In Doris Lessing’s novel, “The Good Terrorist”, there is a passage where she describes two of her characters coming back to their squat “smiling, and glowing with that special look of the successful demonstrator”. I often think of that when I go to demonstrations in Western democracies, such as November 17th’s Occupy Wall Street demo. Whatever the issues, there’s almost always a kind of manifest enjoyment shared by many of those taking part, derived perhaps from a feeling of shared purpose and community and taking part in an adventure that carries some risk of bruises or the inconvenience and discomfort of arrest, but offers opportunities to vent your righteous anger and be duly outraged at the behavior of the police and their shadowy masters. It feels like fun, and it is.
Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been quick to play up this aspect of protest in liberal democracies. Because the risks are low - no one’s going to be ‘disappeared’ by the secret police, or shot from the rooftops by masked snipers - it’s easy to paint the protesters as hobbyist revolutionaries, unwashed kids and permanently-discontented neo-hippies who we’re not obliged to take seriously. The mainstream media, while feigning impartiality, drops continuous hints that the protesters are disorganized, incoherent and, above all, unrepresentative. Nothing to see here, move along. Conservatives go further still, seeing them all as Marxists (or Democrats, which in their minds amounts to the same thing). One particularly over-heated right-winger that I saw described them as “OWS thugs”, and implied that any discourse with these people was best conducted with nightsticks, if not bayonets.
Discredit the messenger, discredit the message. If you paint OWS as dirty hippies, you don’t have to listen to what they’re saying. (In fairness, liberal sections of the media managed to avoid considering whether the Tea Party might have a valid argument or two by painting them all as scary but comical rednecks and racists: turnabout is, I guess, fair play). There’s a handy Catch-22 at work: if you have the time to occupy Wall Street, you obviously don’t have a job, and if you don’t have a job, then you’re obviously not qualified to speak on … well, anything. Meanwhile, of course, most of those who do have jobs are trying to keep them. Their absence from the protests is taken as assent to the status quo, rather than as another indicator of how precarious our economic situation is.
Portraying OWS as immature, work-shy, naive, politically-suspect or unrepresentative is handy, not just for those with vested interests in the status quo, but for anyone who wants to find an excuse for their own apathy. Just remember that by the time the people you say you’ll be willing to accept as ‘representative’ finally descend into the streets, we’ll be in the late stages of a full-on revolution. Be careful what you wish for.
The message that we’re all working so hard to ignore is best summed up in the words of one famous sign carried by an OWS protester, which simply read “Shit is fucked-up and bullshit”. Rather than being inarticulate, it’s actually a succinct summary of what’s wrong: pretty much everything. In the eyes of the people who sympathize with OWS, our political and economic system is fundamentally broken - “fucked-up” - and riddled with dishonesty and corruption - “bullshit”.
If you need more specific examples, it’s not hard to find them. You could point to the way that the US has squandered vast sums on unnecessary and poorly-managed foreign adventures. You could point to the economic devastation wrought by financial speculators who, far from suffering the consequences of their actions, were promptly rescued by the government with lavish helpings of taxpayer money. You could point to the fact that politicians seem as deaf to the concerns of ordinary people as they are responsive to the whims of corporations and the wealthy. You could point to a political process virtually paralyzed by ideologically-driven partisan infighting, to the accelerating growth of a surveillance state, to our total inability to do anything rational about environmental issues or healthcare. Shit is indeed fucked-up and bullshit. Whatever the different signs may say, the root issue is just one thing: a fundamental crisis of confidence in the US economic and political system. And while you might not be prepared to accept the underwashed tent-dwelling drum-battering hippies of Zuccotti Park as your spokespeople, you’d be wrong to assume that they don’t matter. Think of them as the canary in the coal mine: the discontent and loss of confidence in our basic structures goes much deeper than that.
Occasionally, people suggest that OWS and the Tea Party might make common cause. Unless there’s a sea-change in the way American politics works, I can’t see that happening. The psychologies of the people who make up the two movements are too different: they viscerally distrust each other for reasons that might reasonably be described as tribal. But what’s significant is that both movements represent rejections of the established political parties and the prevailing political system. They’re not so much radicals as they are people who have fundamentally lost faith in the possibility of progress through the current system.
You could probably say the same thing about the Founding Fathers.
I am not a Ron Paul fan. I recognize that he is an intelligent and apparently principled man, who appears to hold and be able to articulate a consistent set of beliefs (which already makes him a rarity among contemporary politicians). Nevertheless, I have enough fundamental disagreements with enough of his political positions that I can’t count myself as one of his supporters.
But even as a disinterested spectator, watching Paul being ‘edited out’ of news coverage of the Republican candidates, like a disgraced Soviet commissar being airbrushed out of history after a purge, leaves me with my mouth hanging open in disbelief. Take for example, a typical report about the Iowa straw poll from CBS. The front-runners after the poll are Bachmann, Romney and Perry. Ron Paul? Oh, he gets a mention - mostly dismissive - way down towards the bottom of the page. The article doesn’t dwell on the fact that he nearly tied Bachmann and got twice as many votes as the next guy, eight or nine times as many as supposed ‘front-runners’ Perry and Romney. And as Jon Stewart has pointed out at greater length and more amusingly, this is pretty much par for the course where Paul is concerned. It always has been.
OK, perhaps the straw poll doesn’t mean anything - but where Bachmann is concerned, the media are certainly behaving as if it did. Well, perhaps the results don’t mean anything because Paul’s fanatical followers packed the house and skewed the results - but weren’t everyone else’s fanatical followers trying to do the same thing? Isn’t that how voting works?
Never mind. Ron Paul is not a serious candidate. It has been decided. Let’s not stop to think about that one too closely. If we’re living in a world where Ron Paul is not a serious candidate but Michelle Bachmann is, we may actually be living in Bizarro World and things are going to get a lot stranger before they start making sense again.
So why isn’t Paul a serious candidate? He’s a smart guy, and he seems to have a following. He’s certainly no less electable than anyone else. Electability is largely manufactured these days. Once a candidate gets the official blessing, the party machine and the advisors and analysts go to work, buff out the rough spots and cover up the weak points and generally get him or her looking presidential. The people who do it are pros. They can do it for anyone: some of them are probably already having sleepless nights at the thought that they might be called upon to do it for Michelle Bachmann.
But the word seems to have been handed down from whatever inner circle constitutes the actual fetid black heart of the GOP: don’t mention Ron Paul. He is not electable. That isn’t really what they mean, though. What they really mean is “he’s not manageable”. The real problem is that he won’t do what he’s told. Romney, Perry, Santorum, even poor crazy Michelle, they know who signs the pay checks. They can all be counted on to follow orders. But not Ron Paul: with him, there’s always the danger that he might say what he thinks or do what he believes is right. That makes him unacceptable.
OK, it’s their Party and they’ll connive if they want to. But the internal machinations aren’t the really scary thing.
What is wrong, really wrong, about this whole business, is that the media are going along with it. Even outlets with no particular ties to the Republican Party are following the official line: Ron Paul doesn’t matter. Ron Paul doesn’t count. Don’t mention Ron Paul. Pay no attention to the rather cranky little old man behind the curtain. The Republican Party may want to see their non-preferred candidates brushed under the carpet, but it’s the supposedly independent press and media who are actually making it happen.
That’s not their job. The job of the media isn’t to play favorites. It’s to report and to inform, not to repeat the party line whispered to them by the apparatchiks. Whether you agree with Ron Paul or not, he deserves to be treated as seriously as any of the other candidates (perhaps more seriously than some). When the media, with near-unanimity, decide to ignore or disparage a credible candidate, something is seriously wrong.
The British Labour politician Tony Benn, who also had an adversarial relationship with the press, once said that if he was seen walking on water to rescue a drowning child, the headline in the papers the next day would read “Benn doesn’t know how to swim”. Ron Paul would probably be grateful for even that much attention.
Back in 2003, as the insurgency in Iraq started to pick up speed, I did some thinking about the inherent asymmetry between the goals of the two sides in the conflict. For the US to achieve victory, they had to essentially fix the country and make everything work again. For the insurgents to achieve victory, they just had to keep breaking things. Obviously, breaking things is very much easier than mending them: it was pretty clear that the insurgency could blow up infrastructure and murder people far faster and less expensively than the US could put Iraq back on its feet. It struck me then that putting yourself in a situation where your conditions of victory are very hard to accomplish and your opponent’s are very easy is probably a tactical error.
Fast forward eight years, and that same asymmetry is repeated, this time in the American political arena. For the President to achieve victory, he needs to fix a thoroughly broken economy, while burdened by the costs of two wars, lavish tax cuts, and at least two rounds of buying off the Wall Street vandals who trashed the economy in the first place. All his opponents at home need to do is prevent him doing that. So the Republicans have been conducting an insurgency of their own, blowing things up and generally putting roadblocks in Obama’s way at every turn. Once again, one side’s victory conditions are nearly impossible to achieve, while the other has a much easier task.
Of course to conduct a spoiling campaign - as the Baathist ‘bitter-enders’ and the jihadis of Al-Qaeda in Iraq did, and as the Tea Party and their servants in Congress now seem to be doing - requires a measurable contempt for your fellow citizens, a feeling that it doesn’t matter how many innocents get caught in the cross-fire as long as the hated enemy doesn’t accomplish his goals. But some people don’t have a problem with that.
A study commissioned by the OECD has concluded that the Internet kill switch favored by Senator Joe Lieberman could “cause more problems than it would prevent”. The study also found “a tendency to exaggerated language, an over-reliance on military concepts of war and defence and plenty of confused thinking”.
It’s nice that someone did the study, but I could have told you that for free.
Hosni Mubarak’s speech on Tuesday was basically a fuck-you to the protesters. The clear message was “Fuck you all, I’ll resign when I feel like it”. Although it was flavored with self-pity (“after all I’ve done for you”), in essence it was a bravura piece of arrogance. He was at pains to make it clear that nothing the protesters could do could make him change his plans.
Now he’s gone a step further. The supposedly spontaneous ‘pro-Mubarak’ demonstrations (or, to put it another way, armed assaults on anti-Mubarak protesters) show signs of having been organized and paid for by the regime. If that’s the case, that’s not just the act of a spiteful tyrant lashing out at the people who dared to challenge him: it’s Mubarak sending another fuck-you, this time to the international community and in particular the United States. To allow Mubarak to save face, Obama kept his speech carefully non-committal, but his core message was unambiguous: change needs to start immediately. Sending in armed mobs to beat the protesters bloody, is equally unambiguous: you don’t tell me what to do either.
This may not have been a clever move. You don’t slap a US president in the face. Barrack Obama acts like a civilized man, but he is only the pinnacle of a vindictive system that has a history of avenging slights with near-medieval brutality. The US focus is likely to shift from providing a golden bridge that allows Mubarak to retreat with dignity to cutting the ground from under his feet at every opportunity. The king-maker in Egypt today is the army. US envoys are probably already speaking to key generals, reminding them who foots the bill for all that modern equipment they enjoy so much. Mubarak, on the other hand, has little left to offer them. That doesn’t bode well for his long-term survival.
But long-term survival may not be his plan. At 82, may feel he has nothing left to lose. Faced with the certainty of defeat, he may choose to lay waste to everything around him, to sow such divisions in Egypt as to render it ungovernable and leave a legacy of chaos for his successors. Alternatively, he may really believe - just as he really believes that Egyptians should be grateful to him - that he can still win this one.
Either way, the chances for a peaceful transition to a more democratic Egypt look much smaller today than they did a few days ago.
In Hillaire Belloc’s poem “Jim (who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion)”, the father of the eponymous character advises small children to “always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse”.
Something like that attitude is implicit in Israel’s position on recent events in Egypt, as described in this article from Haaretz. According to the article:
Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.
This is essentially the same “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” reasoning that kept Mubarak in power for thirty years. As far as the Israelis (and the Americans) were concerned, if Mubarak could keep anti-Israeli elements in line and support American goals in the Middle East, he was welcome to run the country however he saw fit. To seal the bargain, Mubarak’s Egypt was the second-largest beneficiary of US foreign aid after Israel, getting an average of $2bn annually — most of which went to the military.
Politics inevitably involves compromises, often ugly ones, but it’s a matter of some shame that the US is so often in the position of supporting tractable tyrants like Mubarak in the interests of an apparent stability. The real trouble is that it’s short-term thinking. In the long run, no dictatorship can last. When it crumbles, the people in the streets know who their friends were. If the army yields to Mubarak’s calls for them to turn their American weapons on the protesters, Egyptians are going to remember who armed the soldiers for a long, long time.
An Israeli official quoted in the Haaretz article says:
“The Americans and the Europeans … aren’t considering their genuine interests … Even if they are critical of Mubarak they have to make their friends feel that they’re not alone. Jordan and Saudi Arabia see the reactions in the West, how everyone is abandoning Mubarak, and this will have very serious implications.”
By ‘genuine interests’, he apparently means the considerations of realpolitik, not moral obligations or democratic principles. Still, he’s not wrong on one level. The Saudis and the Jordanians are definitely watching developments in North Africa, and they’ve noticed the sea change in the international attitude. If the US finally lets Mubarak twist in the wind, they will take note and draw the appropriate conclusions.
Or will they? There are at least two possible conclusions to be drawn here. One, which the unnamed Israeli has in mind, is that the US is not to be trusted and that it will abandon its allies when the chips are down. The other is that it’s time to start making such much-needed reforms at home or one day the ruling families of the Arab world will also be looking out of the palace windows at an angry mob and wondering where it all went wrong. This may actually be a ‘teachable moment’, when Barrack Obama can - and should - try to convince some of our ‘friends’ of the truth of Kennedy’s dictum that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
But amid all the exhilaration of watching ordinary people actually stand up and kick their dictators to the kerb, we shouldn’t forget that what comes next isn’t guaranteed to be all sugar plums and rainbows. The problems facing the people of Egypt and Tunisia aren’t going to disappear overnight simply because the local dictator finally left for the airport. Widespread poverty, endemic corruption and massive unemployment are all things that will survive the fall of the regime.
There’s also the question of the power vacuum. Something has to take the place of the ousted strongman. It would be nice to think that a vibrant, pluralistic democracy could spring up overnight, and that a suitable man of the hour, someone sober and statesmanlike, might step forward to take the helm. Maybe there’s a whole queue of North African Mandelas, all ready to heal the wounds and steer the country into a new era of peace and prosperity. That may be over-optimistic, however.
The US and the Israelis would probably like to see someone like Mohammed El-Baradei in charge (I confess, I’ve always had a certain respect for him, and never more so than when he refused to be bullied by George Bush). Someone who can work with the West but isn’t tainted with tyranny would be just ideal from their point of view. Their fear is that the moderates may not have the necessary support and that it could be the religious movements that end up taking power.
That may be less bad than it sounds. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is religious, but it’s hardly the kind of fiery bomb-throwing organization that Americans imagine when they hear the name. Even the Tunisian Islamists have pledged to work to establish a democratic system. It may be that - as usual - the people of the Arab world have better sense than the West is prepared to give them credit for. The future rulers of Egypt and Tunisia may not be as well-disposed to the West as Hosni Mubarak, but they might serve their own people better.
The Israelis are afraid that whatever comes after Mubarak and Ben Ali will be ‘something worse’ from their point of view. They may well be right. If the place left by the current crop of despots does end up being filled by religious extremists or military strongmen, then the change may also be for the worse for the people of North Africa. At the moment, however, I’m cautiously optimistic that it may not come to that.
Sooner or later, you have to let go of Nurse. If you’re lucky, you may find that it’s not all lions out there.
The must-see item on the Internet today has been Al-Jazeera’s live coverage of events in Egypt. It’s too early to call it for certain, but if someone were to ask me what regime change looked like, I’d probably point to the footage from Egypt and say “something like that”. If I were Hosni Mubarak, I’d be calling my travel agent about now.
Al-Jazeera’s coverage is good: juxtaposing the tranquil images broadcast by Egyptian state TV with their own footage of blazing police trucks was a nice touch. I have quite a lot of respect for “the Arab CNN”. As the scrappy new kid on the block, they’re not afraid to ask the tough questions that the more compliant and complacent American media won’t touch. Earlier today, one of their reporters was hounding a spokesman from the State Department mercilessly, belaboring him with “have you stopped beating your wife?” questions about the US relationship with the Mubarak government. You wouldn’t see that on CNN.
More interesting than that was their overall attitude. From where I was sitting, their coverage didn’t look neutral. It looked strongly sympathetic to the demonstrators, with their correspondents breathlessly enumerating each new development that suggested that the regime was in retreat and that the army was about to throw in with the protesters. For my money, based on what I saw, Al-Jazeera’s sympathies definitely lie with the Arab street.
Al-Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar. In common with a number of other states in the Middle East and North Africa, Qatar suffers from what Julian Assange might refer to as a “democracy deficit disorder”. To put it politely, Qatar and its neighbors are not exactly shining beacons of liberty and freedom of expression. In fact, on the Economist’s Democracy Index, Qatar sits at #137 - just one place above Egypt. Yemen and Jordan, which have protests of their own, are at #146 and #117 respectively; the UAE is at #148 while Saudi Arabia is down at #160.
Right now, the rulers of many of these states are probably looking over their shoulders and wondering if they’re next. If Egypt goes the same way as Tunisia, the odds that others will follow are going to increase enormously.
And Al-Jazeera is cheering for the Egyptian protesters. The US may be waiting to see how the chips fall before saying anything - remember, not only do they have to avoid alienating Mubarrak if he somehow survives, but everything the administration says will be carefully scrutinized by the Saudis and all our other autocratic friends as well - but Al-Jazeera isn’t quite so reticent. It looks to me as if the Arab world’s leading news network has already made up its mind that the future lies not with the autocrats but with the discontented masses.
Interesting, no?
Word has come in that the Obama administration has reached a bipartisan agreement with Republicans over extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, where ‘bipartisan agreement’ is a political expression that means ‘abject surrender’.
For those of you who’ve been too caught up in the Wikileaks scandal or Justin Bieber’s latest single, what was at issue is this: with Bush’s tax breaks set to expire, the Obama administration proposed that, given the tough economy, the breaks should be extended for most taxpayers. They should not, however, be extended for the super-wealthy because, well, they already have a lot of money. Predictably, the Republicans pitched a fit and threatened to torpedo the whole deal if their favored constituency - the mega-rich that the breaks were created for in the first place - didn’t get what they wanted.
The argument in favor of letting the breaks expire for the very richest is that, with the economy in shreds, we can’t really afford to lose $4 trillion from the public purse over the next ten years (if the breaks become permanent, as the Republicans intend they will, that’s the estimated loss in tax revenue). The argument in favor of keeping them is that if we don’t, then the Republicans will fuck things up for everyone. No, that’s not actually the argument that usually gets put forward, although it is the one that ultimately prevailed. The usual argument is that if the richest get to keep more of their money, they will kick-start the economy by ordering new swimming pools and tipping generously (rather than, say, moving all their money to some place whose economy isn’t in a death spiral). This is called the trickledown theory, and those of us who lived through the Reagan years remember how well that works.
Some commentators, like Paul Krugman, argued that Obama should call the Republicans’ bluff. He should just tell them that it was his way or the highway. When, predictably, the Republicans called his bluff right back and blocked his proposal, he should remind the American people exactly who they had to thank for their new higher taxes.
Reading Krugman’s piece, you can tell that he didn’t believe for a moment that was actually going to happen, any more than he believes the Republicans when they say that they want what’s best for Americans. He’s just indulging in one of those little day dreams that liberal economists like to have. He’s a smart man, he knew what was really going to happen.
Which is this: Obama caved, and the Republicans got what they wanted.
You can argue about whether this is a good thing or not. Maybe this time around trickledown will magically work. Maybe we should let the rich keep their money because they can’t use it any worse than the government will. Maybe taxes are a fundamental violation of human dignity and we should have as few of them as possible.
What you can’t argue about is what just happened. The Republicans blackmailed the administration and won. And that’s how it’s going to be for as long as Obama remains in office. Because when you deal with an extortionist, everything they squeeze out of you is just the prelude to the next thing.
A little while back, I wrote a post about belief in global climate change, in which I argued that people’s willingness to believe in anthropogenic climate change was directly tied to their political - or perhaps philosophical and psychological - position. New studies from the Cultural Cognition Project seem to support that conclusion. Don Braman of the project says that “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view”. Another member of the project says that “… the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values. If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way.”
Put another way, you can throw all the scientific studies you want at people, but if they don’t like the conclusions, they can’t hear you.
The package of ‘core beliefs’ associated with any worldview may shift slowly over time - it is no longer controversial to say that our world revolves around the sun - but if you need to orchestrate a rapid response to a pressing problem before it’s too late, you may just be out of luck.
