Grown-Up Politics

Temper tantrums. The "No's." Name-calling. "That's mine," as claim to everything in sight. A habit of telling lie-after-lie in a manner that any smart eight-year old would carefully eschew for fear of losing credibility. These are but a few characteristics of a badly behaved two-year old. So why is it that each of them reminds us of Republican leadership and its rabid cheerleading squad? Sara Robinson brings up the question at Orcinus.

Robert Altmeyer's work, as presented by John Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience, suggests that this childlike -- or childish -- view of the world is as characteristic of political authoritarians as it is of religious ones. As a result, we have become a nation led by moral children ("whiny-assed titty-babies" or WATBs in the emergent phrase of the left blogosphere) -- people whose total refusal to accept responsibility and inability to empathize with anyone's interests but their own would have rendered them unfit for any kind of paying work (let alone leadership positions) if more sensible heads were in charge. Accountability makes them whine. Consequences make them cry. They are not above holding their collective breath until they turn blue. And it's all your fault for being so mean!

What sort of behavior are we talking about? We start with the lying. A lie is a decietful language act. It might be describing a green fir tree as being red, or an empty bottle as being full. Such lies are very literal lies. But speech that misleads in any material way is also a lie. It serves the purpose of a lie to the speaker and it has the effect of a lie on the hearer. So, when George Bush said "Look, nobody ever said that Saddam was responsible for 9/11" there might have been an element of literal truth to the statement, but its sense is a lie. The argument for fighting a war in Iraq has always been to take the fight on terror to where the terrorists are, to engage them in the middle east - asif Iraqis and Saddam had something to do with 9/11.

That is a fantasy George Bush himself denied before uttering the sentence above. And the sobering truth is that the war in Iraq may have destablized the region and produced ten thousand terrorists where virtually none existed before. Still, Americans are fed both the lie of its purpose and the denial of that lie by the administration.

Similarly, there is the interview with Stephanopoulis in which George Bush says "Look, 'stay the course' was never the policy in Iraq." And anyone who has seen the "Stay the Course" ad in the recent campaign can hear administration officials - the President, the Vice President - repeat "Stay the Course" something like a dozen times in various public forums thick with press and microphones and cameras. This is what is normally called a boldfaced lie. And it seems to be the standard modus operandi of the Bush administration.

The practice of claiming "It's mine," is a little more complicated and subtle; but it is hardly less pervasive. An early glimpse of this mentality was Al Haig claiming "I'm in charge" when Reagan was shot. That event antedated the Bush administration by almost two decades, but it accurately foreshadowed the attitude and practice of claiming power and authority that were Constitutionally reserved for other parties.

In one sense lowering taxes on the wealthiest one or two percent of the population in order that those in power may more easily get more wealth might be construed as such a grab. There is a curious argument from the right that government does not have the legitimate power to tax, or rather that it has that power only by virtue of its ability to coerce. But grown-ups recognize that the government does provide a number of services that no other body is in so good a position to provide. There is a legitimate quid pro quo between taxes and governmental services. And the wealthy get more advantages of these services, hence the larger legitimate claim on their purse. In another sense "that's mine" might refer to a kind of sense of entitlement that extends all the way to Iraqi oilfields.

There is hardly an intelligent person outside of the US who believes the war in Iraq was about anything other than securing the nation with the world's second-largest proven reserves of oil. There are some who imagine that one of the reasons was simply to provide a distraction while the other hand obliterated the rule of law in the land. Who benefits from all this? Who has the guns? Who has the economic power?

There is the curious story of the resolution of the long-standing timber dispute with Canada in which the Whitehouse recieves $450 million in payment from Canada to desist in defending a lost suit over $5 billion in tariff fees that the US imposed on Canadian lumber. The US lost in one international court after another and now those pesky Canadians want the money back. Finally, the Bush administration agreed to return all but $450 million. And that, evidently gets paid to the White House. According to the US Constitution, payments by foreign governments go into the US treasury, not the Whitehouse slush fund. Yet the President appears to have claimed almost half a billion dollars as his own not as fees, not as fines, not as payment to loggers put out of business by legal Canadian subsidies of the lumber industry. But because he has the power to call off the big dogs. What is the definition of extortion?

There is some question in the minds of many whether this kind of behavior recommends a law that appears to allow the President to name any person it pleases Him a terrorist, without evidence. With such a declaration, the person can be thrown in jail without habeus corpus, held without charge, and never receive public hearing. And under a separate provision, the President can strip the person of personal property without any process of law. Making matters worse, Dick Cheney is using language that compares anyone who disagrees with him in public to a terrorist. He is deliberately setting up a mental space in which precisely the kind of unthinkable behavior we have just described becomes thinkable. And, once it is thinkable, to cease thinking and start doing.

What do adults call the child who takes everyone else's toys "because he can?"

Nobody really expected this kind of behavior from the Bush administration. Bush will sometimes project a kind of boyish innocence that allows one to believe him incapable of guile and fraud and highway robbery. There was a brief moment in 2000 when even I was just about taken in by it. It is easy to see the political arena as being filled with cynical, self-interested, power-hungry, thugs. So, when someone projects a clean-cut image we fall for it because we dream it might be true. We do it for the same reasons we fall in love: it makes us feel good.

But the problem with this practice is that if the person in question is as innocent and wide-eyed as we like to imagine, then it is a good bet they are being manipulated from behind the scenes. One friend suggested in 2001 that Dubya was the puppet of choice because the hole in the back was big and accomodating. This explains the protest "I'm the decider. I decide:" in Bushspeak means "Hey, I thought I was the decider." And that really sounds like the protest of a very young child when his toy is being taken away and he is sent to bed.

It would be a mistake to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as children. They don't believe any of the stuff that Dubya is supposed to believe in. Their behavior suggests that their only interest is in making Machiavelli look like a saint for lack of creative ways of using up people and discarding them, the Wizard of Oz look like a rank amateur at manipulations from behind the curtain, and Pinky ( the cartoon hero of Pinky and the Brain) look like a character with a lack of ambition despite his constant flow of megalomaniacal plans to rule the world.

According to Kuo, who was once a presidential aide, they have used fundamentalism as a front. They do not believe a word of it, but rather, they laugh at the similicity of fundamentalists. The conclusion we draw is that they court fundamentalists because they are easy to manipulate.

The old testament prophet, Isaiah, and the new testament figure, Christ, both compare religious followers to sheep. There is a remarkable simplicity and innocence to sheep. Fundamentalism seeks to preserve and cultivate that simplicity, not because it serves the sheep very well but because it serves the shepherds. Sheep feel safe and protected. They make no decisions and have no cares. They eat grass and go where they are told, never objecting, rarely straying. And so long as they stick with the flock they live happily. Until it is their turn to produce dinner. It can be a happy enough arrangement so long as the shepherd clearly understands that he has a rather profound responsibility for the well-being of the sheep.

It may sometimes be the case with real shepherds, but it is much more rarely the case for metaphorical ones. And the greater the investment in sheepdogs, the more one can bet that interests between shepherd and sheep are not well aligned. Compliance has started to be an expression of coercion rather than trust. Psychiatrist Salman Aktar also links authoritarianism with compliance. He also suggests fundamentalism turns us into such compliant beings. Instead of sheep, he talks about children.

Fundamentalism [seeks] to offer a world of simplicity, lack of personal responsibility, immortality, purity and simplicity. These are notions of children. This is how two-year-old and three-year-old children think. This is not how a grown-up, adult person thinks. Fundamentalism turns us from adults into children, turns us from individual units of flesh, psyche and spirit, thinking, pulsating, changing, constantly struggling with choices, decisions, tragedies, losses, mishaps, triumphs and victories….Fundamentalism removes us from such war, from such complexity, from personal responsibility, from impurity, from handling looking death right up front in the eyes and then adopting to live in a more responsible manner. Fundamentalism lulls us into a sleep of childhood, a sleep of simplicity but it is worse than childhood because a child is always questioning and attempting to come out of its innocence bit by bit. Fundamentalism is worse than childhood because it takes us backward, not forward. And with fundamentalism comes its twin sister, prejudice, and its evil brother called violence.

Thus we see how fundamentalists can easily be exploited by anyone who wishes to gain an advantage over simple folk. It is for this reason that we need to help fundamentalists and all simple people to become capable of thinking like grown-ups. It is so that people are less likely to be deceived by those who seek to exploit fundamentalists.

For the benefit of religious fundamentalists who resist such an idea, I believe the Biblical passage to consider is Christ's command to be "wise as serpents, but innocent as doves." In other words, do not be decieved like sheep or like children. Think and behave responsibly, like smart and savvy adults; but resist the temptation to manipulate others. Know the tricks, just do not use them. It is to this end that America has an educational system that does not and should not look like the madrassa.

The educational system absolutely must teach students to read and write and do arithmetic. And it must get reasonable competency in these skills by the fourth grade. Then it must spend the next eight years teaching science, geography, history, rhetoric, civics, algebra, geometry, literature, and economics. Students must exit school with a kind of intellectual curiosity to learn more about all these subjects. And they must exit willing to be challenged by new ideas, discuss them intelligently, and adopt new ones that make sense. They must understand that public policy is, by definition, about choosing policies and practices that are inclusive, and make everyone better off, not about using government to grab goodies for oneself.

Ethical thought must be intrinsic to all public debate, and not be a product of religious thought. Rather it must be developed from an understanding of how we all benefit from mutual cooperation and the reasonable expectation of cooperation. This is the foundation of all society. Students must understand that much of what they believe and understand is either some loose approximation of the truth, or is probably wrong in some strict sense. Our best scientific models are approximations. Our worst models are often categorically wrong - they relate the wrong categories.

Our religious beliefs cobble together millenia of superstition mythology, and mistaken notions, but sometimes they help us live as social beings. We must learn from religion's strengths without adopting its weaknesses.. We need to be open to new ideas while preserving practices that actually work. We need to be able to take ideas apart into their components and reassemble them, like a good mechanic does an engine. In this way we can examine and replace defective components and get ideas with real horsepower. We need to listen to each other, be frank and open. We need to validate each others' strengths in order that we might hear each other when it comes time to criticize each others' weaknesses.

Ultimately, Grown-Up politics is about taking responsibility. It is about thinking carefully and inclusively, it is about taking decisive action, it is about acting openly and publically under the light of full disclosure, it is about evaluating progress realistically and openly, it is about correcting the course of action when things are not working, and it is about accepting failure when policies fail. It requires fairness, sobriety, intelligence, judgement, and the willingness to act openly and claim responsibility for the consequences of action.

Sartre argued over and over, that grown-up people take responsibility for their actions. He did this in the ninteen fifties and sixties in France after the Nazis had swept into France, occupied it, and were driven out. Sartre, perhaps consciously or perhaps unconsciously, saw the behavior of the Nazis as an exploitation of a culture of victimization. It was the lower-middle class that swept Hitler into power on a wave of hatred for "the other," "the stranger," "the outsider." It was this group that felt anger at the French demands for reparations and felt betrayed by the German intelligentsia who had agreed to them.

Hitler was glad to exploit this fear and hatred of the outsider. A remarkable amount of his rhetoric was about that. In fact, a person who speaks not a word of German can look at films of Hitler speaking before crowds and see that he is using the body language of hatred to draw in his audience. Exploitation of hatred of the outsider has been considered less of a problem in the US than it was in Germany in Hitler's day. But the danger of the same thing happening today is not altogether absent. Americans love to hate immigrants. And we are being taught to hate the Muslim world. There is even an undercurrent of hatred for Jews.

The reason ought to be obvious; it is not because such hatred is useful to Americans as a group, but because it is useful to those who would exploit that hatred for gain. The shepherd trains the sheepdog, is happy to use him as a tool, and has no fear of his bite, but to the sheep he is always a hypothetical menace.

Racial hatred is the sheepdog to fundamentalist sheep.

What other groups might prove good candidates as targets for racial hatred? We cannot help but wonder - if the real estate bubble really bursts and the dollar collapses and home values amount to pennies on the dollar of the consumer debt that they once secured - would Americans begin to hate the people who hold their mortgages and lay claim to their very homes? After all, it is beginning to look like these people will be Chinese. It will be tempting. But ultimately who would be responsible? The Chinese made the stuff we bought at Wal-Mart and sold it to us on credit, we bought it on credit, knowing we would have to pay one day. But our jobs were shipped overseas by men who preached the religion of the free market, slashed taxes, and sold T-bills to the Chinese until they had their fill. When public debt grew too risky, the Chinese bought mortgage-backed securities. The free-traders we voted into power sold our jobs overseas, mortgaged our nation, and sold the mortgaes on our homes abroad.

So, whom should we blame, then? And what would we do? Who would be the outsider? Who would be the stranger? Who would be the victim? Would we behave as children? Maybe none of this could happen; but the questions remain the same. In such a scenario we would have become the victims of our own greed and ignorance. We would have two choices then. One is to grow up and accept responsibility for our actions. Or rather, our children - who will have derived no great benefit from our profligacy - will have to do this.

The other choice will be to deny responsibility and behave like the children we have become. We will scream and we will shout. We will kick and bite and protest. We will shoot people. And in the end we will lose everything: our houses, our cars, our electonic toys, and our political freedom. It is sobering when one chooses to act like an adult. Responsibility means making difficult choices. It means trying to act fairly and reasonably. It means behaving as if the other guy exists and is as if he is as important as we are. It means letting go of illegitimate claims on things that others own. It means acknowledging the rights of others. It means telling the truth. It means admitting mistakes. It means being able to see things from someone else's point of view. These are not easy things to do. But this is the requirement of all free men. If democracy is to hold any meaning or be of any use we must all begin acting like adults. We have reached the age of responsibility.