wtf?

the suspension of the rule of law would undermine the necessary fiction that such a suspension would result in a horror unbearable to us as a freedom-loving people.

Suddenly I'm a deontologist.

Seconding Labs.

I thought it was pretty convincing. Where does it fall down? The idea that the Democrats have given it any thought apart from what's necessary to sustain their routine spinless dithering?

Thought isn't actually necessary for this process to work. All you need is an instinctive aversion to acknowledging painful truths.

First, note that this is a claim about motivations: "vote...because you don't want to find out..." You believe this is the intent of the relevant people? Second, just what are the constitutional violations that might be illuminated?

Second, just what are the constitutional violations that might be illuminated?

wtf?

well, the details matter in cases like this.

Seconding Labs.

Intentional fallacy!

Claiming that someone votes a certain way because they don't want to find something out is already attributing an intention to them, so it's legit to ask about the intentions of those people. Then the person making the initial accusation says something about false consciousness and we get into a big argument.

Nonsense. One can have unrecognized motivations. It seems clear to me that Adam's reading is correct: the Dems react to things as though the Rs were (1) sane; (2) acting in good faith; (3) negotiable with, and as if the country were still basically lurching along more or less reasonably well.

Labs, You can't just go trusting people when they tell you their motivations. (Bitch speaketh the truth.)

Adam, I realize that not all claims about internal states, motivations, intentions and the like--even sincere claims-- are true. I say I'm straight, after all. But you said that what's really driving the relevant members of Congress is fear "of triggering an 'official' constitutional crisis" and that they "don't want to find out what happens when the president goes ahead...." Saying that members of Congress aren't necessarily accurate in their own claims about motives is one thing; saying that their motives are the things you've identified is another.

Interestingly, based on Ogged's remarks about the "spectre of authoritarianism," if we turned out to be living in effectively authoritarian circumstances and things were basically okay for most people (and they basically are), that would undermine the idea of "spreading democracy."

(Does anyone know whether Saddam was strictly authoritarian or full-blown totalitarian? Don't respond if you want the distinction clarified.)

14: Honestly, I think those two statements are really pretty reasonable, don't you?

The Democrats are objectively acting so as not to acknowledge the constitutional crisis because I assume that for the vast majority of them, the possibility of a genuine constitutional crisis is radically foreclosed. The only possible way for a president to go wrong is through some combination of corruption and incompetence -- seizure of power in such a way as to effectively alter the structure of government is constitutively impossible in their minds. (As is, for example, appointing members to the Supreme Court based on their faithfulness to one's radical ideas of executive authority -- hence we got the old culture-wars boilerplate in the Roberts and Alito confirmations, rather than what was really at issue, even after Bush showed his cards by trying to appoint his own personal lawyer.)

I mean, didn't Pelosi say recently that she was sure Bush would be forthcoming about benchmarks? Their fear is radical, moreso than a conscious fear. (Similar to your fear of being gay, really, if that helps.)

Kotsko has read Agamben more closely than I, but when I read it I saw no reason the people, or part thereof, could not declare the State of Exception. The power defaults to the "dictator" when a State of Exception exists but is not publicly acknowledged, and I think the powers the Dictator may assume become limitless and unconditioned in an undeclared SoE.

The Democrats/Congress certainly are frightened, and should be, because under an SoE it becomes obvious that obedience to the law, in the most general and abstract sense, is conditional. We have not had much liberal civil disobedience since the 60s, because the 60s frightened, umm, liberals.

We survived the 60s and we would return from whatever level of anarchy we create. I fear the moderates the most, those who won't trust the people for fear of the Fascist or Commie mob. But that fear of mobocracy and the admiration of leaders and discipline ultimately enable the Dictator.
It is out of liberalism that tyranny is born.

I once wrote, on my humble blog, "In a democracy, the role of the people is that of sovereign -- that is, the people decides the state of exception. All discussions of "direct democracy," with substantially all citizens voting on substantially all matters, are a red herring, because they misidentify the essence of democracy as voting. The essence of democracy is not voting. It is that the people decides the state of exception."

People in comments dithered with me about who exactly "the people" are.

Just to clarify, before I go swim in the shadow of the smoldering ruins of the republic, Kotsko and I seem to have different readings of the Democrats' motives and intentions, partly because I'm not trying to divine them so much as provide a rational reconstruction of what they might be. On my reading, it's possible that the Democrats are aware of the constitutional crisis, but have made a determination that it's best not to make the crisis explicit.

On my reading, it's possible that the Democrats are aware of the constitutional crisis, but have made a determination that it's best not to make the crisis explicit.

Here, "constitutional crisis" can mean simply radically different interpretations of what is allowed under the Constitution, right? Which makes the state of "constitutional crisis" less rare than one might think. I think.

The position of the Bush administration is that the Authorization to Use Military Force effectively created a situation of war unbounded by time or space, such that the executive has the right, in principle, to kill any human being on the face of the earth -- that is, it is a situation that is "warlike" enough to give the executive full discretionary power, but it is against non-state actors and so does not entail adhering to our treaty obligations. It seems obvious to me that Congress did not intend to create such a situation (i.e., suspend the constitution and all other laws) when they passed the AUMF. Nor does it seem likely that when Congress passes a law, they intend to give the president the option of signing it with the proviso that he does not regard it as binding (i.e., "signing statements"). I could go on and on and on, and we all know all about this stuff -- it's been posted about on this very blog -- which is why I was mystified at Labs' question about "what constitutional violations."

"Objectively," as it were, we have a constitutional crisis insofar as two of the branches of government are in substantial disagreement on constitutional matters. The moment Congress truly asserts itself -- and I mean truly asserts itself, more than this window dressing with the Justice Department -- we have an "official" constitutional crisis.

20:"but have made a determination that it's best not to make the crisis explicit."

They have a point. The essence of liberalism is the tyrrany of law and process. Recognizing even the possibility of a SoE is like repealing gravity. So Bush just has a different interpretation of the Constitution, and we must use the Constitution to control him.

OTOH, all the Republicans on the debate dais tell their base that they recognize and seize the SoE. "Double Guantanamo". Conservatives are not so psychologically dependent on subservience to Law and Process. Conservatism at its core recognizes a sphere outside the Law, and an Outside Power that legitimates Law and Process.

"Double Guantanamo" sends that signal. "I declare the SoE".

I love it when Unfogged becomes a hotbed of radical politics.

It seems obvious to me that Congress did not intend to create such a situation (i.e., suspend the constitution and all other laws) when they passed the AUMF.

They have the option of clarifying their intent.

Nor does it seem likely that when Congress passes a law, they intend to give the president the option of signing it with the proviso that he does not regard it as binding (i.e., "signing statements").

"I interpret the law differently" is not the same as "I will ignore the law." If he breaks the law, then we're to go to the courts. I find it hard to believe that you think that, but for the signing statements, Bush would apply the various laws in what you would consider a fair and reasonable manner.

The moment Congress truly asserts itself -- and I mean truly asserts itself, more than this window dressing with the Justice Department -- we have an "official" constitutional crisis.

Which is to say that we don't have a constitutional crisis at the moment. Why that might be--Dems want to avoid it for fear of making the existence of such a crisis clear, a surprising number of Dems agree with the President for reasons good and very, very bad, etc., remains unclear.

Do you think the AUMF issues are sui generis? I mean, the claims about time and space fall out of the non-state-actors bit, but otherwise this is more or less conventional fare, isn't it?

26:But this is not what Bush is saying. Without being perfectly explicit, but close, Bush has repeatedly implied:"I will not let the Law get in the way of my protecting the American people."

Democrats and liberals cannot even admit that there is a moral place outside the law. Hell, even Mohandas and MLK accept the legal consequences of civil disobedience.

"You are either obeying or breaking the law. There is nothing, except what we explicitly permit, that is outside the Law and Process."

This is not only wrong, but deeply immoral. There is no freedom in that system. No wonder that the Reds hate y'all.

Okay, if it's not because they don't want to provoke a constitutional crisis, why *aren't* the Dems (except for Kucinich, but come on) trying to impeach both Bush and Cheney?

I don't think it's strictly sui generis if by that you mean completely unprecedented in every respect.

I do think that the "sweet spot" factor is unprecedented -- the aspect of being a real war for the purposes of executive power, but not a war for the purposes of treaty obligations. (This rationale has been extensively documented by Jonathan Schwarz.) The "unlawful enemy combatant" designation is the other side of this "sweet spot" mentality -- neither civilians nor true prisoners of war.

"I interpret the law differently" is not the same as "I will ignore the law."

Actually, as Bush uses signing statements they're precisely and explicitly nullifications of law. On, by now, hundreds of occasions. It's hard to see an interpretation of "constitutional crisis" that shouldn't apply to "the chief executive has openly repudiated the laws of the land."

Adam is right that the Bush years are characterized by a kind of hysterical blindness on the part of a political elite (and citizenry) that doesn't want to believe what is staring them in the face: that politics-as-usual has quite simply broken down. In realistic terms, it will basically not have been reinstated until people start to be dragged out of office in handcuffs for the kind of behaviour the Bush White House has engaged in. Congress' fear of doing this is perfectly understandable; once you get to that kind of situation you're essentially talking about coups and counter-coups, constitutional or otherwise.

28: Because they think impeachment is a political loser?

31: But I've seen polls that indicate that it's not a political loser. So what motivates them to ignore such polls?

Ultimately, it's probably something that happened during potty training.

which polls do you have in mind, Adam?

Actually, as Bush uses signing statements they're precisely and explicitly nullifications of law.

Or so argues Dean. I'd be very surprised if any Bush signing statement, or Bush discussion of signing statements, included language that said, "And thus do I nullify the law." So "explicit" is probably not the word I would chose.

I also seem to be the only one who remembers what Justice Kennedy, the swing vote on the 2000 Florida election decision, said. Can't dig it up right this minute, but in effect he said that the US was too fragile to endure a drawn-out fight. This was after the Brooks Brothers riot and a lot of noisy threats by the Republicans, and it's pretty clear to me that he was worried about what the Republicans would do. (The Democrats had been staying within the legal process). He also had to be aware that an arbitrary decision in favor of the Republicans would lead to "peace", whereas an arbitrary decision in favor of the Democrats would lead to chaos.

In short, Munich.

28:Because after two generations under Roe v Wade, the Reds are a whole lot more free and determined than the Whites Blues. The Reds would just eat the liberals alive in the freefire zone. Hell, they are already.

Carl Schmitt was right. Totally.

The Republicans both in the executive and in the judiciary have taken a large number of steps of a large number of different kinds which have the effect of nullifying checks and balances (especially the congressional oversight function) and nullifying due process (including habeas corpus). The phrases "unitary executive" and "war powers" are sort of umbrella justifications of a whole lot of stuff (and add the Patriot Act). The executive has also explicitly stated its intention of continuing in this line, and their statements of intention have been backed by multiple, consequential acts (e.g. refusing to respond to congressional subpoenas, establishing alternate channels of communication which don't leave records, telling the Secret Service to destroy its logs of visitors to Cheney's compound.)

This is by way of saying that I don't understand FL's incredulity: Second, just what are the constitutional violations that might be illuminated? Where has he been.

Kotsko's interpretation of the behavior and intentions of the Congressional Democrats, granted that it's a conjecture and an accusation, strikes me as the most illumnating so far. I think that it accounts for the way the Democrats blinked on Iran Contra 20 years ago too. Several of the Iran-Contra people and some of the Watergate people are still doing their evil work in government.

34: I'd be very surprised if any Bush signing statement, or Bush discussion of signing statements, included language that said, "And thus do I nullify the law."

Whether or not they actually use the words "I am nullifying the law" is a trivial objection, like quibbling over how many times Bush said the words "imminent threat" while he was busy implying that Hussein's Iraq was an imminent threat. If you can think of some reason why Dean is wrong to argue as he does, do feel free.

They have the option of clarifying their intent.

Kotsko, in part, is explaining why they aren't taking this option or forcing the issue.

Kotsko: The moment Congress truly asserts itself -- and I mean truly asserts itself, more than this window dressing with the Justice Department -- we have an "official" constitutional crisis.

Tim: Which is to say that we don't have a constitutional crisis at the moment.

Dream on, Tim. I suppose you can have a quiet nullification without crisis, if that's your point.

After Caesar took power, for some time the Roman Senate continued procedurally exactly as it always had, except that it had no powers.

After Caesar took power, for some time the Roman Senate continued procedurally exactly as it always had, except that it had no powers.

Great point.

I knew Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a friend of mine. Shrub, you're no Julius Caesar.

As far as impeachment being a "political loser" goes: as I've said many times, you can't deal with momentous issues with the kinds of bargaining, horsetrading, constitutuent support, etc. that guides you when you decide on artichoke supports and highway funding. There is a constituency for impeachment, though not 50%, but leadership involves taking chances.

Democrats are fatally crippled whenever this aspect of politics becomes important. The Republicans know how it works. With all due respect, FL and Tim here are Democrats.

There is a constituency for impeachment, though not 50%, but leadership involves taking chances.

Is it still taking a chance if the outcome is certain? The votes aren't there for impeachment, and the public support isn't there to get the votes. I'm not sure how you get around that.

Gabriel, when Kotsko says that we're in a constitutional crisis, it means that vote-counting and calculations of that kind don't work any more. It also means that you take a chance of changing peoples' minds, and take a chance on losing, bacause if you don't take a chance, you're sure to lose.

Have I mentioned how bad I hate Democrats recently?

Where's Brutus when you need him?

If you can think of some reason why Dean is wrong to argue as he does, do feel free.

So the default assumption is to be that Bush nullified the law? That's going to be a tough assumption to defend, I think. You have, at a minimum, to point to places where the Administration would be violating the law but for the fact that it had been pre-nullified. That's going to require going to court, I think, as well as a claim by the Administration, in court, that the act wasn't a violation because of the signing statements.

Kotsko, in part, is explaining why they aren't taking this option or forcing the issue.

Kotsko is offering one possible explanation. My recollection is that HRC has suggested once or twice that she likes an Executive with expansive powers herself.

Schmitt and Strauss argued, among other things, that if one player respects legality and the other doesn't, the one which respects legality loses. They seemed to think that this is a law of nature and not a bad thing at all. Harvey Mansfield (Harvard Straussian) recently came explicitly out against the rule of law.

The Democrats seem likely to lose if they don't do something. Or to be more specific, my wing of Democrats. Hillary seems to be being prepared to be the one to ratify the Korea solution in Iraq.

Hillary has been very stubborn about not backing down on her hawkishness. She loses with rank and file Democrats by this -- she's sending signals to bipartisan and nonpartisan hawks who're ditching Bush that they she'll give them what they want in a somewhat different form.

I have no prejudice against opening old scabs, so I'll just note that FL's argumentation here is more evidence that philosophy training incapacitates you for noticing 500-lb. gorillas not mentioned in your formulation of the case. There's nothing like clear thinking for deferring the perception of actuality indefinitely into the future.

Schmitt and Strauss argued, among other things, that if one player respects legality and the other doesn't, the one which respects legality loses.

Part of the problem is that "respect legality" strikes me as not easily defined, particularly in the absence of a court decision. Are all the people who continually object to the ultimate resolution of the 2000 election--including me--people who don't respect legality?

That's going to require going to court

We have to go before a judge now in order to express political opinion? Ouch.

I think the distinction SCMT is looking for is between good-faith disputation and bad-faith disputation. You can dispute an interpretation of law in good faith while continuing to "respect legality." But disputing or offering an interpretation in bad faith is irreconcilable with a respect for the law.

With regard to the signing statements, I think the argument is that they smell of bad faith.

This, also, requires an examination of intentions.

I capitulate to SCMT's reasoned discourse. No problem exists.

My two cents: The dynamic between the Bush Administration and the Congress has always struck me as a dysfunctional, or even abusive, relationship in one very particular way. The hallmark of such relationships IME -- and I make no claims to universality here -- is that one partner cares deeply about the other partner, while the other partner simply doesn't give a shit. That seems to be what's happening here, which makes it a de facto Constitutional crisis.

As to impeaching Bush being bad for the country, I've seen -- though I don't recall where offhand -- numerous Democratic voters who argued that impeaching Bush right after impeaching Clinton would seriously hurt the country. I don't know whether this is particularly true of the Democrats in Congress, though I suspect it is; it's certainly not an implausible, or even improbable, opinion to ascribe to them.

Or, what Emerson said in the first paragraph of 47.

46: It seems to have been more-or-less stipulated that Bush nullified the law, specifically with regards to domestic wiretapping and the authorization of torture.

All this talk of "intention!" Good God, it's like we're dealing with the isolated actions of bad individuals rather than a systemic problem.

Damn liberals....

53: I think I'm arguing the opposite, though it may amount to the same thing: the problem always exists. I'm willing to bet that you would see much similar rhetoric about abuse of power, etc., on the right during the forty year heydey of liberal power.

I genuinely cannot understand the argument that the actions of the Bush administration are nothing out of the ordinary. Madness.

So let's say that the House screws up its collective resolve and subpoena's Rove's testimony under oath. Bush has already indicated that this is not "acceptable".-- I think that odds are that the subpoena will be ignored at best, and probably defied.

What's the House gonna do? Send the Sgt. at Arms up to the White House to haul Rove off by his ear?

Tim, the game you're playing can't be won. There will be some point around 2050 or 2080 when all the clear, careful thinkers will agree that the US experiences a constitutional crisis around 2000-2010, and if you are still alive then you will congratulate yourself for not having jumped to any conclusions.

May I point out that waiting for a court to declare that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis is self-contradictory and indeed seems to misunderstand what the phrase "constitutional crisis" means?

Adam and I are arguing that there are good reasons to believe that the executive branch is determined to override, ignore, and reinterpret the Constitution, (Kotsko didn't spell this out) that a significant slice of the federal judiciary will support them, and that this is intentional and has been in the works for decades.

I don't think that by your cautious methods of deciding it would ever be possible for you to recognize a situation of that sort soon enough to respond to it effectively. I think that there is lots of evidence for our point of view, but in order to accept our argument you have to be equipped to recognize constitutional crises, which happen surreptitiously and in a hurry.

How can we know that we've switched from normal politics to crisis politics? If you don't have a module in your thinking enabling that kind of realization, you will be blindsided by a crisis.

The Declaration of Independence may not be a perfect model for that kind of thinking, I don't think that it is at all, but that's the decision they're making there: this is not normal politics.

I agree with 48 and 54. And 57.

59: I think they're out of the ordinary. But I think they're out of the ordinary because they reflect a different cultural understanding of US institutions and norms than that which held sway for many, many decades. I don't think that set of understandings has no base in...well, the Bush base.

, and if you are still alive then you will congratulate yourself for not having jumped to any conclusions.

What do you mean if I'm still alive? Do you know something? Tell me!

I'm willing to bet that you would see much similar rhetoric about abuse of power, etc., on the right during the forty year heydey of liberal power.

Jesus, Tim, you should audition to be The Last Man: "So asks the Last Man, and blinks." Yes, the right wing has been justifying a coup d'etat for 70 years. They even tried one early in Roosevelt's presidency. In what way is this an argument here?

You didn't get this way naturally, I know. Only careful training could produce such blindness.

Oh great, now we're getting the token gestures of "equivalence" between left and right.

Damn liberals....

reflect a different cultural understanding of US institutions and norms..... I don't think that set of understandings has no base in...well, the Bush base.

??????????

We're saying that the Bush base (30% of the electorate, plus a lot of media, plus powerful elite figures) wants to make the US into an authoritarian state, and you're counterargument is that the Bush base wants to make the US into an authoritarian state, and it's just cultural?

I grew up liking Republicans, Emerson--the blindness may be more natural than you think.

64: Tim, almost none of us will be alive in 2080, and very few in 2050. That was my way of wishing you a long life, keyed on my perception that you're a very slow learner.

46: You have, at a minimum, to point to places where the Administration would be violating the law but for the fact that it had been pre-nullified.

For example, the Administration would have to be caught using signing statements to create loopholes in anti-torture bills at the same time as it is openly advocating enhanced interrogation techniques? Something like that?

You need courts to determine who ordered whom to do what in cases like that. You don't need them to determine that the events happened, since the events are in the public record from any number of sources.

58: the problem always exists . . . I'm willing to bet that you would see much similar rhetoric about abuse of power, etc., on the right

Yes, that amounts to the same thing. It also would only make sense if the problems during the liberal heyday were qualitatively similar to the problems of the recent conservative ascendancy. Are you claiming that?

We're saying that the Bush base (30% of the electorate, plus a lot of media, plus powerful elite figures) wants to make the US into an authoritarian state,

You're saying "authoritarian" is justified because of either failures in process or failures of substance. I'm saying the Right has made the same charge, in good faith, in the past. I think perceptions of the failures are probably determined by ideological bases. That's fine, there's no way around that, etc. And I want my side to win. But you seem to be applying some standard that exists out in the ether. Or perhaps more properly, you're arguing that we're on a glide path that ends in a place that no one denies is authoritarian. I'm not sure that the independent standard exists, or that your soothsaying abilities are unimpeachable. I wasn't there, haven't studied it, etc., but the 60s look more crisis-y to me than today, and, I'd bet the 30s more so.

71: I'm saying the Right has made the same charge, in good faith, in the past.

Yes, I remember when Clinton started a war of aggression, advocated for torture, openly repudiated the constitutional authority of the Justice Department to restrict his actions, tried to have people tried by military tribunal, locked an American citizen up in a naval brig until he was too insane to stand trial, and so on.

Wait, I don't remember any of that, actually. I think you're drawing false equivalence directly in the face of the facts. Two sides of a conflict can make similar allegations toward each other, but that doesn't make both sides equally correct or trustworthy.

Tim, I think that you should just sit this one out. You seem most concerned with quibbling about some constitutionalist meta-principle, possibly Posner's. I'm not going to insult your intelligence, if your trained incapacity has left you with any, by explaining why I think that we should treat this as a constitutional crisis. You seem to insist on putting the substantive questions behind the veil of ignorance so you can argue procedural questions at a high meta level.

So what does one do? I mean, I agree with Kotsko, I've felt that the 2000 "election" marked a real shift since for the first time we had a situation where lots and lots of people knew that a national election was fraudulent and the fraud-committers took office anyway. It's the combination of action and popular discourse that's different, and that terrifies me. We've had plenty of thugs and frauds and fascists in office, but the idea that the Democrats and lots of non-politicians are just going along for the ride...

In fact, I guess I'd say that the "crisis" lies in the fact that there is no "crisis". We're not having a coup. We're not impeaching anyone. We're just sitting quietly by lobbying and voting and fussing while our government openly ships people off to foreign prisons to be tortured without trial.

So what do we do? Riot in the streets and hope that you inspire the masses to rise up? Call your senator? What? What?

One of the Cleveland elections was fraudulent or dubious, I think. There's a lot more stuff in Bush's case.

grover Cleveland

Al Gore should have followed the example of Andrew Jackson following the corrupt bargain. The union might have been saved.

I'm exhausted after a hard day of chasing the kids around the zoo (snow leopards are actively working at being adorable; gorillas remain disturbing), so I can't argue this coherently, but Kotsko seems obviously right, to the point that I'm assuming that FL and Tim have some more sophisticated objection than I'm successfully following.

78: Don't like snow leopards. Around here, they cover the snow leopard enclosure with wire net so that the snow leopards won't jump out and eat people. I'll take gorillas any day.

63:No, Tim has a very solid point. There is a case to be made that the system, at the margins is often or always in a Constitutional Crisis. I would have to work on what exactly I mean by that, but I can give an example or two.

The 1955-65 (-75) Civils Rights Crisis. I am honestly not so certain that Brown v Board was correctly decided, and that the segregationists didn't have a reasonable Constitutional argument. I wasn't sure at the time. "State's rights" may be bad things used for bad purpose, but I am on Arnie's side if his fight for emission and mileage stds in California.

In any case, in the period of the Civil Rights cases, both sides resorted to force, coercion, violence, and other extra-legal and illiberal tactics and both sides had some victories (busing).

Politics as it should be.

I like to zoom through the outdoor parts of the zoo, stopping only to watch the elephants throw dust on themselves, and then go at a leisurely pace through the acquarium. At least the fish actually move around now and then.

76 -- Hey watch it.

Ok, Clown.

I absolutely agree with 78, and I'm having a hard time understanding what the disagreements are.

It's seemed to me for a couple of years, at least, that an overt constitutional crisis has only been avoided by either the administration weaseling out of a confrontation (see: moving Padilla out of incommunicado), by endless appeals, or by opponents' unwillingness to force a decisive showdown.

Also, it seems to me that on the limitless Article II powers claimed by this administration, both sides are a little afraid they might lose, when it finally came down to a Supreme Court decision.

How's the wind blowing, Justice Kennedy?

It seems to me that if push really came to shove Bush would back down. But push hasn't come to shove - the House hasn't even managed to impeach Alberto Gonzales - because a) Bush is more skilled at brinksmanship, b) there's a sense that things have stopped getting worse and are on the way to getting better, and c) if you put together 200 votes for impeachement, you don't have a constitutional crisis; but you've just fatally shot yourself in the foot. An aversion to dramatic but ultimately self-destructive and futile is a reasonable thing to have in a government, I think.

81: The Shedd Acquarium (in Chicago) is fantastic. I am particularly haunted by the dim tanks filled with vast, weird, lumpy African and Subcontinental river fish. I once had a dream about drifting down a river filled with just such fish.

74: We had this discussion just the other day, with Katherine saying something along the lines of "Do the little things like calling your senator" and ogged saying something along the lines of "Shut up and enjoy the Paris Hilton show." I personally can't be bothered to do the little things, so I think I'm going to go clothes shopping so that when the riot comes I'll have something to wear.

87: I've always bought clothes with rioting in mind, so I guess I'll have to think of something else to do.

I like how Chicago has the Field Museum, which I imagine as a field full of taxidermied animals, and the Shed Aquarium, which I imagine as a shed full of water with fish in it.

Then there's the Art Institute, devoted to the study of guys named Arthur.

There seems to be a conflation here between a "constitutional crisis" and "good faith contention amongst of the branches of government regarding the breadth and nature of their constitutional powers." Nibbling away at the margins, even using novel constitional theories, is not a "constitutional crisis." Trying to get away with actions that strike the vast majority of legal scholars as constitutional absurd on the other hand... SMCT is probably strictly correct that a true "constitutional crisis" requires judicial action: that would be a case where two branches had "out-voted" the third; if the executive doesn't step back at that point, you've got trouble.

I guess where I agree with Tim, if I do, and disagree with many others here is that the importance, again, of the law is vastly overrated.

So yeah, ok, in the early 70s Democrats wanted to weaken and remove if possible Richard Nixon from office, for a variety of reasons. The liberal line is that poor Barbara Jordan & Sam Ervin had no choice, the crimes and evidence were overwhelming and threw themselves at Congress. And more in sorrow than anger, etc...

But in the 90s the Republicans abused the impeachment process in a mad frenzy of self-destructive rage that gave them control of all three branches and very fat bank accounts.

Bullshit. The law is a means to an end, not the end itself. The law is people, not paper.

I was at the Art Institute recently, and liked it more than any other art museum I've been to.

What with technology nowadays you'd think they could sell poster reproductions of more than a dozen of their paintings, though. Where's the Long Tail®?

93: Did you chance to see the strange post-WWII sorta Cranach-looking one where people are laboring to build a cathedral in some ruins? That's my favorite painting at the Art Institute. It's near the Cornell boxes, or at least it used to be.

We didn't get to the Cornell boxes unfortunately. Spent most of the time in pre-1900 Europe, then the early American furniture area, then the rooms with Chagall and De Chirico and Hopper. Some of us had a low tolerance for abstraction and collages.

I was very impressed by this for some reason.

My parents are overwhelmingly fond of the French Impressionists, for reasons that have always escaped me. I remember being a tiny child and whining, at the museum, "Not the Impressionists again!" Of course, at that time I didn't have any tolerance for abstraction either. I wanted paintings of angels, people and mythological subjects only.

I like the furniture rooms a lot.

They used to have a fantastic children's play room, with weird big plastic oval rocking chairs and strands of spaghetti-like, faintly-luminous plastic dangling from the ceiling. Now gone, alas.

When we went into the Monet room (or maybe the Cezanne room, whichever one exists) it was somewhat disorienting compared to all the other rooms. "Whoa...all these paintings look identical." The subtleties are lost on me.

91:I would define a Constitutional Crisis as a political conflict that cannot really be resolved by Constitutional means to an outcome that would create "the consent of the governed" a losing minority that retains their faith in the system, that they have a stake in perpetuating processes. The losers may not act on their disappointment, but the important thing is whether they feel the decision was politically legitimate. Abortion.

Liberalism is supposed to create legitimacy, not merely force stuff on each other in alternating terms. A lack of violence is not peace, and I would contend that liberalism is a failure.

79: PETA needs to get to work on that.

To sorta-relatedly threadjack, have you-all seen this? Or what about this? They're articles about forced labor on American projects in Iraq.

No matter how much politics I have, I can't get over my shock at the nakedness of this kind of thing.

And this, come to that. I know it's the Socialist Worker, but I still have no reason to believe it's a lie. You-all, I call a riot in the streets ASAP.

I'm not sure Kotsko is completely right. It seems correct to say that the Democrats are gunshy and aren't pressing the issues that they should, but I don't think it's because of fear of an overt constitutional crisis. (This is not the intentional fallacy. If Adam says "This is their intention" and I disagree, that's just an argument.)

When Democrats voted for the AUMF, the political will of the people was very pro-war and it was in their getting re-elected interest to look tough on terror. (And the Democrats didn't control Congresss then, either.) No need to worry about triggering a constitutional crisis then; there were other worries, like looking like they weren't serious about terror.

Why not now? 85b seems to get it right. The system is broken, but only partially. I feel better about the country than I did a year ago. And 85c seems to be right on, too. I don't think there's much political will for impeachment. (People think Bush is doing a bad job, but not because they think he's doing anything illegal, but because Iraq is a clusterfuck.) I don't think they have the votes for it. That's enough of a reason not to impeach. And here's another: anyone here believe that Bush has anything to do with actually running the government? Anyone believe that impeaching him will make the constitutional problems go away? So the Democrats should attempt to impeach the President, lose, just to make a symbolic last stand? And then impeach Cheney?

I don't think it has anything to do with acknowledging the suspension of the rule of law and 'not wanting to find out what would happen'; it's just that they want power and think that their best chance for getting more is not to start a fight they can't win.

100, 101: Jesus Christ on a fucking pogo stick.

No matter how much politics I have, I can't get over my shock at the nakedness of this kind of thing.

The duty is to the shareholders, not to the employees who may or may not be enslaved.

Or shorter: What they fear isn't a constitutional crisis, but that they'll provoke one and the electorate will say, 'as long as it's just the terrorists' and shrug.

105: That's exactly the fear -- that the electorate will walk away from the rule of law and not look back. Once we've openly, rather than tacitly, abandoned it, it's going to be harder to recover from.

105: That's exactly the fear -- that the electorate will walk away from the rule of law and not look back. Once we've openly, rather than tacitly, abandoned it, it's going to be harder to recover from.

Right. The Democrats might be thinking "we don't have the votes for this" or "this is a political loser," but what's in the background of all that, whether they're thinking about it or not, is that "losing" would mean the open repudiation of constitutional government by the people.

Not all the people, obviously...

Yeah, but then what's driving it isn't the nebulous fear of a constitutional crisis, but the very everyday fear that 'I won't get re-elected.' And now it's very weird: do we have a constitutional crisis if a majority of the electorate is okay with it?

The real question is whether we think that the crisis we're in is one we can recover from.

A related issue here seems to be transfer of power. One could argue that Bush has severely damaged the constitutional regime, but if his term runs out and someone comes in who restores adherence to previous constitutional norms, that might be a better solution than the Dems' provoking a sharp confrontation that they could well lose.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely why I am so fucking terrified by the news that's coming out of Iraq. People just don't care that we're sending in the Iraqi army to break unions. They don't care that we are using forced labor to build our embassy. They don't care that we, a nation which has always formally (though not actually) opposed torture, are now openly practicing it. They know, and they just don't care very much. This isn't accidental, either--a lot of work has been done to make sure that no one cares very much.

But seriously, I was raised to believe that the fundamental argument, the keyest of key points, was that the United States was supposed to be about fair trials for everyone, equal treatment under law. It's not that I ever believed that this was what was happening, but I was raised to believe that "equal treatment under law" was the standard against which we were to judge things. And people seem to have totally abandoned that, which scares the hell out of me.

(People have totally abandoned it after the ruling class has systematically worked--with its attacks on labor- and class-action lawsuits and its perverse approach to tort; with its transparently biased tax policies, with its systematic defunding of everything that binds us together as a nation--to break that logic. All these crappy things that they do, those are intentional cultural attacks on any kind of solidarity. They also, of course, put a lot of money in people's pockets.)

those are intentional cultural attacks on any kind of solidarity

This is where you totally lose me. People grow up, they end up doing what they do, they try to do a good job and get ahead, and things shake out how they shake out. Often, they shake out poorly, which is why we have a government and regulation, etc.

105 is about what Kotsko meant. Democrats have acceded to Bush's usurpations in the fear that if they fight the issue, they'll lose, and Bush will have succeeded in making his usurpations de facto (and with the help of Alito and Scalia, probably de jure) legitimate.

So we're limping along with the form but not the substance of constitutional government.

The arguments that Democrats might lose if they force the issue are valid, but they seem to assume that they're more likely to win if they don't force the issue. Cheney, Rove, and Bush have 20 months left, and they have a lot of tricks in their bag. One conclusion to take from "We can't impeach Bush" is that we are in extremely dire straits.

My belief is that this is not normal politics, and that the kind of vote-counting people are doing misses out on what's happening.

Yeah, but then what's driving it isn't the nebulous fear of a constitutional crisis, but the very everyday fear that 'I won't get re-elected.' And now it's very weird: do we have a constitutional crisis if a majority of the electorate is okay with it?

No, that's not the argument being made. Say the Democrats are thinking:

If I bring the constitutional conflicts out into the open, there's a 60% chance the judiciary and the electorate are with me, the administration is humbled and brought back into line with the law, my party takes power at the next election and everything's good. But there's a 40% chance I lose, and it becomes a matter of openly admitted public record that there is no legal restraint on what the Executive may do -- it may start wars at will; crush the testicles of the children of its political opponents; and use the full power of the state to maintain its own political power. Once this is the open state of affairs, it will be difficult or impossible to recover from.

If I weasel along and don't bring matters into direct legal conflict with the Executive, I look personally weak, and the chance that my party takes power drops to 50%. But the 50% of the time that I lose, the loss still provides for a figleaf of legal control over the Executive -- while they are doing whatever they want, we can pretend that we could stop them if necessary. Then, when the political situation looks better for us, we can stop them another time, and no irrevocable damage has been done to the structure of our government.

I think the fear really is for the survival of the system, not just for personal political gain.

And now it's very weird: do we have a constitutional crisis if a majority of the electorate is okay with it?

Sure. If it were overwhelmingly popular that the Executive have unlimited dictatorial powers, uncontrolled by Congress or the judiciary, that would still be a huge change in our system of government, and I'd call it a constitutional crisis.

Another thing that's weird: if you asked your average fresh-out-of-civics eighth grader at Independence Middle School what a constitutional crisis was, they'd probably describe a situation where the Checks and Balances they learned about were violated by a power-hungry President and the people and Congress and the Judicial Branch were upset about it. And then there'd probably be a revolution with cake for the winners.

Shouldn't a crisis at least mean we don't have so many iPods and diamonds?

I don't know what you call it when there's a constitutional violation and about half of the people are okay with it, and about half don't care or couldn't understand it. We have to interpret the Constitution, after all, and the Constitution is supposed to work for us, not the other way around: so is it a crisis when most of the people are okay with interpreting it a way it probably wouldn't have been interpreted when it was written?

Oh, something dreadful happened to my formatting there. Hold on while I edit.

112: I think I might find you, so to speak, if I refined my terms. Joe Average Republican is thinking of tax breaks. Clever think-tanky strategists are also thinking of tax breaks and electibility, but they are, I suspect, also thinking about breaking up political formations through defunding programs.

In fact, there's a very good and well-documented article (republished in one of the World War III Illustrated anthologies) about the intentional defunding of all kinds of HUD programs with the specific goal of breaking up black communities and letting the politically liberal cities go to hell. This was actually an unannounced conservative strategy at the Federal level back in the seventies.

I think I could think of other documented instances, too.

The thing is, thinky-tanky smart rich white guys have no reason not to think about stuff like that. Why wouldn't you try to skew your political tactics to weaken the social formations of your opponents?

Right, I'm not getting 112. Saying that the right is developing policies with the goal of breaking up class solidarity doesn't seem to conflict with or particularly relate to what you say.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely why I am so fucking terrified by the news that's coming out of Iraq. People just don't care that we're sending in the Iraqi army to break unions. They don't care that we are using forced labor to build our embassy.

Right. Yesterday's discussion on this thread, especially from Emerson and McManus (whom I respect tremendously), sometimes veered into unreality. Who is going to take to the streets? Who is going to take the radical measures necessary to oppose Bush and his backers? Hardly anyone in this country. My political discussions with acquaintances, even in New York, are much more often on the level of trying patiently to explain why that Law & Order actor would not be a better president than Obama -- nowhere near the level of radicalism needed to get people to see the whole regime as illegitimate.

re: 117

All of that makes sense. Or at least, it's plausible. That Thatcher government of the 1980s carried out actions explicitly designed in a similar way. Not only is this acknowledged fact, but some of these actions are often the things she is praised most for by, for example, Blair.

112 is wrong. The business lobby has definitely invested ...hundreds of millions?...of dollars in changing people's opinions so they no longer get angry at capitalism when capitalism screws them throughout their life and will presumably screw their children and grandchildren. And also to do whatever it takes to make sure their opponents are not cohesive/informed/funded/optimistic enough to organize effectively. This investment has had an effect.

119: And that, mostly, is because the establishment media has no interest in conveying to people the truth or importance of events, and every media outlet that does is considered unimportant, partisan or both. We'd be better off if Time Magazine and Newsweek suddenly vanished, for one, along with every TV news show. People would go for news to where the actual news is, instead of being fooled into thinking that what's on CNN is the news.

Meh, let's not get sidetracked; Frowner is right that I was mainly objecting to the language in 111. I think the problem is less "intentional cultural attacks" (which lets us have convenient villians) than systemic problems which consistently disadvantage workers and the poor.

119: The short-term picture is pretty bleak, yeah. There are groups--low income people, in particular low-income people of color; immigrants from Mexico and South America--who will probably mobilize themselves in the medium term, just because things are so massively sucky for them. But when that happens, an awful lot of otherwise-okay people are going to say, "No, wait, stop making trouble, there's no crisis here!"

Eventually we'll get fascism that will be obvious to everyone, and we'll end up impoverished and global-warmed into some kind of upheaval. But I'm not looking forward to this process.

LB and lefty-law types, do you ever read the ,Baffler? There's a very pop but interesting-to-Frowners-everywhere article about tort law and a drift away from what you might call the democratic administration of law.

It's just a matter of language whether you consider that these "systemic problems" have been intentionally created by oligarchs, or have been intentionally allowed to continue for the benefit of oligarchs.

I think I was a taught a very different version of American history than the rest of you.

I don't -- I should take a look at it.

The thing is, Ogged, sometimes there are convenient villains. There's been a consistent political effort since the Reagan administration to stack the federal bench with political apparatchiks, and it's succeeded well enough that there's a real shot that any case politically important to the right will be decided on the basis of political advantage to the specifically favored party, rather than any larger principle of law. That's men-in-smokefilled-rooms stuff, but it's true.

Believing that everything bad is structural and therefore impossible to change is a cop-out. Some things happen deliberately.

126: Didn't you grow up Republican? I mean, you've clearly recovered mostly, but you miss a lot of information in your formative years that way.

everything bad is structural and therefore impossible to change

Not at all impossible to change. Actually, maybe easier to address with regulation. And of course there are smoked-filled rooms, but I think it's more helpful to think of people as acting in response to incentives and good-faith belief than simple venality.

Believing that everything bad is structural and therefore impossible to change is a cop-out. Some things happen deliberately.

The current vogue for denigrating conspiracy theories serves a very useful function in this respect.

While it's true that some things are 'systemic', and that sometimes events are best explained in terms of incompetence, rather than malice, it's also true that there really are powerful vested interests at work. Even if those vested interests don't operate in precisely the cartoonishly sinister way beloved of the more out-there conspiracy theorists.

And of course there are smoked-filled rooms, but I think it's more helpful to think of people as acting in response to incentives and good-faith belief than simple venality.

People generally? Sure. People in terms of the specific individuals who have been shaping the news over the last six years? Are you smoking crack?

Saying 'don't turn to malice as a first explanation when good faith confusion and disagreement are a possibility' is decent and sensible. Ruling out malice and venality when there's strong evidence for it is just goofy.

I'm speaking more generally. I take the venality of the Bushies as a given. It was really just a disagreement with the language in 111 that I quoted in 112! I don't think we disagree!

Maybe it's easier to imagine Bizarro-world good intent, like "those ignorant immigrants will just swamp our beautiful republic if we let their children go to our public schools" rather than "I hate immigrants". But the thing that we can't overlook is the strong probability that harmful policies are not mistakes but result from actual intent to harm.

This becomes particularly clear in the recent abortion debate, where a pro-lifer faction is actually saying that we want dangerous abortions because dangerous abortions will discourage demand. (I paraphrase substantially.) Those people may believe that they are "doing the right thing" but they are consciously, strategically advocating a harmful policy.

It's time, isn't it?

Hitler.

Seriously, though, impeachment is a vastly complicated process; if you want to get through it successfully you have to do things deliberately, and much of the action will inevitably happen in secret, in closed hearings, or in staffer's offices as they try to gather evidence and pry loose the more junior chunks of the facade. It's an extremely large scale criminal investigation against and incredibly powerful defendant. This is not an overnight thing, or even a siz month thing.

That said, we're probably fucked. The idea that people do not understand the "creeping" part of creeping authoritarianism, at least insofar as it relates to personal comfort, is a creeping bummer to a kid from a mostly Jewish hometown.

32
31: But I've seen polls that indicate that it's not a political loser. So what motivates them to ignore such polls?
Ultimately, it's probably something that happened during potty training.

Posted by: Adam Kotsko

32: Another motivation to ignore the polls might be the belief that it's more complicated than the polls make it seem -- the belief that a yes-or-no question phrased something like "Should the president be impeached?" is bad for capturing the complexity of peoples' viewpoints today and absolutely horrible for capturing what those viewpoints will likely be a few years or decades from now.

This is something that always bugs me about the frequent invocation of polls favoring withdrawal from Iraq or impeachment of Bush or what-have-you. Just because a majority of people say they want X, today, in the context of talking to a pollster who approaches them out of the blue, doesn't mean they would feel well-disposed towards Politician Y of party Z just because he or she has done X, by method A, with consequences B, C and D. And it says even less about what they would think five years later, after seeing consequences E and F and listening to windbag G.

Two related examples: the week Nixon was pardoned, public support was about 80-20 against the pardon, but by the time Ford died, public support for the pardon was about 70-30 supporting it. And I get the impression that withdrawal from Vietnam was popular at the time, but that didn't keep the "stabbed in the back" myth from becoming a big part of the story.

This is not to say I agree with the Democrats who have been doing so little about Bush or ending the war, just that we shouldn't assume it's entirely for personal psychological reasons.

the problem is less "intentional cultural attacks" (which lets us have convenient villians) than systemic problems which consistently disadvantage workers and the poor.

Surely, though, "systemic problems" are manipulable; systems are created things, after all. Even if you don't want to go down the conspiracy theory route (sorry, Frowner, I realize that's not what you said), I don't think that you have to instead divorce agency from the problem altogether. Especially when, as Frowner's saying, there *are* active movements trying to address the problems, and those in power *are* actively trying not only to thwart those movements but to deny their legitimacy altogether.

Anyway, forced labor and union busting in Iraq. Why is this a surprise? We've got forced labor and union busting in Florida citrus groves, for god's sake, and it's government-backed as well.

134: The "creeping" part is why I think the argument that the D's are trying to avoid a constitutional crisis, they're just trying to avoid provoking one b/c that'll make them lose the elections, is a distinction without a difference.

Hitler.

Nah. Mussolini or Franco. Or, more likely, Venice.

I don't know from constitutional crises but I suspect that a part of the shyness re: impeachment is that there's a chicken/egg-like quandary there. If they impeach Bush they get President Cheney and whatever troll he'd offer as his VP. If they impeach Cheney, Bush will just line up vile motherfuckers down the block and past the Treasury building and start nominating them one by one to fill the position of VP. There's no way to knock one down without getting something worse in the slot they currently fill. They would have to spend every penny of political capital they have - and then some - to accomplish nothing. I think they've chosen to let Bush play Risk with the rest of the world while they try to fix pet project problems here and there and keep their fingers crossed in the meantime. A part of me hates them for it and a minority part of me respects their ability to show restraint.

137: well, right. I was saying that they may well be working on their approach to it, but that constructing such an approach takes a great deal of time and effort behind the scenes, for reasons which may or may not have anything to do with winning elections. You're dismantling an edifice.

My suspicion is that constitutional governance is a matter of history now for the US because of the problem of self-discipline. The anti-New Deal core of conservatism kept their focus for three generations, and the Nixonian stalwarts kept theirs for three decades, pushing here and pulling there to get things lined up so that when they had the opportunity to exercise really untrammeled power, they were set. By contrast, random samplings of the intelligensia, who could be developing a clear understanding of the situation and sharing an alternative vision of how we could run our society with the public at large (who are seeing through more and more media lies but tend to lack a sharps ense of just what they'd like to aim for) can't manage to shunt dreams about fishes and the like to a different comment thread, while another random sample want to parse out the hypotheticals while ignoring any sufficiently inconvenient facts. This is a microcosm of why we're fucked: too many of the people who could be doing something, including the verys imple things people like Katherine describe, can't be bothered and would prefer to prank their way on through.

Villainy got and held its critical mass. I don't see any signs that virtue is going to do the same, not in time to make a difference. I have hopes and fancies, and I'm doing my part because sometimes I assess things wrong and it'd be a shame to refrain from doing good just because I think it's hopeless. But in general I think the Spectacle ate too many brains, and that the people we'd need to help turn the tide would rather be clever than useful.

137: I think if the Democrats could be convinced that the American people really cared about things like creeping executive power, they'd be on the warpath in a heartbeat. Criticisms of the Iraq war were always muted and quiet until it was clear that things were going so badly that criticizing the war could win elections.

Bush will just line up vile motherfuckers down the block and past the Treasury building and start nominating them one by one

Beautifully put.

Bruce is probably right.

Cala: Yeah, there's clearly (to me, at least, based in large measure what I hear in markets and such) a lot of genreal public interest in saner government. But without a political faction willing to take that and act on it, it stays as scattered discontent.

I don't actually think that my class' serious case of Weimar culture is all that's wrong with the country, nor the only thing that prevents a fix. I do think it contributes in a big way, and it's close to home, that's all.

Although, Bruce, I'm not entirely sure that the lack of tightly-focused political strategizing on Unfogged is the best illustration of your thesis. Of course, it is my random dream about the fish that's laying the republic low, so who am I to say? I guess I don't think of Unfogged as my chief political work, though...

I'd be more inclined to attribute the lack of a coherent left theory in the US to a mixture of the genuine effectiveness of COINTELPRO, union-busting and McCarthyism (really--lost continuity, lost institutional memory); serious and never-resolved underlying disagreements about race and immigration (the very things that are fragmenting the European social democratic consensus); the perceived collapse of all-ideas-associated-with-Marxism; and, honestly, the fact that a lot of left theory types are pretty well shielded from the consequences of inaction. We're not on the sharp end of the current situation. You could even say that people who aren't on the sharp end of a situation have limited political usefulness--they're apt to be idler and stupider about stuff, and more attached to the status quo.

Good comments, Bruce. I have a long record of arguments or discussions about meliorism or incrementalism vs Leninism or fatalism. I am not trying to make things worse is about all I can say.

"The real question is whether we think that the crisis we're in is one we can recover from." ...Cala at #109

No we can't. There is a revolution a'brewing, and this one won't only be cultural. The 60s still had America as economic hegemon, wih two jobs in every garage an a chicken in the pot.

I see the revolution this time in the fucking objective endogenous conditions. Economic, geo-political, militarily, America is wire-dancing. It cannot be sustained, and won't be. Very very soon.

Why are Democrats chickenshits? Two words:"$200 oil."

If those words don't strike terror in your heart, you are not living in America. It will happen in the next decade, if not way sooner, and when it does America will go over a cliff. Guaren-fucking-teed.

I don't know what it will look like, or what will come out the other side. It will be as fucking extreme as Europe in the 20s & 30s. It will be out-of-control. Returning to the glory days of liberalism will not be an option.

I am scared for America. I am even more scared for the rest of the world, since we have most of the weapons and a proven willingness to use them.

Who is going to take to the streets? Who is going to take the radical measures necessary to oppose Bush and his backers?

Neither McManus nor I is an optimist. We have a diagnosis but not a prescription. I think that people are deluded in thinking that not forcing the issue is more realistic and more likely to succeed than forcing it.

Cala's 115 baffles me, as do Tim's comments.

I think if the Democrats could be convinced that the American people really cared about things like creeping executive power, they'd be on the warpath in a heartbeat.

Sometimes politics requires taking chances, changing people's minds, and leadership, and Democrats don't seem to be capable of it. It's a characteristic weakness of liberal democracy.

Nah. Mussolini or Franco. Or, more likely, Venice.

Or Mexico. Or Turkey. Or, worst case, Argentina under the generals.

Your toothbrush, handle & bristles = petroleum products. Make em out of wood, cut and carved and transported 2000 miles from Oregon? Oops, that is a lot of energy.
.
And the plastic bristles? Horsehair or pig bristles? So, what a 50 dollar toothbrush? Or going back to baking soda and your finger?

And how is that transition gonna feel over a period of 5-20 years? When the Bush and Cheney kids get electric toothbrushes and orthodontists that our kids, even at a 6-figure income, can't afford? And what can we do about anyway?

Not much. Won't come back, the standard of living will decline for the rest of the century. Unless we cut the world population down to around two billion.

Agree with 78 except the part about gorillas....

As to the "what do I do about it?" question, realize that having ordinary conversations about these issues and writing blog posts about them is itself a form of doing something. It's not doing much, but neither is attending a protest or making a phone call to your Senators or writing a letter to the editor or donating to a human rights group or an afternoon knocking on doors for a presidential candidate--all things we tend to recognize as 'doing something'. By itself it's unlikely to have much effect but doing a little is better than nothing & is a necessary prerequisite to doing a lot.

151: Mixed feelings about this. I think it's too easy to believe that chatting about the apocalypse with imaginary friends carries substantial political weight, when actually I think it often takes up time and energy that could go somewhere else.

But I think there's a lack of focus, and that's the problem. I look at the political stuff I do, and most of it's rather crap. It just goes round and round--I volunteer at a bookstore that sells books to inform the same set of left-liberals about things, who then "get involved" with activism by volunteering at the bookstore or writing a zine that we sell at the bookstore, or making some buttons or something. I go to some protests. I was in a group that was doing some really exciting Mexico solidarity work and it fizzled, mostly because people didn't want to do the boring stuff that would have sustained the group.

And 'round here, three out of the maybe eight explicitly left spaces in town are on the brink of folding; the ones that remain are, with one exception, either so cultural as to be removed from organizing or rather weird and dead-end already.

(I hit "post" prematurely.) There's no idea that ties things together--we don't have any common explanatory structures. And we're so divided by race that it's ridiculous; in fact, my statements about activism don't even make any sense unless you're assuming (as I sometimes do and should not) that the only "activists" are white.

I can't wait till we put all you people in reeducation camps.

61

"... There will be some point around 2050 or 2080 when all the clear, careful thinkers will agree that the US experiences a constitutional crisis around 2000-2010, and if you are still alive then you will congratulate yourself for not having jumped to any conclusions."

Was there a constitutional crisis between 1916-1920? The constitution is more resilent than some of you believe.

152, 153: Yeah, I'm entirely not an activist, and a large part of the reason is that every time I've tried to 'get involved', the organization I've been looking at has been self-evidently ineffective. (This is no sort of excuse -- that just means I should have looked harder.) But it is terribly hard to figure out how to start doing a lot.

Seriously, didn't we have just this exact same discussion a week and a half ago?

Here's why peak oil doesn't frighten me too much (esp. for the near term): There is LOTS of petroleum left. Also, there are lots of substitute energy sources that can be brought online well within the Peak Oil/energy descent timetable that most people who are concerned about those things advance. For energy used directly transportation, there is alcohol, LP gas, electricity and bio-diesel. For stationary energy uses we've got natural gas, coal, various bio-fuels, photovoltaics, other solar schemes, wind, geothermal, tidal power, hydro-electric, wave power, and of course, nuclear.

Unfortunately, given the limited supply of petroleum, there probably are going to be some economic disruptions, which will further degrade the lives of the already immiserated. But boar's bristle toothbrushes? Why would you go to all that trouble when the raw materials for convential plastic toothbrushes are stored by the thousands of tons in landfills conveniently located near most major urban areas?

The thing to be scared of is not that capital and the state have dug themselves in too deep. Rather, it is that the people in power have planned for each of these contingencies with their usual aplomb, and will continue to grow ever more powerful and ever more secure in their power as we move through rest of this century.

154: Does grad school count?

re: 156

Yeah, I wouldn't remotely describe myself as an activist, either. However, I do give money (tiny amounts in the form of membership fees) to a couple of single-issue pressure groups, write letters to MPs and politicians, attend the occasional demo and have done a tiny bit of leafleting. Fairly pathetic, really. But standard stuff.

I have not said anything about this crisis being unique. From time to time I point out that under Nixon we had an unelected President and an unelected vice president. On the other hand, each successive Republican affront seems to get less resistance, and at this moment the media are effectively behind Bush, Cheney and Libby.

The Constitution is resilient if people fight for it, but we're wondering whether anyone will.

I don't think that blog talk is doing something, in any meaningful sense. I do think that becoming informed is a prerequisite to useful action - people can sometimes do good things when they're ignorant and stupid (in the sense of not being able to think either logically or with honest emotions that don't get hijacked by the nearest thugs), but it's better to have clues. It's like eating in some moderately healthy way before you go out on business - it's not the job, but it helps you do the job.

161: Eh? Nixon was elected, wasn't he? Don't you mean under Ford?

161: Eh? Nixon was elected, wasn't he? Don't you mean under Ford?

I think you guys are treating a difference in degree as a difference in kind, & it's very very frustrating. If work is meaningless unless you can draw a clear causal link--or at least make a plausible argument that such a causal link might exist--between a specific action of yours & a positive outcome; then I can think of almost nothing I've done politically in my entire life that counts as 'meaningful.'

I don't mean to minimize the value of having people who are paid to or are independently wealthy enough to work for liberal causes or candidates full time. There's really no substitute for it & I hate how difficult it is to find a job doing that, & how few liberal resources go to paying talented people's salaries as opposed to buying air time for lame commercials that a candidate's consultant gets a ridiculous cut of.

But the idea that there's some dichotomy between activists who engage in 'meaningful' action and the rest of us schlubs who do nothing real is paralyzing. And it's not actually how the world works. There's actually a spectrum of involvement between complete indifference or opposition to a cause, & devoting your life to it. Moving along that spectrum will almost always entail:

A) learning what the hell you're talking about.
B) some attempt to influence public opinion.

A is completely intertwined with B....When I'm writing a legal brief to persuade a judge of some argument, is researching the case law before I start writing something that's "not the job, but helps you do the job", similar to eating a nutritious breakfast? I don't think so; I think it's half the job.

When a bunch of NGOs publish a list of CIA prisoners who've never been accounted for--was the time they spent trying to figure out those prisoners' names something that's "not the job, but helps you do the job?" Of course not.

Some of the names on that list they got by traveling to dangerous places & interviewing former prisoners & various other things we imagine heroic human rights activists doing. Other names, they got by running Google & Nexis searches.

What's the difference between an NGO doing that, and a blogger reading their press release or report & writing a post or comment linking to it? It's just a difference in degree.

Katherine, for what it's worth (probably not much :) ), my personal hierarchy runs about like this:

First tier - learning enough to understand what a good outcome might look like and some of what's likely to be involved in heading toward it, both in general principles and the specific situation at hand.

Second tier - supporting the people doing things that help improve a troubled situation.

Third tier - doing stuff myself.

As for what constitutes good action, I tend to apply Jesus' parable of the talents and see what folks are doing with whatever it is they've got. Providing information is doing something. Keeping a heterogeneous group moving togeher is doing something. Lots of things are doing something, big or small, and add up. It's just that I tend to think of haphazard kibbitzing as more like prep than action.

Ah, no one will ever read this. But I, er, disagree. Sort of. It's not that I think haphazard kibbitzing is useless, mind, but that there's no neccessary connection between it and anything else, and that there's a crucial, almost fatal breakdown right now between knowledge/discussion and action.

In this country, right now, a vast amount is known about the war, the Bush administration, rising inequality, etc. And yet I feel like nothing's happening. People know and they don't act. There aren't effective channels. Seriously, I call my senators as much as the next person, but although it occasionally defeats a specific, weak piece of bad legislation, do you really feel that we'd get out of Iraq even if every US citizen called? Would we get national healthcare?

Hell, even demonstrations do little or nothing--our lords and masters have figured out that they can ignore us because we're going to assemble and go home. (Although I don't think the solution is neccessarily to riot, unless you think you can win the riot). The regular courses of political action don't work very well right now--they may work to address certain small, local problems, but they do not address the big issues, even when those big issues present themselves in the small form of little pieces of legislation.

It is fatally, fatally easy to spend all your time spreading information to the kind of people who have lots of information already, building solidarity with the people with whom you already have solidarity, etc. Unfogged is a lot of fun, and I do learn stuff here, but Unfogged is not my political work. I did my political work long before Unfogged was a gleam in Ogged's roguish eye.

In this--although not in the "what Unfogged needs is party discipline" sense--I agree with Bruce Baugh, above. There needs to be a coherent set of ideas about how to engage in politics, ideas which bridge the gap between talking about stuff and making changes stick. It's not a question of the real world versus the imaginary world of the tubes; it's a question of where actual changes can be made.

I don't think that idle chat on Unfogged is useless on the face of it, but I do think that people should think carefully and honestly about how what they do online creates political change.

(Please don't read this as "I'm Frowner and I do actual activism, so ha ha." I'm on holiday from the bookstore, my other project folded, and I'm in a state of great disgust and confusion about how to spend time.)

I call my senators as much as the next person

s/b "I call my senators way more than the next person". Political involvement is not a common thing in the modern US.

do you really feel that we'd get out of Iraq even if every US citizen called?

Seriously? Yes. Even if "every US citizen who wanted us to get out of Iraq" called. But we would have to live in a pretty different US for that to happen.

Difference in degree, not difference in kind. That's all I'm saying. As far as results, I have little if anything to show, and yet I worked with people who HAVE gotten results & they seem to think these efforts matter.

One of my major frustrations here is that when you do spent vast amount of times doing factual research, NO ONE WILL FUCKING READ IT OR LINK TO IT, because they think it's: 1) depressing, 2) useless, 3) too long. Well, if no one reads it or disseminates it, no, it doesn't accomplish much (which is why I've stopped posting about it...I don't think it would be useless, but it's not useful enough to justify the time & aggravation) But either public opinion matters, or it doesn't; either intensity matters, or it doesn't.

If it doesn't, a lot of "real activism" is useless as well. Your presence at a demonstration won't end the war; you won't even affect the press coverage measurably; why bother? The .8 seconds of air time for a lousy ad your donation bought won't swing the primary; why bother? Your day of working for a campaign in New Hampshire probably won't swing one single vote; why bother? Your call to your Senator won't change his vote; why bother? You can denounce the Military Commissions Act until you're blue in the face, but it will pass. You can get Obama to cosponsor a bill outlawing rendition, but you know damn well it won't pass. All the efforts of hundreds of habeas lawyers aren't going to get Guantanamo shut down before 2009; have not led to a single federal habeas hearing or a single prisoner's court-ordered release; and in precious few cases can you say that a lawyer's efforts are what got his client out. Any factual discoveries you or a journalist or a human rights group makes will be read only by "the kind of people who have a lot of information already" about these policies, most of whom already oppose them. The court doors almost always seem to slam shut in the end. Congress has been useless. You could argue that none of it has worked at all.

But you'd be wrong. The effects are too slow, too little, too late, but they are also real & if more people were involved they'd be more dramatic. Most of the effects have NOT taken the form of, oh, a court ordering a prisoners release or awarding damages, or Congress passing a beneficial law. But the Executive Branch does behave as if the courts & public opinion are constraints. Not very good constraints, obviously, but not nonexistent.

Maybe we're talking past each other. I do agree that comments here are not very useful, and when an effect gets small enough it's understandable to round it down to zero. But that's because we're not especially trying to be useful here, not because there's some intrinsic inability to do useful political work on a blog, or because learning about & discussing an issue isn't 'real' activism. And even idle political discussion & reading & the most limited involvement is like oxygen in a democracy.

I don't know what to say, and this conversation is getting old. I once had a similar attitude--I found it paralyzing, and I just don't think it's accurate.