As regular readers know, I used to be a libertarian. I was even involved with the Libertarian Party and went to various events held by it and by other libertarian groups. So I understand the movement as a whole and to a lesser extent, I understand conservatism. One thing that all libertarians understand is that theirs is not a popular ideology. And it never will be. That’s one of the great sadnesses of being a libertarian: as much as you think the philosophy is perfect, you know that most people will never agree with you.

Make no mistake, libertarianism as well as conservatism are elitist beliefs. Almost all fellow travelers agree that it is best if fewer people vote. The idea that voting should be as easy as possible goes against their interests, but I doubt that most of them think this is the reason they are not fans of democracy. Instead, arguments go something like this: people who aren’t willing to go out of their way to vote don’t pay much attention to politics anyway and thus shouldn’t vote. For these people, voting is privilege, not a right, much less an obligation of citizenship.

As a result of my experiences, I’m not at all surprised that conservatives have taken to voter suppression with such abandon. They think it is not only okay, it is right. They think that democracy is a bad thing that must be stopped as much as possible. Now, there is a lot of racism and sexism buried deep in this. But it is not what voter suppress is all about at its core. I recommend reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. In that book, he shows that what really defines conservatism from Edmund Burke onward is a resistance to the expanded inclusion of people who count as eligible voters. And modern conservatives have never really gotten over the idea that the votes of the poor ought to count as much as the votes of the rich.

This is well on display in the Supreme Court. In an excellent article, The Right to Vote, Norm Ornstein sums up the recent decision gutting the Civil Rights Act:

All it really means is that Roberts and the other conservatives on the court are not keen on democracy and so they found a justification for allowing Republican controlled states to go back to the bad old days when only the “right” kind of people were able to vote.

Ornstein thinks the solution is a constitutional amendment. Although I think that would be a good idea, it isn’t going to happen. And the reason it isn’t going to happen is that conservatives don’t believe in democracy. A lot of people think they can be shamed out of this belief, but I think if we give them enough pressure, they will start proclaiming their distaste for the foundational basis of our republic. As it is, much of the conservative movement now wants to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment that made Senators elected directly by the people. This is not a group that will have a problem publicly dismissing democracy as “mob rule.”

I wish I had a solution to these problems. More and more, our nation seems to be trapped by our outdated Constitution. As it is, far too much power is given to sparsely populated states. These conservative “taker” states will never allow the nation to reform itself itself. Apart from the big states cutting themselves up, I don’t see a normal way forward. I think about this every time I hear some conservative politician claim that the US Constitution is the greatest document ever written. One could only think that if he had never read another country’s constitution. Many improvements have been made. But the very basis of ours keeps from enactment any of the great innovations over the last 226 years. This is how great countries die: when a selfish minority stops the majority from leading it into the future. Of course, I say that because I’m a liberal. I believe in democracy.

Martin Longman over at Political Animal has been writing about how the business community might try to take back the Republican Party. He also mentions how they are interested in a third party. You know, all that Third Way bullshit. Now, I think from a practical standpoint, there is absolutely nothing to it. The business community may have backed away from people like Ken Cuccinelli, but that’s not because they are freaks and extremists; it’s because they see that they are unlikely to win.

But on the broader point, I agree: a lot of business leaders are unhappy with the Republican Party. The problem is that they always have been. In general, they don’t like the social conservatism on the right. They prefer the supposed libertarian leanings of the Republicans. So they want to pay less taxes and they want zero regulations. But they also want the crony capitalist side of the party. They want the government to grease the wheels of the market with safe transportation systems, a solid currency, and those lucrative government contracts. So they don’t want the Defense of Marriage Act and anti-abortion laws? Big deal! They’ve been grumbling about this kind of stuff for decades but it’s always been a small price to pay for all the goodies the Republican Party gives them.

I understand where Longman is coming from. Having a totally crazy, extremist Republican Party is bad for the Democratic Party. It is bad for America! And I would very much like to see the Republicans become more reasonable. But it just isn’t the case that this is going to happen via the “adults” in the party. I get so tired of talking about this, but would someone please show me how it is that the supposedly reasonable Republicans are anything but extremists? The business leaders may want immigration reform, but that’s about the only reasonable position they hold. And even there, they want reform that is almost entirely for the benefit of the business community. A decade and a half path to citizenship doesn’t show any concern for the actual people. And if the business leaders could get reform without any path to citizenship, they would.

What we are seeing is the same old attitude of the business elites: they want it all. That’s what Third Way is all about: a conservative movement without the rough edges. One where business interests don’t have to compromise on anything. Well, that’s just not the way that politics works. And the hybrid libertarian-crony-capitalist ideology that corporate America wants is really, really unpopular. So they are going to have to compromise with someone and there is no indication that they think the government shutdowns and Debt Ceiling threats are not worth everything that the Republicans will give them.

One of my main historical observations is that the New Democratic movement has destroyed both liberalism and conservatism in this country. And it did it by moving the Democratic Party far to the right on economic issues. The Democratic Party is now more pro-business than the Republican Party. Yet the business community hasn’t noticed this. There would be compromises if they moved over to the Democratic Party, but no more than there currently are with the Republican Party. But they continue to hang around in the Republican Party, hoping that it will move to the left on the issues they want them to. But if the party did that, it would have no constituency. If the Republicans moderated on abortion rights, they would lose half of their voters.

The United States has long been screwed up in the way we see business. Hollywood stars are not our aristocracy. Business leaders are. All you have to do is watch an episode of Shark Tank to see how we’ve been trained to see these billionaires as our betters—even as the people seeking money are clearly their betters. And this obsession with wealth and power hurts the wealthy and powerful most of all. It turns them into immature idiots who think the world is out of kilter if they don’t get everything they want. Well, in terms of the Republican Party, they will never get all they want. Their power is dependent on hating gays, women, and immigrants. And that’s a deal they’ve lived with this long, and they will continue to live it. Or they will as long as the Republicans continue to win elections.

Regular readers of this blog are well aware that I am a Francophile and an Anglophile. What I am not is a Germanophile, or as I would put it (because I’m not a nice man) a Krautophile. The amazing thing is that it is not because of the Nazis. But I’ll come back to that issue. The problem for me is that culturally the Germans have an attitude—an attitude that I am familiar with because of individuals I have known.

No one walks around thinking that they are morally superior because they are really good at math. They might be obnoxious in many other ways but not in that way. But when it comes to things like diet or credit rating, many people really do think in terms of morality. I know from my own experience of being thin throughout my life that there was nothing I was doing that make me thin. Similarly, most people with stellar credit ratings have never been tested: they have had easy, affluent lives and have never been forced to make a decision about which of too many bills to pay.

But it is worse than this. Many people develop a kind of addiction to feeling morally superior. These are the kinds of people who will pass up a drink in order to feel superior to those who don’t. I don’t especially have a problem with these people. Everyone has mechanisms for feeling special. But the mere fact that they are acting as they do to feed this feeling of moral superiority means that they are not, in fact, morally superior. It’s like people who think religion is a game where they behave in order to get into heaven. What kind of lame-ass God wouldn’t see through that?

This is the impression that I’ve always had of Germany. As a culture, it seems to act as though it is better than everyone else. And this has really been on display since 2008. To a large extent, Germany is the European Union. It is over 20% of the whole economy. And it hasn’t been hit that hard by the recession. Yet it’s attitude toward the other countries in the EU (especially in the south) has been like a cross parent toward a naughty child. If only the other countries would behave like them, everything would be fine. Of course, that isn’t true. And as Paul Krugman likes to say, “Economics is not a morality play.”

Germany stands as the naturally skinny broccoli-loving girl looking down her nose at the pudgy girl with her unfortunate genetics and attraction to fatty foods. But as usual, it’s even worse than that. Because in the case of Germany, its smug attitude toward the other EU countries is harming those countries. It would be like the skinny girl, instead of eating a slice of pizza force fed it to the pudgy girl.

Paul Krugman posted a number of articles the last couple of days on this subject. It all started when the US Treasury Department released a report that showed that Germany’s trade surplus was hurting the global economy. I haven’t read the report, but Krugman produced a graph that showed that since the financial crisis, Spain’s account balance has gone from -10% to about +1%. That’s what we would expect. But during the same time, Germany’s account balance has been constant at about 6%. This is very simple: the way to recovery is not for everyone to have a positive account balance because that can’t happen. Germany is a rich country; they should be importing more. But instead, they are pointing a finger at the poorer countries and complaining they aren’t more like Germany.

In another article, Krugman notes that the European Commission (EC) estimates of structural unemployment in Spain are way wrong and this is forcing the country to do more austerity than even it thinks is reasonable. So the EC was going to change the way it was calculating this rate, but Germany stepped in and blocked it! It’s almost unbelievable.

That brings us back to the Nazis. I think that the German people were largely victims of the Nazis. But you can see how a culture that thinks itself morally superior to everyone else might breed a political movement like the Nazis. Regardless, that attitude is now not only hurting Europe, it is hurting the whole world. Germany has nothing to feel superior about.

Afterword

For the record, the United States is very much like Germany in this regard. I could definitely see fascism taking root here the same way it did in Germany in the 1930s. And we as a people have a tendency to think of ourselves as better than other people. We aren’t the biggest economy for historical reasons. We are the biggest economy because we are “exceptional”! And look, I’m very fond of many of our eccentricities. But every country has its own style and things that make it special. Being simply better than other countries in an absolute sense is not one of them. I am not a fan of hubris and this is something that both Germans and Americans have in abundance.

I read a great article by Colin Woodard over at Ten Miles Square, Violence Is a Regional Issue. It is based on the work in his book, American Nations. In it, he divides the United States up into eleven regional cultures. I haven’t gotten the book yet, but he provides historical and sociological reasons why the the regions are different.

For example, he notes that “Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans” settled the northeast and the midwest. Their sense of working together for the common good resulted in a more liberal culture. Compare this to the deep south that was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values… from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.” Hence the conservative attitude of that region, “Every man for himself and if you become a slave, well, you deserve it!”

What most struck me was this map:

In my lifetime, I’ve only ever lived in three places for any amount of time: San Francisco, Portland, and Settle. So The Left Coast really stuck out to me because Woodard is absolutely correct: we are a distinct culture. And although we share a lot with our El Norte neighbors below, we are distinct from them. And we are utterly distinct from The Far West. So I’m inclined to take his theory very seriously and I look forward to reading the book.

Most of the article is simply about another piece Woodard wrote, Up in Arms. You should check out the whole article because he describes each of the regions. But he highlights how conservative areas are also more violent: both in terms of legal and illegal violence:

He doesn’t make any value judgments about this. But it is interesting that the regions of the United States that are most inclined to consider themselves the “real America” are the places that are the most violent and intolerant. Think about that they next time you hear Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz demagogue about Red State America.

As I discussed this last week, the Benghazi “scandal” is back in the news because of a really terrible bit of reporting by 60 Minutes. It was based primarily on claims made by Dylan Davies (referred to in the report as Morgan Jones as though he really has to worry about retaliation). I’ve been amused by a number of reporters being surprised that he managed to luck out and get the 60 Minutes interview the same week his book on the same subject came out, The Embassy House. Do they really not know how books are publicized? Just to be clear: 60 Minutes ran its story because the book was coming out this week.

But there is more than yet another writer using 60 Minutes to sell his book. Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post got hold of Davies’ report to his employers. This was submitted three days after the Benghazi attack and it paints quite a different picture. In it, there is no scaling of 12-foot walls and no knocking out of terrorists. There is mostly just, I was unable to get to the compound because the roadblocks. Davies is supposedly sick, but his ghostwriter was around to speculate that the real lie must have been the report he filed. He said that Davies probably just said that because his supervisors told him not to go to the compound.

There is another possibility, of course. Davies could be lying now. I don’t say this just because he’s pushing a book that he undoubtedly got paid quite a lot for. Everyone who can seems to be selling out; that alone doesn’t make them liars. What I find more suspicious is how Davies paints himself as a fucking Rambo in this book. His superiors said to stay away. But there were people in trouble. So without a thought to his own safety, he rushed to the compound, scaled the wall, defeated a terrorist, and was an eyewitness to history! Give me a very big break.

Regardless what you think of this guy, you have to question his veracity. After all, lying on a two and a half page official report is not the kind of everyday lying that people do. And there are details in the report. For example, in the book he say that he made an unauthorized trip to the hospital to view Christopher Stevens’ body. Ah, another clandestine operation for our Rambo Does Benghazi narrative! But according to DeYoung, in the report he provided a much less exciting version, “He learned of Stevens’s death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.”

None of this especially matters. Benghazi is still a non-story. And the revelations that Davies is probably a guy trying to be in fantasy that soldier he never was in fact doesn’t matter to the Republicans in Congress:

So it doesn’t matter if Davies is a liar, his story agrees with the narrative we are pushing, so it’s all good. But the Republicans didn’t need any of this. They just make it up as it goes along. But how far the mighty 60 Minutes (which is standing by the story) has fallen. It is a totally irrelevant “news” program unless you want a heads up on the next week’s big books and television series.

What happened in Texas this last week is really bad. And I am not especially talking about what it means for reproductive rights. As you have probably heard, on Monday, the US District Court in Austin stopped part of Texas’ new anti-abortion law from going into effect because it was likely unconstitutional. Then today, the US Court of Appeals overturned that finding, claiming that the law likely was constitutional. What this reversal says to the people is that the judicial system is not objective in the least and will come to wildly different partisan decisions one on top of the other.

I’m not claiming that the original court decision was politicized. As it was, abortion rights activists were unhappy with it. It was a pretty typical, middle of the road, decision based upon the law. It only struct down a small part of the law as it was. But what it looks like to outsiders is that there are pro-choice judges on the district court and anti-choice judges on the appeals court. The second half of that is true. And the terrible thing is that the conservatives win when the people decide the whole system is rigged. But then, we’re pretty used to this. The conservative have a long history of making sure the government doesn’t work and then turning around and screaming, “We need to get rid of the government! It doesn’t work!”

Of course, the last thing that conservatives want to do is get rid of the government. There is no doubt that the conservatives want as big a government as the liberals. More and more, I think the conservatives want a much bigger government. They want an ever increasing military, despite the fact that we spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. They want everyone spied on all the time. They want lots of big government contracts for rich industrialists. They want welfare to be a bunch of big checks cut to fundamentalist churches. And most of all: they want a government worker in every operatory to make sure no woman ever gets an abortion!

Let me speculate a bit toward the future. Let’s suppose that the Christ fanatics got their way and Roe v. Wade was overturned. What would they do? The first thing would be to get the Supreme Court to find that all abortion is illegal. The anti-abortion crowd will not be happy that innocent “children” are being “murdered” in California and New York. Once they got that, they would move on to birth control. We are already seeing that. A large faction of the anti-abortion movement is against birth control and it doesn’t take much to figure out what they are really about. After that: no abortions anywhere and no birth control, there would still be more to do. They would want to make sure that all pregnant women took care of themselves. Can you say, “Death penalty for pregnant drug addicts”? I thought you could! Bottom line: much of the anti-choice movement is fascist.

The appeals court decision found that the law did not cause an “undue burden” on women’s right to get an abortion. But with the closed clinics, women in west Texas will have to travel hundreds of miles to get care. If that is not an undue burden, when why not just make abortion illegal throughout the United States. The women would still be able to go to Catholic Italy and get a legal abortion. I don’t see the big distinction between 600 miles and 6,000 miles.

Regardless, the whole thing is a mess. I’m sure that the anti-choice ideologues are certain of the justness of their cause. But it really bothers me. To me, it is all about compassion. In the name of the unborn—proto-humuns without lungs, brains, or (if you ask Thomas Aquinas) souls—these people seem to be willing to inflict the worst cruelty on actual breathing, thinking, and (if you listen to them) soulful people. What’s more, the Biblical justification for banning abortions is not at all clear. But the Bible is very clear on hubris—on what God thinks of people who put themselves in his position. In the end, their argument against abortion is very simple: their pastor told them it was wrong. There’s no God there—no Jesus there. Just their hubristic certainty that they and those around them know what God wants.

Unfortunately, we have some of the same kinds of thinking coming from our highest courts. Maybe the fundamentalist Christians are right: Satan has come to America, but he dressed to look like Jesus.