The civil war raging between the Republic establishment and the tea party movement continues to heat up, and Democrats appear more than happy to sell ammunition to both sides. Last week, Richard Viguerie, a legendary figure within the modern conservative…
Posted on 28 October 2013 by Rob Painting Key Points: In keeping with scientific expectations, the ongoing emission of greenhouse gases from human industrial activity is causing the Earth to build up heat - a process known as the increased (enhanced…
Kim Song-ju sought to escape the living hell of North Korea, but after crossing a freezing river into China was returned, like so many other defectors. He was sent to a prison camp, where he shared – with 40 other unfortunates – a cramped cell that had to be entered on all fours through a tiny door less than two feet high. They were starved – their watery soup often containing stones – and routinely beaten by guards, who told them they were no longer human.
Kim's mother died in the prison, handcuffed to her bed. Her body was never returned to her family, who fear it was used for medical experiments. Eventually Kim escaped again, and now lives in Surrey's serene suburbia. Last week, he was in Westminster Central Hall, in London, one of several witnesses telling their horror stories to a United Nations commission of inquiry investigating the hermit state's atrocities. "In North Korea the words 'human rights' do not exist," he said.
Other defectors told of hunger and torture, of forced marriage and abortions. One woman had to leave her Chinese-born son when sent back to North Korea, fearing he might be killed, given the regime's obsession with racial purity. She was chained to three other women and made to haul heavy loads after being returned. The panel has also heard of mothers forced to drown children in buckets, of men seeing brothers executed, and of families eating lizards and grass in order to survive.
North Korea is often seen as something of a joke: a strange, secretive place in the grip of cartoon communism and under the thumb of crazed dictators. Rare glimpses behind the bamboo curtain fuel the fascination, with images of mass games, military parades, rocket launches and a ski resort built by its Swiss-educated young ruler. Or there are the buffoonish antics of US basketball star Dennis Rodman, drinking tequila with Kim Jong-un and saying the "dear leader" only wants the world's most repressed people to be happy.
The UN inquiry, due to release initial findings this week before giving its full verdict early next year, will hopefully challenge such complacency. If it finds there are crimes against humanity – and it is hard to envisage any other conclusion – then there could be the establishment of a special prosecution by the international criminal court (ICC).
Such a move might be only symbolic, since North Korea is not a signatory to the treaty that created the court, and its vainglorious leaders will not risk their liberty by travelling anywhere that might hand them over to justice. But it would demonstrate belated determination to confront what is without doubt a hideously despotic regime, and put some pressure on China to stop protecting its client state and neighbour.
It would also shore up a crucial court, established to prosecute the world's worst crimes but facing unprecedented pressure over its relentless focus on African offenders. There is rightful outrage all those indicted are from Africa. But now this is being used to press for the deferral of charges against Kenya's new president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy over their alleged roles in 2007 election violence. These calls are shamefully being supported by some western nations, which fear a diplomatic rift could damage their war on terror in east Africa.
There should be no illusions over North Korea: it is a quasi-fascist state, ruled along racist lines by a highly corrupt elite. It has run giant gulags holding an estimated 120,000 people in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for half a century – yet how often do we hear them condemned by either politicians or celebrities? One camp is 31 miles long – and, as Amnesty International will reveal next month, satellite images show they are expanding.
The only exit usually is death – and it is thought that four in 10 inmates at one prison died from malnutrition. Uniquely, this is a country in which not only is life totally controlled, with circumstances dependent upon the actions of your forebears in the Korean war, but with collective punishment. If someone commits a crime, such as watching a banned soap opera or possessing a Bible, their family, friends and even children can be deemed to share guilt. So there are thousands born into slave labour who know of no existence beyond the barbed wire and brutality.
I visited North Korea last month in the guise of a tourist. The propaganda is relentless, from endless portraits of the regime's two dead leaders to a vast mausoleum holding their bodies, built of finest marble and the size of a small airport in a nation where millions are impoverished, hungry and without healthcare. Workers march to their jobs behind red flags and posters exhort people to work harder, yet this bankrupt nation is propped up by aid, black markets and China.
Throughout my trip I was escorted by two "guides" who even stayed in my hotel; they were members of the elite trusted to mix with foreigners. Their explanations for the lack of cars on the roads or goods in shops were farcical, but they were friendly and funny; one night we got drunk together in a karaoke bar. Yet despite their elevated status they had not heard of the Beatles, hip-hop or even South Korean superstar Psy – and my attempted explanation of his YouTube hit foundered on their lack of knowledge of the internet.
It was a surreal experience, like visiting a Stalinist theme park – and so baffling that I left with more questions than when I arrived. But visitors do not see the death camps, dreadful famine or grinding poverty, which has stunted growth of North Koreans by three inches and shortened life expectancy by a decade. This is an entire country imprisoned by ghastly rulers, a state of affairs both intolerable and unsustainable. The world has stood by and done nothing for too long.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start? The bad news is: if you're being personally…
[Spying laptop via Shutterstock]
Media watchdog group Free Press’s recent infographic reveals how media corporations are using shell companies to evade the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) ownership rules and gobble up local TV stations across the US. It’s another sobering…
This was a management not a technology failure. Obama's error was not to empower technologists to tell him the truth
The launch of Healthcare.gov has not gone well. This is the Obama administration's fault.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1 October launch, it looked as if the problems were caused by a surfeit of interest. As the days went on, however, the problems persisted. The site's most basic interactive operation was creating a new account. This was required for all subsequent uses of the insurance market, but something like nine out of ten attempts failed. By the middle of the month, Consumer Reports was telling its readers "Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can", because the site could not perform, even under the conditions its designers imagined.
Much of the resulting "What went wrong and what now?" conversation has focused on the difference between the world-beating mastery of technology for Obama for America (OfA)'s re-election effort v the subsequent administration's considerably more plodding use of technology after taking office.
Several people central to OfA have pointed out that their work was, in many ways, easier than Healthcare.gov's. They could start from scratch, did not have to coordinate with as many outside entities, and could hire anyone they wanted, and work in any way they liked. Everything about the way the government builds large technical projects contrasts unfavorably, from specification to procurement, to hiring, to management.
But the most important distinction between OfA and Healthcare.gov isn't about how each project dealt with technology. It's about how each project dealt with reality.
Obama's re-election team developed new technology, which they tested early, often, and aggressively (very aggressively). The team working on Healthcare.gov tested it late, infrequently, casually. Most importantly, when testing at OfA showed something was broken, they fixed it. When the little testing they did showed parts of Healthcare.gov were broken, they launched it anyway.
Building a bad website is a technology failure. Launching a bad website is a management failure.
Many people in Democratic politics-tech circles are now suggesting that Healthcare.gov is the best anyone could have hoped for, by pointing out how cumbersome rules for procurement, hiring, and management are inside the government. All of these problems are real, but every one of those difficulties existed the day the Affordable Care Act was signed. (As Rusty Foster pointed out at the New Yorker, IT disasters aren't late-breaking events. The people working on the project know how its going.) Henry Chao, a deputy CIO at Health and Human Services and one of the only people with a clear-eyed view of the problems, had understood what was happening, and not happening, by March this year; yet, his superiors are said to have downplayed his concerns.
And it's visibly not true that the government is destined to fail. As Merici Vinton of the Consumer Financial Protection Board points out, when you have a process that prevents you from launching a big, critical site all at once, you just don't launch it all at once. Knowingly building a key part of an important initiative using a process you believe will fail is almost the definition of a bad decision.
It's possible to argue that in the current partisan atmosphere, denying the Republicans any fodder for complaint during the design of the insurance exchange was paramount. It is not possible, however, to argue that this strategy worked well. The same techniques used to avoid small early failures, like delaying specifications or avoiding partial rollouts, were the very things that created the large, late failures of the launch. The political strategy created a larger version of the very problem it was designed to avoid.
So, now what?
The obvious thing is to fix the site so that it performs its core functions. This work is already underway, though expectations of a "tech surge" are overblown. One of the most widely understood dynamics of complex software projects is that adding more workers tends to delay things, as the complexity of additional communications swamps the boost from having extra help.
But even after the site works, the underlying management problems are still there, and those should alarm us Democrats. The lesson from this launch isn't just about technological management; it's about the ability of officials to receive and act on bad news – surely, a core function.
Before Obama's remarks on launch day, someone should have said:
Hey, chief, say it's a soft launch, or the first day of public testing. Say we need feedback, or that the we're going to fine-tune it. Say anything but "Come and get it."
That, of course, didn't happen. Instead, Obama compared the site to Amazon.com – an irresponsible comparison, even if things were going well – and invited all comers to take a look. ("You don't have to take my word for it.") As bad as the site was on the morning of 1 October, Obama made it worse that afternoon, by raising both expectations and traffic.
Why would he do something that counter to his own interests? Because no one was in a position to warn him not to. Chao had been worrying, for over six months, that the experience was going to be "third world", but (as we now know from the first congressional hearing) responsibility was so diffuse, and the people who knew it was going badly lacked either the authority or the access to tell the president otherwise.
An organization paralyzed by the inconvenience of reality is having more than just procurement problems.
One obvious response is that the president of the United States shouldn't have to spend his time dealing with the launch of a website. But Obama and his team will now spend more time in the next 90 days talking about Healthcare.gov than they would have spent over the last 90 days, if they'd taken more time to understand how it was going. You can't make a piece of technology central to the most important achievement of your administration, and then let people run it without telling you the truth about its progress.
The business of government, from information-gathering to service delivery, will be increasingly mediated by the internet. As that becomes clear, we are at last having a conversation about how the government can get good at that. But as long as senior management believes that postponing failure is the same as avoiding it, and that not talking about a problem is the same as solving it, all the talented programmers and flexible work rules in the world won't be enough.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
It's instructive to remember that when the Tea Party first began to gather steam, the name referred to a "party" in the celebration sense – the Boston Tea Party, specifically: an event of planned chaos, a protest that masqueraded as an Indian attack. Over time, the name has lost its punny puckishness much as the movement has steadily shifted from a proudly anarchical – even populist – response and rebellion within the GOP to a smoothly functioning alternative to it. The government shutdown proved that attempts by the GOP establishment to co-opt the Tea Party as a source of energy just created a network of political sleeper agents. With its own mechanism for drafting (and supporting) candidates, its own agenda, and its own media eco-system, the Tea Party is a third party by almost any criteria but ballot affiliation – and leadership. The absence of any official organizational structure might be one reason the Tea Party has remained so lively despite a terrible national reputation and negligible policy achievements. When something goes wrong, those identified with the failure fade for a time and the attention of Tea Party-identified voters shifts smoothly to someone else. There's also no demand for positive policy victories or signature legislation: no one has to win a debate, just spoil the outcome. Thus it's no surprise that Ted Cruz is the current face of the Tea Party: All his achievements are proudly in the negative, all his goals are set resolutely in the past. But the Tea Party's fickle and hive-like nature virtually demands that Cruz cycle out of the spotlight eventually. He will either fail to stop something from happening or, perhaps worse, accidentally cause something to get done. For when that happens: here's a look at some of the Tea Party's once and perhaps future leaders. The don't-call-them comebacks: politicians and activists who've tasted Tea Party's adoration and haven't given up on a second sip. These are primarily hacks who clawed their way on stage at some point and are now biding their time in minor-media purgatory with the hope that they'll be able to fake-controversy themselves into relevance once more. Herman Cain: the one-time front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination sputtered into the national conversation just this week, asserting the accusations of sexual harassment that sealed the end of his campaign were the work of "a force bigger than right": the Devil. He is an aggressive and peppy Twitter user and turns up on Fox Business to predict disaster on a regular basis.
Former Congressman Allen West (Florida): the former congressman who compared the Democrats to Josef Goebbles and worried about Obama supports being a "threat to the gene pool" last month left his post as the director of programming for the conservative news aggregator Pajamas Media under allegations of anti-Semitism. He claimed that he was moving on voluntarily "to pursue political aspirations." So keep an eye out.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (Minnesota): she's leaving Congress even as an ethics investigation against her continues; if she is seeking a quieter life you wouldn't know it by the bombs she keeps throwing: In the last month, she proclaimed the government reopening to be "a very sad day" and said that Obama's presidency was a sign of the end of the world. Miley Cyrus played her in an SNL sketch.
Congressman Paul Ryan (Wisconsin): former vice-presidential candidate currently in some kind of witness protection program, but he did manage to smuggle out a Wall Street Journal op-ed that was mostly ignored. He's in a gym somewhere, waiting. Waiting.
Former Governor Sarah Palin (Alaska): will not be ignored, even though people try to: Her trippy word-salad appearance on Fox during the shutdown prompted an uncharacteristic reining in of the Wasilla wildwoman, with Megyn Kelly desperately trying to stop the crazy train: "Let me jump in! Let me jump in! But I want to ask you a question governor!"
Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher: His 15 minutes of fame ticks inexorably on, strung out by Wurzelbacher's proud adoption of the Misunderstood White Guy cause. He popped into consciousness last month for re-posting a rant about "wanting a white President." He is also available to act as a plumber. Most likely to succeed: Sarah Palin. She combines lack of self-awareness with a contradictory but well-honed sense of what makes good clickbait. Reporters will never, ever tire of her. The junior varsity class: They have yet to capture the Tea Party's full attention, but could bound onto centerstage at any moment.
Senator Mike Lee (Utah): Right now probably best known as the guy still willing to sit next to Ted Cruz in the Senate cafeteria, Lee was one of the first candidates to stage a "Tea Party" challenge to a sitting Republican senator. Despite a narrow victory in that primary (that included placing second at the official nominating convention), Lee has legislated like a man who believes he's got the mandate of a movement. He was at Cruz's side, literally, during most of the shutdown and echoed the fiery rhetoric of the most extreme conservatives (he compared the campaign to shutdown the government to the Revolutionary War). Utahans are reportedly unhappy about this – all the better to move to a national stage!
Congressman Tom Cotton (Arkansas): Cotton has racked up an impressive amount of national attention as a fresh Republican face, and he's done it without saying anything especially insane. He did quote John Wilkes Booth approvingly once, but has reserved his extremism more for policy than punditry – he wanted to extend sanctions on Iranian human rights violators to family members (in violation of the Constitution's prohibition against conviction on the basis of "corruption of blood") and was among those to vote for stripping food stamp provisions from the Farm Bill (this despite representing a third of Arkansas' over 500,000 food stamp recipients). He's challenging a conservative Democrat, Mark Pryor, rather than a moderate Republican in the state's Senate race; a win could put him at the mean girls table with Lee and Cruz.
Matt Bevin: Bevin is the Kentucky hedge-fund manager mounting a populist primary challenge to that RINO squish Mitch McConnell (the current Senate Republican leader). McConnell's refusal to champion Tea Party causes – he didn't speak about the government shutdown until its third day – has made Bevin attractive to far right fundraisers and activists. Based more on disappointment in McConnell than Bevin's promise (or crazy talk), his otherwise quixotic campaign (unseating a five-term minority leader) has gotten national attention and support from the likes of the Senate Conservative Fund (early backers of Cruz and Lee, as well as Cotton) and Palin. Most likely to succeed: I've got my eye on Cotton. He's currently beating Democrat Mark Pryor by four points in the US senate race matchup. Pryor has already put up ads tying Cotton to the shutdown, but the tactic might not succeed as well as it could in other races – not because Arkansas voters liked the shutdown much more than anyone else, but because Cotton was savvy about moderating his support of it. In the end, in fact, he was one of the few House Republicans who voted to end it. Could that cost him national Tea Party support? It didn't even cost him the support of the Club for Growth, who has been running ads on his behalf. As for the Tea party base, once Cotton is in the Senate he won't have to answer to voters as often or as quickly and can take the same cost-free extreme stands that other Tea Party senators do. The models of false-modesty: these elected officials have been lauded as Tea Party leaders despite professed reluctance and unsure attachment. They have political positions that make for an occasionally uncomfortable fit but seem willing to tailor them if the Tea Party mantle comes with extra large pockets and a presidential berth. Governor Chris Christie (New Jersey): despite his notorious post-Sandy embrace of Obama, Christie's bullying personality echoes favorably among Tea Party supporters. He casts his history of bipartisan negotiation as a form of steamrolling practicality, and many of his actual policies, save regarding gun control, fit comfortably within the far right framework. It's chic now for the hard right to denounce him: he didn't fight gay marriage hard enough, for instance. But if he can roll out enough insults to Democrats and pal around with more conventional Tea Party heroes such as Steve Lonegan (the erstwhile GOP NJ senate candidate), Christie could convince the conservative base he has their best interests at his large heart.
Senator Marco Rubio (Florida): Rubio was a relatively minor player in the shutdown theater, but he stands to benefit enormously from it as far as Tea Party support goes, as it has weakened the chances that the immigration debate will return to front-and-center. Rubio's valiant effort to craft a message on immigration that could appeal to the deeply skeptical conservative fringe shook up what had been a masterful Jenga-like tower of mixed positions: a little Tea Party here, a little GOP careerism there. He now looks more careerist than ever. Perhaps more problematic is Rubio's attempt to distance himself from the shutdown in retrospect: He now says, "I was never in favor of shutting down the government," a story that seems tailored to make him seem reasonable, which won't do at all.
Senator Rand Paul (Kentucky): Paul's weak spot is foreign policy—not so much that he doesn't have any experience (few Tea Party darlings do) but that he sounds an isolationist note that can register to many self-proclaimed patriots dangerously like weakness. Paul has been sly about positioning on this, however; at the Value Voters conference earlier this month, Paul gave a rousingly xenophobic speech heavy on Biblical allusions to Muslims' perfidy… he just declined to say we should bomb them. He thundered, "I will not rest" until Christian pastor Saeed Abedini is released from Iranian prison, but was cagey about what his wakefulness entailed: "everything within our power, within our voice, from the White House, from the State Department, from our government" stops conspicuously short of military intervention. That base covered, or at least shaded, Paul's other positions (pro-life, pro-gun, against NSA surveillance, Obamacare, regulation in general) need little protective coloring in the deep red climes of Tea Party nation. What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz. Most likely to succeed: Rand Paul. I suspect he'll continue to stand to Cruz's side for awhile longer, collecting speaking engagements and offering Cruz fulsome praise until Cruz's moment ends. The only important variable is when that moment comes; I'm betting that Rand hopes it lasts until sometime in the fall of 2015.
The Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to a provision in Obamacare which requires that insurers cover preventive health care without co-pays. Three private companies — Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, and Autocam – are arguing that the inclusion…
I confronted Twitter abuse. Then I broke – because I'm human. Feminism has to take account of the fact that both women and men have emotional and psychological limitations
I led a campaign this year asking the Bank of England to keep a woman on its banknotes. Following its success, I was treated to a tour of the dark depths of Twitter, which unleashed a torrent of graphic and violent rape and death threats upon me.
In an interview, Naomi Wolf referred to this, implying that I had retreated to my "parlour" when things got "difficult". This irritated me because the one thing I didn't do was retreat. In fact, I did exactly what Wolf says I should have done. I did "lean in". I did adopt my warrior pose. And my God, did I shout back. I shouted, I screamed, I yelled, I bloody pushed. And then I broke, which is why I came off Twitter for most of September. I don't think having a breakdown was a good outcome.
The other day, I read a brilliant article in Wired by Laura Hudson, called Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad. The name says it all really. To be a man in Breaking Bad you keep pushing, you keep providing, dominating, overpowering. Until you break. Until you die. And it's not just in Breaking Bad. Yes, the show takes it to extremes, but this is a masculinity we all recognise. And it's one that is celebrated. It's one that is contrasted with the pussydom of femininity.
And this is the problem with Wolf's comments – and comments like hers. They leave no room for humanity. Those words say that all the women who contacted me during those awful weeks, to say that they had suffered the same, to say that they had been silenced, that they had been driven underground by fear, those words say that those women were wrong. That they were weak. That they were letting the movement down. So Wolf's words aren't feminist.
Strong claim, I know. But to be fair to Wolf, it's an easy trap to fall into. It's the trap of a society that says to be a man you have to be inhuman. It's the trap of a society that places that inhuman masculinity on the highest pedestal we have. And it's a trap that feminists should be trying to avoid.
Wolf is right to say that feminists will come in for abuse. We always have, and until we live in an equal society, we always will. But she is wrong to imply that we should therefore just suck it up. She's wrong because it's defeatist: we should be outraged by abuse. We should flag it up, say it's wrong, challenge it, try to stop it. But more than this, she's wrong because sucking it up is part of that privileging of a masculinity that doesn't even serve men, let alone women.
As a society we need to grow up and get out of the playground. There is nothing inherently admirable about refusing to acknowledge emotion and psychological limitations. We all have them – to deny them, as Wolf's way of thinking does, is not only unhealthy, it's also unrealistic. And it's egotistical.
Part of the point of having a feminist movement rather than a feminist solo enterprise is that it's not just about one person's drive for success, glory and power. It's about all of us standing together and fighting. And you know what that means? It means that when one of us falls, when one of us needs a time-out, when one of us has led a battle and is under attack, the rest of us can step in and take over. We even have a word for it. It's called sisterhood.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Democrats like moderate Keynesianism. Republicans favor free markets unfettered. The crisis-ridden system is never challenged
The economic aim of both major US political parties is, in the end, the same: to protect and reinforce the capitalist system.
The Republican party does so chiefly by means of a systematic, unremitting demonization of the government. They blame it for whatever ails the capitalist economy. If unemployment grows, they point to government policies and actions, and attack particular politicians for what they did or did not do to stimulate the economy, directing criticism away from the employers who actually deprive workers of their jobs.
Republican solutions for capitalism's ills always involve reducing the government's demands on private capitalists – lower their taxes, deregulate their activities, and privatize government production of goods and services. Their program for the future is always: free the private capitalist system from government intervention, and you will get "prosperity" and growth.
The Democrats protect and reproduce the system by assigning to the government the task of minimizing the problems that beset capitalism. So, for example, they want the business cycles that are an inherent affliction of capitalism to be foreseen, planned for, minimized and overcome by government intervention. This is the underlying purpose of Keynesian economics and the monetary and fiscal policies it generates.
Beyond cycles, capitalism's more long-term problems, such as tendencies to produce great inequalities of income and accumulated wealth, lead Democrats to propose very modest government redistribution programs. Minimum wages, progressive tax structures, food, housing and other subsidies, and freely-distributed public services exemplify Democrats' Bandaids meant to protect capitalism from its own potentially self-destructive tendencies.
From the GOP, you will hear denials that such self-destructive tendencies even exist. Economic problems always reduce to pesky and unwarranted government tampering in the free market. The few Republicans who will admit that capitalism is responsible for its own ailments also see capitalism as a fully self-healing system. The best solution for capitalism's problems, they insist, is to let the system function and correct them. Anything else will just make matters worse.
Most Democrats will paint Republicans as slavish servants of short-sighted corporations and the few whom they make rich. These, say Democrats, threaten capitalism's survival by failing to utilize government solutions to problems that consequently become worse and increasingly dangerous, putting the whole global economy – and capitalism's reproduction – at systemic risk.
Republicans will disregard Democratic economic policy as steps toward what they call "socialism": socialism defined as government ownership and operation of what should be private enterprises.
Neither party, though, has figured out how to prevent capitalism's business cycles. Both consistently fail to make sure that cycles they failed to prevent would be shallow and short. So, today, Republicans blame the crisis since 2007 on government over-regulation and interventions in the housing and finance markets (and they blame Democrats for championing those policies). Democrats blame the crisis on too little regulation of those markets and insufficient redistribution (and – you guessed it – they blame Republicans for opposing those government policies). In short, crises, like everything else, are just opportunities to be explained and exploited politically to advance each party's characteristic policies and their electoral strategies.
In what were "normal times", US capitalism would reproduce itself with nice, calm oscillations between Republican and Democratic presidencies and congresses. For the minority of Americans who legitimately cared about which party was in or out, their interests focused on issues usually disconnected from any structural debate about the capitalist economic system. These included local and regional issues, foreign policy, social issues like sexuality, access to guns, flag-burning, draft protests, and so on. Capitalism rolled along, in part, because both parties functioned as alternative cheerleaders for it, treating it as beyond criticism.
Recent political gridlock, shutdowns, etc suggest a "new normal" has arrived. Political combat between the parties has become more intense and intractable, because capitalism has changed since the 1970s. By then, the post second world war boom in western Europe, north America and Japan – and also anxieties about the USSR, China, and their allies – had lofted real wages and government-funded social services far above their levels in capitalism's global hinterland, especially Asia, Africa and Latin America. Capitalists in western Europe, North America, and Japan were therefore eager to evade both the high wages and the taxes they faced.
Major technical breakthroughs at the time made evasion possible. The ubiquitous availability of jet travel made movement around the globe much easier, cheaper, and faster. Computer and telecommunications advances enabled enterprise headquarters to monitor, command and control production facilities anywhere on the planet. It suddenly became practical to move production and distribution sites from locations of high wages and taxes, to locations of poverty and weak government. Sharp competitors led the way as, first, manufacturing and then, service jobs were increasingly "exported" or "outsourced". Laggards suffered and so learned the importance of following their more nimble competitors.
Most Republicans and Democrats facilitated the process by endlessly promoting "free trade" and arguing that any constraints on free enterprises' relocations were unthinkable, inefficient and other synonyms for "really bad". As more and more jobs left the US, and formerly prosperous cities and states entered long-term declines, the two parties blamed their favorite targets: one another.
The idea that capitalism and capitalists were the problem was something neither Democrats or Republicans allow into their debates and talking-points. Yet, it was precisely capitalists' profit-driven, self-interested decisions to move that have caused our economic problems. And so they remain.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him."
"That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP. "I realized that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me.
While conducting a focus group with Republicans over the summer he had a similar revelation, although it came not from a sole outburst but almost throwaway comments, often left on cards after the session. As one man left his handout he half-joked: "It's probably digital, so you can check it on the NSA files." Another asked: "Now you're going to guarantee that what we put down here, we won't be getting a call from the IRS about an audit or anything like that?" Alongside this sense of being spied upon was relief that, in these Republican-only groups, they had found kindred spirits. "I'm not alone in the way I view things for the most part," wrote one on a postcard. "Not by myself in thought process," confided another.
Those seeking to understand what drove the Republican party to shut down the government this month in a strategically disastrous move that laid bare its deep internal divisions – and ultimately led to humiliating defeat – could do worse than start here. The report reveals a sense of ideological, demographic and cultural siege, on the American right, from which there is no obvious escape. Unable to comprehend or process last year's election defeat, they feel the nation has become unmoored from its founding principles and is on a full-scale, unrelenting descent into chaos. Obama has been victorious in implementing socialism and the party they identify with has proved incapable of halting the decline, leaving them alienated not only from the country at large but one another. If it appears as though they are howling at the moon, it's because they feel all earthly options have been exhausted.
Describing Ireland's economic and cultural transformation in his book The Deportees, Roddy Doyle wrote: "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." Many Republicans have precisely the same feeling.
Central to this deep-seated sense of angst is race. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within 30 years, will no longer be in the majority. "They are acutely racially conscious," says Greenberg. "They are very aware that they are 'white' in a country that is becoming increasingly 'minority'." Growing increasingly dependent on an ever-shrinking base, they see their electoral fortunes waning but are resistant to adapting their message to broaden their appeal beyond their narrow racial confines. Race is less the explicit target of their anxiety (issues such as affirmative action and civil rights no longer dominate) than the primary (if not exclusive) prism through which their political consciousness is being filtered. "Race," writes Greenberg, "is central to their worldview."
There are three main ways in which this has been a factor in the recent government shutdown and Republican schisms. First is gerrymandering. Since race is one of the best predictors of voting behaviour, House congressional seats have been manipulated largely on racial grounds. Politicians at state level carve constituencies into odd and unlikely shapes, shuffling around various racial groups to protect incumbents. Both parties do this when they have the chance but Republicans, who run more state houses, have had more chance and have undertaken the task with much zeal and guile. As a result, in 2012 the Democrats won more votes nationally for Congress but still got fewer seats, giving the Republicans who shut down the government a fragile mandate. It also means incumbents need not fear losing their seats, leaving them able to act out.
Second is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare – which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown.
"Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters," writes Greenberg. Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programs that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government. One participant, echoing the views of many, said: "Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don't. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it's just a pursuit … you're not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it."
Finally, there is Obama – the black son of an African immigrant and white mother – who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they're most likely to use to describe him is "liar". But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity.
"[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim – and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing." As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals).
Their inability to craft a credible strategic response to these insecurities only serves to reinforce them. "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president?" taunted Obama last week. "Go out there and win an election." The trouble is Republicans can't because their racially charged rhetoric alienates minorities, leaving them more electorally isolated, prompting defeat – which leaves them ever more divided. Meanwhile, their reckless obstruction in Congress, which nearly triggered a default, makes the nation's descent into chaos more likely. Unable to come to terms with the country in which they live, they are complicit in creating the very future they most fear.
Twitter: @garyyounge
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.
