The Left's Central Problem
The central problem of the (self-described) decent cosmopolitan left is that America is not, by their standards, a decent cosmopolitan country. The United States is a nation-state. Early on, the United States was a Herrenvolk democracy or ethnocracy dominated by a relatively small slice of the European-origin population. Since then, American democracy has deepened and broadened in many respects, but it remains infused by nationalism and a constitutional regime that is in many respects elitist and anti-majoritarian. As it turns out, the elitist and anti-majoritarian dimensions of the American constitutional state interact with American ethnoracial diversity in a number of interesting and, for the left, vexing ways. (Consider the rather amusing name of the “American Constitution Society,” the left’s answer to the Federalist Society. Originally, the group was to be named after James Madison. Madison, though, was a slaveowner. And besides, many prominent members of the ACS favor radical revisions of the United States Consitution. Some, including Bruce Ackerman, favor a German-style constitution. So perhaps the group ought to have been named the German Constitution Society, thanks to Germany’s more extensive protection of basic rights, its consensual model of worker-management relations, and its embrace of minority-friendly proportional representation.) For example, it shapes and some would say perverts the kind of redistribution that occurs. As Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have argued, it seems that ethnoracial fragmentation cuts against redistribution — taxpayers are reluctant to subsidize members of outgroups, a gut instinct that is easily characterized as racist. But perhaps this impulse is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable. Now, I don’t think this is obviously true, but it’s no less plausible than the other story, namely that the interrelationship between extreme homogeneity and social democracy is an unambiguously good thing.
Which leads me to Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Chris Hayes has written a characteristically smart piece on the hypocrisy of Wright’s critics.
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After three decades of the mainstreaming of dangerous and reactionary viewpoints, though, even the mildest bit of left-wing radicalism is deemed toxic and taboo. So while Ann Coulter can call John Edwards a faggot, Grover Norquist can say he wants to drown the government in the bathtub, and a host of imperialists can foment an illegal and pre-emptive war based on lies, Barack Obama’s pastor isn’t allowed to mention that America has been throughout its history the site and cause of much evil in this world.
This, of course, is a fairly straightforward result of the nationalism of most Americans, and the (mostly correct) view that while America has been been “the site and cause of much evil in this world,” surely we’re not unique or even terribly distinguished in this regard. Mind you, this is more of a sad commentary on the world, but it is true nonetheless. American exceptionalism, our peculiar form of nationalism, often collapses into American solipsism. And Wright’s brand of “mild left-wing radicalism” is just that: surely Wright, as a learned and impressive figure, understands that the evils he describes are present in many societies, and that America has taken the lead in seeking to redress them.
Chris continues,
Ultimately, though, this controversy, like so many in American life, is about race. It’s telling that the issue of Wright’s views have percolated among the right-wing fringes for months, but it was only with the discovery of a video, and the images and sounds of an angry black man decrying racial oppression in the cadences of the black church that the media staged a collective freakout.
Of course, documentary evidence of a white man doing the same would surely have a similar impact. I grew up watching television, and I have a keen appreciation for the power of images. By layering race over this simple and familiar fact, Chris takes a mundane fact, that people respond to images more readily than text, and makes it seem alarming and suspect.
Chris ends with the following:
And if, of all things, it is his pastor’s heated denunciation of American injustice that undoes the candidacy of an African American with a legitimate chance at the White House, any conscientious observer could be forgiven for thinking: God damn America indeed.
The trouble is, for the decent cosmopolitan left, that only a small minority of Americans are conscientious by their admirably high standards. There’s a profound mismatch between the country their values and the frankly nationalist values of the country they seek to govern and remake in their own image. Chris touches on this difficulty here:
So now, after years of Democrats being hectored for being insufficiently pious we have candidate who speaks openly and genuinely about his Christian faith, and what happens? The man whom the candidate says brought him to Jesus is transformed into a political liability. The entire episode has a familiar Lucy-and-the-football quality to it. Four years ago Democrats, having been told they had to prove their patriotism and military bona fides, nominated a war hero, and what happened? He was promptly attacked precisely for his record of military service. It’s a rigged game.
And of course this seems like a rigged game when these efforts are pursued in such a calculating manner. (I can’t think of a more delicate way to put this.) Authenticity matters to voters, and Kerry was a contradictory figure in many respects. I have no doubt that Senator Obama is as devout as he claims, yet he’s also reluctant to wear an American flag lapel pin. Though he’s embraced a devotional, very public brand of religiosity, it could be that his thoughts on faith are decidedly complex, and not well suited to being enthusiastically discussed on the campaign trail. That is perfectly respectable, and some would say to his credit. Unfortunately, such a stance represents a liability in a confessional culture, a point that Senator Clinton has made in another context.
Finally, Chris begins his essay with an interesting notion.
Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. And as it stands despite protests and lawsuits and bills passed in the state legislatures, and organizing and marching and lobbying and petitioning, abortion in America remains legal and each year over 1 million innocent children are murdered. Yet America continues to stand idly by and allow this mass slaughter. If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation’s continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG.
Does anyone remember the notorious First Things symposium on the justness of the American regime in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade? And the alarmed reaction of ardently “pro-American” conservatives, several of whom left the board of First Things and condemned some of the symposiasts. Then there was the Falwell incident. It could be that Wright isn’t getting a fair shake. But devout anti-Americans of the right, including friends of mine, are profoundly alienated from America’s nationalist mainstream. Read Ross for more insight on this subject.
The lovely Charles Bennett, professor of quantum information theory, defines information as “distinguishability.” I think of this every time I read about America being “the site and cause of much evil in this world”; it is literally a statement devoid of information.
— JA · Mar 18, 12:34 AM · #
I think of this every time I read about America being “the site and cause of much evil in this world”; it is literally a statement devoid of information.
As is this comment of yours, for it tells us nothing about your particular objections to that description of America. Do you believe that America causes much evil in this world? If you think the answer is self-evidently yes, I’m afraid you’re mistaken; there are quite a few people in this country who would deny precisely that, and their existence, I would suggest, means that the statement indeed has quite a bit of “distinguishability”. Certainly, it distinguishes them from me. But maybe you mean that the statement has no meaning because it’s no more true of the United States than of any other country? Again, that requires those trivial old argumentative tactics like support, justification, and argument. There are quite a few people in the world who would argue that the United States causes on balance less than it’s fair share of evil; and quite a few who would argue precisely the opposite. The existence of both, I suggest, implies that the statement isn’t nearly so information-free as you suppose. Certainly, I’d say, that as a response to a thoughtful and probing post like this one, yours doesn’t pass the distinguishability test as well as the statement you imagine you’re critiquing.
But, of course, your comment intended to impart no information; it meant only to score cheap points in the great game of Blog Comments, where any statement— even one as self-erasing as yours— is judged only by the most cursory and ephemeral notions of “wit”, snark, logic, and intellectual victory, before it’s allowed to waft out into the air, already forgotten.
— Freddie · Mar 18, 01:50 AM · #
Ouch, Freddie! That was a smack down.
You are certainly right that I wasn’t trying to add anything important to the conversation; I was just transitioning from Reihan’s point about America not being that “distinguishable” (in the way it causes evil in the world) to the broader point that indistinguishability is equivalent to “zero information”. My bad.
— JA · Mar 18, 02:22 AM · #
But now that I’m here…
Let’s say that all the countries in the world were actually coins buried in the sand, and let’s say that Freddie is an old man walking the beach at 6 in the morning looking for coins with a metal detector. Except instead of a metal detector, it’s actually a worthiness detector, used to detect coins made out of good and evil.
Now let’s say that Freddie winds his dial too far to the left, where the only signals his detector will register are from those coins made exclusively out of good. All the other coins, even those which have a high worthiness level but are not perfect, slip beneath his radar. And let us suppose that we know beforehand that no purely good coins are buried in the sand. What has Freddie done?
Now let’s suppose that Freddie flips his dial to the right so he can find coins that have even a tiny bit of evil in them. What happens now?
In the former Freddie ends up with zero coins, and in the latter he ends up with all of them. In neither scenario is he able to distinguish one coin from the other.
Thus, at most he’s picked up information about the set of coins — i.e., no coin buried in the sand is perfect. But he’s discovered absolutely nothing about how the coins relate to each other, which, for our purposes, is the whole friggin’ point.
— JA · Mar 18, 02:49 AM · #
“But he’s discovered absolutely nothing about how the coins relate to each other, which, for our purposes, is the whole friggin’ point.”
Exactly wrong. If America is “the site and cause of much evil in this world,” then we can conclude by ethical inference that America and/or American’s have a huge positive moral obligation to ameliorate that evil. Assessing the moral standing of America isn’t just to score points vis a vis other countries.
— salacious · Mar 18, 03:14 AM · #
“Of course, documentary evidence of a white man doing the same would surely have a similar impact. I grew up watching television, and I have a keen appreciation for the power of images. By layering race over this simple and familiar fact, Chris takes a mundane fact, that people respond to images more readily than text, and makes it seem alarming and suspect.”
This is both true and incomplete. The angry speech of a black man denouncing america is going to elicit fear and offense in certain segments of the white population that the angry speech of a white man denouncing america would not. As we are finding out, we are still not beyond race in this country.
What is most offensive to me is the posture of outrage assumed by Obama’s politcal opponents. There’s nothing like politics to encourage misanthropy.
— cw · Mar 18, 03:21 AM · #
But what if our evil is caused by us trying to ameliorate a greater evil or enacting a good that was better than the evil we had to do to do it? Wouldn’t that make our evil good?
Or, to quote Satan’s smash hit “Up There”:
Is there no reason to the rhyme?
Without evil there could be no good
So it must be good to be evil sometimes!
I don’t think Freddie’s going to like this post.
— JA · Mar 18, 03:35 AM · #
“But perhaps this impulse [ethnoracial fragmentation] is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable.”
Jim Crow as pareto-optimal corrections to defects in democratic allocations? Nice.
Comments: I think we are missing the points trying to figure how how exactly good/evil (coins?) America is (correct answer: 37 evil, 54 good). Wright’s points, in the larger context, is that (a) America’s slavery relationship with African-Americans has been evil (pretty singularly evil, too) and (b) it is still ongoing. I’m going to assume that if there wasn’t the prison industrial-complex, apartheid education, radical segregation, inequality, AIDS epidemics and other still ongoing, Wright would probably sound like Rick Warren.
As Erza pointed out, Supreme Court nominees were being vetted by Falwell in 2005. Hardly a sideline freakshow.
— Mike · Mar 18, 06:45 AM · #
Excellent post. The first paragraph, especially, should be printed out and framed somewhere.
I wonder, however, how much irony should be read into it. For a “characteristically smart piece”, the passages you quote seem to conflate many things, and I’m sure you’re well aware of that.
A small nitpick for example: it absolutely does not follow that being “pro-life” means believing that “each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child.” After all, it doesn’t take a law degree to understand the difference between homicide and murder, which requires a criminal intent on top of the homicidal act itself, and I have no doubt that many pro-lifers, no matter how uneducated and brainwashed Mr. Hayes probably assumes them to be, can make the distinction.
Aaaanyhooo.
The phrase that got me ticking in that post was “[S]urely Wright, as a learned and impressive figure, understands that the evils he describes are present in many societies, and that America has taken the lead in seeking to redress them.” Do you actually believe that or are you writing this with your tongue planted firmly in your cheek, highlighting the absurdity of Rev. Wright’s views by ironically assuming premises that would render them sound?
In fact, on a broader note, I’ve been shocked to see how the left blogosphere has rallied to defend Rev. Wright’s outlandish-to-delusional statements, or rather not defending his actual remarks, but erecting around them a barrier of ad hominem responses. This is shocking because when something so extreme comes from the right, the response of the left blogosphere to the (house-broken) conservatives is “SURELY, you can’t believe THAT, you HAVE to distance yourself, after all it will only strenghten your intellectual positions to disassociate them from right-wing kooks” — and the right-wing bloggers oblige, as well they should, because it does strenghten our standing to keep kooks at arm’s length.
However, shouldn’t there be some symmetry there? Shouldn’t lefty bloggers distance themselves from Rev. Wright’s more outlandish remarks (while possibly lauding his certainly impressive history of religious service), precisely because they are stronger without them? And shouldn’t righty bloggers expect that of them? SURELY Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes et al. can’t seriously believe that the U.S. government invited 9/11, or that the War on Drugs (regardless of its failings) is purposefully designed as an instrument of racial discrimination and dominance, or that American society is run, cabal-style, by a gang of rich, racist white men, or the few other ridiculous things that Rev. Wright has said over his long and distinguished career? And yet here we are. It’s kinda sad.
— PEG · Mar 18, 09:51 AM · #
As a moderate, leaning left, I think that America has been the most benign great power in world history, and has done a solid job addressing internal injustices and problems.
<i>The central problem of the (self-described) decent cosmopolitan left is that America is not, by their standards, a decent cosmopolitan country.</i>
Oh, pish posh. Everyone would, by inclination, rather hear nice things than criticism about our sect/country/family etc. Just ask Jesus.
The central problem of the left is that the right has such a well-financed, sprawling, effective effort to portray suggested solutions to problems and criticism of American military misadventures as “poor-mouthing America.”
Just look at how few Iraq invasion opponents appeared in the MSM in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. I supported it (and I was wrong at the time, and it’s my own fault) in part because it seemed like the only reasonable view in town. Well, why was that?
— Elvis Elvisberg · Mar 18, 02:28 PM · #
what work is ‘cosmopolitan’ doing in this post? Does the cosmopolitan right have the same central problem? Is there a cosmopolitan right? Wright, of course, is no cosmopolitan, is he? Is being a ‘nation-state’ in tension with cosmopolitanism? (I don’t think so: you can’t spell internationalism without nationalism)
— matt · Mar 18, 05:38 PM · #
Now let’s suppose that Freddie flips his dial to the right so he can find coins that have even a tiny bit of evil in them. What happens now?
Well, let’s suppose he flips in in the middle, where only coins that have much evil in them are registered. This would yield the most information.
— Consumatopia · Mar 19, 03:58 AM · #
And of course this seems like a rigged game when these efforts are pursued in such a calculating manner.
There’s a difference between the calculating manner of the candidate himself and that of the party and liberals seeking a candidate acceptable in general elections. The candidate needs to be sincere. The party need not be sincere—the whole point of compromise is that you propose something you don’t like or care about to get something you do like.
The trouble is, for the decent cosmopolitan left, that only a small minority of Americans are conscientious by their admirably high standards.
Only a small minority of human beings could live up to the standards implied by the Sermon on the Mount. That fact might represent “trouble” for Christianity, but it hardly represents a defect of Christianity.
and that America has taken the lead in seeking to redress them.
Ludicrously false. America is far behind in per capita foreign aid. We’re tops in military expenditures, but those have tended to cause more evil than good.
— Consumatopia · Mar 19, 04:15 AM · #
Consumatopia:
Just a quibble with your last point here: I’m not sure how you mean “far behind in per capita foreign aid”. Certainly we, like almost every rich country in the world, are far behind Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The rankings, in cents per capita according to the Carnegie endowment for International Peace, are below. #s are found at www.infoplease.com and correspond to 2002, with government and private giving combined. There are two distribution clusters, one with four nations up around 65-70, and another with everyone else down around 20-25. The U.S. comes in at 18. It’s not clear to me, of course, that ‘per capita foreign aid’ is the measure of utility, but just for the sake of argument:
Greece 7.1
New Zealand 9
Portugal 9.1
Italy 11.2
Spain 12
Australia 17
United States 18
Canada 19
Austria 20
Japan 20.4
Germany 21
Finland 25
United Kingdom 25
France 26
Belgium 30
Ireland 34
Switzerland 42
Netherlands 61
Sweden 62
Denmark 65
Norway 126
In terms of purely personal giving, which I would think is more relatable to the number of people in a country meeting standards of conscientiousness, the U.S. does somewhat better, ranking fourth out of the above 21 countries behind Ireland, Switzerland, and Norway. Norway is the outlier in both case. Freakin’ freaks.
Also, it may be that the redress Mr. Salam was referring to was not the U.S. fixing other people’s problems, but our own. Arguable, but not ‘ludicrously’ false.
— Seb · Mar 20, 07:09 PM · #
Yes, as I said, obviously, we do not have the lead here—though, clearly, nobody’s giving very much.
In terms of purely personal giving, which I would think is more relatable to the number of people in a country meeting standards of conscientiousness
But we’re not talking about individuals—Reihan said “America” as a singular noun, which suggests that we as an entire country, including government, are taking the lead, and it looks like a bunch of countries are in fact leading us. And I’m not just being anal here—some concept of America as a singular entity that should proud or ashamed for accomplishments and sins within our collective past seems to be a core assumption of the entire argument over “the left’s central problem”. I mean, if you want to be judged as nationless individuals, then the cosmopolitans have already won, no?
Now, perhaps Mr. Salam was, indeed, referring to us fixing our own problems. That would be odd, since he was addressing Reverend Wright’s claim that America is “the site and cause of much evil in this world”.
— Consumatopia · Mar 21, 01:03 AM · #