The Binary Fallacy and the End of Both Parties

(Wash., DC) The results of eight years of Bush-Cheney at the helm make the demise of the Republican Party an easy call. Our financial system is on life support. The major banks are insolvent, according to banking and legal authority William K. Black. If they're not, they're in intensive care. No matter how many trillions of dollars worth of infusions they receive, they're not making loans. The economy is in a free fall with growth down 6% a quarter and job losses running at nearly 600,000 a month. We're stuck in two catastrophic wars. Despite President Obama's election, we're viewed with suspicion and disregard throughout the world.

The public knows which party bears the primary blame for all of this and they're not about to forget any time soon. The Republican Party is headed for the political graveyard.

They're not going to rely on past achievements though. Through their self-proclaimed national leader, the odious Rush Limbaugh, they've chosen to attack the first Latino nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, for being a "racist." Former Oxycontin addict Limbaugh said, "She brings a form of bigotry and racism to the court." He went on to say that nominating her was like nominating Klansman and Aryan Nation advocate David Duke for the highest court.

continue reading after the jump

These charges are quite literally bizarre, particularly with Limbaugh calling anyone else a racist. Newt Gingrich has joined Limbaugh in a duet of stupidity. This is appropriate since Gingrich is the architect of the power and policies used by Republicans to drive the nation into its current crisis.

The political impact for Republicans will be devastating. Sotomayor is the first Latino nominated to the Supreme Court. Latinos represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. They went for Obama 67% to McCain’s 33%, and comprised 9% of the electorate in 2008. Among Latino youth, the fastest growing segment of the Latino population, the choice was 76% Obama compared to 19% McCain.

Sotomayor is also a woman nominee. Women comprised 53% of the electorate in 2008 and they went for Obama 56% to 43% for McCain. Many of those women are working and struggle with fools like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on a regular basis.

The Republicans are like an early adolescent frenetically trying on new identities, each seemingly stranger than the last. Led by the Southern wing, the party began by opposing the bailout for the big three U.S. automakers. Acting as though the nation doesn't need any heavy industry or a few million people don't need a job, their mask of fiscal rigor hid the fact that key southern states have the manufacturing base for major foreign automakers.

They then turned to Rush and, at the same time, held a national protest in April. Sparsely attended, this nationwide event acquired the unfortunate name of "Tea bagging." It failed to produce anything more than some Jerry Springer quality footage for a brief spot on local news. Recently, the national Republican Party, backed by early presidential aspirant Gingrich, tried to rename the Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party." There is no end in sight to this parade of irrelevant, out of touch efforts.

We're now seeing the final phases of the Republican dance macabre. The Limbaugh-Gingrich anti-Latino campaign is so dangerous that some Republican senators, including right wing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), are moving away from the slanders against Sotomayor. John McCain (R-AZ) also sees the implications for his party. He's signed up to attend the National Council of La Raza conference this summer to counter the anti Latino rhetoric spread by other Republican leaders.

Democratic loyalists are acting as though the Republican demise is an accomplishment on their part. It is as though their understated -- but very complicit -- support of the Republican policies of empire and wealth transfer to the ultra wealthy will go unnoticed.

Congressional Democrats voted in the majority to authorize the Iraq invasion. They voted in the majority to fund the Iraq adventure long after the lies leading to war were well known. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. A Democratic controlled Senate allowed further government spying on personal communication (FISA Amendments) in 2008 and a third of Senate Democrats supported the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gutted habeas corpus.

Democrats voted for the initial Wall Street welfare bill; also know as the bailout. Right now, the Obama administration is responsible for doubling the Bush administrations cash transfer form the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street and the banks. Democrats failed to pass the only major bill to ease rampant foreclosures. This left 1.7 million families likely to lose their homes. Democrats did pass a credit card reform bill but forgot to cap those 29% interest limits that the banks arbitrarily assign.

There was an announced policy to leave Iraq. To date, all we've seen are plans to open up a new phase of the Afghan war with tens of thousands of troops simply switching job assignments from Iraq to an even more treacherous landscape. Ominously, we now have plans for super embassy in Pakistan to rival the fortress constructed in Iraq.

Democrats don't want people to see pictures of Bush-Cheney torture from the prison at Guantanamo, probably because it occurred with funding that they helped provide. They don't want to close that facility if it means housing prisoners in the United States. This forced their president into the extraordinary and troubling position of maintaining current prisoners in Cuba. As the Democratic Senators participated in the 90 to 6 vote to refuse President Obama funds to close Guantanamo, they were resolute in failing to mention that only10 of over 400 prisoners there are charged with a violent crime. To borrow an appropriate response, You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Apparently not.

Democrats won't even talk about the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians due to civil strife caused by the war that they funded. Failing to talk about it means it never happened, they hope.

Despite all of the alleged but obvious crimes of Bush-Cheney against people here and around the world, the Democrats want to "look forward" and bypass prosecutions of any sort against the Bush administration.

The Binary Fallacy

The binary fallacy is the crude dialectic that assumes that the two political parties are the only choices for voters and that what's bad for one party will always be good for the other. As evidence for this, we have Nixon's Watergate scandal followed by huge Democratic victories in congressional elections. President Carter's economically distressed four years begat the Reagan revolution and so forth.

Democrat Party operatives see the collapse of the nation and attendant pain as working against the Republicans since they were in control when the decline was assured by Republican sponsored programs. The situation is so bad, they argue, no one will take the Republicans seriously over the near and midterm. Add the highly favorable demographics among youth, women, and the emerging Latino population and you've got the dominant political party of the next few decades.

Republican loyalists speak of the risks that the Obama administration has inherited. When he falters, as he may given the circumstances that Republicans know all too well, his failure will assure a Republican comeback they argue.

Both parties fail to realize two flaws in their embedded fallacy.

First, the fallacy became a manufactured truth over decades due to the rigged game of U.S. politics. Funding and access to major media presume membership in one of the two major parties. Third party candidates need to poll equal or ahead in the public opinion polls, as Ross Perot did in 1992, in order to get any media attention or money. When the system is heavily rigged to exclude third parties, then, of course, there are only two choices.

The second flaw in the binary fallacy is embodied by our current troubles. The fallacy does not take into account successful performance during extreme crises. We're either in a depression or we're in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Times are desperate for tens of millions. The vast majority lives in fear of entering the world of the unemployed, homeless, and bereft. Iraq is the biggest foreign policy disaster in modern times. Our new plans for an Afghanistan adventure have the potential to equal Iraq in terms of national loss and increased threats of blowback.

One party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed -- wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive fantasies of empire through war.

The two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other.

When you're broke, you know it.

When you're out of work, you know it.

When there are no jobs, you know it.

And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it.

The game is up. The party is over. The people have a fundamental right to survive, at the very least. If both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look nothing like the current two political parties. The binary fallacy and the two parties that fail to address our crises will be no more. Relying solely on the failures of the opposing party while embracing their programs will soon be defunct.

END

Special thanks to Kathyn Stone for her helpful comments.

Images: Gingrich Geithner-Obama

Permission granted to reproduce in part or whole with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Michael Collins June 6, 2009 - 12:25am

Michael Collins's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Analysis | USA: Domestic Issues )

well summarized

commendations for this article are so overshadowed by the fact of it's content that i can barely go there but indeed, well done, michael.

desperately sad content. our poor tragic nation. undone by sheer willful stupidity as much as anything.

Zuma June 6, 2009 - 1:14am

I was about to send you an Agonist mail

But here you are! Ola!

I got over the disappointment by inventing my own version of
Gnosis. If I seem to be within a few degrees of the "truth," knowledge trumps disappointment. In this case, another take on the content is simply that the parties danced off the cliff together some time ago. Citizens need to send a message of total defiance to those in charge. It will take a couple of times before they get it. I wish I knew the best method but I don't. It is something to look forward to;)

Michael Collins June 6, 2009 - 1:50am

magilla gorilla

25,000 dockworkers sent one hell of a message about iraq, only the larger message needing be sent was about the whole magilla. iraq continues or as one might say became [also] af-pak as far as the messages mattered. the message is sent by our very planet but the whole license taken with it is a message itself back: nothing matters. nothing deters the gorilla. NOTHING. thirty plus years of message-sending hasn't accomplished one iota in preventing arriving where we are. and so on. yes, it's maddening, maddeningly insane. adrenal overload, outrage overload, cognitive dissonance, it all literally maddens us all as i've said [a whole lot lately!]. the constitution, the dollar, the planet, anything and everything will be -is -tanked. from without? no! from effing within, and within again. the untouchable never to be seen whole magilla gorilla that wants all the bananas even at the expense of the last banana tree. nobody can effectively say squat, not leahy or kucinich or durbin, and it makes no difference even if they do as durbin did. as fulbright did 36 years ago. how do we possibly compile all this mountainous evidentiary weight, decades plus plus into a full country-wide indictment with any teeth? what does it matter if it isn't a corporacracy if it might as well be? what does it matter if 9/11 wasn't a false flag black op if it might as well have been? what does it matter if the magilla gorilla isn't deliberately earth's worst matter when it might as well be? like darth cheney said, 'so what?'... in this world now of fantastic complexity and danger, the power junkies, the gorilla, are helplessly lost to their own jag and it makes crack look like camomille.

citizens need to live whole lives of 'defiance', as we will anyway, after the embers cool: i'm thinking of that special i saw a few nights ago that Don mentioned, where whole buildings were self-sufficient and made their own power and grew their own food. the real conundrum will be, i imagine, water... if there's any overlap between time of consensus and the beginning of the time of no hope left at all, that is what needs to be done; some message. off the grid. like two peaks, like christiania. do our own policing and fire departmenting and learn how in the hell to turn our very pee into potable water. nationwide, vastly. secessions? phtt! a new [re]constitution? phtt! just do it. all of us, from texas to idaho, florida to california, and i hope oklahoma too somehow (the absolutely craziest state i've ever seen but they know how to live poor)...

when i was a teenager, the first "political" book of any sort i ever read was Do It! by that butthead jerry rubin. i found abbie hoffman's book, Steal This Book more cogent and useful. i have a copy even yet.

Zuma June 6, 2009 - 6:31am

I'm not worthy of such a fine post

But I'll gladly take it in and enjoy myself.

25,000 dockworkers were largely ignored while this lie carried the day. The dockworkers will live and die in dignity with regard to their statement on the international homicide by The Money party. But the charming speaker at the UN that cursed day will bear the shame of his lies, no matter what he did before or what he tries to do after. It's a true case of "the horror."

"in this world now of fantastic complexity and danger, the power junkies, the gorilla, are helplessly lost to their own jag and it makes crack look like camomille…"

But they forget that for sentient beings, the difference is apparent after enough time. Their time is up. Sayonora and sail on.

I can't thank you enough for this:

"In those days when the magic glow of FDR still flickered in our memories when Eisenhower reigned with paternal benignancy and the Kennedy's appeared on white chargers with the promise of Camelot, it was possible to forget the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who had taught us to mistrust power, to check it and balance it, and never to yield up the means of thwarting it." J. William Fulbright

Irony noir combined with impeccable analysis. I'm going to find the book. What a treasure it must be.

We do live in consciousness where defiance serves on the front lines. As river walker said at another forum, "I expect that people don't really know what to think anymore, even if they are sincere. It's a non-stop barrage of daily crises and garbled, senseless messages. At some point the senses break down."

I agree that "citizens need to live whole lives of 'defiance', as we will anyway, after the embers cool …just do it."

Michael Collins June 6, 2009 - 10:38pm

war dept. vs. defense department

how long ago i don't know, we renamed our war department the defense department. (perhaps nowadays some may think we have both, with the war dept. called defense and the "defense" dept. called homeland security...) there was a wisdom reflected in the name change... -consider sonny liston trying to whup mu -erm -cassius 'float like a butterfly / rope a dope' clay. his strategy was genius, and powerful. inspired. bruce lee too had similar genius. (these two, i hope they speak now at long length in heaven.) bruce lee is well worth reading.

these two worthy men aside, my point may be analogized by of all things -a classic superman tale from 1963, 'Superman Red, Superman Blue' -where supes is split into two, and one has the superstrength but the other has the invulnerability. needless to say, the one with all the strength is comparatively disadvantaged were they to contend with one another.

strength doesn't mitigate reproachability, but oh so many patently disagree. the myth of america's moral stature is pretty much blown off now, and obama, twice over (for all his well-spoken lies), has blown off more capital than he apparently realizes (or rather apparently needed to do so as his strings commanded). strength and weakness now are at crossroads of definition and the testosterone crowd shouts out any debate, reaffirming their own point in so doing. who can deny any argument for volume when delivered at high volume? would i be more correct were i to type in all bold and italic caps? (hrm, forget that question; i did just that in a comment above, yes. *koff*)

'there is no fight', said bruce lee, quite wisely, and i always try to remember that. these are trying times but i will say it does appear we backed off from a precipice. 2 years ago, it seemed we were already over it, what with warrantless no-knock laws, martial law, no habeus corpus, and -well, none of that has been rescinded yet, has it? are we still technically under national martial law? northcom still exists, doesn't it? these are trying times still nonetheless. (still, at least our young aren't fed tales of supermen inventing 'anti-evil rays' curing nikita kruschev of his 'evil'.)
there is no fight. that's a very central thing to consider when faced with psychopathy, especially on a national or global scale. going down to such amoral level, especially when passionately 'armed' with rigorous righteousness is exceeding weak, a great vulnerability, literally an achilles heel. i would again recommend robert d. hare's book, 'snakes in suits'. all his books, actually.

to continue calling our war department a defense department is a gross misnomer, a gross lie. it's not just inaccurate, it's outright incorrect and should be, must be, corrected. it is a 'war' department at the very least. (more rightly, it is an occupation department. an invasion department. a pirate department.)

***

http://smirkingchimp.com/ is an interesting site, one i'd heard of several times but never got in the habit of visiting. glad to be reminded. (the agonist ought be on their blogroll, i say.)

Zuma June 7, 2009 - 1:24am

'Cover me!'

hm. i was just reminded of one thing obama said i liked, his call for our cover.

Published on Thursday, June 4, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The Times They Aren't A-Changin' ... Yet
by Randall Amster

To his credit, Obama basically came into office telling us this, that he would only be as capable of real change as our demands made him be -- both because the realities of governing are designed to dim the spark, and since it's our ire that provides the cover needed to play a good hand at the old bargaining table. In other words, if we shake the windows and rattle the walls, our well-meaning delegate might just get on a roll that'd be hard to stop.

Zuma June 6, 2009 - 1:43pm

Thank You! BuzzFlash.Com

This was linked front page on BuzzFlash.Com. The link is to this article in The Agonist. Thank you http://BuzzFlash.Com !!!

BuzzFlash was my island of sanity on the net at the start of all of this and is still my favorite mega news service.

Michael Collins June 7, 2009 - 10:39pm

excellent!

never been there. should have already checked them out, & now will indeed.

Zuma June 7, 2009 - 10:56pm

It's an excellent site

The site is Democratic but they're open to intra party debate. Mark Karlin, the publisher, has done interviews with Bugliosi on his book about Bush v. Gore, written persuasively about 911, etc. Great collection of lots of articles. There's also BuzzFlash.Net, a user submission and nominating companion for the larger .com. I don't know of another site like it.

Michael Collins June 8, 2009 - 10:28pm

...a user submission and nominating companion?

that does sound different. admittedly, i'm limited in my experience, i think. don't really know what i don't know, but i estimate i'm familiar with 1% or less of the various sites one might post on, and that doesn't count the right wing or far wing sites.

i registered on smirkingchimp 2 days ago.
-i've been registered on democraticunderground for a coupla years now and never even go there. likewise afterdowningstreet.org. (i think i may have posted there once, a long time ago. there are others i can't even think of. (GNN? dunno.)

has anyone ever written comprehensively on all the various sites? i wonder whom even could authoritatively.

i wouldn't even be here had i not been encouraged by e_compass_rosa (on LJ) and intrepid liberal and jk_fabriani, so i wonder how many people are unaware of their possibilities. there are many voices out there, experienced, intelligent, discerning voices that i've often wished would spread themselves around more, yet as i say, i hardly do so myself. on livejournal alone, for quite a while i've known of several folks i'd love to see here. perhaps they see their eclectic range of topics as something unwelcomed for lack of thematic focus, i don't know.

Zuma June 9, 2009 - 2:14am

Well written, Michael

People are beginning to realize that the Republican Party is slowly shuffling off to oblivion. It has become a parody of a responsible political party, and its ingrained habits of hypocrisy now dictate its behavior to such an extent that party officials say things that have no connection to reality whatsoever (Sotomayor is a racist, e.g.). Perhaps the average voter understands now that Republicans live in a fantasy world and should never be allowed anywhere near access to real power.

But it seems dangerous to accept the premise that the Democrats are the beneficiaries of all this and will reign for 20 or more years until a new opposition party gains credibility. Since the Democrats are tied as deeply to the military/industrial complex that runs this country, they believe they can get away with Republican lite policies because there are no other choices for the voters. They believe all power runs through the ballot box and they can safely mimic Bush without consequences.

The voters have another option - they can go on strike. While on the surface this appears to merely buttress the Democratic Party because its hardcore voters will still be enough to keep them in power, a voters strike makes the country much more difficult to govern. How will this manifest itself:

1) If people are fed up enough with the status quo, they will take their protests to the streets. These won't be the ludicrous tea-bagging parties, but serious complaints about lack of services or opportunities, and the complaints will be directed at local government.

2) The heavy cost of government taxation will be another source of protest. The tendency of all governments to gouge the taxpayers with petty fees, or usurious fees (parking fines which double if not paid in 14 days), may lead not just to public protests, but disengagement from the responsibilities of citizenship. People will simply not pay. Voluntary payment of income taxes will decline. Bartering of services is already on the rise and will grow even more, depriving the government of sales tax. Properties are already being abandoned, causing the property tax take to fall. Local and state governments are already under stress trying to find revenues to fund basic services, but a voter and taxpayer revolt will make these problems much worse. Even the federal government will feel the strain, as the bond market begins to extract a heavy price for any new borrowing.

3) Obama's coalition of enthusiastic supporters will evaporate in disillusionment. He will increasingly have to rely on corporate donations to fund his campaigns, because voters won't have the means to make campaign contributions and nothing he has done will justify people making financial sacrifices for him.

4) Alternatives to the dominant media are arising to challenge the way this country is run. There are a lot of disgusted journalists who have lost their jobs and have been rethinking what has gone wrong with the US. They are slowly finding their voice on the internet or through books that don't have to be marketed through a corporate publisher. An angry public will no longer trust the traditional media and will find ways of reading and listening to alternative views.

5) The secession movement will pick up pace. Calls for secession will be another form of localized protest against enormous government taxation burdens and lousy services.

6) People like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich will gain more respect and a wider audience. People will really begin paying attention to what they have been saying, which will be seen as more credible than what is coming from either party.

7) "Extremist" candidates will win some elections on both the Republican and Democratic sides. These will be politicians who have found a way to run low-cost campaigns based on wild ideas like socialism or secession. They will shake up the status quo from within.

-----------

Will all this be enough to bring about radical reform? A lot depends on how elected politicians respond, but they usually respond to fear. In this case, there will be real concern that the social compact between government and the citizens has broken down, and something very different is needed to restore it.

Numerian June 6, 2009 - 9:07am

I'm less worthy as I move along. Very useful scenario.

I'd like to say, 'You know, that's what I thought.' But I didn't.

My starting point in thinking this through was the statement of fact. You can't have dialectic without, one of the two poles.

"Perhaps the average voter understands now that Republicans live in a fantasy world and should never be allowed anywhere near access to real power."

Gingrich is the cleanest version of this. Could he really think that he would get elected president? . He's the Republican exemplar. Bouncing Rush is the exclamation point.

Carvell's new book was another affront. How on earth can he think that we're this stupid. Losing one's (fill in the blank ______ retirement, job, etc.) is a major event, presuming you're not a robot. People got the first part of this message, a solid jab from the end of corporate loyalty in the 1980's and a devastating right cross from the failure of "hope" and "change" most recently.. There is a great deal of fear and pain that won't be tolerated for much longer, as you point out.

The only ballot box that will help the Democrats are the black box applications in the computerize voting machines that served the Republicans so well.

What you said below bears repeating and I'm think I will do just that::

"Will all this be enough to bring about radical reform? A lot depends on how elected politicians respond, but they usually respond to fear. In this case, there will be real concern that the social compact between government and the citizens has broken down, and something very different is needed to restore it. "

Here's a validation of your scenario in a briefer context by the person that provided me with this eye opening information. This as well … I asked the question in the box.

Thanks for the comments and scenario.

Michael Collins June 6, 2009 - 10:40pm

Changing Incentives

I've mulled this one over at length during my coursework in political management (campaign strategy, lobbying, etc). Right now every political incentive is to grandstand for your constituency, no matter the outcome of the resulting policy. That's why Congress as a whole can have such a dismal record, yet the same people come back election after election.

What we need to say as voters is, "We will hold you accountable for the outcome, not just your personal position." Therefor, I propose a national, non-partisan anti-incumbency campaign. The premise is simple -- encourage all voters nationwide to vote against the incumbent candidate in the primaries.

Why the primaries? First, the low voter turnout means successfully ousting someone requires fewer participants. Second, by voting them out in the primaries, the voter is still free to elect a new representative from any party they choose. That's necessary to keep the effort non-partisan. You can vote out your Republican congressman, and still elect another Republican if you so choose.

The political game continues, because even if in a single election a few members get voted out, enough insiders remain to keep the game alive. So it is, election after election. But introducing a credible threat that voters "might just get rid of the lot of you," would significantly change the incentives away from self-service to the national service of really solving problems.

BuddhaSixFour June 6, 2009 - 2:08pm

Incentive plan

More horror. Very well said: " Right now every political incentive is to grandstand for your constituency, no matter the outcome of the resulting policy." It's really worse than "Cops" sometimes. Corker at the GM hearings and Lindsay Graham just about anytime are the two that come to mine immediately.

Election cycles serve up the same bad outcomes from those who don't vote, as well as those drawn into the hysteria. That's about 40% of the electorate. Why don't they vote? They think "they're all crooks!" That gets us people like Bush and members of Congress who fund wars that they know are based on lies, describing it as though they have know choice.

Your proposal of "a national, non-partisan anti-incumbency campaign" may show up soon, presuming there's an approximation of the reported and actual vote after things hit the fan.

"The political game continues, because even if in a single election a few members get voted out, enough insiders remain to keep the game alive." Yes, and that's described by the talking heads as our consistent preference to avoid giving one party too much power. The nonsense like that is endless and toxic.

Sometimes a simple change can have a profound impact. One of the simplest changes would be to have no funding other than that available through free media: network, internet, cable, and US Mail. No organized giving of hard or soft money. That would give your anti-incumbency program a real chance. Another simple change would be to makek the elected sign a contract like they did back in the day (like way back in the 1000 years that the Republic of Venice provided prosperity and freedom for all of its citizens -- See A Contract with the Citizens United States of America).

Hope your professor had lots of coffee to keep up with you in class.

Michael Collins June 6, 2009 - 10:50pm

wonderful post Michael

thanks :)

Tina June 7, 2009 - 5:52am

good stuff - here is my Minnesota take

I dig it (sorry this got too long. Shorter: the GOP is stronger locally than you may realize!)
At the center & higher echelons, the GOP is badly degraded from elite deviance, general strategic fogginess and a lack of clearly credentialed party leaders arranged in the GOP's preferred linear way. However the GOP is stronger at state levels than you might realize, and I believe is likely to bounce back from its low ebb at the State Legislature levels.

In particular everyone needs to wrap their heads around redistricting, which the GOP is going to go after very aggressively now that the corporate minions can buy out everyone's aggregate credit card patterns (they will subdivide into about 150-200 electoral message niches based on purchase patterns).

The generally conservative exurbs are actually very under-represented legislatively if they grew out in your state. These are people who chose their homes based on a lack of proper services & other civic plumbing (in many cases, literal plumbing, which is more expensive than septic tanks and often comes with urban planning rules attached).

Meanwhile the GOP state party apparatuses have focused on coopting the hordes of arch-fiscal conservative Ron Paul people, who have surged into these parties at the local party unit level. Unlike the scene about 15 years ago, they would rather grab at the levers of power in Basic Party Organzational Units (BPOUs) than try to build a fiscally conservative (but socially hands-off) third party.

You can see that Michele Bachmann, to cite a notable example, is adept at co-opting their messages. This is because the Sixth Congressional District's now active GOP delegates is at least 40% Ron Paulistas.

That doesn't resolve the deteriorated dead-end of their brain labs - i mean discredited, Reagan-burdened beltway think tanks that previously had captured the OODA loops of the national media & chattering bourgie types.

In America you can never underestimate the ability of major parties to recapture these "third strands" -- which ate up the Jesse Ventura people, the Farmer-Labor Party, the Progressives, the Socialists, etc etc. This of course is facilitated by the all-important electoral rules of the game, that both parties guard jealously as a matter of course.

Minnesota has been a dabbling pool for third parties and other independent political formations friendly to libertarians, socially liberal fiscal conservatives like Ventura's people, the Perotistas and others. The Greens hold some slots in Minneapolis. That's still just about it -- and I see a bounceback coming for the GOP, when redistricting shows how many grumpy white dudes actually live in the exurbs now.

For more reading you might enjoy my grandfather's pamphlet (he was a quasi-libertarian Republican MN legislator for 26 years) promoting Minnesota's nonpartisan Legislature structure;
http://www.hongpong.com/hp-archives/2005/04/08/1957_minnesotas_nonp.html
this 1957 pamphlet is framed to show that party domination of legislatures is its own structural toxin, designed to ensure ward heelers and hacks can control which individuals hold legislative seats, as well as ensuring interests like banking can block "harsh" progressive reforms. (the MN nonpartisan legislature, having no party whip bloc system, was able to break the banks by sparking the nation's first mortgage moratoriums in the early Depression). Interestingly, as he puts it, the circa 1913 trust-busting policies were intended to break not just trusts but party domination of electoral offices. It is **Never** framed that way today. Until then, my friends :)
--
Hongpong.com

HongPong June 7, 2009 - 1:20pm

Helpful observations & the pamphlet is a gem

I'm not an advocate for third, fourth parties, although they are useful way to get new ideas and programs in the system. Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party came up with Social Security. FDR implemented it and grabbed as many members as possible of that considerable movement.

Coopting the followers is the goal of either of the two parties. That's one thing that the parties can do with intelligence and efficiency. The Farm Labor Party and the Ventura movements are easier to understand in the historical context that you presented, particularly your grandfather's pamphlet.

The truly impressive thing is that there was a debate. The system was in place to allow that and the attitudes of citizens took full advantage. Missouri passed a state amendment recently that was preceded by a traveling statewide debate on the issues, very high level. So this type of process survives here and there.

Imagine if we had such a debate without the histrionics and the bait and switch tactis that compromise deliberations.

Here's a reason to think that letting the people decide based on real debate might just work. Day in and day out, juries are empaneled all over the country to consider criminal and civil issues that can be very complex. These randomly selected jurors take their jobs seriously, show a high degree of integrity. There are miscarriages in this system, but they seem to be the exception. Few instances of corruption are uncovered and nobody is railing about how consistently "stupid" juries are. The jury system is probably the least corrupt of all government functions.

Thanks for this excellent background.

Michael Collins June 8, 2009 - 3:02am

One party created the current disaster

What drivel: It was the clinton regime who repealed Glass-Steagel.

Bilejones June 7, 2009 - 7:08pm

A Distant Mirror

by Barbara Tuchman, 1977. Except we're thirty years on now from the depiction of chaos that Tuchman was sketching then and therefore that much closer to the Day of Reckoning. I cite this book as a way of pointing to the idea that the liberal tradition has historically and is now failing to grasp the profundity of the changes we are experiencing as a culture. We need so much more than a reform of the existing system, just as was the case at the end of the medieval period. She stepped outside of the immediate conceptual bubble we find ourselves in in this hour of the twilight of the liberal-capitalist phase to attempt to find a new perspeictive on what in 1390 and now seems like a playing out of the end times of all of humanity.

And so, I contend once again that the liberal tradition cannot adequately articulate the remedy to the problems we face as a dying culture. Collins' admonition against anyone retracting the privilege to vote within this system can only keep us locked within it. Our myriad and growing problems, the outrageous excesses of the banks, the military-industrial hegemonies, the corporate behemoths, are logical outgrowths of large-scale capitalism, which has an uneasy but intimate relationship with liberalism proper. There are those who have sounding the warning in the last decade: Academics such as Saul Newman, calling to us from the extreme left, who maintains that political liberalism, far from insuring maximum levels of freedom for the maximum number, actually covertly works to create a climate of subservience to the needs of those in power:"behind the language of rights, freedoms, and universal ideals, there is a covert network of disciplinary technologies and normalizing practices designed to regulate the individual." This is inevitable due to the fundamental structure of liberalism which induces the liberal subject to constitute its identity through the identities it expressly excludes, thereby giving the lie to its claims of universality. In other words, liberalism is indeed reducible to a Christianity reinvented in terms of Enlightenment ideals. Or to put it another way, by the philsopher Karl Lowith: "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." "Through the acknowledgement of the supra-personal dignity of the State, the single, concrete individual disappears. For the state is a servant either of the individual or Right. Since only the latter is correct, the state is prior to the individual, just as Right is prior to the State."--Carl Schmitt Liberalism, as a result, operates by constructing the individual around a certain subjectivity which actively desires its own domination in its quest to fulfill within itself the liberal idea of the essence of humanity. Marx had a word for it: the Gattungswesen, or "species-being", a term which he lifted from Ludwig Feuerbach, the renowned proto-communist philosopher who is almost single-handedly responsible for the very notion of secular humanism we hold so dear today. Just as Christianity enjoins us to aspire to the creation of the "Good Man" within ourselves, so does the concept of Gattungswesen operate. "man is to man the new supreme being", says Feuerbach. And so we come to worship at the shrine of the Human. But this Human, what is it exactly? It is an abstraction; in Marx it is construed at "the Proletariat", in Rousseau it is embodied in his maxim "Vox populi est vox dei", in Bentham "the greatest good for the greatest number". The entire lexicon of this view of the Human is shot through with such debilitating strictures. And all of these hypostatizations of spirit induce us to look away from ourselves as concrete individuals and toward some self-defeating abstraction: If I work for the proletariat, am I not substituting some averaging of their needs and expectations for what I might determine for myself? This is majoritarianism, inseperable from the democratic ideal. How else to arrange things so that things just don't break up entirely? It's like dismantling a bomb, but the direction one moves in such a dismantling is paramount for there to be any chance of success.

David Westling June 7, 2009 - 11:44pm

I come at this from a fairly simple perspective

Capitalism depends fundamentally on growth in profits. Capitalism doesn't work if business profits stay the same year after year, because there is no incentive to invest your money in business.

You can deal with this problem in part by using a fiat money system. This requires that the money supply grow at some rate that creates inflation - not too much, but just enough so that the currency is debased domestically year by year, giving the perception of growth in profits. You therefore get the phenomenon of rising prices over time, along with rising wages and corporate profits.

But this alone does not really solve the capitalist demand for a return on investment, because the nominal increase in prices is eaten up equally by the inflation induced by the central bank. You still need a real source of growth, and that comes about from population growth. Capitalism as an economic system has been tied historically to growth in global population since the Renaissance, but especially accelerating during the industrial revolution and on.

What appears to be happening globally is that population growth is stagnating in developing countries, mostly because of an inherent contradiction in capitalism. As the nation industrializes, the skills needed from workers grow ever more complex, requiring lengthier and costlier education. These days a post-graduate degree is often necessary for success in developed countries. Because of the high cost of rearing a child to compete in such an economy, the birth rate falls below the rate of replacement, and population shrinks. The only solution is immigration. The US allows it and has been able to grow in the 1990s even though its base population has been shrinking. Japan does not allow immigration and its economy has stagnated.

The long term trend on population suggests that global population will peak around 2040, and will either begin to decline or even crash. What does capitalism do in such circumstances without its fundamental source of growth? It disappears, replaced by what we don't know, but I suspect it will be something like a modern form of feudalism.

Numerian June 8, 2009 - 3:12am

You saved the best for last, imho

"It's like dismantling a bomb, but the direction one moves in such a dismantling is paramount for there to be any chance of success."

That is our current dilemma. We're teetering in a number of areas like war and peace, economic functionality, and the prospect of removing our species off the food chain through eco catastrophes. It's different than the brief Anglo-French peace in 1390 (which I think is your reference). There was to be more war in that 100 years affair and both societies were going to survive, despite the madness.

The rendering of Newman's views that the "fundamental structure of liberalism … induces the liberal subject to constitute its identity through the identities it expressly excludes" may explain a great deal. `

That the various political philosophies ultimately take on religious form reminded me of "Mother Courage "continuing to negotiate for her son in order to save a bit of money. She was too clever by half when she provoked the kidnappers to kill him.

We're surrounded by religious wars - Islam versus Christianity, science versus ignorance, and Democrats versus Republicans. They're so meaningless; we don't seem to know which direction to take (to diffuse the bomb, as you said). Valuing money above human life, our curse, may ultimately cause us to lose our children, quite literally.

What a ridiculous way to proceed. That's the point of the article. Our opposites are really one and the same. They don't even know what they're fighting about other than stylistic and personnel differences. While they engage like battling clans, any chance of .plans that benefits humanity are lost.

You said, "Collins' admonition against anyone retracting the privilege to vote within this system can only keep us locked within it." I take it that you were referring to these passages from the article: "One party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed" and "One party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed..."

Elections are the ultimate point of the exclusionary system of liberalism as you described it. They are the sacrament that is supposed to protect us. The need for money, rules, technical manipulation, discrimination against minorities and the poor all cast doubt on the process.

Nevertheless, elections are one of the workable vehicles that we have right now. They're familiar and very high profile. We need to pursue multiple opportunities to force the leaders to behave in our best interests. Boycotts, grass roots movements (in the extreme circumstances), demonstrations, etc. may all be necessary to let the non enlightened know that we're on to their game. They're like a one trick pony. Surprise doesn't go down well. They can't handle it. Their entire effort is for conformity to their needs.

The level of awareness and the connection with reality is much more prevalent among the vast majority than it among th ruling class and their patrons. If we're going to survive, we need to lead. If they help, fine. If not, that's another matter to deal with.

Michael Collins June 8, 2009 - 9:05pm

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The Binary Fallacy and the End of Both Parties

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