Friend of the Devil

Friends or acquaintances frequently ask me if I listen to both sides when it comes to politics; usually the other side is defined as Ann Coulter, Rush, whatever. The binary construct is an interesting feature of the American political landscape. The bipolar political world that puts Ann Coulter on one pole and Michael Moore on the other blinds us from seeing the other constellations in the universe.

The truth is I try not to waste my time with partisan dreck from either “side.” I am interested in information over position. Politics is more interesting as a study of how power systems and the satellites orbiting them function in our society. People who identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans sacrifice their intellectual integrity for tribal unity and tie credibility to tribal identity rather than ideas and evidence. The guys with Ds after their names are assumed to be right or wrong and vice versa for the guys from tribe R.

I suppose I am a political nihilist; I believe the system is rotten to the core, requiring major reform or revolution. (When I say revolution, I don't mean guys with guns in the streets.) I feel hesitant using a loaded term like nihilism because it implies destruction without purpose. That isn’t quite accurate; maybe I lack the philosophical sophistication to use the correct slogan. Let me elaborate a bit to better explain.

Both parties are absolutely beholden to narrow elite interests and corrupted by lobbyists and militarism. They represent a rather narrow range of disagreement within the business sector; their differences primarily tactical rather than strategic. I don’t mean to underplay the importance of those tactical differences. They are literally life and death differences to a lot of people around the world. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that a Democratic president named Gore probably wouldn’t have invaded Iraq after 9/11, even though he would have accepted that the U.S. had the right to do so. He would have been more likely to conclude that the tactical costs would be unacceptable. It’s a minor difference, but would have made a huge difference to millions of people.

To really understand politics you have to separate personalities from issues and interests. Understand and pay attention to what is done, give very little attention to what they say they are doing. Follow the money. It takes a little bit more work and effort, but you won't embarass yourself by saying things like we invaded Iraq to spread democracy.

The same cognitive framework is useful for understanding other institutions; the media for example. I don’t think there is much to be learned by studying where on the spectrum of acceptable conservative or liberal positions a specific media organ’s coverage falls; the evidence cuts both ways and is largely dependant on perspective. Realize that the real function of the media is to set the boundaries of acceptable debate. To get at that, you must study the media as an institution. They are corporations, often with alliances and interlocking ownership of other corporations; and their business is to sell advertising to other corporations. A full understanding of these relationships will tell you a lot more about them than the tone of their coverage. One would expect that they would reflect the world views of business elites that own them and their customers, who are advertisers - not readers or viewers. Their liberal and conservative bias reflects the differences of opinion within those elite sectors. Big business dominates our entire system of politics largely because they own it. I personally don’t accept the legitimacy of that set-up.

I said above that tactical differences between the two parties make significant differences. It is a familiar enough argument that in politics one should subordinate their grievances and make a practical choice on the lesser of two evils. This admittedly rational choice bugs me because you are effectively conceding the war to win the battle. If you look around the online political community you find that the biggest blogs are the ones that are very comfortable making this compromise; DailyKos, Atrios, etc. But at some point party unity becomes an end unto itself.

The catch is that if you support a cadre of bullshit artists for long enough, you eventually become one. Let’s be honest; Democrats are mostly opportunistic politicians with slightly different ideas on how to maximize their power than Republicans. There are few moral differences between the two. These people will always make political calculations. If they think they will gain political traction among their constituencies even though it means they have to support a policy that will kill or injure hundreds of thousands of people then they will. They will reverse course if their consultants tell them the calculation yields a different outcome. That is partly why politicians historically lag behind popular movements; politicians are not leaders. With very few exceptions, they are all moral cowards and hypocrites. This trickles down to voters. Inexplicably, perhaps to resolve cognitive dissonance, what starts as a rational choice of the lesser of two evils ends up as a complete rationalization and rehabilitation of one side or the other. Republicans are exceptionally thuggish; Democrats are virtuous saviors of the Republic; Democrats are in league with terrorists; Republicans are statesman and patriots; and so on.

You can see this manifest itself all around the liberal blog community. Liberal bloggers are in an uproar over the torture legislation winding its way through Congress, as if they don’t know that the U.S. has an extensive history of training torturers and murderers. A few years ago several CIA training manuals with chilling passages advising assassination and torture were declassified through FOIA requests. These training manuals were used on US military bases. Earlier in the 20th century, the US government intentionally infected blacks with syphilis and denied them treatment for over 40 years to study its effects. The infamous Tuskegee experiments while probably not considered torture are nonetheless at about the same level of moral depravity. And don’t forget the well documented history of CIA experiments on unsuspecting subjects using mind altering substances. In Vietnam, the U.S. was guilty of perpetrating atrocities on prisoners. U.S. forces butchered and tortured Philippino peasants at the turn of the 19th century. And you can just keep going back; slavery was institutionalized torture, the extermination of native populations, etc. (Alfred McCoy has written extensively on the history of U.S. torture in the 20th century.) Liberal bloggers pretend the torture legislation is a paradigm altering bill when it is at most an expansion of the frontier.

Or take the ongoing lionization of Clinton. Liberal bloggers are recasting Clinton as a progressive champion and statesman. Let’s not forget Clinton’s record.

He did nothing to dismantle the Cold War military apparatus that continuously sucks resources out of social programs for weapons systems that have no practical use or enemy. The expected peace dividend never materialized after the long standing rationale for indefinitely maintaining a war time economy crumbled with the Soviet empire. Today we spend more than the rest of the world combined on military expenditures. It may have been beyond Clinton’s power to dismantle the military industrial complex, but the point is that he did and said nothing to even raise awareness of it. Instead, Clinton spent his political capital on economic policies favoring the wealthy.

Clinton sold out the middle class on NAFTA. The surging dot com bubble fueled the economy and saved his legacy by temporarily obfuscating the effects of the NAFTA-hastened death of the manufacturing sector. The modern American economy produces very little tangible goods. Corporations have moved manufacturing plants south of the border and overseas where wages are lower and there are no regulations. True, the migration did not begin because of NAFTA, but NAFTA hastened the process by removing the few remaining barriers. NAFTA also gave multinational corporations the ability to overturn domestic environmental and labor laws on the grounds that they were obstructing free trade; effectively outsourcing law making to corporations. The technology bubble burst shortly after Clinton left office and after a few years of marginal gains in the late 1990s, the multi-decade long trend of the middle class losing economic ground as their wages slowly decline returned.

Clinton cheered the civil liberties assault policy packaged as the War on Drugs, which numerous studies have proven is wrong headed, misguided, counterproductive, and ineffective. Currently 60% of federal prisoners and 30% of state prisoners are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses. Roughly 30% of federal prisoners have no history of any other crime. (William Chambliss dissects the effects of the War on Drugs in greater detail in Power, Politics, and Crime.) Clinton’s Plan Columbia continues to be one of the biggest outlays of American foreign aid in the budget. The U.S. pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of Colombian paramilitary narco-traffickers to kill guerrilla narco-traffickers. The plan has continued despite very little observable impact on drug trafficking and a well documented record of drug trafficking and violence from all parties.

Others point to Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as the definitive example of his knack for milquetoast political compromise.

Bring these things up or the more recent widespread Democrat complicity in the Iraq war to the Democrats’ online cheerleading squads and you will quickly be admonished for effectively giving support to the other side. In the ongoing American political struggle, we would all do well to remember that the devil isn’t the one that changes when you shake his hand.