The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

by David Sessions

07/23/10

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The Essay That's Inflaming the Right

Earlier this week, Rush Limbaugh devoted a significant chunk of his show to a sprawling essay by Angelo Codevilla in The American Spectator arguing that a vast American “ruling class” runs the country and shuts out dissenting views on every major issue. It circles the wagons around its liberal self, perpetuating its own ideas and protecting members of the club from competition on merit and a true marketplace of ideas.

A brief excerpt:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

This is pretty innocuous stuff, but it comes near the beginning. If you read on, you discover that this Progressive ruling class wants to reorder the family, ruin businesses and social institutions it dislikes, and drive God out of public life, among other crimes against American values.

The tragedy of Codevilla’s essay is that it takes serious, legitimate grievances with our broken political system and turns them into culture war red meat. It spins elaborate, conspiratorial fantasies about the malicious motives of this “ruling class,” and then tries to pin them all on “progressives.” We don’t get anything close to a serious accounting of the failures of institutions ranging from government agencies to Wall Street to Congress. We only get that it’s all a big plot, and if you dig deep enough you’ll find liberals at the bottom of it—exactly what people like Rush Limbaugh and his listeners want to hear.

Magazines on the right should be deeply exploring the discontent of the “country class,” as Codevilla dubs it, and trying to determine how best to address those problems in a modern republic. But instead, this piece goes the route of the Tea Party: it lays the blame on fictitious bogeymen and allows the establishment to dismiss its grievances on the cheap.

by David Sessions

05/31/10

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Déjà Vu: A Very Brief History of Pension Reform in France

As European debt makes headlines around the world, the euro remains in free fall and E.U. leaders feel the pressure to deal with deficits at home, the government of French president Nicolas Sarkozy is working to put the country’s pension system back in the black while avoiding popular revolt.

France has received less scrutiny than other European nations facing catastrophic debt, but its fiscal picture is only a bit better than places like Greece, Spain, and Ireland. Like other European nations, French public finances were hit hard by the Wall Street meltdown. The country’s budget deficit will reach 8 percent of GDP this year, and its public debt is at 84 percent of GDP. According to The Economist, the European Commission predicts that France’s debt could be up to 95 percent of GDP by 2020.

The famously generous French pension system, which allows workers to retire at age 60 on a high percentage of their lifetime salary, is in particular trouble. The constant focus of mostly unsuccessful reform attempts over the past two decades, it continues to balloon beyond its means. A council advising the government says the system’s deficit will be €10 billion year, and could multiply to €103 billion ($127 billion) by 2050.

Faltering pension systems are sending chills across Europe, where, as the New York Times reported on May 22, “the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt.” The secure life of social democracy, the pride of Europeans who sniff at the harshness of American capitalism, suddenly seems uncertain, and raises specters of the doomsday predictions that have been haunting France over the past decade.

The social crisis does not, however, have much to do with the reckless spendthrifts in Athens or the gamblers on Wall Street. The main culprit is population. France’s system depends on younger workers to pay for their parents’ generation as they finish out their lives in comfort and stability. For several decades it seemed to work. But now, as longevity increases and population decreases, the ratios of workers to retraités (retirees) is slipping to dangerous levels. By 2050, according to state statistics, France will have only 1.2 workers for each rétraite. In 1960, it was four to one.

Read the full article

by David Sessions

04/22/10

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In Texas, Even Democrats Use Their Guns

In the age of armed Tea Partiers and conservative brick-throwers, you can always count on Texas to turn it all around. This story, from my tiny hometown newspaper, takes the cake:

Freestone County resident running for State Representative for District 8, Democratic candidate Charles E. Morgan, was arrested Thursday April 15, 2010 on a charge of phone harassment; a Class B Misdemeanor.

According to court documentation, on August 23, 2009, Morgan placed a phone call to Anadarko Petroleum Corporation’s emergency phone, wherein Morgan threatened to bring a gun to the residence of Anadarko employee Kelly Hutchinson. The recorded phone conversation was submitted to authorities by Hutchinson, who filed a complaint of phone harassment.

Morgan has been an active representative for Citizens for Environmental Clean-up (CEC), speaking before the County Commissioners Court on several occasions about installing air quality monitors and conducting a noise assessment for the county.

Where else would an armed Democratic candidate threaten a petroleum corporation with a gun over environmental disagreements?

by David Sessions

04/19/10

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On the Wrong Side of the Historical Tea Party

Nothing gets me going quite like Sarah Palin’s idiotic foreign policy pronouncements, so I’m especially glad to see Will Saletan point this out:

Sarah Palin thinks Barack Obama is a wimp. She’s been going around to Tea Party rallies, invoking the spirit of revolutionary Boston and castigating Obama for failing to exalt American power and punish our adversaries. She seems blissfully unaware that the imperial arrogance she’s preaching isn’t how the American founders behaved. It’s how the British behaved, and why they lost. Palin represents everything the original Tea Party was against. …

The British hawks, like Palin, saw self-restraint as wimpy and dangerous. If Britain retreated from the tax policies that had provoked the Tea Party, they warned, the colonists would take this as “Proofs of our Weakness, Disunion and Timidity.” Miller writes, “Few Englishmen believed that the mother country could retain its sovereignty if it retreated in the face of such outrage: it was now said upon every side that the colonists must be chastised into submission.”

by David Sessions

03/11/10

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Another Exceptional Critique of Lowry and Ponnuru

Daniel Larison offers another deconstruction of the infamous essay and the even weaker response:

[T]heir argument is not really with Obama’s belief in American exceptionalism, but something much more basic. They do not much care for his domestic policy, and they have a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with his foreign policy even though they cannot actually prove it. For whatever reason, instead of advancing policy arguments against the administration’s agenda, they have concocted a half-baked theory to make American progressivism and American exceptionalism appear antithetical to one another when any halfway honest accounting of modern domestic and foreign policy tells us that they have been complementary and closely linked. From my perspective, that is one reason to be very skeptical of American exceptionalism, but there is no real reason why anyone who believes in American exceptionalism should doubt Obama’s belief in the same.

Conor dealt with this business here and here.

by David Sessions

03/03/10

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Iraq Veterans Keep Sniping at 'The Hurt Locker,' Missing the Point

The chorus of military criticism of The Hurt Locker keeps getting louder. A slew of Iraq veterans have dissected the its accuracy without, in my opinion, making a serious argument against it as a film. Now, a former infantryman has taken to the Atlantic to say it shouldn’t win Best Picture because its license with reality is essentially the same as soldiers who lie about their military exploits to appear heroic. (Really.)

I understand the urge for people with firsthand experience to nit-pick the movie’s accuracy, particularly as critics rave about how “realistic” it is. But that’s different from imposing an arbitrary moralism on a movie—insisting The Hurt Locker shouldn’t win an award because it did the things the medium is known for, namely making things more exciting and or condensing the timelines. The movie doesn’t purport to be a true story, and even with a journalist screenwriter and actors that underwent military training in preparation for their roles, is still very obviously a work of fiction. (One could work up a similarly lengthy list of that-would-never-happens for any of its rivals in the Best Picture category.)

Brian Mockenhaupt, the soldier writing in the Atlantic, admits that movie “nails” the setting—the heat, dust, sweat, trashy streets, curious Iraqis, etc. Which is essentially what it was trying to do. I would wager Bigelow cared more about a realistic “feel” than precisely realistic plotting. It’s sequenced like an action film, and her shaky camera is meant to convey a sense of running alongside the squad, not the phony factual authenticity Mockenhaupt imagines. We are supposed to feel like we are in the middle of one of Will James ill-advised escapades, never mind the fact that it probably wouldn’t have happened exactly as it does on screen. We feel the danger and emotion of a very intimate situation, which most war movies, with their giant casts and swelling themes, fail to capture.

The strength of The Hurt Locker is the very adrenaline rushes its military critics are complaining about. Call them Hollywood-concocted scenarios if you must, but surely they can play a role in helping us “outsiders” grasp the sensations of being on the ground in Iraq without having us believe everything we see on TV. Its punch has little to do with its alleged factual weaknesses. Thanks to this film, I now understand a tiny fraction of the terror of disarming a bomb that could dismember me at any moment. I have a glimpse of what it’s like to shift from that deadly environment to the humdrum reality of American daily life. I was not, contrary to Mockenhaupt’s read-in analysis, told “that war, as experienced by so many Americans, isn’t meaningful enough as is, but must be gussied up with outsiders’ interpretations of what makes the experience profound.”

The Hurt Locker is, as Dana Stevens wrote, “without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq.” None of its Best Picture competitors (other than maybe Avatar) can lay claim to such a superlative, and that’s why it deserves the statue. The Oscars are about exciting movies.

by David Sessions

02/28/10

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Evangelical Humanitarians, Condoning Anti-Tax Violence, Etc.

Peter beat me to recommending Ross’ great column on the health care summit, but almost everything in the Times Week In Review section is worth a read this week.

Nicholas Kristof on evangelical humanitarians expanding the definition of “pro-life”:

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

…Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

And Frank Rich on Republican pols who got way too close to condoning the suicide attack on the I.R.S. building in Austin:

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Elsewhere we have a clash of European privacy and American speech, the terrifying things that could happen if we leave health care alone, and some typical Gore on climate change.