Quick Thoughts on the 9/12 Protests
— I trust Matt Welch to file an accurate and fair-minded report. His take is here.
— James Poniewozik gets this right:
…as someone who happened to be in New York City eight years ago today, the implicit premise of the 9-12 Project—that those who aren’t on Beck’s side must have somehow “forgotten” 9/11 and its aftermath—ticks me off royally and personally.
I was at home in Brooklyn, holding my six-week-old baby on the couch, when I saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center on TV. I watched the smoking pit of the ruins from the roof of my apartment building as bits of memo paper and ash drifted on the winds to my neighborhood. I was there on 9/11, and 9/12, and 9/13. You’ll excuse me if I don’t feel warm nostalgia for the lingering smell of burnt airplane fuel, and metal, and bodies.
Nor, of course, does Beck. What he purportedly wants is to bring back our feeling of “unity.” I remember that feeling. After 9/11, I remember hardcore liberal New Yorkers rallying behind Rudy Giuliani, saying nice things about President Bush when he spoke at the WTC ruins. I remember thousands of American flags being flown out of apartment and brownstone windows, not as political statements or in the you-better-prove-your-patriotism spirit of flag pins and Freedom Fries, but simply because we felt we Americans were all in this together.
So since March, what has Glenn Beck been doing to re-establish that sense of nonpartisan national brotherhood? Calling President Obama a racist, declaring that the government was bringing fascism upon us, asking his fans to dig up dirt on political figures he doesn’t like, and predicting civil-war-like uprisings. Because that’s how you bring people together.
This is as good a place as ever to quote Mickey Kaus’ Twitter feed: “My friends on the Right don’t like Glenn Beck either. In private, they say he’s a careerist phony.” In public they apparently “respect the grassroots”.
— The protests aren’t — as I write this at 3:30 am PDT — anywhere on the front page of the New York Times Web site. Shouldn’t they be?
— Dan Riehl makes the rookie mistakes of trusting an obviously inflated attendance figure, and regurgitating this tidbit: “I heard multiple reports from Cops on the ground just covering the deal who said they had never seen a crowd this large. One claimed to have been working DC for twenty years.” Hmmm, can anyone else name an event that drew larger crowds to DC during the last twenty years that easily falsifies the information offered by that anonymous source? Journalism 101: cherry-picking the highest attendance number offered by a foreign newspaper and uncritically passing along the anecdotal impressions of a single cop are great ways to credulously present inaccurate information to your audience. Isn’t this the kind of thing that savvy bloggers criticize the MSM for doing?
What do I think about the protests?
1) I’m averse to big protest events generally — too much time spent on a liberal arts college campus where I scoffed at the silly activists. Jim Crow, the British occupation of India, and the Vietnam War — those called for unusual public displays of opposition. Ill-defined concerns about the size of government? I’m with you, but persuading others by protest rally requires an answer for “why now” that I don’t think you’ve got… so maybe more usual methods of opposition would work better?
2) Or maybe some different unusual means of opposing the Obama domestic agenda would prove more effective? I’m going to think hard about how best to oppose those things with which I disagree. (Note to David All: Twitter is not the answer!)
3) If you’re going to have a big protest — or even a mid-sized family reunion — you can’t help it that some loonies are gonna show up. This is part of why I am averse to big protests, but it’s also why no one should judge the average protester by the looniest signs that surrounded them.
Okay, I’m gonna go read some Dos Passos now.
“persuading others by protest rally requires an answer…”
I think a key function of some protests, including the tea party protests, is not to persuade people to change their minds about policy, but to persuade the people who already agree that they are not alone – to give them courage.
As for “why now”? Two reasons. One, it’s a last straw thing. Two, it’s the tremendous ballooning of the problem. I believe it is no coincidence that the Chinese are making a lot of noises lately about their loss of confidence in the dollar. These two things – the Chinese loss of confidence and the tea party demonstrations – have a common cause in the economic misbehavior of the US government.
I know some people like to say, “it’s because it’s Obama”. I don’t think so. There was a lot of protest in the fall, to the bailout that Bush and Pelosi were both pushing. If they did not immediately take to the streets, that is surely the sort of thing that takes some time to develop.
— Constant · Sep 13, 12:08 PM · #
Conor I had a horrifying epiphany while Manzi’s post on libertarianism as means….which is a a pretty dumb idea IMHO, because we already have pockets of Distributed Jesusland in this country to observe…..and they are not attractive. Yearning For Zion and the polyg communities in southern Colorado are examples.
Localized chattel slavery of women and children is never pretty.
My revelation is that small government worked in America as long the population was 99% white protestant.
Because local religious welfare providers and locally elected governments were dealing with a homogeneous population. This worked fine as long as the America electorate was 99% white protestant.
The trouble began when women and blacks became citizens….women got some indirect benefits and representation because they were part of white protestant families….blacks didn’t.
So the federal government was forced to intervene to provide civil rights and welfare to non-white citizens.
So Hayek was wrong….the welfare state doesn’t lead to socialism…it leads to the death of the religious local welfare providers…..to Great Britain style secularization, where the churches are dying.
White is about 75% of the electorate now, and not all protestant and not all conservative. A third of whites vote democratice, and that third is primarily culture producers, academe, youth, the scientist community, etc.
The reason the Teabagger Demographic is so furious is that they had Obama forced on them basically because Bush was such a horrorshow.
A difference of 192 ec votes is huge…they are attempting to make up in volume what they lack in numerical representation.
TNC cites this piece on South Carolina ….the state didn’t approve woman’s suffrage until 1970.
Joe Wilson’s outburst was also influenced by rising tensions in the local job market with hispanics in his district I think.
The GOP is cognizant that it needs hispanic votes because of the demographic timer on non-hispanic caucs.
The leadership is bitter and frustrated that it cannot go after those delicious hispanic votes (conservative, religious, family-orientated) because their base will rage-log on them at the first sign of hispandering.
Talk about riding the tiger…..immigration reform is next on Obama’s agenda.
After xmas healthcare will be just a memory.
It will be entertaining to see how Beck and Rush deal with hispanics.
Rush has some bad audio history…I haven’t relly heard Beck say anything…because I avoid hearing him…does he have an illegal immigrant posture?
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 12:52 PM · #
The lack of numerical representation is why they are desperate to exaggerate turnout, and push the bi-partisan theme.
Those crowds are pretty uniformly white and older, with a few token minorities and youth prominently featured.
It is just another force-amplification strategy, like yelling REALLY LOUD at town halls.
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 01:20 PM · #
I trust Matt Welch to file an accurate and fair-minded report.
Then you’re far less discriminating then I’ve been giving you credit for. Seriously. Welch is a flagrant anti-leftist, yet another bohemian conservative constantly looking for virtue in exactly the people he shouldn’t be. And that comes shining through in that ridiculous dispatch. I have looked at literally hundreds of pictures from these events. Is it really possible that Welch didn’t see a single one of the Confederate flags? Of the dozens and hundreds of pieces of “Obama is a Muslim” signage and apparel? Where are his condemnation of the Birthers who poured out into the thousands? Why doesn’t he take these people to task for professing fiscal conservatism yet failing to protest a man who failed fiscal conservatism in every possible manner? Why doesn’t he ask why there isn’t a shred of a coherent message to these protests, beyond “We hate Obama”? Where is an honest reflection about the rampant nativism and cultural warfare these protests represent for many of the participants? Should I look through Welch’s archives and find fawning tributes to the anti-war protesters from several years ago? Or should I, perhaps, understand that Matt Welch is not and has never been the kind of person to write an “accurate and fair-minded report”? Maybe if you counted up Welch’s various posts and writings and tried to assign some sort of percentage figure to which criticize the right and which criticize the left, you’d find yourself a little less credulous.
— Freddie · Sep 13, 01:47 PM · #
Try this Conor.
I was raised to be a republican, guns, dogs and United States Pony Club.
My ancestors were robber barons and cattle barons.
Now I’m just ashamed that I ever believed that bullshytt.
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 02:18 PM · #
“My revelation is that small government worked in America as long the population was 99% white protestant. Because local religious welfare providers and locally elected governments were dealing with a homogeneous population. This worked fine as long as the America electorate was 99% white protestant. The trouble began when women and blacks became citizens….women got some indirect benefits and representation because they were part of white protestant families….blacks didn’t. So the federal government was forced to intervene to provide civil rights and welfare to non-white citizens.”
And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?
And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.When I get nervous I get scared.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 13, 03:26 PM · #
Niiice Tony.
Here’s my dark epiphany.
The welfare state doesn’t lead to socialism…..it just kills off the local welfare providers that can’t compete (historically in rural America and GB, local community churches).
Government welfare doesn’t require the investment of church attendance or conforming to a belief system about social behavior.
Citizenship makes it free, or at least much cheaper.
Think of the welfare state as a kind of public option for religion.
;)
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 04:00 PM · #
Mako, mebbe try Matthew 5:39. Not forever, but like for a week or so. Seriously.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 13, 04:08 PM · #
Matt Welch isn’t at all crazy or vicious, but pardon me if I don’t find libertarians exactly reliable when they try to argue that their comically marginal political sect is catching on.
In this case, this leads to Welch making two mistakes: (1) fudging the size of the crowd (“six figures” could be 100,000, just over the size of the media estimates, or just short of a million), and (2) not noticing how shallow the putative libertarianism is (mainly about guns and taxes), nor the ample evidence of paranoia and xenophobia.
— kth · Sep 13, 04:19 PM · #
Tony, Tony, Tony….the teabagger demographic brought this on their bigselves….if they had just lissened to White Jesus there and took care of their black neighbors like they took care of themselves…..why, this never would have happened!
Now I think we are headed for Big Time secualrization and a Permanent Disenfranchisement of Big White Xian Bwana.
And I also think Ezekiel said Glenn Beck is going to hell.
;)
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 04:22 PM · #
You know Conor….perhaps you and the rest of the Bourgie Conservatives could build some good will among us upper right tailers if you would actually refute disengenuous people like Welch.
Nate Silver is a good start.
— matoko_chan · Sep 13, 04:45 PM · #
Please don’t think all liberals are hiding their social-awkwardness, inferiority, and ignorance behind a badly made facade of smug self-satisfaction, faux-elitism, and arrogant racism based on their incomplete self-educations due to malleable paranoia and deep resentment of their abusive fathers and school bullies, just because of Matoko the Bigot.
And I’ll promise not to judge every conservative as a Beck-brainwashed mongoloid who overcompensates with bizarre and inappropriate slogans and signs whenever duly elected representatives actually try to modestly improve the quality of life for them and their neighbors due to an unfounded sense of dread and manipulated panic over the inevitable, normal progress of an industrialized Christian democracy toward the proper leveling and just collectivization of fortunes, just because of the ‘tea-partiers.’
Deal?
— Montay · Sep 14, 12:34 AM · #
Or maybe some different unusual means of opposing the Obama domestic agenda would prove more effective? I’m going to think hard about how best to oppose those things with which I disagree
How’s about if you find some different unusual means to oppose the Obama agenda, and you let those 9/12 protestors use the means they used. Then everybody will be happy. Deal?
— The Reticulator · Sep 14, 03:05 AM · #
Oh, I’m not a racist, Montay….I’m an IQist.
And Reticulator knows I’m right too…..he said the same thing in a comment.
Hayek and Burke are just cover for the low information racism of the conservative base.
And the South will never rise again…..the welfare state is the stake in its foul rotten heart.
— matoko_chan · Sep 14, 03:31 AM · #
The Matt Welch who wrote McCain: Myth of a Maverick is a flagrant anti-leftist?
“Maybe if you counted up Welch’s various posts and writings and tried to assign some sort of percentage figure to which criticize the right and which criticize the left, you’d find yourself a little less credulous.”
Could I count the books he’s written? Hrm. Amazon says it’s just the one.
http://www.amazon.com/Matt-Welch/e/B001I9ONCI/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
He’s also the guy who wrote The Pro-War Libertarian Quiz:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/34149.html
He’s also a guy who voted for, in this order, Nader, Kerry, Barr (and his justification for Barr was that he lived in DC which will go 90% for Obama anyway, might as well throw the Libertarian a bone).
He’s a hair more complex than I’ve seen him painted here.
— Jaybird · Sep 14, 03:23 PM · #
I can only say after having read the post and then the responses. “What the hell is going on?”. If Conor can throw out some reasonable issues, agree that Beck’s association with the Washington protests taints them but at the same time say there’s something there, then that seems worthy of some introspection and conversation.
Instead we get the same old Matako crap that is, ironically, deeply biased and prejudiced and (what’s the word)…. Oh yeah, racist. This is most decidedly not “The American Scene” I want to be a part of. Mr. Chan, please follow your psychiatrist’s advise and take your meds.
— C3 · Sep 14, 07:55 PM · #
I’m a grrl, that once was a conservative.
Instead of slinging adhoms, refute my argument, please.
I SAID the federal intrusion into states rights began when blacks became national citizens but not local citizens in say, the southern states.
The growth of the welfare state is now organic…..and I predict unstoppable.
I don’t think unchecked growth of government is a good idea…..but I am merely pointing out the environmental trigger that instantiated it.
— matoko_chan · Sep 14, 08:08 PM · #
Instead of slinging adhoms
Now, that is some great unintended irony, Matoko, lawls!
I don’t think anyone here is required to refute your argument, because you haven’t made one. What you’ve made is a statement. An argument usually includes some definition of terms and supporting evidence. In your case, for instance, you should define what you mean by “national citizens” and “local citizens” and you should provide some sense of your historical understanding of the federal intrusion into states’ rights (what events precipitated this intrusion, how did the intrusion manifest itself, why do you date the “federal intrusion” from that period rather than some earlier/later period, etc.) You might also want to consider the ideas that seem implicit in your inchoate “argument” — for instance, the notion that protections for the oppressed/minorities are inextricably intertwined with federal “welfare state” intrusions. I suggest you read more about the history of “welfare state” progressivism in the South (particularly in the early twentieth century) before you leap to that conclusion.
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