Toyota Hearings: Return of Regulation?

I don’t expect much from the Congressional hearings on the Toyota accelerator problem. It’s just the obligatory dance that Representatives and corporate barons do for their audience of voters and consumers.

However, I hope that it is a subtle sign that serious regulation is back. For decades, Republicans worked to dismantle and cripple the regulatory regime that protects consumers, and Democrats too often lent a hand. Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress have disappointed progressives in almost every way, but perhaps they will return to pre-Reagan values on regulation.

Republican Gomorrah – A Review

Republican Gomorrah, a new book by Max Blumenthal, examines the Christian Right’s growth, its domination of the Republican Party, and the scandals of its prominent figures. Every group has its scandals, but what is intriguing about the Christian Right is that its scandals tend to involve exactly those behaviors that it most stridently denounces. Again, no party or philosophy has a monopoly on hypocrisy, but Blumenthal shows how core ideas are responsible for both the Christian Right’s success and its problems.

Blumenthal bases his analysis on the work of Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who left Germany after the Nazis came to power. In Escape From Freedom, Fromm wrote that having freedom is not always pleasant. Sometimes it can be a burden because you have to make your own decisions and you are responsible for the outcomes. Many people gladly give up their freedom by submitting themselves to obey without question a trusted authority figure. In the political realm, this can lead to a mass movement such as the Nazis created.

Christian theology has similar dynamics with respect to freedom. On the one hand, free will means you are responsible for your sins and will be punished for them – with hellfire according to the more conservative sects. However, there is an out. If you accept Jesus as your Savior, all your sins are forgiven.

A modern twist involves the industry that offers therapy/treatment for personal crisis. People make mistakes in their personal lives or simply don’t know how to handle certain things. So they turn to the therapy industry to tell them what to do about problems such as addiction, abuse, and infidelity. There is a promise that parallels the promises of political authoritarianism and religious salvation: obey the therapist and all your problems will be solved.

The Christian Right has put together all these modes of escaping from freedom into a single movement. A pioneer and the most successful practitioner has been James Dobson, a child psychiatrist who founded Focus on the Family. His newsletter gives advice about how to deal with problems in the family. His organization now gets so many requests for help that it has its own zip code. All these people mailing or calling in for help get put into a database, which is used to send out calls to political action. Dobson and similar figures function as what Fromm calls “the magic helper,” who then exploits this dependent relationship to further both a political movement and their own finances.

Unfortunately, many personal problems cannot be prayed away or otherwise cured with a simple fix. These people become involved in the movement, which distracts them momentarily from their personal problems. However, problems such as addiction are still there and not being effectively addressed. This is especially true for gay Evangelicals, who believe that homosexuality is a sin, a personal choice (“lifestyle”), that can be cured by prayer and spiritual counseling. So gays, alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, and others lead double lives – preaching against the actions by day and overdosing on them by night. (I bet a similar analysis would apply well to the problems the Catholic Church has had with deviant priests.)

Viewed in this light, all the scandals involving Christian Right leaders – and the list is huge! – make sense. It also makes sense how the followers tend to forgive these lapses, and often the leaders are able to resume their leadership roles after a period of public repentance. Instead of seeing virtue as something that can be attained and maintained, it is a constant struggle, a war against Satan, and they expect (and have personally experienced) many setbacks. As long as the disgraced leader frames his personal failure in terms of a cosmic religious war, he is treated as a good soldier who suffered a wound in battle.

Although “faith-based” and “reality-based” approaches were coined in other domains, the terms also make sense in the area of personal problems. Most personal problems can’t be solved in a single moment of insight; they have to be managed and moderated over years, maybe a whole lifetime. (And in the case of homosexuality, it isn’t a problem in itself; the problem is the self-loathing and denial caused by the hateful position of the Christian Right.) Instead of a slow and steady course of treatment, the Christian Right has institutionalized an approach that almost guarantees a roller coaster ride, from euphoric highs of participating in a mass movement to self-loathing lows of indulgence.

The Problem is the Democrats

It’s not a new insight, for me or most progressives. It’s easy to take shots at the Republican Party because its positions and especially its methods disgust me. However, the U.S. needs a progressive party. The Democrats used to fill that role, more or less. Now, not so much. Goodbye, Ted Kennedy. We miss you already.

Bill Moyers talks about it on Bill Maher’s show in the context of healthcare reform.

The Road to Fascism

Last week’s blog post by Sara Robinson (by way of Common Dreams) got me to thinking and reading about the possibility of a successful fascist movement in the US. It referenced a scholarly history article by Robert O. Paxton, which was very enlightening. So what do they say? Could it happen here in America?

Success [of a fascist movement] depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies seem to condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner (p.13).

That sounds awfully familiar after only seven months of Obama’s Presidency. “Weakness of a liberal state” refers to a weakness of political will (e.g., to crack down on illegal immigration) or a paralysis because of political gridlock. Republicans have become “the party of No,” obstructing when they don’t have power.

The relationship between the well-heeled politicians of the Right and the less educated, less affluent part of their base has been changing. The old Southern Strategy appealed to racial bigotry and fear, but its effects took place in the privacy of the voting booth. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, vote for us, then go back to watching the monster trucks. In the age of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, however, the right-wing masses are permanently stirred up, angry, ready to fight. At its heart, fascism isn’t about ideas; it’s about emotions (anger and fear) and violent action. The emotion part has been obvious for a while. The mobilization for violent action, taking it to the street, is what seems new to me.

According to Paxton, fascism as a full-fledged political force began in the 20th Century. However, the protofascist roots began in the US, in the form the Ku Klux Klan:

Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders’ eyes, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group’s destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe (p. 12).

We don’t see anything yet to match the Klan in its heyday. Survivalists, militias, White Power groups, and the like are at the margins. However, if we do see a resurgence of protofascist violence, “conservative” talk radio, Fox News, and the right-wing blogosphere will be the movement’s nervous system. The ultimate irony is whipping up what might become fascism by calling Obama the new Hitler.

Republican Mobs

Right-wing organizers and media personalities have been mobilizing their audiences to attend and disrupt town hall meetings of Democratic legislators. Paul Krugman writes:

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

In general, I think that ordinary people need to get more involved in politics and hold their elected officials to account. However, what is happening on the right is very different from the examples of activism I admire. For one thing, violence and the threat of violence have no legitimate place in citizen activism. There are times when fighting is necessary, but moving us in that direction is reckless and irresponsible.

Another difference between responsible activism and the mob is education. I don’t mean schools and degrees, but instead an understanding of at least the basics of whatever is at issue. We have examples of disinformation, like the “kill Granny” scare. We also see plain ignorance, like seniors shouting for government to stay out of Medicare. It’s sad to see people used as pawns to fight against their own interests.

Kill Granny?

From The Washington Post:

A campaign on conservative talk radio, fueled by President Obama’s calls to control exorbitant medical bills, has sparked fear among senior citizens that the health-care bill moving through Congress will lead to end-of-life “rationing” and even “euthanasia.”

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as “guiding you in how to die,” “an ORDER from the Government to end your life,” promoting “death care” and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to “kill Granny.”

For me, it goes without saying that this “kill Granny” scare campaign is the worst kind of demagogy. However, the Democrats should have seen this coming. Many bills have several hundred pages, but you can’t treat health care reform in the same way. For the forces of Reaction, this is a do-or-die battle. The more complicated the bill is, the more targets they have to snipe.

In the reality-based community, there is a debate about two models of health care – the national health insurance model (i.e., single payer) vs. the Bismarck model (i.e., heavily regulated competition). One concern is that with national health insurance (NHI), if the system is underfunded or has some other kinks, Congress will have to become involved again. Given how broken American politics is, that is an unwelcome prospect. In a Bismarck system, the insurers would at least make sure that income and outgo are balanced, while competition exerts downward pressure on premiums.

Another point, however, weighs in favor of NHI: it is much simpler. The concept is easy to understand – Medicare for everyone. Or, if it is politically necessary to be incremental, Medicare for anyone who doesn’t choose a private insurer. If the Republicans utter the word “socialism,” then the line of counterattack is clear: Republicans want to destroy Medicare (i.e., socialized medicine).

Sotomayor v. White Supremacists

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, on its own, doesn’t excite the progressive in me. The Supreme Court hasn’t been an agent of social progress in decades, and in most situations, it probably shouldn’t be. Sotomayor is competent and mainstream.

What gets me riled up is the tactics of the regressive Right. Reasonable people can have good-faith disagreements on issues such as affirmative action. However, painting Sotomayor as some Latina supremacist is absurd. Much has been made of the “wise Latina” comment. I’ve read the transcript of the whole speech, and it’s the opposite of racist. More importantly, Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has reviewed her cases related to race:

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.

All evidence points to a sober and conscientious application of the law, not an agenda to advance Latinas at any cost.

Some of Sotomayor’s critics, on the other hand, have a history of cheering and justifying White supremacy. Senator Jeff Sessions of the Judiciary Committee was himself rejected by it for a seat on the U.S. District Court in Alabama because of racist remarks. He said that he liked the KKK until he found out that some of them smoked pot. Pat Buchanan made an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show and unabashedly claimed that White men deserved to dominate U.S. politics because of their achievements. No one should be surprised, given Pat’s role as an architect of the “Southern strategy” and his other disgusting comments on race. And then we have the wit and wisdom of Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Have they no shame?

Republicrazy

A July 6 poll by USA Today and Gallup found that 72% of Republicans say they would be very likely or somewhat likely to vote for Sarah Palin for President in 2012. What can I say? As a VP, she would have attended state funerals and done other insignificant tasks well suited to her only talent, personal charisma. As President, she promises to bring theocracy, incompetence, and corruption to the job. Are Republicans so enthralled with image over substance? Two terms of George W. Bush say yes. C’mon, Rs! You can do better.

The S Word

• Republicans are against socialist programs.
• Social Security is a socialist program.
• Medicare is a socialist program.
• Unemployment insurance is a socialist program.
• Disaster relief is a socialist program.
• Therefore: Republicans are against Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and disaster relief.
• Q.E.D.

Certain problems exist in the US, one of the least regulated of the developed economies. If markets could solve them, they would have done so already. People want their government to solve problems. Programs like the ones I mentioned above are popular not because they are “socialist” or in any other ideological category but because they are attempts (however flawed) to solve real problems.

Until the Republican Party stops playing commissar and thought police and starts addressing real problems, it can only offer fear it all its ugly forms.