not actually mutually exclusive. The rugged individualist can link arms with his neighbor to beat global warming. He can decide to do it.
I'm certainly not advocating any kind of statist mind control, but the idea that anybody with a pulse gets a vote seems to open the system to horrendous manipulation. I'm pretty sure we can do more in the public schools to endorse and promote active citizenship. And while any whisper of a poll tax is quite correctly DOA, is it really good governance to pretend that there are no qualifications at all for voting?
Right. While we're on it, how about parenting? (On the other hand, if my folks had faced a parental license requirement, I might very well not have emerged to post this note.)
Politics is a lot of things but it all boils down I think to what Bismarck called "The art of the possible" and that at least in the popular modern American political model is what has become the problem. The beauty of process even when it's ugly is that it allows for ideas and solutions from sometimes wildly disparate points of view to come together and be torn down to basic and fundamental elements of policy and doctrine and recombined in an almost alchemical process into wholly new elements that quite often bare little resemblance to the original source material, and this is where it runs into trouble.
People like to frame modern American politics as a game or sport but in truth it is more like a religion than anything else and it shouldn't be. If it is any kind of contest at all it billed as a winner take all war against evil for nothing less than the very soul of the nation. That narrative has been oversold in one way or another so much over the last thirty odd years by every pundit, former official and self proclaimed "expert" on anything, that like medieval pilgrims to the holy land virtually every American of any political stripe has been sold at least one piece of the "True Cross" and several of Saint Stephens finger bones.
One of the reasons most religions have a very vivid history of mutual violence and bloodshed is because of what defines them at their fundamental core; They all claim to have the market cornered on ultimate universal truth. There is no room for other points of view in the end and anyone who refuses is almost surly damned unless they confess their sins and swear allegiance to the true faith. That is why people subscribe to religions, they provide a solid and absolute surety of the order of the universe and the worshipers place in it. They provide comfort, and a unity of purpose that nothing else can.
That is why it is not only detrimental but dangerous to think of the political process in terms of religion. If the idea that if the other guy wins even a small victory or that one side or another should have to compromise even the most insignificant point of ideology is seen as nothing less than heretical blasphemy then no one will ever speak for fear of political damnation and there will never be any answer for any problem that is not part of the orthodox dogma.
That our modern politics have succumbed to this kind inquisitional logic is almost beyond dispute. Our Government is trapped in a cycle of philosophical "Holy War" in which nothing of genuine consequence has any hope of getting accomplished. This does however offer the political clergy the easily expedient, and self defending escape rout of being able to blame someone else when it inevitably fails.
In every great religion there have been great philosophers and people who grappled with the hard points of what they believed the "Truth" of the universe to be but these people were by and large trying to work from inside a preexisting dogmatic tradition. There was never a serious effort to compromise any article of faith to make it more applicable acceptable to people outside of it.
That however is exactly the way the political process works best. Unlike religion it is messy, uncertain, and inherently unstable. Our founders knew that, and when they constructed our government they not only allowed for it they essentially built it into the system. All of our systems of political weights and counter weights, of checks and balances are all set in place with the full knowledge that people will make mistakes but that there should always be ways to repair replace them with more effective measures when circumstances have changed. All one has to do is look to the constitution and see the 21st amendment for proof. Americans do actually understand that on a basic level which is one of the reasons why words like "Bi-partisan" still have any currency with the public at all, but we are also conflicted about it. We all want to think that we are the ones who sent Mr. Smith to Washington and we hate to think that he had to compromise anything in order to make the machinery work so that he could do the job we hired him for.
The American people need to remember that it is no political sin to compromise and that no one should be excommunicated or accused of heresy for trying to make a deal with the devil because that is how the work of the political process gets done. The political process should never be confused with a religious ritual that demands ceremony and scripture in a quest for purity and perfection because Washington D.C. isn't a cathedral full of saints.
Odd you discuss Russia's veto of US proposals in the UNSC in terms of death and bloodshed, yet any mention of America's automatic veto of any pro-Palestinian proposals - the truculent and spiteful veto that for decades has directly maintained an environment of ongoing death and bloodshed on both sides - is strangely absent.