Monk

[Egypt’s liberals] could organize protests and demonstrations, and act with often reckless courage to challenge the old regime. But they could not go on to rally around a single candidate, and then engage in the slow, dull, grinding work of organizing a political party that could contest an election, district by district. Political parties exist in order to institutionalize political participation; those who were best at organizing, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have walked off with most of the marbles. Facebook, it seems, produces a sharp, blinding flash in the pan, but it does not generate enough heat over an extended period to warm the house.

-- Francis Fukuyama

This is a good observation about political activism and effective politics in general. One thinks, for instance, of the failure of the Occupy movement in this country in comparison to the success of the Tea Party. It is not enough to draw a crowd and the cameras. It may be a heady experience, but it takes a good deal more to affect electoral outcomes and get laws passed.

If you thought American politics was corrupted by big money before, just wait and see what will happen now that the Supreme Court has untied the corporate money bags to flow into our elections. God, what is America going to look like in another twenty years...

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It will be an uphill fight. Republican interest groups are outspending Ms. McCaskill and other Missouri Democrats by a 7-to-1 ratio; Ms. McCaskill herself is being outspent by 3 to 1. Though she has raised nearly $10 million, the amount could be dwarfed by the unlimited money at the disposal of Republican-oriented groups.

Once again, as in 2010, Congressional races will be the elections most affected by unregulated slush-fund money. Though “super PACs” and secretive independent groups will be spending hundreds of millions on the presidential race, it is at the Congressional level where big money can have the most impact. Many candidates, particularly in smaller states, cannot compete with independent groups, allowing individual wealthy donors to have an oversized influence on the future of the House or the Senate.

Already, conservative interest groups have spent more than $17 million on televised attack ads in state and local races, and Jeremy Peters of The Times recently reported that they plan to spend more than $100 million by November. Total outside spending on Congressional races this year is likely to exceed the $300 million level of 2010.

-- New York Times editorial

Frank Fukuyama is coming out with a new book, "The Origins of Political Order", and Thomas Friedman wrote a column about some of Fukuyama's ideas.

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“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.

I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great country again, no matter who is elected.” We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy. Our deformed political system — with a Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery — is now truly holding us back.

-- Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times

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One does wonder what America will look like at the end of this century. Not that I will ever see it. Which is probably for the better.

A couple of nice paragraphs from Thomas Friedman's column today. About the Middle East uprisings and crackdowns and whether liberal democracy is a real possibility.

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“There is a saying that inside every fat man is a thin man dying to get out,” notes Michael Mandelbaum, the foreign policy expert at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “We also tend to believe that inside every autocracy is a democracy dying to get out, but that might not be true in the Middle East.”

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To be sure, we have to remember how long it took America to build its own liberal political order and what freaks that has made us today. Almost four years ago, we elected a black man, whose name was Barack, whose grandfather was a Muslim, to lead us out of our worst economic crisis in a century. We’re now considering replacing him with a Mormon, and it all seems totally normal. But that normality took more than 200 years and a civil war to develop.

-- Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times

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Syria has been the main story in the headlines these days, as even the Assad regime has been rocked hard by a popular uprising. However, Assad has cracked down with a new level of brutality. Russia has protected Assad in the UN, holding back Western military assistance. This is one regime that everyone would like to see come down, more so than the Mubarak and Ghadaffi regimes, but the outcome is gravely in doubt.

It has been a long, long time since I have read anything by Bill Kristol, and when I saw the headline blurb on a piece about Romney's tenure at Bain, I was sure it was going to be another one of those "Rah, rah, go, Capitalism, go!" hurrahs, but Kristol really surprised me. Capitalism must serve the common good? Now that is music coming from the Republican side, and from a true-blue Republican at that.

When one reads this piece alongside Brooks's column yesterday, making a liberal case for serious government reform, one can feel the stirring of optimism in the blood.

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Glenn Greenwald, who I take it is a fairly mainstream journalist, has written a scorching piece on America's newfound bloodthirstiness, a lamentable trend that has shown itself more clearly since the assiassination of Osama bin Laden. Killing bad guys is the one area where America can still demonstrate its superpowerfulness. Greenwald notes that what is unfortunate is that, with the liberal Democrat Obama in the White House now, this macabre glee is now bipartisan and is therefore deeper cast in the American character, arguably.

It is a darker turning. It is not the best we can be. On the other hand, it would be a worse thing, if the stories were about our frustrations with trying to capture suspected terrorists for trial, while the deaths of American innocents continued to accumulate thanks to terrorism, in which case Obama and the Democrats would definitely lose what power in Washington they have in favor of the Republicans and cowboy right-wingers. When you are in war, I am afraid that supreme virtue becomes a secondary ideal.

What is all the more worrisome, though, is that the War on Terror could go on for years, for decades. Forever? And American life can become much darker yet. One dreads the day when Americans will be picked up off the streets of this country and subjected to torture or even execution on grounds of suspicion. Can that day be far off?


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Ross Douthat begins his Sunday column by reporting on the assault on the Coptic Christians in Egypt, which leads him to the grander question about whether violence has become rarer or more common over time, taking in Steven Pinker's latest book on the subject, “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”. If Pinker is right, Douthat sharply observes, it may be because ethnic and genocidal violece has helped to pave the way, as it may now be doing in Africa and the Middle East.

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Considering all the insecurity we are feeling over our way of life, I am surprised that it has taken this long for me to come across Marx. Even here, it is a good, moderate treatment: no call for arms and to stampede Wall Street more effectively.

Mr. Gray merely notes the prescience of Marx in seeing how capitalism would eventually undermine the middle-class. Gray assumes, probably correctly, that the market and capitalism are likely to remain, but perhaps without a broad middle-class. He does not address a question, though, which comes to me: can democracy survive without a broad-based middle-class? Is it possible that our only real choice for a political system will be between oligarchy and totalitarianism?

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Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.

More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.

But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.

-- John Gray for The BBC

Is the Arab world unready for freedom? A crude stereotype lingers that some people — Arabs, Chinese and Africans — are incompatible with democracy. Many around the world fret that “people power” will likely result in Somalia-style chaos, Iraq-style civil war or Iran-style oppression.

That narrative has been nourished by Westerners and, more sadly, by some Arab, Chinese and African leaders. So with much of the Middle East in an uproar today, let’s tackle a politically incorrect question head-on: Are Arabs too politically immature to handle democracy?

-- Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times

It's a question that has proved more presseing since the pro-democracy conflagration in the Middle East has spread throughout the region, including Libya and Bahrain. As for the potential for realzing a sustained democracy, I recall the dire picture painted in my undergraduate days, that essentially only countries that were under the heel of the British have shown any real timber for such popular government, and I haven't grown more optimistic with age, but then I also feel rather doleful about the democracy we have in the Western world, which seems more like a rich man's toy.

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Krugman has a nice piece about trying to keep untangled the political fictions from reasoned interpretations, when it comes to judging our candidates.

And Americans still do seem to have a thing for the rugged cowboy image. I don't really get it, but I suppose it is our archetype for rugged individualism.

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