Does the Cato Institute Need Saving?

The Cato Institute has a reputation among the left of being not much more more than a conservative think tank (sometimes recognized as libertarian) that serves the whims of the Koch brothers, which is why the recent plea by executive vice president David Boaz to "Save the Cato Institute" from their very benefactors should be so interesting to progressives... but has been largely ignored or, worse, dismissed as something that the left shouldn't care about at all (see many of the comments at a Daily Kos post here). I think this attitude is completely wrongheaded, and here's why.

Largely as a side effect of my mostly unread ramblings here, I have begun to embrace my Marxist and socialist leanings and now read more progressive websites and blogs. And what I have noticed is that while progressives are better than conservatives at sticking to the facts, they are far from perfect. They cherry pick. They distort. They commit all the cardinal sins of conservatives of twisting the facts to fit their views. The main difference is that they aren't as bad as the conservatives.

This is why we need the libertarian Cato Institute. Yes, it cherry picks and distorts the facts when it wants to, but it also calls out both progressives and run-of-the-mill conservatives when they do the same. The left needs fact checkers like those at Cato to keep them honest! Conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute aren't good enough when both they and the progressives agree on something or whose views are not that far apart.

Take the war on drugs, for example. The GOP is generally speaking all for it. The Democratic Party has a wide range of voices on the subject, but when push comes to shove they follow the GOP line (just look at the way Obama has changed his tune so dramatically once in office). And few Democrats are as radically in favor of drug legalization as the Cato Institute, which holds that position for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, from a progressive point of view, is the harm drug prohibition does to the poor and minorities.

To wit: the left needs a voice like Cato that is unusually independent and provides unusually honest policy analysis.

Religion as Power Worship

I spent a large part of my adult life as a Christian, where religious activity largely consists of "worship," which I have come to believe is one of the most pernicious activities ever engaged in by humankind. In this first post I will discuss the political implications of worship.

In Christianity, prayer and worship consist of debasing oneself before a superior being, of praising Him for his power and superiority, of thanking Him for His gifts and proclaiming oneself unworthy of them, and so on. This power worship is a feature of many religions, but is particularly pronounced in the Abrahamic traditions. God here is a despot; His rules are law that must be obeyed even when not fully understood; and most importantly: what He does, what He says, what he demands of you -- all must be qualified by the adjective "good."

Power worship is something that can only be done in the context of authoritarianism. If we were truly equals of God, we could have a conversation with Him. Instead, we must praise, thank, and beg from Him as we do of a monarch, since He is the one created us, could kill us at any moment, and will send many of us to hell.

Is it any coincidence that Christians, on the whole, tend toward right wing authoritarianism?

As a Christian, I could actually feel the gears clicking in my associative cortex. While raised in a democracy, I accepted that Christian cosmology was essentially authoritarian, which makes sense given the time and place in which it developed, and I tried to find some consistent way of being a modern who believed in democracy while accepting a traditional view of Christian theology, with all its implications for the natural order (including how we organize our power structures). Let me tell you, I had to ignore a lot of cognitive dissonance to make it work for myself.

The traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox Christian who believes that monarchy is the only God-ordained and approved form of government is crazy, but at least he or she is crazy in a consistent way. On the other hand, the orthodox Catholic, for example, tries to be faithful to two contradictory traditions: that before the Second Vatican Council, which was for the most part reactionary, and that afterward, which embraced many Enlightenment values.

Many intelligent people pull this off... but like any contradiction, it cannot be lived by the majority of people for long. Enlightenment values are so superior to, and so incompatible with, traditional Christian values that the former eventually triumph, and people in technologically advanced countries (where you don't have to pray to God for rain so your family won't die) abandon Christianity in ever greater numbers.

I think this internal contradiction is created, in large part, by the power worship inherent in Christianity, and I think power worship is so inseparable from Christianity that there truly exists a cultural war of sorts between traditional religion and modern democratic values. Thus, I no longer believe that it is reasonable or even possible to be a committed traditional Christian and a full member of democratic society (at least, not without a good dollop of self-deception). The siren's call of authoritarianism is too strong. As for liberal Christianity, that always was a stepping stone at best, and more and more people are abandoning it as its cultural value diminishes.

Left vs. Right

This is one of the more perceptive remarks I've seen in Maass's The Case for Socialism:

If Barack Obama and Bill Clinton look better compared to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, it shouldn’t be forgotten that these latter-day Democrats are plainly more conservative than plenty of presidents who came before them—Republicans included. Thus, Republican president Richard Nixon launched more antidiscrimination and affirmative action programs than Bill Clinton. That’s not because Nixon was more liberal. On the contrary, he was a miserable right-winger. But Nixon was under pressure to act from the mass social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, something that neither Clinton nor Obama have faced. (p. 102-3)

Since the shape of the U.S. government encourages a two-party system, there really isn't much room for ideological diversity, and the parties will tend to converge closer and closer together under the pressure of the electorate. Thus, while to the left of the Republicans, Obama the "socialist" is actually to the right both on the economic and authoritarian-libertarian scales according to the Political Compass. The solution, perhaps, is not to join third parties that are destined to fail in the U.S., but to turn to mass movements and more radical forms of democracy.

Against Identity Politics

NOTE: I am quite uncertain about the arguments I make below, so please take my conclusions with a grain of salt. I am rather up in the air about the case for making identity politics a significant part of leftist politics. Perhaps sometimes it has some value.

I am reading The Case for Socialism, by Alan Maass. In it, the author makes the case for making identity politics part of socialism because of racism (against blacks and immigrants) and sexism. At 180 pages, this book is closer to a manifesto than a political treatise, so I would not expect a carefully written argument here. As I mentioned before, I am no fan of identity politics, and Maass hasn't changed my mind.

Let me preface these remarks with a big complaint I have about Marxism. I think the reduction of all cultural and other issues to economics is one of the least plausible things about it. I hate reductionism and find it particularly worthless in the social sciences. As someone with Marxist and socialist sympathies, I certainly agree that economics underlies social issues to a much greater extent than normally recognized, but I don't buy that all political and social issues are really just economics in disguise.

Anyway, on to Ms. Maass's argument for identity politics.

First, he argues that racism is at heart an economic issue. He makes a good attempt, but I remain unconvinced that the current levels of poverty and crime among African Americans is due to racism via the economics of slavery. He cites statistics about income and incarceration rates, but does not thereby establish that current racism, much less economics, is the sole or even overriding reason for the plight of blacks in the U.S. That's sloppy reasoning.

This is not to say that racism does not play a major role in the problems among black communities in the U.S., but the author just assumes that this is the case, and further goes out on a Marxist limb by saying that it is economics that is the primary driver of this racism.

With regard to immigrants, I mostly agree with him. Capitalists need a cheap labor force, so they have a vested interest in keeping the borders open but keeping illegals illegal. Of course things got out of hand eventually, with anti-immigration rightwing politicians cracking down on immigration because of political pressure. That shows that economics is not the only driver of cultural activity, which the author admits grudgingly but does not seem to realize the full implications of: "This isn’t to say that economic interests alone shape the different systems of oppressions that operate under capitalism. On the contrary, forms of oppression take on a life of their own, which can sometimes obscure the underlying economic connection" (p. 49).

With regard to women, he has some good points regarding unpaid labor in the home by women. My complaint here is that he is speaking to the rhetoric of the socially conservative wing of the right, not things as they are for the vast majority of people today:

Women are primarily responsible for the raising of children and labor inside the family, placing a double burden on them of paid labor at work and unpaid labor at home. Woman and men alike are taught from an early age that this is natural—that women are drawn to the family, instinctively nurturing, deferential, and all the other traits summed up by the cliché “a woman’s place is in the home.” At the same time, women are taught something else entirely—that their worth depends on the “beauty,” their physical appearance, their sexual attractiveness to men (not to other women, of course!). (p. 50)

Does this paragraph strike anyone else as overstated? Perhaps it is because I live in liberal, secularized New England, but I don't think the plight of most women is anywhere near this bad. Yes, women are underpaid (though the gap is objectively speaking not nearly as bad as the raw numbers suggest) and still do more than their fair share of unpaid "homemaking" compared to their mates, but progress is being made -- an important point, as we shall see.

The author concludes:

The point of this is to show, first, that the prevailing ideas about women or Blacks or any other oppressed group are designed to bolster a system of oppression—and second, that various forms of oppression can be traced in critical ways to the underlying priorities of an economic system run in the interests of profit and power. If this is true, then the socialist project of creating a new world has to involve all the struggles against oppression in society, and those struggles have to be championed by everyone fighting for socialism. (p. 53)

This is to widen the definition of socialism to include not just economic but all causes against oppression.

On the one hand, I agree that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice should be fought, whether or not their causes are economic. On the other hand, insofar as their causes are economic, shouldn't we root out the cause rather than the results? The author's logic makes no sense here. For example, if capitalism is the overriding cause of racism, then why not primarily fight capitalism? Why treat the symptom rather than the disease? Identity politics is just a bandaid.

Capitalism is, to a degree, to blame for all the working poor, not just poor African Americans. We should fight poverty regardless of race, and fight racism regardless of economic status. To tightly link the two, as the author would have us do, is to obscure the problem. If we could bring more African Americans out of poverty, we could eliminate that much racism, though by no means all. In other words, don't mix economic and racial policy, even if you are decide to fight on both fronts!

Yes, racism against latinos is directly connected with worries about "the brown horde," as a Mexican-born blogger I used to read put it, and that feeds into insane immigration policy. But the racism will persist however hard we work until we have solved the underlying economic and policy issues. Yes, fight the prejudice, but work harder on fixing immigration law!

And while I will not pretend that things are perfect for women, even here in the enlightened northeast U.S., the author's rhetoric seems completely over-the-top to me. Furthermore, things are getting continually better for women, whereas things are getting continually worse for the working class.

Let me repeat that: The key to helping the the oppressed is to take the class war seriously. Class trumps race, sex, and nation in traditional socialism. Identity politics is a horrible distraction. This is not to say that we should not fight racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice, but I strongly disagree that we should elevate these issues to the same level as class struggle.

A few months ago, the Center for American Progress posted an article about the dangers of menthol cigarettes, then immediately made it into an issue of identity politics because LGBTs are more likely to smoke menthols than regular cigarettes. Now let me ask you this: should we regulate or ban menthol cigarettes because they're worse than regular cigarettes and thus harm people, regardless or race, sex, or sexual orientation? Maybe? Fine. Should we be concerned because the poor smoke more menthols than regular smokes, since they are the ones who can least afford to be harmed by them? Maybe? Then I'm on your side. Should we be more inclined to regulate or ban menthols because the LGBT community smokes them more than regulars? If you think so, then you've lost me. There's no rationale behind that that isn't already covered in concerns about health and the poor.

Look, I am not indifferent to matters of race, culture, sex, etc. I have spent so much time among Chinese that I have absorbed big chunks of their culture. (A couple years ago someone called me "Chimerican.") I have seen racism against Asians and been the subject of racism from Chinese people as well. The oppression of people because of their race, gender, sexuality, or any other reason should be stamped out. What I disagree with is this indiscriminate, haphazard mixing of issues of prejudice with issues of economics, especially when you claim, as a socialist, that class comes first. If capitalism is the root cause of racism and sexism, then shouldn't you spend more energy on fighting the root cause?

The Green Party and Science

I have been looking a bit into far left parties. Writing these posts, despite their lack of a big audience to date, has made me think more seriously about my political views and my reluctance to take strong political stands, a reluctance whose roots lie in my naturally deep and profound skepticism toward all claims of knowledge. This may look like an abrupt turn from many of my earlier posts from just a few weeks ago that criticized progressives, but, as I noted then, it wasn't so much progressivism that I disagreed with as it was a certain attitude endemic in progressivism that I (still) find annoying.

Anyway, now I am indulging my leftist tendencies. Seeing the total corruption of the Democrats makes me more and more skeptical that capitalism and democracy can co-exist, so I have been looking even further left.

I may have more to say about that in the future. In the meantime, one of the leftist parties I was looking at is the Green Party, and today I ran across this post. The author points out that the Green Party's platform is in favor of mandating insurance coverage for alternative healthcare such as acupuncture and homeopathy. The author's objection is that these things are "quack medicine." I agree that homeopathy in particular is nonsense; some, like acupuncture, have some limited evidence of their efficacy. Either way, the question should clearly be whether a particular medical practice is backed up by evidence. In a capitalist society, unfortunately, therapies that do not make a lot of money for corporations do not receive enough research, so I'm not sure how (again, in a capitalist society) combining a focus on evidence-based medicine with universal health insurance would improve things for promising alternative therapies.

Either way, the fact that the Green Party takes this position is quite disappointing for me, since I like its emphasis on environmentalism. This isn't to say that I would never support a Green candidate. On the other hand, in many ways the Green Party seems to be simply a more progressive version of the Democrats, including its capitulation to working in a capitalist society, so I am doubtful how much good they could do if the they supplanted the Democrats or became a major third party.

A Star Trek World is Impossible

Here's a disturbing quote from a brief but good article, Making Sense of 7 Billion People:

But the fact remains that, for all humanity to experience a material standard of living now enjoyed by a tiny fraction, we'd need four more Earths. It's just not possible. And that, in the end, is the significance of 7 billion people. It's a challenge.

Although I am very appreciative of the amazing advances of technology even in my lifetime (I'm in my 30s), I could live without much of it. What worries me is that a world in which wars are being fought over scarce resources is one in which freedom will no longer be possible. We already have seen how our need for oil has led to endless conflict in the Middle East, where I think most of it realize we have no business. What will it be like in 20 or 30 years? We have plenty of coal, but that's environmentally still a disaster compared to other fossil fuels, or so is my understanding, especially in places without the wherewithal or political will to design cleaner plants (hi, China!). And I don't hold out much hope for renewable energy resources, though perhaps big advances are coming in the next decade or two (but isn't that always the refrain?).

As you can see, I'm still a humanist at heart. Part of the reason I am think more about civil liberties than the environment is because I am resigned to the fact that governments are bought by corporations and that little headway will be made on the environmental front for some time. We live in a capitalist world, where profit drives policy. Mother Earth has a disease and I'm not that hopeful that we can cure it before we do even more serious damage.

On the other hand, environmental and social policy are intimately bound up with each other. Perhaps the way toward a more stable and enduring human freedom is through ecology. But it's hard to believe that such a world is possible with capitalism as we now have it in all parts of the world.

Demonizing The Other

Over the past few weeks I have started following some Pagan blogs, and am encouraged by the number of sane, rational Pagans out there. Things aren't perfect, though. The combination of crony capitalism and Christian social conservatism in the Republican party makes the right a perfect foil for leftwing political views combined with religious pluralism.

A few days ago, one of these progressive Pagans used Manichean language to describe the right in the U.S., calling them "nihilists" who only believe in the will to power. The impression I got was that, while Democrats were ordinary, flawed politicians, Republicans were a different species altogether, without any principles or scruples.

While I'm happy to grant that the GOP is considerably worse than the Democratic party at present, I do not believe they occupy different universes. Both parties are populated by the last people on Earth whom you'd want to be politicians, i.e. people who want to be politicians! Almost any politician who makes it to the top ranks of government is going to be driven by goals worse than a desire to serve others, and having once attained office will make more and more compromises with whatever nobler principles he or she has. All politicians are demagogues to a degree, which means you really can't take what they say that seriously. They are balancing what they believe with their need to say things that will get them elected.

Furthermore, I question the intellectual integrity of anyone in this day and age who subscribes to such absolute bifurcations between the Light and the Dark, Good and Evil. That's a relic of dualist religions, of which Christianity is an unofficial member. I suppose there is room in Neopaganism for dualism of that kind, but I doubt that Pagans who subscribe to this kind of demonization of The Other are actually aware of what they are doing.

Once you demonize The Other, you don't need to try to understand them. They are no longer really people, but forces for evil wearing a mask. Unless you believe your opponents are sociopaths one and all, you have an obligation to understand where they are coming from, no matter how repugnant their views -- or so it seems to me. To do otherwise is to make the same mistakes that led to so much human suffering in previous generations, as Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Addendum on U.S. Theocracy

As a postscript to my previous post on the possibility of the U.S. becoming anything close to a theocracy, I would like to expand on the strangely confident prediction I made that, in twenty years,

social conservatives will have even less influence than they do in the Republican party today, as this last bastion of Christendom, tottering at it already is, collapses for lack of foundations.

Non-Christians, and many liberal Christians, do a lot of hand-wringing over the influence of Christianity in modern U.S. politics. In specific, concrete instances where conservative Christians want to impose their vision of society on the populace as a whole, I agree that action must be taken. However, from my perspective, conservative Christianity has already lost and we are well on to becoming a post-Christian state, just as has happened in Europe.

If you read the news, you see conservative Christians constantly making a lot of noise on their own behalf and attempting to influence the Republican party. I, on the other hand, read conservative intellectual Christian blogs for several years and saw nothing but a kind of despair that Christendom was falling away in the U.S., in the same way that it had across the pond. The almost constant refrain was that Christians would once again become a small, perhaps even persecuted, minority, as they had been in the first few centuries AD. These people had accepted that the number of Christians in the U.S. drops every year and that there was no reason whatsoever to believe this demographic decline is about to reverse itself.

In the decades to come, some of the remaining conservative Christians will become more vocal exactly as their power continues to wane. No doubt there will be the occasional election where their influence will increase for a time, but the average extent of that influence will progressively decline, until they become largely irrelevant, either silent in a society whose values they despise, or attached to bizarre fringe groups.

What's My Beef with Progressives?

I have been pondering my critical remarks about the left in many of the posts I have published so far, and wonder how fair I have been. Mostly, I think, I am voicing my resistance to conformity with the Neopagan (especially Wiccan) community, and my distaste for the particular kind of rage and illogic endemic on that side of the political spectrum. (The right has its own species of rage and illogic!)

Perhaps this isn't fair. The GOP has become something of, well, a joke over the last few years. I did not vote for Obama, but not so much for his political views as my belief that he was a phony, a good speech giver and little more. I get my distrust of rhetoric from reading a lot of Plato many years ago. But boy has the Republican party gone completely off the rails over him, whether from racism, which I doubt is a big factor, or some other reason, I don't know. The result is that the fringes of the party have come into prominence, even respect, in a way they never could even during the Clinton presidency.

If the right was ever the voice of moderation and reason, it certainly is no longer. It is doing even more to make the U.S. a banana republic than the Democratic party, it is anti-science, and it is still the voice of social conservatism in this country. It's even worse than the Democrats in its love for war-making, and has been for several decades.

So, as much as I personally feel uncomfortable with the way progressives speak and act, and as much as I very strongly disagree with playing identity politics (it's why I stopped following the Center for American Progress) -- nevertheless, I think that I will back off a bit. Beating up on the GOP is like shooting fish in a barrel, and beating up on progressives when I agree with them on many issues doesn't really help anyone, either.

As a final, contrarian note, I do wonder whether Republicans are really "the party of unreason." Here's an interesting study that suggests that both the left and the right believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence -- just on different issues.

Clarification on Libertarianism

I have already mentioned libertarianism several times on this blog in just a few posts. This is a reflection of my current interests (watching the unfolding GOP primaries), but I want to make a clarification at the outset that I am not a libertarian, neither pragmatic nor ideological.

Now that I've said that, let me give two quick, personal, unofficial definitions.

Ideological libertarianism. This is a political philosophy based on the non-aggression principle or something similar, such as Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It is not necessarily utilitarian, which means that it places personal freedom high enough that it might not matter to such a libertarian if their policies led to worst results than other political philosophies.

Pragmatic libertarianism. This is the view that libertarianism offers the best solutions to political problems. It doesn't take a stand on the non-aggression principle or any other overriding view of human relations; it simply states that, given the alternatives, libertarian government is the best we have. It is thus more or less explicitly utilitarian.

A few years ago I flirted briefly with pragmatic libertarianism. I never took ideological libertarianism seriously because I came to the conclusion that it logically reduces to anarchism. Absence of coercion in human relations sounds nice, but it is unworkable in principle if followed strictly... unless you are an anarchist.

Finally, I have always been attracted to agrarianism, but only as a romantic, and over the past year I read some Marxist theory and followed the blog of a Christian-turned-Marxist. I do think that capitalism is fundamentally corrupt, but I have serious doubts that there is a solution that, if an attempt were made to implement it, would not make things much worse. Thus, I tend to be a realist on politics, and I have a strong distrust of revolutionaries.