We'd better hope that the Democrats figure out a way to steal the 2008 election, so that our dictator is a competent technocrat rather than a sociopath. (Or at very least, a competent sociopath.)
If you think we're living in a dictatorship already, I don't see why you'd think holding elections argues against it, since it's pretty obvious that the elections could be stolen with ease*.
*not that I'm saying the last few elections were stolen—never that—only that it would be easy to do so, should those in power want to.
I wish I believed in all the fire and brimstone afterlife stuff, because then at least I'd feel like Bush and others would face some consequences for what they've done to the country.
Well, this is why political scientists have to make up terms like "elective dictatorship," "totalitarian," "authoritarian," and the like: that the executive can flout the law (even a lot of the time) doesn't mean that he has absolute power.
I don't think 'dictatorship' is a helpful term here. I'll take 'authoritarian democracy'. [pwned by 5]
And I also think that what's important is the rights that the government takes; but what the people are willing to give up determines that, because the people will get a government that takes everything they'll give.
As for why the terrorists won: As the Steelers are discovering, you don't do well when the people on your side give the ball away. The Republicans and terrorists both hate our freedoms, and both find it useful to have the other around. Working together, they won and we lost.
(Before anyone complains about that, the CIA believes that bin Laden released a tape just before the election in order to help Bush. Meanwhile, the NIE on Iraq says that the war's helped terrorism, and Bush's reaction was not to change policy but to cover the NIE up. I do not claim that the Steelers are deliberately throwing the game.)
Liberal democracy does not work if you allow non-liberal parties to run. The Republican Party should've been outlawed when they tried to run Goldwater. But noooooooo...
I think this government has abused its powers, but not been dictatorial. I think the opposition has been weak and divided. And I think the country can simply turn away from this period, as it did from the excesses during both world wars and the cold war. The terrible things done then and now are not irrevocable.
6:The original "dictators" were guys like Cincinnatus. A temporary suspension of freedoms for the duration of the emergency. ....
Ya know what? I've been reading "State of Emergency" "State of Exception" stuff all weekend, including old stuff on Kotsko's blog and I'll think I'll pass on this for now. I need a nap.
Just in passing, in a democracy, the people are sovereign, can in all or part declare a "State of Exception" and extra-legally change the management. The people also have the monopoly on violence. Just ya know, a casual thought.
Interception in the end zone. It's a dictatorship, folks.
7: Is that an Agambenian point? On bad days I think it's right (though the thing to do would've been to prevent the terrorists from retaking the South after the Civil War). This may go back to ogged's point about the rights people are willing to give up; even the Constitution doesn't seem to prevent us from voting to destroy the liberal order.
Scratch the bad days, at this point I think the GOP is a criminal conspiracy and we would be better off if it were outlawed, if there were a non-violent way to do so.
What bothers me most about the whole situation: most everyone's cool with it. How are we supposed to run a republic when we have to rely on our compatriots?
It's more a Schmittian point, although I also think it's a pretty obvious common sense point. This of course presupposes the desire to continue in a liberal democracy in perpetuity, which our current populus does not evince.
Haven't we been in an authoritarian democracy before, though? Japanese-Am interment--that was pretty bad. Maybe we're always weaving over a dividing line and then coming back again.
21: Also, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. We could well be in a period of authoritarian democracy or whatever right now, but it doesn't have to be permanent.
These examples are what I meant by turning away in 8; sometimes there's a reckoning, but mostly it just eases. The apology and reparation for the internment took about 50 years.
And FDR threatened the court, yada yada. The point is that the threat today is trivial, trivial, trivial. If you're willing to give up various freedoms because of the risk profile we face today, you're just willing to give up certain freedoms.
The problem with a very trivial threat is that being under such a threat is so close to normal life that it's hard to tell when the threat is over -- something that's not true of a civil war or an unprecedented global depression or a world-wide conflagration. This is only compounded by the fact that our ruling elites seem to have so much difficulty being able to identify even civil wars when they see them (viz. Iraq).
You're all taking the Emerson-McManus pills today, people. This isn't a dictatorship, we're not living under the boot heel of oppression, etc. Admittedly, it's a little weird that so few people are concerned with the pollution of our precious bodily fluids, but 'twas ever thus, I suspect.
Besides, I just put up a 56-0 victory on NCAA Football 2006. This dictatorship rules.
If you're willing to give up various freedoms because of the risk profile we face today, you're just willing to give up certain freedoms.
This is compounded by the evident fact that many of the people willing to give up freedoms live far away from any place under even the limited threat there is.
"And I think the country can simply turn away from this period, as it did from the excesses during both world wars and the cold war."
There's no evidence that the country effectively wants to. There's also a convergence of all kinds of different negative factors, each of which might be reversable in itself. For example, on the big questions (not social conservativism) all the major media seem to be in the bag for the Republicans. They put out just enough criticism and just enough truth to convince themselves that they're not puppets, but they're good at fooling themselves.
I no longer take comfort in the Roosevelt example. We've never demobilized since 1941, and a large extent of militarization has become permanent, in public opinion especially. There were little dips between 1945 and ~1948(?) and between 1975 and 1980, and maybe between 1992 and 2000 (~16 of 65 years), but most of the time we've been in a hot or a cold war.
"They Thought They were Free" by Mayer is a good book to read. Germans not targeted by the Nazis did not notice any problems until Germany started losing the war.
Jim Henley's point of view looks pretty good to me these days, now that the fake libertarians have become fascists.
That Mayer book is from like 1902. If you're interested in a good case study of the way that authoritarian politics can infuse liberal democracy (in the German context) check out William Sheridan Allen's "Nazi Seizure of Power," it's pretty excellent (and still well respected in the field!). And I have to say, calling this regime "fascist" or even "proto-fascist" is akin to Bush calling radical Islamists "islamo-fascists" i.e. analytically misleading if rhetorically powerful. It's more useful to come up with a new genealogy and phenomenology of this current conservativism, which seems to me a bit of a new animal. Towards that end I'm interested in Weiner's authoritarian democracy idea. As for US fascists, I think someone like Michael Savage is legitimately a proto-fascist, but then, he hates the Bushies almost as much as he hates the liberal intellectual elite.
I hope that "1902" was a misprint. The Mayer book was written after WWII and dealt specifically with the Nazi regime as experienced by the people in one small rural area.
I think most of us agree with this. And any name for the new animal should include reference to the state of permanent emergency to which these fuckers seem committed.
The unarmed resistence will be much more effective, starting with the great rhetorical victory that no one can call us terrorists.
Also I think the most useful step at this point is to promote massive resistence to military service. (See, you were kidding, I am not.) Military families are stretched to the limit, and are beginning to see that all those lost limbs aren't winning them anything. I would really like to see more people say "No, fuck you, I will not redeploy."
33. 1902 was intentional, I was exaggerating to clearly enormous comic effect (how could he write about the Nazis in 1902?!?!? ha ha). The Mayer book is pretty old, though (1966 I believe), and I don't believe it's really used much in scholarship now. I'm just saying the Allen is an excellent history and, while pretty old (84), still a reference point for work these days.
The current situation leads to an interesting dilemma for advocates of 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms. Those rights are i) supposed to be in order that events such as those currently happening -- the removal of habeas corpus, for example -- can be prevented from happening and yet ii) the people who are the loudest advocates of those rights turn out to perfectly happy to give up the very liberty that the 2nd amendment was designed to protect and iii) as Kotsko says, no-one thinks that civil militias would have a hope in hell against the US military anyway.
Hey, on this topic of the armed resistance, do you guys really think that if, say, 15% of the country went the way of strasmangelo jones, that the army could easily put it down? I'm not sure I buy that (at least as long as the resistance uses asymmetrical warfare effectively). The US army hasn't exactly rocked the house with the Iraqi insurgency.
I need to believe that "dictatorship" is altogether too dire and drastic a term. But I don't necessarily believe that.
Okay, no, we are not (or not yet) living under a dictatorship. But if eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and etc, it looks to me like liberty now comes at a cost that the American people are, increasingly, no longer willing or able to pay.
I'm hoping sloelrnr will weigh in with some sort of historically inflected comment, wherein parallels are drawn to an earlier constitutional crisis and so on and so forth (with bonus points for a direct reference to the Anti-Federalist Papers).
Yeah, true enough, #43. But last I knew, the past in relation to the present, or what happened in relation to what happened next, was about all we've ever had to go on.
This is compounded by the evident fact that many of the people willing to give up freedoms live far away from any place under even the limited threat there is.
The problem is, it's not their freedoms they're giving up. Making the argument to them that they're giving up their freedom isn't going to fly; they know perfectly well that the suspension of habeas corpus is never going to personally affect them.
The people I run into on the net itching for extralegal violence are mostly rightwingers. Many of them seem to have prepared themselves for it.
Not to be tedious, but Mayer's book is reportage, not theory. The closer to the event, the better reportage is. I'm willing to concede that Stub's book is good too. Of course, I'm an old guy and don't share in the excitement of being up to the minute.
I'm curious about how people are defining "dictatorship." When the executive is not bound by the rule of law on matters of fundamental rights, I think that's a dictatorship. That's different from a totalitarian regime like, say, Saddam's, in which the executive controls many more aspects of a citizen's life, and it's different from an unlivable America, in which we all feel oppressed.
As for armed resistance, that seems like exactly the wrong way to go, because our imbecilic compatriots will see the resistance as a reason to give the government even more power. A general strike is the way to go, but good luck with that.
Hume was not "fat". He was pleasantly plump, maybe (and hey, back in the day when skinniness reminded people of famine and starvation, plump really was pleasing), but he probably didn't even come close to portly.
(As an aside: I think Adam Smith was addicted to sugar).
49: I haven't thought about this much, which makes it par for the course for me, but I would associate dictatorship more with a complete disconnect between the public and the executive, such that there is no public check on executive action. I don't think that's the case here. And I definitely agree that armed resistance now would be epicly teh silly, but I was wondering about the effectiveness of armed resistance in a hypothetical situation where we really do have a dictatorship. Of course, hypotheticals are the work of the devil, so nevermind.
This isn't a dictatorship, we're not living under the boot heel of oppression, etc.
Really? Why don't you go take a picture of a public feature like the Pentagon or the Bay Bridge and then call me from your cell to discuss this further.
Unless you you were kidding and I missed the joke, in which case nevermind.
IA, aren't you supposed to be writing a book about Sex and the Scottish Enlightenment?
One of my arguments for maximizing rather than minimizing Bush's ill intentions is that he tends to backload what he does, so the effects only become evident much later. I'm thinking especially of fiscal policy, and to an extent tax policy, but the Patriot Act together with Bush's interpretation of war powers and of the intrinsic powers of the executive make him able to do a lot of stuff he hasn't done yet. A lot of the torture debate is about establishing a precedent for ignoring checks and balances and making judicial review almost impossible.
I don't know much about labor history, but what I do know suggests that our imbecilic compatriots would also see that as a reason to give the government even more power, and also maybe to exercise some of that extralegal violence Emerson mentioned. For that last see also the civil rights movement.
The classification of what Bush is doing is somewhat academic to me. I like the word "fascist", since it's agreed upon not to have a definite meaning, except for badness.
He seems clearly to be abolishing all the limits to executive power we used to read about, along with much of civil liberties, while taking us into a war against an undefined enemy which can never come to an end, and setting us up for some kind of financial crisis in the next ten years or so.
Regarding "fundamental rights", I've come to regard all people in law, including judges, as primarily highly-skilled advocates. There's this myth that there's som untouchable substrate that everyone in law reveres and wants to preserve, but watching lawyers at work it seems that whatever went before is just raw material for them, or a starting point for development. I'm thinking of Yoo especially, who was tenured IIRC at one of the best schools in the country.
I think of economists that way too, of course. I like to listen to DeLong, Krugman, and the others chat back and forth, but it seems that economics per se is silent or equivocal on whatever critical questions there are. (I'm thinking of the interminable, inconclusive discussion about stagnant wages and increasing inequality.)
61: I suppose my annoyance with the fascism tag is sort of an academic/popular thing. In the general public sphere, I guess there really isn't a clear definition of "fascist" beyond an equivalency with authoritarianism and badness. But the thing is, "fascism" does still have analytical use if you really want to look at the ways that the Fascists, Nazis, and, say, the Iron Guard and Arrow Cross worked, and the ways that those systems of thought and organization might work again.
That's why I'm interested in an attempt to classify Bush's actions, since I think that automatically involves understanding how and why his policies are working (or if they are working), and thus leads to better understandings of how resistance is best mounted. For instance, if I really thought Bush and the gang were fascists, you can bet I'd be involved in a militant resistance right now. But I agree with ogged that at this point it would be counterproductive.
IA, aren't you supposed to be writing a book about Sex and the Scottish Enlightenment?
Oh, I briefly flirted with some sort of "queering the Scottish Enlightenment" angle. All those men's clubs as sites of Habermasian sociability, but just what were those guys up to, anyway?
Sadly, if somewhat predictably, I found I couldn't go through with it. So it's gender (and civil society) and the Scottish Enlightenment, which isn't half sexy enough, but what's a nice Catholic girl to do?
Hume wrote to a friend: : "My Belly has swelld so enormously. Alas! that is not an Infirmity, like gre[y hair] to be disguis'd with Power & Pomaton." Lord Charlemont wrote, "His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the Corpulence of his whole Person was far better fitted to communicate the Idea of a Turtle-eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher." Diderot, who wasn't thin himself, thought he looked like "a fat well-nourished Bernadine monk." Henry Marchant described him as "very large & heavy built."
But it beat the alternative. When dying, according to Boswell, "He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance . . . He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present."
It seems to me that a nice Catholic girl could have a lot of fun inventing scandals and scurrilous rumors about a bunch of free-thinkers and Protestants.
Is it true that Hume only died of syphilis after three days begging for a priest to come absolve him and screaming about the eternal hellfire he saw before him?
via Hilzoy, Sandy Levinson says a dual state, with a lawless regime existing alongside a law-governed one. Not a snappy phrase for it, though. Godwin's law is violated.
I suppose I shouldn't mention that during Aquinas's last exalted days he spoke incessantly about the importance of communion in two kinds and vernacular Bible translation.
The billiard-playing part, and the denial of cause-and-effect part, are just one and the same part of the same thing.
Hume wanted to deny cause and effect because he was so bad at billiards; he couldn't stand the thought that his cue caused the wildly misaimed motion of the cue ball or the subsequent pathetically inaccurate motion of the balls it hit.
22: When Belisarius defeated the Vandals in North Africa and captured their king, it was such a major win that he was given a honor almost unknown (and certainly not within generations) at that point, a victory celebration by a general who was not the emperor. And how does a Roman general celebrate a victory? By coming to Constantinople and abasing himself before Justinian in emperor worship, of course, in the true, old, Roman way.
I wouldn't call the U.S. government a dictatorship. But I wouldn't deny how it has changed, even within my lifetime. It's not any one thing, or just a product of the events since 2001, though they've helped. It's not any one political figure, though some are more responsible than others. And it's not just politicians, but us, as well. A republic, if you can keep it.
It is also true that I am consummately Becks-style, in preparation for Pats-Broncos, and hence find doomy Roman empire comparisons especially attractive at the moment.
I think for the word "dictatorship" to be effective, you need to be able to apply it to a government sometime before things got so bad that it would be unthinkable to actually utter “this is a dictatorship” out loud because the secret police would whisk you away immediately.
Shit. Just woke up from my nap. Turn on the TV to get weather and the movie "Wonderwall", from the Harrison soundtrack of the same name, is the first thing I see. I shit you not. Jane Birkin was the 2nd most beautiful hippie...woman. Mickey Dolenz married #1.
During the nap I dreamed I went postal. I am not joking. Started by killing my dogs, then I took my scoped longgun... Fuck Fuck.Fuck.
Those comments over at hilzoy's are some other Bob McManus. So is this.
I've said it before (though not here) and I'll say it again: the nearest parallel to today's Republican Party is the Mexican PRI-corrupt and authoritarian, though not yet completely fascist. Funny how the Republican Party hates the spics 'cause under their rule we've totally become a richer, more powerful Mexico, Caudilloism and all.
88 No I'm not stras. My argument is complex or subtle or stupid.
What were the calm quiet well-dressed young black men who sat at the lunch counters feeling? What were they feeling? Were they suffused with a Jesus/Gandhi love of all mankind, including their beer-bellied mirror-sunglassed truncheon-wielding friends?
You channel the rage into more tactically and strategically productive avenues, but without the rage, you got nothing to channel.
Politics during the 60s involved encounter therapy.
Can I play?
None of you give a flying fuck about the war, about the poor, about the constitution. You got your little box educations and your little box houses and your little box causes that are more about making you feel good than helping anyone else. And you think you are going to change the world with phone calls and fifty dollar donations to tv cable executives who do politics as retirement hobby.
I doubt that gives the idea, I was never any good at it.
And if you can't handle your best friends, people who love you, saying the worst things imaginable to you...you are not ready to sit quietly for the billy club to give you permanent brain damage.
I don't smell rage in the blogosphere. Mostly I smell fear. There is potential, but everybody is too motherfucking nice to each other.
When the executive is not bound by the rule of law on matters of fundamental rights, I think that's a dictatorship.
(a) if not bound de jure, this doesn't apply to the US, at least not clearly;
(b) if not bound de facto, this makes the US like every other similar state, doesn't it? At least the question then becomes one of degree, which I think will leave you looking shrill and unhinged.
95:Oh Adam. Hypocrisy is saying things you believe are untrue. Most hypocrites behavior is in line with their real beliefs.
Not living up to your ideals, not walking your talk is like the human condition, frailty, weakness, sin. Maybe I will run when the shit hits the fan.
stras, you are looking at my politics. The leftysphere seems to me to have a real shortage of trollish left wingnuts. I can count the number of full blood socialists or actual radicals that comment regularly on the big blogs on the fingers of one hand. They are all over at counterpunch making balloons. The blogosphere is a nice big organization. It has potential. I should let it be a self-congratulatory circle-jerk, an orgy of small expectations fulfilled?
Ain't my place to kick it's ass? Ain't Emerson's place? Ridiculous for me to castigate my betters?
Sure it is. So what?
Hypocrisy is saying things you believe are untrue.
No, hypocrisy is "a show or expression of feelings or beliefs one does not actually hold or possess": for example, insisting that the true measure of devotion to one's political ideal is getting bludgeoned into brain damage by a police truncheon while staying cozy and safe writing comments on other people's blogs.
for example, insisting that the true measure of devotion to one's political ideal is getting bludgeoned into brain damage by a police truncheon while staying cozy and safe writing comments on other people's blogs.
That might not be hypocrisy, depending on what one's own political ideal is.
If I immolate myself tomorrow in front of Dallas City Hall will you love me stras?
I'm not the one periodically telling everyone else they don't give a fuck about the war, the poor, and the constitution, Bob. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with your frequent leftier-than-thou outbursts; they frequently devolve into little more than '60s protest nostalgia, which would be alright if you were trying to get us or anyone else to protest anything now. Instead, your goal seems to be to say, "Look at how much more I would theoretically care about this stuff than you people - if I actually went out and did any of the things I talk about all the time."
Just ignore stras, bob. Immolating yourself will do less than nothing. About half the country likes Bush's caudillo tendencies; they aren't confused, they are reassured.
Unsurprisingly, I find stras's responses to Bob to be pretty consistently insufferable. Maybe he could shorten them to "Shut the fuck up, Bob." (Then presumably someone would chime in with "ATM," even though it wouldn't really make sense.)
Here, I'll try it: "Shut the fuck up, stras."
['But the one I really hate is max, with his fucking bracketted sub-comments.']
There is this great scene, one of my favourites, in Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. They are filming a boxing movie, just the crowd backdrops, no boxers, just extras. They turn out the lights except for the ring and the camera filming the stands and the 2nd asst director says:"Now Everybody cheer!"
And the two friends of our protagonist boo. And the 2nd asst director says:"Cmon this is costing money. Whoever is doing the booing, I can't see you, stop it. If you are sitting next to the booers, tell me who they are. Now let's try again."
I challenge Bob to a self-immolation match. And the rest of you can fight the power by infighting, eating your tails, eating your young, whatever it is we good liberals are supposed to do.
So, I have lots of rage too, as I hope is apparent, but actually I think donating fifty dollars to a cable millionaire who wants to be a senator is about the best thing we can do here, at least preferable to whatever Bob is proposing, which I confess I'm also unclear about.
Organizing a movement -- well, that would be good. But in the meantime, the only hope for stopping very very bad things from happening, and the groundwork being laid for worse, is some sort of check on executive power. And the only way that's happening is if the Democrats take at least one of the houses, and the White House in 2008. The Democrats are ineffectual, yes, but they're a hell of a lot more effectual than anything else we have in the immediate term.
You shouldn't listen to me, though, but you should listen to Katherine, because she is always right about everything. Actually she says give the money to human rights orgs, but vote Democratic.
And I think most people get it. There was an irony at 91. The irony was not in the language. I don't bother with people I don't like and respect. I assume...aww, no fun explaining away irony.
as far as organizing a movement--I've thought a listserv about bloggers interested in these issues might be a good idea. I thought about it right after Hamdan (I saw this coming, though I underestimated how bad it would be), but then figured I should do some posts before harassing people, and then when no one linked to those posts I concluded there wasn't so much interest. But obviously the problem was actually that the timing was way off, and that I didn't write short or punchy enough posts--the interest is clearly there.
On my travels through this beautiful country of ours, I am passing through a lot of western states. And I'm going to say again what I've said before: in the west, this suspension of the rule of law stuff will not fly if only the Dems will run someone who will talk about it. All we need to do is point out that while the administration may *say* it only wants to use the rules against terrorists, if you *read* the rules, they potentially apply to absolutely anyone that the government wants to take into custody. That they have established a dictatorship without anyone noticing is a profoundly patriotic argument, and it'll fly out west.
If the Dems run anyone who has the guts to make it.
We'd better hope that the Democrats figure out a way to steal the 2008 election, so that our dictator is a competent technocrat rather than a sociopath. (Or at very least, a competent sociopath.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:44 PM
If you think we're living in a dictatorship already, I don't see why you'd think holding elections argues against it, since it's pretty obvious that the elections could be stolen with ease*.
*not that I'm saying the last few elections were stolen—never that—only that it would be easy to do so, should those in power want to.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:44 PM
What an interesting conjunction.
The dems won't be able to steal the election, because the big two voting machine makers are run by
fascistsrepublicans.Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:48 PM
I wish I believed in all the fire and brimstone afterlife stuff, because then at least I'd feel like Bush and others would face some consequences for what they've done to the country.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:49 PM
Well, this is why political scientists have to make up terms like "elective dictatorship," "totalitarian," "authoritarian," and the like: that the executive can flout the law (even a lot of the time) doesn't mean that he has absolute power.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:50 PM
I don't think 'dictatorship' is a helpful term here. I'll take 'authoritarian democracy'. [pwned by 5]
And I also think that what's important is the rights that the government takes; but what the people are willing to give up determines that, because the people will get a government that takes everything they'll give.
As for why the terrorists won: As the Steelers are discovering, you don't do well when the people on your side give the ball away. The Republicans and terrorists both hate our freedoms, and both find it useful to have the other around. Working together, they won and we lost.
(Before anyone complains about that, the CIA believes that bin Laden released a tape just before the election in order to help Bush. Meanwhile, the NIE on Iraq says that the war's helped terrorism, and Bush's reaction was not to change policy but to cover the NIE up. I do not claim that the Steelers are deliberately throwing the game.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 1:54 PM
Liberal democracy does not work if you allow non-liberal parties to run. The Republican Party should've been outlawed when they tried to run Goldwater. But noooooooo...
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:02 PM
I think this government has abused its powers, but not been dictatorial. I think the opposition has been weak and divided. And I think the country can simply turn away from this period, as it did from the excesses during both world wars and the cold war. The terrible things done then and now are not irrevocable.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:11 PM
6:The original "dictators" were guys like Cincinnatus. A temporary suspension of freedoms for the duration of the emergency. ....
Ya know what? I've been reading "State of Emergency" "State of Exception" stuff all weekend, including old stuff on Kotsko's blog and I'll think I'll pass on this for now. I need a nap.
Just in passing, in a democracy, the people are sovereign, can in all or part declare a "State of Exception" and extra-legally change the management. The people also have the monopoly on violence. Just ya know, a casual thought.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:14 PM
I do not claim that the Steelers are deliberately throwing the game.
At least we're clear on the important matters.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:15 PM
Interception in the end zone. It's a dictatorship, folks.
7: Is that an Agambenian point? On bad days I think it's right (though the thing to do would've been to prevent the terrorists from retaking the South after the Civil War). This may go back to ogged's point about the rights people are willing to give up; even the Constitution doesn't seem to prevent us from voting to destroy the liberal order.
Scratch the bad days, at this point I think the GOP is a criminal conspiracy and we would be better off if it were outlawed, if there were a non-violent way to do so.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:15 PM
Cinncinatus went home and gave up power.
What bothers me most about the whole situation: most everyone's cool with it. How are we supposed to run a republic when we have to rely on our compatriots?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:18 PM
It's more a Schmittian point, although I also think it's a pretty obvious common sense point. This of course presupposes the desire to continue in a liberal democracy in perpetuity, which our current populus does not evince.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:19 PM
You're all shrill.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:19 PM
I do have kind of a nasal voice.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:21 PM
14 is a bit much.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:23 PM
Yeah, the people have failed you, and you'll just have to get another people.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:23 PM
17: Are you referring to the Onion article, or the Stalin quotation?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:29 PM
Surely a contemporary answer refers to both simultaneously.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 2:33 PM
15 is false.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:03 PM
Haven't we been in an authoritarian democracy before, though? Japanese-Am interment--that was pretty bad. Maybe we're always weaving over a dividing line and then coming back again.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:10 PM
I think it's the point of republics to decay. And to have people mourn them. Still.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:12 PM
21: Also, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. We could well be in a period of authoritarian democracy or whatever right now, but it doesn't have to be permanent.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:17 PM
These examples are what I meant by turning away in 8; sometimes there's a reckoning, but mostly it just eases. The apology and reparation for the internment took about 50 years.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:24 PM
And FDR threatened the court, yada yada. The point is that the threat today is trivial, trivial, trivial. If you're willing to give up various freedoms because of the risk profile we face today, you're just willing to give up certain freedoms.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:28 PM
The problem with a very trivial threat is that being under such a threat is so close to normal life that it's hard to tell when the threat is over -- something that's not true of a civil war or an unprecedented global depression or a world-wide conflagration. This is only compounded by the fact that our ruling elites seem to have so much difficulty being able to identify even civil wars when they see them (viz. Iraq).
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:39 PM
You're all taking the Emerson-McManus pills today, people. This isn't a dictatorship, we're not living under the boot heel of oppression, etc. Admittedly, it's a little weird that so few people are concerned with the pollution of our precious bodily fluids, but 'twas ever thus, I suspect.
Besides, I just put up a 56-0 victory on NCAA Football 2006. This dictatorship rules.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:45 PM
If you're willing to give up various freedoms because of the risk profile we face today, you're just willing to give up certain freedoms.
This is compounded by the evident fact that many of the people willing to give up freedoms live far away from any place under even the limited threat there is.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:46 PM
"And I think the country can simply turn away from this period, as it did from the excesses during both world wars and the cold war."
There's no evidence that the country effectively wants to. There's also a convergence of all kinds of different negative factors, each of which might be reversable in itself. For example, on the big questions (not social conservativism) all the major media seem to be in the bag for the Republicans. They put out just enough criticism and just enough truth to convince themselves that they're not puppets, but they're good at fooling themselves.
I no longer take comfort in the Roosevelt example. We've never demobilized since 1941, and a large extent of militarization has become permanent, in public opinion especially. There were little dips between 1945 and ~1948(?) and between 1975 and 1980, and maybe between 1992 and 2000 (~16 of 65 years), but most of the time we've been in a hot or a cold war.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:48 PM
"They Thought They were Free" by Mayer is a good book to read. Germans not targeted by the Nazis did not notice any problems until Germany started losing the war.
Jim Henley's point of view looks pretty good to me these days, now that the fake libertarians have become fascists.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 3:51 PM
That Mayer book is from like 1902. If you're interested in a good case study of the way that authoritarian politics can infuse liberal democracy (in the German context) check out William Sheridan Allen's "Nazi Seizure of Power," it's pretty excellent (and still well respected in the field!). And I have to say, calling this regime "fascist" or even "proto-fascist" is akin to Bush calling radical Islamists "islamo-fascists" i.e. analytically misleading if rhetorically powerful. It's more useful to come up with a new genealogy and phenomenology of this current conservativism, which seems to me a bit of a new animal. Towards that end I'm interested in Weiner's authoritarian democracy idea. As for US fascists, I think someone like Michael Savage is legitimately a proto-fascist, but then, he hates the Bushies almost as much as he hates the liberal intellectual elite.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:08 PM
If anyone wants to start up armed resistance, I'm in.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:08 PM
I hope that "1902" was a misprint. The Mayer book was written after WWII and dealt specifically with the Nazi regime as experienced by the people in one small rural area.
Hush, SJ. Not funny.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:15 PM
Realism dictates not starting up armed resistance against the greatest military power in the history of the world.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:16 PM
I think most of us agree with this. And any name for the new animal should include reference to the state of permanent emergency to which these fuckers seem committed.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:19 PM
@32:
The unarmed resistence will be much more effective, starting with the great rhetorical victory that no one can call us terrorists.
Also I think the most useful step at this point is to promote massive resistence to military service. (See, you were kidding, I am not.) Military families are stretched to the limit, and are beginning to see that all those lost limbs aren't winning them anything. I would really like to see more people say "No, fuck you, I will not redeploy."
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:21 PM
33. 1902 was intentional, I was exaggerating to clearly enormous comic effect (how could he write about the Nazis in 1902?!?!? ha ha). The Mayer book is pretty old, though (1966 I believe), and I don't believe it's really used much in scholarship now. I'm just saying the Allen is an excellent history and, while pretty old (84), still a reference point for work these days.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:23 PM
My call for unarmed resistance would be more effective if I spelled it correctly.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:24 PM
re: 32 and 34
The current situation leads to an interesting dilemma for advocates of 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms. Those rights are i) supposed to be in order that events such as those currently happening -- the removal of habeas corpus, for example -- can be prevented from happening and yet ii) the people who are the loudest advocates of those rights turn out to perfectly happy to give up the very liberty that the 2nd amendment was designed to protect and iii) as Kotsko says, no-one thinks that civil militias would have a hope in hell against the US military anyway.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:25 PM
Hey, on this topic of the armed resistance, do you guys really think that if, say, 15% of the country went the way of strasmangelo jones, that the army could easily put it down? I'm not sure I buy that (at least as long as the resistance uses asymmetrical warfare effectively). The US army hasn't exactly rocked the house with the Iraqi insurgency.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:27 PM
I am so shrill that none of you can even hear me. Remember that awful ring tone that adults can't hear? That's me.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:28 PM
I need to believe that "dictatorship" is altogether too dire and drastic a term. But I don't necessarily believe that.
Okay, no, we are not (or not yet) living under a dictatorship. But if eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and etc, it looks to me like liberty now comes at a cost that the American people are, increasingly, no longer willing or able to pay.
I'm hoping sloelrnr will weigh in with some sort of historically inflected comment, wherein parallels are drawn to an earlier constitutional crisis and so on and so forth (with bonus points for a direct reference to the Anti-Federalist Papers).
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:33 PM
Just because, in the past, the future has always been like the past, that doesn't mean that the future will be like the past this time.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:36 PM
re: 43
Yeah, but dude, Hume was fat.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:38 PM
Yeah, true enough, #43. But last I knew, the past in relation to the present, or what happened in relation to what happened next, was about all we've ever had to go on.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:42 PM
Yeah, but dude, Hume was fat.
Well I'll be.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:44 PM
This is compounded by the evident fact that many of the people willing to give up freedoms live far away from any place under even the limited threat there is.
The problem is, it's not their freedoms they're giving up. Making the argument to them that they're giving up their freedom isn't going to fly; they know perfectly well that the suspension of habeas corpus is never going to personally affect them.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:47 PM
The people I run into on the net itching for extralegal violence are mostly rightwingers. Many of them seem to have prepared themselves for it.
Not to be tedious, but Mayer's book is reportage, not theory. The closer to the event, the better reportage is. I'm willing to concede that Stub's book is good too. Of course, I'm an old guy and don't share in the excitement of being up to the minute.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:47 PM
I'm curious about how people are defining "dictatorship." When the executive is not bound by the rule of law on matters of fundamental rights, I think that's a dictatorship. That's different from a totalitarian regime like, say, Saddam's, in which the executive controls many more aspects of a citizen's life, and it's different from an unlivable America, in which we all feel oppressed.
As for armed resistance, that seems like exactly the wrong way to go, because our imbecilic compatriots will see the resistance as a reason to give the government even more power. A general strike is the way to go, but good luck with that.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:47 PM
And any name for the new animal should include reference to the state of permanent emergency to which these fuckers seem committed.
How about "Egyptian-style democracy"?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:48 PM
Hume was not "fat". He was pleasantly plump, maybe (and hey, back in the day when skinniness reminded people of famine and starvation, plump really was pleasing), but he probably didn't even come close to portly.
(As an aside: I think Adam Smith was addicted to sugar).
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:52 PM
The US army hasn't exactly rocked the house with the Iraqi insurgency.
That's because the US Army doesn't want to stay in Iraq. (Not in large numbers, anyway.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:54 PM
49: I haven't thought about this much, which makes it par for the course for me, but I would associate dictatorship more with a complete disconnect between the public and the executive, such that there is no public check on executive action. I don't think that's the case here. And I definitely agree that armed resistance now would be epicly teh silly, but I was wondering about the effectiveness of armed resistance in a hypothetical situation where we really do have a dictatorship. Of course, hypotheticals are the work of the devil, so nevermind.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:55 PM
This isn't a dictatorship, we're not living under the boot heel of oppression, etc.
Really? Why don't you go take a picture of a public feature like the Pentagon or the Bay Bridge and then call me from your cell to discuss this further.
Unless you you were kidding and I missed the joke, in which case nevermind.
Posted by shpx.ohfu | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:57 PM
When the executive is not bound by the rule of law on matters of fundamental rights,
There's no agreement about which rights are fundamental, and so there are no fundamental rights.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:59 PM
Do we have BMI readings on Hume? He looks fat in that famous painting.
"Hume's empiricism lead him to deny the existence of his feet." Discuss.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 4:59 PM
IA, aren't you supposed to be writing a book about Sex and the Scottish Enlightenment?
One of my arguments for maximizing rather than minimizing Bush's ill intentions is that he tends to backload what he does, so the effects only become evident much later. I'm thinking especially of fiscal policy, and to an extent tax policy, but the Patriot Act together with Bush's interpretation of war powers and of the intrinsic powers of the executive make him able to do a lot of stuff he hasn't done yet. A lot of the torture debate is about establishing a precedent for ignoring checks and balances and making judicial review almost impossible.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:00 PM
There's no agreement about which rights are fundamental
? Does anyone deny that habeas is a fundamental right?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:01 PM
A general strike is the way to go
I don't know much about labor history, but what I do know suggests that our imbecilic compatriots would also see that as a reason to give the government even more power, and also maybe to exercise some of that extralegal violence Emerson mentioned. For that last see also the civil rights movement.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:01 PM
38 -- I don't think that follows.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:02 PM
The classification of what Bush is doing is somewhat academic to me. I like the word "fascist", since it's agreed upon not to have a definite meaning, except for badness.
He seems clearly to be abolishing all the limits to executive power we used to read about, along with much of civil liberties, while taking us into a war against an undefined enemy which can never come to an end, and setting us up for some kind of financial crisis in the next ten years or so.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:03 PM
Regarding "fundamental rights", I've come to regard all people in law, including judges, as primarily highly-skilled advocates. There's this myth that there's som untouchable substrate that everyone in law reveres and wants to preserve, but watching lawyers at work it seems that whatever went before is just raw material for them, or a starting point for development. I'm thinking of Yoo especially, who was tenured IIRC at one of the best schools in the country.
I think of economists that way too, of course. I like to listen to DeLong, Krugman, and the others chat back and forth, but it seems that economics per se is silent or equivocal on whatever critical questions there are. (I'm thinking of the interminable, inconclusive discussion about stagnant wages and increasing inequality.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:09 PM
Hume was not "fat". He was pleasantly plump, maybe
I didn't take IA for one of those "revisionists."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:10 PM
61: I suppose my annoyance with the fascism tag is sort of an academic/popular thing. In the general public sphere, I guess there really isn't a clear definition of "fascist" beyond an equivalency with authoritarianism and badness. But the thing is, "fascism" does still have analytical use if you really want to look at the ways that the Fascists, Nazis, and, say, the Iron Guard and Arrow Cross worked, and the ways that those systems of thought and organization might work again.
That's why I'm interested in an attempt to classify Bush's actions, since I think that automatically involves understanding how and why his policies are working (or if they are working), and thus leads to better understandings of how resistance is best mounted. For instance, if I really thought Bush and the gang were fascists, you can bet I'd be involved in a militant resistance right now. But I agree with ogged that at this point it would be counterproductive.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:12 PM
Oh, I briefly flirted with some sort of "queering the Scottish Enlightenment" angle. All those men's clubs as sites of Habermasian sociability, but just what were those guys up to, anyway?
Sadly, if somewhat predictably, I found I couldn't go through with it. So it's gender (and civil society) and the Scottish Enlightenment, which isn't half sexy enough, but what's a nice Catholic girl to do?
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:15 PM
64 was me, unfortunately.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:15 PM
Hume's philosophy presents itself as lean. What a hypocrite.
I suppose he put on weight during the billiard-playing part of his day, not during the denying-causality-and-substance part.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:17 PM
Hume wrote to a friend: : "My Belly has swelld so enormously. Alas! that is not an Infirmity, like gre[y hair] to be disguis'd with Power & Pomaton." Lord Charlemont wrote, "His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the Corpulence of his whole Person was far better fitted to communicate the Idea of a Turtle-eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher." Diderot, who wasn't thin himself, thought he looked like "a fat well-nourished Bernadine monk." Henry Marchant described him as "very large & heavy built."
But it beat the alternative. When dying, according to Boswell, "He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance . . . He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present."
Posted by Mike J. | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:18 PM
It seems to me that a nice Catholic girl could have a lot of fun inventing scandals and scurrilous rumors about a bunch of free-thinkers and Protestants.
Is it true that Hume only died of syphilis after three days begging for a priest to come absolve him and screaming about the eternal hellfire he saw before him?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:21 PM
via Hilzoy, Sandy Levinson says a dual state, with a lawless regime existing alongside a law-governed one. Not a snappy phrase for it, though. Godwin's law is violated.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:26 PM
I'm not absolutely positive I'm willing to endorse everything Thullen says.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:30 PM
#67. Keep this up, Emerson, and I'm going to have to ask you to step outside.
The billiard-playing part, and the denial of cause-and-effect part, are just one and the same part of the same thing.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:31 PM
I suppose I shouldn't mention that during Aquinas's last exalted days he spoke incessantly about the importance of communion in two kinds and vernacular Bible translation.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:36 PM
The billiard-playing part, and the denial of cause-and-effect part, are just one and the same part of the same thing.
Hume wanted to deny cause and effect because he was so bad at billiards; he couldn't stand the thought that his cue caused the wildly misaimed motion of the cue ball or the subsequent pathetically inaccurate motion of the balls it hit.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:37 PM
W.C. Fields in the billiards skit modeled himself on Hume.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:39 PM
Just in:
Brown is going to try to topple Blair in a Constitutional Revolution
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:45 PM
With hair like that, there's no way the man can fail.
Posted by Stub | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 5:53 PM
I can't help thinking that we've been living in a dictatorship
Unlike all you conservatives, I'm a liberal, and I value diversity. I say let the dictatorship exist in its natural habitat.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:03 PM
its
The real Michael has obviously been disappeared.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:08 PM
Careful, Ben. Being-a-little-bitch* may soon be outlawed.
*the pheonomenology of which may be found in part III of Sein und Zeit, for those why know how to obtain a copy.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:10 PM
*le sigh*
why s/b who
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:10 PM
22: When Belisarius defeated the Vandals in North Africa and captured their king, it was such a major win that he was given a honor almost unknown (and certainly not within generations) at that point, a victory celebration by a general who was not the emperor. And how does a Roman general celebrate a victory? By coming to Constantinople and abasing himself before Justinian in emperor worship, of course, in the true, old, Roman way.
I wouldn't call the U.S. government a dictatorship. But I wouldn't deny how it has changed, even within my lifetime. It's not any one thing, or just a product of the events since 2001, though they've helped. It's not any one political figure, though some are more responsible than others. And it's not just politicians, but us, as well. A republic, if you can keep it.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:12 PM
It is also true that I am consummately Becks-style, in preparation for Pats-Broncos, and hence find doomy Roman empire comparisons especially attractive at the moment.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:16 PM
I'm as pessimistic as ogged is, but it makes me feel somewhat better that ogged is as pessimistic as I am.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:23 PM
I think for the word "dictatorship" to be effective, you need to be able to apply it to a government sometime before things got so bad that it would be unthinkable to actually utter “this is a dictatorship” out loud because the secret police would whisk you away immediately.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:23 PM
Shit. Just woke up from my nap. Turn on the TV to get weather and the movie "Wonderwall", from the Harrison soundtrack of the same name, is the first thing I see. I shit you not. Jane Birkin was the 2nd most beautiful hippie...woman. Mickey Dolenz married #1.
During the nap I dreamed I went postal. I am not joking. Started by killing my dogs, then I took my scoped longgun... Fuck Fuck.Fuck.
Those comments over at hilzoy's are some other Bob McManus. So is this.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:24 PM
See? Bob's with me on the armed rebellion thing.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:36 PM
I've said it before (though not here) and I'll say it again: the nearest parallel to today's Republican Party is the Mexican PRI-corrupt and authoritarian, though not yet completely fascist. Funny how the Republican Party hates the spics 'cause under their rule we've totally become a richer, more powerful Mexico, Caudilloism and all.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 6:57 PM
88 No I'm not stras. My argument is complex or subtle or stupid.
What were the calm quiet well-dressed young black men who sat at the lunch counters feeling? What were they feeling? Were they suffused with a Jesus/Gandhi love of all mankind, including their beer-bellied mirror-sunglassed truncheon-wielding friends?
You channel the rage into more tactically and strategically productive avenues, but without the rage, you got nothing to channel.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:01 PM
then I took my scoped longgun
Come on Bob, details.
.308? Or do you dream big time and go with the .50 BMG?
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:04 PM
Politics during the 60s involved encounter therapy.
Can I play?
None of you give a flying fuck about the war, about the poor, about the constitution. You got your little box educations and your little box houses and your little box causes that are more about making you feel good than helping anyone else. And you think you are going to change the world with phone calls and fifty dollar donations to tv cable executives who do politics as retirement hobby.
I doubt that gives the idea, I was never any good at it.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:09 PM
And if you can't handle your best friends, people who love you, saying the worst things imaginable to you...you are not ready to sit quietly for the billy club to give you permanent brain damage.
I don't smell rage in the blogosphere. Mostly I smell fear. There is potential, but everybody is too motherfucking nice to each other.
Not enough trust for real politics.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:21 PM
Anytime you want to actually say what your "real politics" would look like, Bob - or even go out and practice what you preach - I'd be all ears.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:32 PM
Neighbor, how stands the Union?"
Posted by Daniel Webster | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:33 PM
93: The hypocrisy of the speaker doesn't make the statement untrue.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:44 PM
95: When the speaker's message consists of an accusation of hypocrisy, yes, it does.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:50 PM
Er, no it doesn't.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:53 PM
When the executive is not bound by the rule of law on matters of fundamental rights, I think that's a dictatorship.
(a) if not bound de jure, this doesn't apply to the US, at least not clearly;
(b) if not bound de facto, this makes the US like every other similar state, doesn't it? At least the question then becomes one of degree, which I think will leave you looking shrill and unhinged.
I will now return to double-teaming Teo and Tia.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:55 PM
91 is a joke, right?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:58 PM
95:Oh Adam. Hypocrisy is saying things you believe are untrue. Most hypocrites behavior is in line with their real beliefs.
Not living up to your ideals, not walking your talk is like the human condition, frailty, weakness, sin. Maybe I will run when the shit hits the fan.
stras, you are looking at my politics. The leftysphere seems to me to have a real shortage of trollish left wingnuts. I can count the number of full blood socialists or actual radicals that comment regularly on the big blogs on the fingers of one hand. They are all over at counterpunch making balloons. The blogosphere is a nice big organization. It has potential. I should let it be a self-congratulatory circle-jerk, an orgy of small expectations fulfilled?
Ain't my place to kick it's ass? Ain't Emerson's place? Ridiculous for me to castigate my betters?
Sure it is. So what?
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:59 PM
I will now return to double-teaming Teo and Tia.
I don't think it's possible for a single individual to do that, Labs.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 7:59 PM
95:Oh Adam. Hypocrisy is saying things you believe are untrue. Most hypocrites behavior is in line with their real beliefs.
No, that's lying.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:00 PM
91 is a joke, right?
You only say that because you don't give a flying fuck about the war, about the poor, about the constitution.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:02 PM
99:Can't imagine anyone decent who cares about anything saying such things, huh, FL? Ain't no point to being mean, impolite, having bad manners?
Yeah, sure, I was only kidding.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:03 PM
Hypocrisy is saying things you believe are untrue.
No, hypocrisy is "a show or expression of feelings or beliefs one does not actually hold or possess": for example, insisting that the true measure of devotion to one's political ideal is getting bludgeoned into brain damage by a police truncheon while staying cozy and safe writing comments on other people's blogs.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:09 PM
Quick, I'll fashion a barricade:
|===|===|===|===|
And we can climb atop it with roses:
(---(@
And die. In the rain.:
:-(
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:12 PM
for example, insisting that the true measure of devotion to one's political ideal is getting bludgeoned into brain damage by a police truncheon while staying cozy and safe writing comments on other people's blogs.
That might not be hypocrisy, depending on what one's own political ideal is.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:13 PM
Things to do in blog comments:
(1) incite the revolution
(2) talk about how I will travel to Lord Spatula's home to engage in fisticuffs.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:13 PM
105:If I immolate myself tomorrow in front of Dallas City Hall will you love me stras? I doubt you would have any less contempt.
In the context of blog commenting am I playing it safe? What is our context of politics? Do you want reassurance?
Ok, we have a dictatorship. More cock jokes. You are all very fine people. Back to normal.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:15 PM
I challenge Labs to a knife fight.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:23 PM
If I immolate myself tomorrow in front of Dallas City Hall will you love me stras?
I'm not the one periodically telling everyone else they don't give a fuck about the war, the poor, and the constitution, Bob. I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with your frequent leftier-than-thou outbursts; they frequently devolve into little more than '60s protest nostalgia, which would be alright if you were trying to get us or anyone else to protest anything now. Instead, your goal seems to be to say, "Look at how much more I would theoretically care about this stuff than you people - if I actually went out and did any of the things I talk about all the time."
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:25 PM
Just ignore stras, bob. Immolating yourself will do less than nothing. About half the country likes Bush's caudillo tendencies; they aren't confused, they are reassured.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:25 PM
110: You're going to bring a gun, aren't you?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:35 PM
For the record, and before this escalates further, I'm sorry for getting snippy at Bob in this thread (and in previous threads).
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:35 PM
Unsurprisingly, I find stras's responses to Bob to be pretty consistently insufferable. Maybe he could shorten them to "Shut the fuck up, Bob." (Then presumably someone would chime in with "ATM," even though it wouldn't really make sense.)
Here, I'll try it: "Shut the fuck up, stras."
['But the one I really hate is max, with his fucking bracketted sub-comments.']
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:39 PM
Thanks, Adam. Love you too.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:40 PM
Adam is all sweet and cuddly like a cactus.
Posted by Adam | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:50 PM
Wow, 117 was me. Sorry about that, no idea how it happened.
Have a rose. (-----(@
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:53 PM
111:
There is this great scene, one of my favourites, in Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers. They are filming a boxing movie, just the crowd backdrops, no boxers, just extras. They turn out the lights except for the ring and the camera filming the stands and the 2nd asst director says:"Now Everybody cheer!"
And the two friends of our protagonist boo. And the 2nd asst director says:"Cmon this is costing money. Whoever is doing the booing, I can't see you, stop it. If you are sitting next to the booers, tell me who they are. Now let's try again."
Cheer. Cheer. Cheer. Cheer. Cheer. Cheer.
Boo.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:53 PM
You're going to bring a gun, aren't you?
Now you've ruined the surprise.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 8:56 PM
I challenge Bob to a self-immolation match. And the rest of you can fight the power by infighting, eating your tails, eating your young, whatever it is we good liberals are supposed to do.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:02 PM
So, I have lots of rage too, as I hope is apparent, but actually I think donating fifty dollars to a cable millionaire who wants to be a senator is about the best thing we can do here, at least preferable to whatever Bob is proposing, which I confess I'm also unclear about.
Organizing a movement -- well, that would be good. But in the meantime, the only hope for stopping very very bad things from happening, and the groundwork being laid for worse, is some sort of check on executive power. And the only way that's happening is if the Democrats take at least one of the houses, and the White House in 2008. The Democrats are ineffectual, yes, but they're a hell of a lot more effectual than anything else we have in the immediate term.
You shouldn't listen to me, though, but you should listen to Katherine, because she is always right about everything. Actually she says give the money to human rights orgs, but vote Democratic.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:02 PM
And I think most people get it. There was an irony at 91. The irony was not in the language. I don't bother with people I don't like and respect. I assume...aww, no fun explaining away irony.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:13 PM
no, giving the $ to good candidates is fine and dandy too.
I'm trying not to think about the Democratic party too much mainly for the sake of my own sanity.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:23 PM
as far as organizing a movement--I've thought a listserv about bloggers interested in these issues might be a good idea. I thought about it right after Hamdan (I saw this coming, though I underestimated how bad it would be), but then figured I should do some posts before harassing people, and then when no one linked to those posts I concluded there wasn't so much interest. But obviously the problem was actually that the timing was way off, and that I didn't write short or punchy enough posts--the interest is clearly there.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:28 PM
I'm sure you could gather a lot of people from the bloggers against torture.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:33 PM
On my travels through this beautiful country of ours, I am passing through a lot of western states. And I'm going to say again what I've said before: in the west, this suspension of the rule of law stuff will not fly if only the Dems will run someone who will talk about it. All we need to do is point out that while the administration may *say* it only wants to use the rules against terrorists, if you *read* the rules, they potentially apply to absolutely anyone that the government wants to take into custody. That they have established a dictatorship without anyone noticing is a profoundly patriotic argument, and it'll fly out west.
If the Dems run anyone who has the guts to make it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-24-06 9:54 PM