"Leviathan in Lousiana" — George F. Will

George F. Will's column in the Sept. 12, 2005, Newsweek is instructive. "Leviathan in Louisiana," about what Hurricane Katrina teaches us, teaches us also what lies at the root of the conservative mentality: namely, "the prudence of pessimism."

For the conservative Will, the keynote of the Katrina experience was the swift "descent from chaos into barbarism" in the wake of the flooding. "Whirl is king, having driven Zeus out," Will echoes from the words of Aristophanes. Katrina exposed for all to see, writes Will, "how always near society's surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by civilization." And so we saw "the essence of primitivism, howling nature" plastered all over our TV screens.

In other words, Will feels, Katrina ratcheted its victims down into "a Hobbesian state of nature," phraseology based on sentiments proposed in 1651 by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in "Leviathan." Adapting Hobbes, Will says that in a castastrophe such as Katrina "mankind's natural sociability, if any, is so tenuous that life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'."

Thus are we forced in such circumstances to recall "the fact that the first business of government, on which everything depends, is security." It is a "brute fact," Will adverts, that politics, the basis of government, "arises from something not distinctively human — from anxiety about security, and fear of violent death."

The government which Will finds indispensible for controlling "the social furies" is not the "big government" which conservatives begrudge the bigness of. It is, rather, the government which "understands how thin and perishable is the crust of civilization" and does something about it. In fact, in the course of his discourse Will takes a slap at conservatives who are not "thoughtful." Thoughtful conservatives are, in Will's estimation, "those whose conservatism arises from reflections deeper than an aversion to high marginal tax rates."

In short, it's the city against the beast, here. Modern cities, per Will, are "such marvels," inasmuch as they are made from "the specializations and divisions of labor that sustain myriad webs of dependencies." That sophisticated complexity is what Will thinks "makes them fragile." And so the Katrina event has not launched just a "liberal hour" in America, "in that it illustrates the indispensability, and dignity, of the public sector." It has also triggered "a conservative hour, dramatizing the prudence of pessimism."


Thus, the pessimistic view of Katrina. The view I take, as oldstyleliberal, is distinctly more optimistic.

Where there is complexity, there is fragility, it is true enough. But also where there is complexity, there is the uncanny ability to fight one's way out of chaos, to struggle back to the so-called edge of chaos where wonderful things happen.

There are scientists today who believe there exists a fecund regime of evolutionary change wherein the dynamics are just right for novelty to emerge. Mathematically, this regime is positioned in between stable order and chaos. When stable order disintegrates into chaos, a counterdynamic — often, not always — is set up whereby the system returns itself to the edge of chaos, at which point new order is generated "for free." That is, the order comes from within the system; it is not imposed on the system from without.

This is not to say that Washington shouldn't spend the requisite billions that are needed to rebuild New Orleans. All edge-of-chaos systems consume "food" and "energy"; we can think of the D.C. gigabucks in that way. No, it simply means that the essential dynamics of reconstruction need to come from the people and institutions in the region itself.


But that's not really my point here. My point is rather that George Will has put his finger on the quintessential difference between him as a conservative and oldstyleliberal as an anti-conservative. Specifically, oldstyleliberal is an optimist about the trajectory of human affairs and Mr. Will is not.

I, in fact, believe in something like the perfectability of the human experience. Now, such a bald statement immediately needs a raft of qualification. Utopian schemes such as Karl Marx's doctrine of socialism originally was are simply not on. There is no ideological "quick fix" to all our woes. In fact, I'm not saying a completely woeless day will ever come.

What I'm really talking about is a religious conviction that the "kingdom of heaven" is a slam dunk. It is destined to arrive — it will transpire here on earth — given enough time. God's kingdom will emerge when enough people in the world have sufficient faith that human solidarity and compassion can, for all time, trump George Will's "howling nature."

And, oldstyleliberal would add, it is out of such solidarity, compassion, and hope that this and every "liberal hour" proceed.

Gunpoint Solidarity in Iraq?

What does Christian teaching have to tell us about the rightness or wrongness of the ongoing war in Iraq?

"Jesus was not a pacifist in principle, he was a pacifist in practice," Albert Nolan writes in Jesus before Christianity (p. 152). This book is an eloquent argument that Jesus preached, above all, compassion for all humans and solidarity among all humans. His "kingdom" was one of "total liberation for all people."

The "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke of could be enabled by faith alone ... faith in the redemptive and restorative power of human compassion and solidarity:

The "kingdom" of total liberation for all people cannot be established by violence. Faith alone can enable the "kingdom" to come.

If the "kingdom of heaven" comes through faith alone — faith in universal brotherhood and sisterhood, faith in compassion and solidarity — then can there ever be a justification for using arms? Yes, answers Nolan:

... we can surmise that if there had been no other way ot defending the poor and the oppressed and if there had been no danger of an escalation of violence, [Jesus'] unlimited compassion might have overflowed temporarily into violent indignation. He did tell his disciples to carry swords to defend themselves and he did clear the Temple courtyard with some measure of violence. However, even in such cases, violence would be a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence.

How does this apply to Iraq?

Our armed forces are ostensibly in Iraq now — never mind the original rationales — to quell the post-invasion insurgency and foster national solidarity under a new, democratic constitution.

If this were indeed "a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence," as we have been, in effect, told that it is, then Jesus might approve.

But we've been quelling and fostering and preventing for over two years now. Our leaders keep backing away from predictions that our troops will start coming home later this year or in 2006. The mounting body count shows no sign of abating. If anything, the pace of the killing is growing.

The main indigenous source of the ongoing Iraqi resistance, the Sunni Muslims, have distanced themselves from the draft constitution to be voted on soon. Even if the constitution happens to be ratified in that vote, the projected December elections look to be anything but an exercise in burgeoning national solidarity, because of ongoing Sunni suspicions of Kurdish and Shi'ite semi-autonomy.

The Iraq war has long since ceased to be anything like a "temporary" use of violent force.

And you can't forge solidarity at the point of a gun.

So you don't have to be an in-principle pacifist to believe the troops should come home. It's good non-pacifist Christian teaching that tells us to get out of Iraq now.

... Reclaiming Public Responsibility

In After Katrina ..., I suggested that in the wake of that recent hurricane, American politics may have started to tip in a different direction. What direction might this be?

An answer to the question can be extracted from an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun. "A steady withdrawal from responsibility", by Goucher College assistant professor of anthropology George Baca, indicts a "make-the-federal-government-weaker philosophy" for the longstanding abdication of public social responsibility which Katrina has now exposed.

Katrina, says Baca, "washed away the gloss that decades of civil rights reforms have put over the American public's contempt for poor African-Americans, leaving their isolation and poverty for the world to see."

Weakening the government in Washington, D.C., by reducing spending on programs — "except, of course," Baca points out, those expenditures focused "on law enforcement and jails" — has been called by conservatives "starving the beast." What Baca shows is that so doing, even when it zeroes out supposedly race-neutral initiatives like government spending on infrastructure — levees are infrastructure — has hurt poor and working-class blacks disproportionately.

Those below the middle class rely on the fruits of public spending more than, say, the newly successful black middle class does. Katrina has made that clear. When the levees crumbled in New Orleans, post-hurricane, middle-class folks were long gone. It was the impecunious who could not find transportation, most of whom were black, that suffered.

So the conservative ploy of adverting to how many blacks have "made it" since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s has just masked how many more blacks have not made it, in an ideological atmosphere where private markets have trumped public initiatives.

Until Katrina, that is.

Katrina is now Exhibit Number One in the case that "the privatization of public goods," as Baca summarizes the thrust of American politics since President Reagan, was what left New Orleans and the two-thirds of its population who are poor, most of whom are African American, singularly exposed to the threat of a Category 4 hurricane.

So the direction in which I hope American politics has begun tip is one in which, the next time a political candidate extols anything like "starving the beast" or "the privatization of public goods," sensible voters will say, "But ... what about Katrina?"

After Katrina ...

oldstyleliberal is surely not the only one wondering if Hurricane Katrina has turned the tide of American politics. Can it have taken us past a tipping point such that the erstwhile hegemony of the right, as represented by President Bush, turns into a resurgence of the left?

Consider columnist Trudy Rubin's op-ed piece in today's papers, "Katrina debacle flattens America's image abroad". This analyst of America's foreign policy, particularly that vis-à-vis the Middle east, has never been a Bush booster ... but that's not what's important now. What's important is that, like so many other of her fellow anti-conservative pundits today, she clearly smells presidential blood.

Rubin tells of a plenitude of voices abroad, both friendly and antagonistic to the U.S., who fear America has lost its mojo. Why? Because we couldn't step in quickly enough and strongly enough in our own homeland to keep Katrina's body blows from morphing into chaos. Then she adverts to all the U.S. troops that couldn't be sent to New Orleans because they were trying (with questionable success) to quell chaos in Baghdad. Finally, she wraps her indictment up in a pretty bow of indignation at the Bush tax cuts which have so "shrunk his [Bush's] monetary options" that a choice between alternative military deployments became inevitable.

It's a tri-cornered charge of gross incompetence, stone-faced insensitivity, and ideological stubbornness ... and, for once, it all sticks.

Before Katrina came along to complete the triangle, the anti-Bush types could rail against the Iraq war and its faux justifications. Or they could lambaste Bush for his tax cuts and other compassionless domestic policies. But until now, they couldn't tie the two modes of complaint together into one overarching indictment that made ineluctable good sense.

That was then, this is now.


The images of devastation on our TV screens for the last couple of weeks guarantee that America has experienced one of those "I'll never forget" moments ... the JFK assassination, the Challenger disaster, and 9/11 being others. This time, unlike most of the others, we can blame Washington — not for the natural disaster, clearly, but for the lack of preparation and the tardy response that surely caused hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

This time, unlike most of the others, the situation just happened to be one in which average white folks sitting aghast in their living rooms could identify with poor, black, inner-city residents waiting vainly for rescue on rooftops above a stinking, toxic flood.

This time, unlike most of the others, there was linkage. Try as conspiracy theorists might, they could prove no linkage of the JFK assassination to anything beyond the paranoid fantasies of one Lee Harvey Oswald. Challenger was the fault of bureaucratic stupidity in NASA and its contractors, but the blame ended there. This time, we can paint New Orleans after Katrina into a portrait of American haplessness which includes Iraq, al-Qaeda, record gasoline prices, and the massive budget deficit caused by the huge Bush tax cuts.

This is one woeful president that we have. Or at least, so it inevitably seems, after Katrina. (More to come on this topic in ... Reclaiming Public Responsibility.)

Things Looking Bad in Iraq

This morning's The Baltimore Sun contains an op-ed piece by local psychiatrist/author Gordon Livingston, "Iraq looking more and more like Vietnam," which offers the most eloquent, succinct, and persuasive argument oldstyleliberal has yet seen to the effect that the war in Iraq is a huge — and growing — mistake.

The parallels with the Vietnam fiasco of the 1960s and '70s mount, Dr. Livingston says. Efforts to produce a constitution that everyone in Iraq will accept seem to have foundered, echoing our inability to foster a government in Vietnam that the Vietnamese would have preferred to Ho Chi Minh's communist regime, and that they would even have been willing to fight and die for. Dr. Livingston writes:

[L]ike Vietnam, where the average peasant was apolitical and just wanted the killing to stop, Iraqis appear more interested in security and basic services than in the details of governance.

"What can I do with a constitution if I have no water, gasoline and electricity?" asked one citizen quoted by The New York Times. "How come they gathered to approve the constitution while Iraqis are slaughtered?" asked another.

Now President Bush has even "closed the circle" of Iraq's resemblance to the Vietnam imbroglio by holding that the reason we must stay the course (and consequently get more U.S. troops killed) is basically to honor the deaths that have already taken place: that is, to keep those earlier sacrifices from having been in vain.

Dr. Livingston, who fought in Vietnam and came to oppose that war very strongly, says that "that ever-reliable call to arms: freedom, ours and the Iraqis'" is no longer valid as a justification for the war, if it ever was. "Along with most of our pre-war delusions" concerning weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links, he writes, "we have quietly relinquished the idea of a flowering secular democracy in Iraq that would serve as a beacon of hope to other peoples of the Middle East. In fact, we will be lucky if the Iraqis can agree on anything short of civil war."


The polls show that 54% of Americans now think the Iraq war a mistake. President Bush's approval rating is now a measly 36%. As far as oldstyleliberal can see, the president has done absolutely nothing of late to shore up his popularity, save possibly for his nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court, which some moderates (but virtually no liberals) approve of. As our supposed "war president," he's taken a five-week vacation while Cindy Sheehan, mother of slain soldier Casey Sheehan, so captured the media's attention by her personal protest against the war that she in effect had Bush for lunch.

Meanwhile, the mission in Iraq has stalled. There is no apparent progress in turning over security operations in that country to Iraqis. There is no reason to believe Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds will compromise on a constitution that all will support. There is no U.S. exit strategy that will guide us in extracting our troops from Iraq.

Furthermore, reports are coming out of the country to the effect that, contrary to what our administration has been saying, most of the insurgency we are fighting in Iraq is staffed by radicalized and disaffected locals — not by terrorists who have entered the country from elsewhere.

Things are looking very, very bad.


Yet oldstyleliberal still holds out hope for that "flowering secular democracy," that "beacon" to the rest of the Middle East. Let's face it, if all we are doing by "staying the course" is trying to keep a lid on chaos, then all those who have already died in Iraq did so in vain. When we do leave, if no secular democracy has taken root, the only alternative to chaos is theocratic dictatorship à la Iran.

If the reason more have to die is so that President Bush doesn't have to admit that the earlier deaths were his fault — due to his error, his stubbornness — how very, very sad.

I'm too much of an optimist to believe that will be the case.

Still, Dr. Livingston has me (in the words of a country music classic) almost persuaded that all my hope is in vain.

And the Possible Nominees Are ...

The Baltimore Sun print edition of Sunday, July 2, 2005, devoted a page to a rundown of the nine most likely candidates to be nominated by President Bush as Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court replacement. Try as I might, I can't find this material online, so here's a brief summary, with specific reference to how each potential nominee might vote in abortion cases. (There is a page, "Potential candidates for the high court," available in the online version of The Sun, but it does not have the same information.)

Samuel Alito is a 55-year-old judge appointed in 1990 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware). He dissented in a case in which the majority on the appeals court overturned a Pennsylvania law requiring notification of the husband by a wife getting an abortion. He is said to adhere to the same judicial principles as current Justice Antonin Scalia. Would almost certainly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Edith Brown Clement, 57, was appointed by President Bush in 2001 to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi) and "sailed through the Senate on a unianimous vote." She apparently has never tipped her hand as to how she would vote in abortion cases. Leaning on abortion unknown.

Emilio Garza, 58, serves with Clement on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi), to which he was appointed by President Bush's father in 1991. In his decade-plus on the Circuit Court, he has been noted for "uphodling Supreme Court precedents supporting abortion rights." This, of course, is not proof positive that, once on the Court, he would vote to retain Roe. Leans in favor of retaining Roe.

Alberto R. Gonzales is a 49-year-old Harvard Law graduate now serving as Attorney General of the United States. A long-time friend and legal counsel of the President, he has served on the Supreme Court of the State of Texas. While there, he "once chastised Priscilla Owens, whom Bush named to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, for her opinion in supporting a Texas law requiring parental notification when minors seek abortions." That's no guarantee, though, that he'd endorse Roe v. Wade once on the federal Supreme Court. Leans in favor of retaining Roe.

Edith Hollan Jones, 56, is (with Clement and Garza) yet another judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi), appointed in 1985 by the current President's father. Jones wrote in a key 2004 abortion case, "If courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe's balancing scheme with present-day knowledge, they might conclude that the woman's 'choice' if far more risky and less beneficial, and the child's sentience far more advanced, than the Roe court knew." She called the Roe decision an "exercise of raw judicial power." That "paper trail" alone would seem to make her anathema to abortion-rights supporters. Would almost certainly vote to overturn Roe.

Michael J. Luttig, 51 years of age, was appointed in 1991 to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina) by the first President Bush. Has both upheld a Virginia law banning "partial-birth" abortions and, later, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against such laws, this generally conservative jurist "wrote in 2000 that the state law must be struck down, citing the need to follow precedent." Position with respect to Roe hard to read.

Michael McConnell, 50, was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals (Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma). Considered to count Justics Scalia among his "intellectual allies," he has been "fervent in his oppostion to Roe v. Wade." In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece he called Roe "an embarrassment to those who take constitutional law seriously." But during his 2002 confirmation hearings he said Roe was "settled law." Nonetheless, as a hypothetical Supreme Court justice, he probably leans against Roe.

John Roberts is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The 50-year-old ws appointed by Bush in 2003. Though he has little track record on abortion as a judge, opponents cite "anti-abortion and other positions he took in writing while working in the Reagan and [first] Bush administrations." But was he just being a lawyer and taking his "client's" side? Position with respect to Roe hard to read.

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a 60-year-old judge on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina). A colleague of Luttig, with whom the generally collegial jurist has openly dueled, he was appointed in 1984 by President Reagan. The newspaper rundown did not cite any particular history with respect to the abortion issue. Position with respect to Roe hard to read.

Of these nine, it looks as if only Alito and Jones would as Supreme Court nominees give great aid and comfort to hard-line opponents of Roe. McConnell looks to have put himself in the position of standing by Roe as long as it is "settled law," but once on the Court that made it so, he could well be quite open to "unsettling" it; he's probably the third choice of the anti-Roe contingent. Luttig, Roberts, Wilkinson, and Clement are harder to predict. Each is a "conservative," but one whose abortion track record is too murky to read confidently. Finally, it looks like Garza and Gonzales are the most pro-Roe of the lot, though their seeming let-Roe-stand attitudes are not, by all indications, cast in concrete. Any one of these, if elevated to the Supreme Court, could furnish a fifth vote to overturn Roe.

Can We Have Too Much Liberty?

Happy Independence Day 2005, America!

02 Jul 2005 (Reuters) Beyonce Knowles dances during Destiny's Child Live 8 performance in Philadelphia

In this morning's Baltimore Sun, strangely, music critic Rashod D. Ollison's article Did egos stifle Live 8 message? presents evidence that our culture has gotten too ego-dominated, too self-absorbed ... too free. Instead of teaching about starving, disease-ridden children in Africa, à la Live Aid 20 years ago, Ollison writes that the recent Live 8 concert was "an unabashed celebration of celebrity and technology."

It was, he says, all about "chasing that paper" — i.e., money — along with the fame, glory, and celebrity that are its accoutrements. Artists were more interested in pitching — themselves, their latest singles and CDs, their concert tours — than prompting elevated consciousness. Ollison:

Even if some of the stars didn't have a product to push or an ego to stroke, they certainly weren't going to miss an opportunity to be seen — if not heard. One of the most surreal moments at Live 8 was in the press tent when Anna Nicole Smith showed up. Wearing a pink halter top that barely contained her cantaloupe breasts and skin-tight jeans, she posed and preened for pictures and never uttered a word.

"Why are you here today?" journalists wanted to know. But Smith kept quiet as she turned her behind to a photographer — for a better view, I guess. After about a minute or so of vacant smiles, Smith, who coyly flashed the black pasties she wore under that stripper-like top, was escorted by the waist off the press tent stage.

Mightn't this be a better world if, for example, performers like Beyonce Knowles thought twice before appearing on stage in "a too-tight, too-short miniskirt" — especially on such an occasion as a benefit concert like Live 8?

Aren't things just way, way too sexed up, these days?

Can we have too much liberty?


oldstyleliberal asks these questions in the context of the surprise retirement announcement by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Implicit in her seat being refilled on the nation's highest court come next October is very likely an end to legalized abortion, sometime in the next few years.

President Bush is expected to nominate a jurist that, unline Justice O'Connor, will vote to overturn the Roe, Casey, and other decisions that presently make state laws banning abortions unconstitutional.

If said jurist can obtain Senate approval — a big if — he or she will very likely turn the typical "O'Connor court" 5-4 majority which favors letting Roe stand into a 5-4 anti-Roe bloc.

oldstyleliberal personally thinks abortion ought to be legal: a matter of individual conscience. Yet, oddly enough, he feels this country would be better off going back to having abortion be illegal.

His feeling is that, on matters of concern in today's so-called "culture wars," this country veered way left during the period from, say, 1965 to 1980. The Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion for the first time was handed down in 1973, right in the middle of this period.

Ever since then, the cultural and religious right has been quite successfully raising hell.

Ever since then, our politics have become ever more polarized, making it harder and harder for our leaders to make needed compromises for the advancement of the public good.

Ever since then, our popular culture has gotten, more and more, all about me-me-me-me-me.

And ever since then, our sense of sexual modesty and marital discretion has flown right out the window.

Can we have too much liberty?


Stripped of legal and constiutional jargon, the basic sense of the Roe decision was that no one can tell a citizen of the United States what to do with her fetus. Her freedom is unlimited when it comes to deciding whether or not to carry her pregnancy to term. Her decision is a private one which she makes alone, with at most her doctor's help.

The corollary seems to be, in terms of how people have actually reacted to this legalization of discretionary abortion, that if it's OK to abort, then there must be absolutely no valid societal strictures which remain in place to rein in our personal, marital, social, and sexual behavior.

All so-called "Victorian" bets are off. If Anna Nicole Smith wants to show us her pasties and Beyonce Knowles wants billions around the world to see her panties, the expected, self-absorbed reaction is that of Zykia Moore, "a wishbone-thin, 16-year-old junior at University City High School in Philadelphia," who told music critic Ollison of one of her main reasons for attending Live 8: "I want to get into a video because I can dance. Can you get me into a video?"

That, and it was "a nice day." Plus, "I'm trying to see Destiny's Child, Maroon 5, Jay-Z, and Will Smith."

Anything about the suffering in Africa? Not a word.


Roe came at a time when the Zykias of the '60's had turned the corner into young adulthood, after some pretty darn idealistic teenage years. Though we couldn't actually stop the war in Vietnam, we did see some of the kinder, gentler thrusts of our '60's zeitgeist reflected in cultural and political ways. The Democratic Party in particular adopted reforms that were supposed to make it more ... uh, democratic. More broad-based. More responsive to "the people."

Actually, for better or for worse, what Democrats grew more responsive to were left-leaning, reformist, special interest groups ... such as feminists. The "women's liberation movement" couldn't get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, back in the '70's, but it could rejoice nonetheless in the Roe decision.

Surprisingly it was, for the American left, not the millennium many had hoped for. For one thing, the right began fighting back ... hard. For another, a lot of leftists, saying they'd been "mugged" by the "reality" of the civil unrest and moral slide of the period, moved over to the right and became neo-conservatives. Plus, the paleo- and neo-conservatives proved to be much better organized than, say, the feminist organizations pushing for the ERA. The forces of the right rallied support from rank-and-file America by means of (in those pre-Internet days) sophisticated direct-mail campaigns. Before you could say Ronald Wilson Reagan, they had put one of their candidates in the Oval Office.

Reagan appointed Ms. O'Connor, the first woman ever to serve as a Supreme Court justice, who went on to craft one of the most significant and praiseworthy tenures ever recorded on the nation's High Court ... but who wouldn't help overturn Roe. Meanwhile, the culture grew ever less kind and ever less gentle. The radical-liberal dream of the '60's generation for peace, love, and human brotherhood and sisterhood died amid ever greater self-obsession, or greed, or narcissism ... whatever you'd like to call it. And, in terms of how libertine and depraved our sexual/moral conduct could get, the beat would go on and on and on and on.

Is there a connection here?

Is it possible that the social conservatives are right: you can't get to love, peace, and human brotherhood on a ticket of radical, absolutely unfettered personal and sexual freedom?

Can we have too much liberty?


oldstyleliberal has come around to the belief that, today, right now, we in fact do have too much freedom.

Each of us has become too convinced that "it's all about me." We've stopped believing that "no man is an island," that (in the words of an idealistic song from back in the day) "he ain't heavy, he's my brother."

Little wonder that the people who vote their "moral values" nowadays are trying, quite simply, to "take back the night." And it looks like, with Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement on the Supreme Court and with the expected subsequent overturning of Roe, they may get their wish. Their campaign of over 30 years has finally brought this country to a historical tipping point ... and though he's been staunchly on the other side, oldstyleliberal, this blog's proprietor, is actually glad.

He's glad because maybe now, with the culture wars over — oldstyleliberal is admittedly looking ahead a year, or five, or fifteen — it will actually be possible to have liberals and conservatives meet in the middle to get things done ... things like enacting a program of wage insurance that can help American workers endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as we compete economically in an increasingly "flat" global marketplace with the likes of India and China.

Things like making Americans' pensions and health benefits portable, so they aren't lost when people switch jobs.

Things like actually making American schools the best in the world.

Things like finding ways to wean us off foreign oil and gasoline.

Things that will move this country forward for a change.


These are the things we so desperately need, and they are exactly the things that get back-burnered in the poisonous, polarized, hyper-partisan atmosphere we have now, when the Senate spends so much time and energy on averting "nuclear options" and taking a hand in whether a Terry Schiavo might be allowed to die in peace.

If overturning Roe is exactly what is needed to take the wind out of the sails of the culture wars — and oldstyleliberal thinks it is — then let's get to it. Let's allow President Bush to name whatever properly qualified jurist he wants to, to replace O'Connor. Let's bring the necessary case or cases before the Supreme Court. And let's strike down the three-decade-old constitutional ban against the individual states' anti-abortion laws.

Then let's take a good, hard look at the benefits of turning back the clock to a period marked by, at one and the same time, greater sexual restraint, less self-aggrandizement, more personal deference, less cynicism, and higher regard for others. Let's stop celebrating kinkiness, knavishness, and churlishness and, as once we did, let's start extolling the milk of human kindness.

Maybe by Independence Day 2010, if all of this comes true, we'll be en route to fulfilling the American Dream as never before!

The Politics of Grievance

In the July 12, 2005, TIME Magazine, political essayist Joe Klein waxes perspicacious in "Which Brand Would You Buy?" He says our politics today are really divided into "a Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush's overseas activism."

Never mind labels like conservative or liberal, Republican or Democratic. With the caveat that "there is no such thing as a pure political product," the actual continental divide in American public affairs now is between what oldstyleliberal would personally relabel the Politics of Responsibility and the Politics of Grievance.

The Party of Passion is easier to describe — albeit less monolithic — than the Party of Reason. It's the new, "moderate" version of the "America First" populism of the 1930s and '40s, the people who couldn't stand the idea that the U.S. might have to fight Germany and Japan. It's, in pundit James Carville's word, the proponents of "neo-isolationism" who see America so beleaguered at home by job outsourcing, illegal immigration, inadequate health-care coverage, and culture-internal threats like abortion and gay marriage, that global involvements are abhorrent.

The Passionist-Populists come in extreme-left versions like Democratic Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and extreme-right versions like perennial GOP presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan. The two sides are apt to have different emphases, different ideas about what most needs fixing and why. "It is," accordingly, "very difficult to build a Passion coalition." Yet the left-Passionists and the right-Passionists have in common their sense of grievance. This is a tragic sense that things are way, way off track in this country, and it's the fault of our leaders. It is also an angry sense that "the system is rigged by dark and powerful forces that prevent the little guy from getting ahead."


As for the Party of Reason, the common denominator of its "partisans" is perhaps their willingness to put partisanship and pessimism aside and enact the future, however imperfectly. The fourteen U.S. Senators, seven from each party, who hammered out the compromise that forestalled the "nuclear option" vis-à-vis filibusters of federal judicial nominations were meeting future reality head on. They were doing their best to shape it constructively, without jettisoning the past wholesale.

Klein also mentions, along these lines,

... 24 leaders of groups ranging from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the liberal AFL-CIO had been meeting secretly for seven months because they were worried about the sketchy, inefficient quality of American health care and wanted to figure out a proposal for universal coverage ...

and

... Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Newt Gingrich, the yin and yang of politics in the 1990s, announc[ing] that they had found common ground on the issue as well.

The Party of Reason is a party of common ground, of accommodation, of wisdom, of responsibility. It's the party which realizes that

Putting up trade barriers may cause massive inflation at home and social turmoil in countries like China; a strong flow of immigrants is absolutely necessary to the economy; and a peremptory withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq might leave civil war and a safe zone for al-Qaeda operatives.

It occurs to oldstyleliberal that the Party of Reason was in charge of the country back in the days of Ike and JFK and LBJ, when (for example) it took the combined efforts of the then-former Senate Majority Leader, President Johnson, and the then-current Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Or when (for instance) the powers-that-be had to join forces, all for one and one for all, to put an American on the moon post haste and steal back the Soviets' Sputnik thunder.

Even the conservatives of that day, Barry Goldwater et al., were basically the right wing of the moderate, centrist Party of Reason. There were, of course, true extremists, such as the John Birch Society on the right, and, on the left, a slurry of Communists, Socialists, and so forth. But for the most part, there was little polarization and little sense of system-is-rigged-against-the-people grievance.

We were basically united in facing a common enemy abroad: Soviet-style state socialism. Today we again face a common enemy abroad: fundamentalist radical Islamism. But, sadly, the difference today is that the Voice of Reason is too often drowned out by the Politics of Grievance.

On Thinking Independently

In yesterday's print edition of The Baltimore Sun, two op-ed pieces talked about Americans' supposedly impaired ability to think for themselves. Oddly, one was from the left and one was from the right.

The one from the left was PBS journalist Bill Moyers' "PBS under siege from right." Moyers, whom oldstyleliberal greatly respects, is the former host of the weekly NOW program on the Public Broadcasting System. He recently made the Sun-excerpted comments in a speech to the National Conference on Media Reform.

Moyers is the former host of NOW because he came under fire for alleged liberal bias in the content of his program. To Moyers, reporting on "the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power," which was job number one of NOW, is not biased, it's the heart and soul of journalistic objectivity.

"The Big Lie" is, to hear Moyers on the subject, the prime modus operandi of the current Bush Administration. Its "princes and priests" are, he says,

... the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate ... the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil ... the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets ... the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

When "Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism," Moyers says, journalists

... invariably [fail] to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. ... An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy - or worse.

The op-ed piece from the right which touched on the same topic of enforced orthodoxy vs. independent thought was Thomas Sowell's Why liberals hate black self-reliance. Sowell, who is himself black, claims liberals intentionally keep African Americans dependent on Democratic-initiated social programs so as to be able to count on their votes.

These purported cynics, the liberals, can't afford to let blacks know "the truth" about their own history — for example, that "reductions in poverty among blacks and the rise of blacks into higher-level occupations were both more pronounced in the years leading up to the civil rights legislation and welfare-state policies of the 1960s than in the years that followed."

"Least of all," writes Sowell, can liberals "afford" to let California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a black whom President Bush controversially aims to appoint as a federal judge,

... become a national figure on the federal bench. The things she says and does could lead other blacks to begin to think independently — and that in turn could threaten the whole liberal house of cards. If a smear is what it takes to stop her, that is what liberal politicians and the liberal media will use.

So the Bush conservatives are accused of engaging in a plot to "squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy," while the liberal Democrats are allegedly engaging in a "smear" campaign against major Bush judicial nominees. In both cases, if these pundits are right, Americans' ability to think for themselves would be impaired.

Sure, that would be bad news ... but the basic attitude of oldstyleliberal to all this rhetorical mudslinging is, can't we all stop and take a deep breath? Can't we dispense with the bombast, from both sides, and together set about making a more perfect union? Can't we put away these verbal stilletos which turn today's politics into a bloody playground rumble?

Hail! The Fearless Fourteen

These fourteen moderate U.S. senators, seven Republicans and seven Democrats, brokered the compromise which averted The "Nuclear" Option, the proposed rule change which would have made minority filibusters of the most ideologically extreme White House judicial nominations all but impossible to carry out.

Their courage in breaking ranks with their respective party leaders and putting our government above ideological partisanship are to be congratulated by all patriotic Americans. Thanks to them, the U.S. Senate is back in business!

	Senator Robert C. Byrd (D - WV)			Senator Lincoln Chafee (R - RI)
	Senator Susan Collins (R - ME)			Senator Mike DeWine (R - OH)
	Senator Lindsey Graham (R - SC)			Senator Daniel Inouye (D - HI)
	Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D - LA)			Senator Joseph Lieberman (D - CT)
	Senator John McCain (R - AZ)			Senator Ben Nelson (D - NE)
	Senator Mark Pryor (D - AR)			Senator Ken Salazar (D - CO)
	Senator Olympia Snowe (R - ME)			Senator John Warner (R - VA)

The "Nuclear" Option

oldstyleliberal has been trying to figure out how he feels about the looming "nuclear" threat in the U.S. Senate — i.e., the action contemplated by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to change Senate rules and allow ending filibusters by simple majority votes when the topic at hand is a federal judicial appointment. Right now, such filibusters, like all other types, require a supermajority of 60 senators to end them.

Some of the bench nominations of the Bush White House are currently threatened with being held up by a coordinated Democratic filibuster. There are 44 Democrats (and one Independent) in the Senate, so a united front on their part could put the kibosh on any particular Bush nomination.

Especially, a nomination (not now but perhaps very soon) to the U.S. Supreme Court, which under the right circumstances could eventually reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Since oldstyleliberal is pro-choice, he naturally leans against changing the filibuster rule. But one should always be leery of one's own biases when something truly important beyond those biases is at stake.

That's why oldstyleliberal was happy to run across an article in the Perspective section of the Sunday Baltimore Sun this A.M. In "Ex-senators wary of 'nuclear' threat," Sun staffers polled several respected ex-senators on their thoughts about Bill Frist's "nuclear" option.

One, Clifford Hansen, a Repbulican senator from Wyoming from 1967 to 1978, gave oldstyleliberal a sound, principled reason, other than his support for Roe, for wanting to keep the Senate rules as they are:

"Being a Republican, we were the minority party, and I suspect there are some similarities between our situation then and those that the Democrats find themselves in today. I am sure that it would have concerned me if there were limits on the filibuster. When I was in the Senate, the Democrats were in control, and we had made a lot of friends with the Democratic Party, and I realized then that if I were going to get anything done, I had to reach out and establish some real friendships with members on the other side."

In other words, the nation is best served when the majority party cannot impose its will alone, without horse-trading with the minority — and vice versa. That's why a filibuster that can be kept alive by 41 senators until the horse-trading takes place makes good patriotic sense.

So count oldstyleliberal as being against changing the Senate filibuster rule vis-à-vis judicial nominees. Senators one and all, just say no to the "nuclear" threat!

Hillary in the Middle

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democratic Senator from New York, has recently taken yet another position oldstyleliberal favors. According to "Shifting right, or there already?", an article at the MSNBC website, Sen. Clinton has joined forces

... with conservative Republican senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas and conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to tout their request for $90 million in federal funds for research on how the Internet, i-Pods, and other electronic media affect children's emotional and behavioral development. ... Hard-shelled cynics might portray her alliance with Santorum, Brownback and Lieberman as a Clinton shift to a more conservative stance, just as some have so interpreted her Jan. 25 speech which stressed the need for teenage sexual abstinence.

Not to mention her recent advocacy of compromise on the abortion issue (see my earlier post The Case for Abortion Compromise).

Senator Clinton's position on children and the media is mentioned in a recent TIME cover story, The Decency Police:

... earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum and Brownback to decry indecency in pop culture and call for a federal study of its effect on children.

There are two reasons why oldstyleliberal says three cheers for Hillary.

The first reason is that he agrees with social critics: TV (along with other media) has reached a tipping point and gone over an invisible line into hyper-raunchiness.

Now, oldstyleliberal does not favor censorship when it comes to what some call smut and others call free expression of sexual ideas (or of any other so-called "dangerous" ideas). oldstyleliberal has even been known to enjoy outright sleaze occasionally. He is, after all, a normal, red-blooded American male with definite prurient interests. (And by that statement he does not mean to exclude normal, red-blooded American females from having their own prurient interests, also.)

But when raunch and sleaze invade just about every program that is broadcast, of whatever category, at whatever time of day, oldstyleliberal says Whoa! Time out! Hold the mayo!

So he thinks Hillary is right to at least try to set up a federal commission to look into what can be done and why it needs to be done.

But there's a second reason he is in Hillary's corner on this one. To wit, he thinks the Senator from New York's reaching across the aisle, as it were, on issues like abortion, teenage sexual abstinence, and media sleaze makes her an ideal Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008.

This country needs its liberals to "shift right" somewhat, if they are to elect one of their own to the White House ever again. Entrenched positions at the left extreme of the ideological spectrum don't cut it these days. Compromise and accommodation are the order of the day.

As oldstyleliberal mentioned in You Go, Hillary!, Senator Clinton not long ago lectured on "Women and Leadership in the 21st Century" at the Panetta Institute. In taking questions from host Leon Panetta and from the audience, she bemoaned the loss of a spirit of compromise and bipartisan consensus in Congress today. It appears she has decided to not only talk that kind of talk, but to walk the walk as well.

Imagine it is 2008. Hillary continues to be the hands-down favorite for the Democratic nomination, actually gets the nod ... and then goes on to win the Oval Office. Given Americans' recent penchant for divided government, the Republicans will very likely retain control of both houses of Congress. What kind of liberal Democratic president would be better-suited to working with a right-wing GOP legislative branch than one who, like Senator Clinton, has established her bona fides as credibly "shifting right" when the occasion demands it?

That's oldstyleliberal's second reason for lining up with Hillary on the topic of what media sleaze does to our kids: it bodes well for her anticipated presidential bid in 2008!

The Case for Abortion Compromise

Andrew Sullivan has a fine essay in the March 7, 2005, issue of TIME Magazine on the need for liberals to join conservatives on "doing all we can to ensure that fewer and fewer women exercise" their right to an abortion.

In "The Case for Compromise on Abortion," Sullivan lauds Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for leading the way in her recent speech to pro-choice advocates:

She said something so obvious and so right it's amazing it has taken this long for it to be uttered: whatever side you're on in the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate, we surely all want to lower the number of abortions. Whether you believe that an abortion is a difficult medical procedure for a woman or whether, like me, you believe that all abortions are an immoral taking of human life, we can all agree on a third principle: we would be better off with fewer of them.

Sullivan then goes on to point out that the conservatives in his hoped-for coalition against the frequency of abortion are likely to blanch at such alternatives as "expanded access to contraception," repugnant to many Catholics. Also, at expanding adoption efforts to include gay couples.

Additionally, Sullivan worries that conservatives will be loath to reduce abortion's frequency all that much, in that "their argument for making it completely illegal may become less salient."

Too bad that he ignores parallel drawbacks from the point of view of dedicated pro-choice liberals (who oldstyleliberal thinks need to take their heads out of the ground). Columnist Ellen Goodman, in one of her columns, wrote of Hillary's speech:

Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?

It also occurs to oldstyleliberal that liberals might themselves object to a drastically reduced number of abortions making their pro-choice adamancy less salient. If abortion demand were to dwindle, why would abortion need to remain legal?

So here we have exactly the sort of situation which oldstyleliberal feels points up how his style of liberalism differs from the knee-jerk form prevalent today, as well as from knee-jerk conservatism.

The difference lies in the willingness to compromise, to take a both-and approach rather than an either-or approach.

From Andrew Sullivan's standpoint, America's leadership should damp down the feuding over whether abortion should be wholly unconstitutional and illegal or should be wholly unrestricted and available on demand.

Leave the contentious issue of Roe v. Wade for one minute, quit the ideological bickering about when life begins for a while, take down the barricades, and craft a strategy that assumes abortion will be legal for the foreseeable future, but try to reduce it.

The feuding does not reduce the number of abortions in America by one single abortion. It's in service to entrenched and opposed ideological positions, not to what oldstyleliberal thinks ought to be the watchword of our politics: empowering people.

The Hillary Compromise — Sullivan, in fleshing it out, calls it "the pro-choice, pro-life compromise," but that's too ungainly — would empower women to pursue one or more of several non-abortion strategies: abstinence, which "can work for some women"; increased access to contraception, valuable especially for sexually active teens, as promoted by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's proposed Prevention First Act; expanded adoption alternatives, including gay couples. Another possibility not mentioned by Sullivan would be programs that support single motherhood.

In this way, the Hillary Compromise looks like a triumph of pragmatism and people empowerment over entrenched, people-be-damned- there's-something-more-important-at-stake-here ideology. And that suits oldstyleliberal just fine.

Ideological Bubbles

A recent op-ed piece in The Baltimore Sun lambastes the institution of professorial tenure at America's colleges and universities and the notion of "academic freedom" it supports.

Thomas Sowell's "Academic freedom twisted on today's campuses" addresses, specifically, the rantings of Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, who has written that the World Trade Center workers who died in the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns" doing Nazi-style dirty deeds in "the mighty engine of profit." From this example Sowell extrapolates that tenure and academic freedom are crocks.

Mr. Sowell's logic is itself a crock. For one thing, he is tarring all universities and tenured professors by association with this one admitted "jackass." Furthermore, he himself admits that Churchill's "remarks that provoked so much controversy were not made in a classroom or even on campus" — so no students were at risk of left-wing propaganda. Moreover, if indeed "at one college, some gutsy students start chanting 'OT' — for 'off topic' — when one of their professors starts making political comments that have nothing to do with the subject of his course," then how big could the risk have been, even if Churchill were indulging himself right in the university lecture halls?

So where's the beef?

Manifestly, Sowell's article is an example of rhetoric in service to naught but inflating — or keeping inflated — his particular neo-conservative ideological bubble. This particular bubble is the one which says that unfettered pursuit of the profit motive is the mainspring of American liberty. Private enterprise, good; public welfare, bad. Markets, good; regulation, bad. That kind of thing.

But advocacy of the supposedly "good" things is never enough to inflate an ideological bubble and keep it inflated. Much of the air pressure must come from rhetoric that does nothing but bash the supposedly "bad" things.

Here, the "bad" thing is the seeming near-socialism (if not outright socialism) of Prof. Churchill's stance. It's as if making the slightest room for such ultra-left opinion on our campuses of higher learning threatens to bring down the whole American house of cards.

That's the way it always is with ideological bubbles. They wouldn't be bubbles if their main function wasn't to rigorously exclude whatever notions lie outside the surface of the bubble. It's as if anything outside the bubble might be a pin.

Thus, during the Cold War almost all Americans, even liberal ones, were anti-Communist. But there were ideologues who kept yelling that most of our national leaders weren't stauch enough in their anti-Communism. There were Reds under every bed, they said ... and so the thing to do was denounce, denounce, denounce the few actual Reds and their "fellow travelers" that did exist.

That didn't actually help win the Cold War, but it did inflate an ultra-conservative ideological bubble which persists to this day. The bubble was quite tiny in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican challenger, lost badly to President Lyndon Johnson on a platform of Cold War staunchness and small-government libertarianism.

But by 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution, the bubble had grown considerably.

Then, by 1992, when Bill Clinton won the Oval Office, conservatives had to stop bashing Communists to keep their bubble inflated — Communism had fallen on the ash heap of history — and start bashing "liberals." We started to hear the "L-word" used as an out-and-out slur.

Of course, every now and then these days an actual socialist or near-socialist such as Prof. Churchill pokes his head out of the ash heap as if to judge how many more weeks of "capitalist winter" there will be ... and conservatives such as Mr. Sowell gleefully bash away at him, just like in the good old days. Anything to keep that bubble of ideology inflated.

Privatizing Social Security, Part 2

In Privatizing Social Security, Part 1, oldstyleliberal took note of the fact that the water level in the Social Security trust tund "reservoir" will start dropping in a decade or so, and by late in the second quarter of this century the reservoir will fully run dry. That means Social Securiy benefits are threatened in the medium term, and if nothing is done, will one day stop flowing entirely.

What to do? There are two basic options. One is President Bush's proposal to partially "privatize" Social Security, plowing payroll deductions into personal retirement accounts which, if their annual yield is at least 3 percent higher than the inflation rate, will eventually make retirees better off than they are today under straight Social Security. (Or so says the Bush Administration.)

The other basic option is to raise taxes. If more tax money were collected, it could be funneled into the Social Security trust fund to make up the shortfall in contributions. Of course, the contributions themselves are taxes — payroll taxes. Conceivably, raising the (FICA) payroll tax rate and/or the maximum pay level which is subject to the payroll tax could help.

But that idea's not even on the table. Doing that would burden less affluent workers, all of whose pay is under the maximum, more than more affluent workers, some of whose pay is not taxed.

In other words, the payroll tax is regressive. Both politically and mathematically, there's no way a regressive tax could solve the Social Security problem. What's needed would be to target a progressive tax such as the income tax.

That's why critics of the President's plan such as former Social Security Commissioner Kenneth Apfel recommend making the income tax more progressive as a Social Security fix. Apfel wrote in "Unnecessary and unwise" in The Baltimore Sun:

Simply repealing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 percent of Americans would resolve a large part of the Social Security shortfall.

In other words, Apfel wants to make tax rates higher for the people with the biggest incomes. That is equivalent to making income taxes more progressive. (And the Bush tax cuts were equivalent to making them less progressive.)

In addition to personal retirement accounts and tax hikes, there are other fixes to Social Security that have been suggested, but privatization and tax increases are the major topics in the debate.

Which leads oldstyleliberal to his suggestion: why not do both?

Why not both institute personal retirement accounts and roll back the Bush tax break for the top 1 percent.

There would be several advantages. First and foremost, a lot of the burden which falls on the Bush privatization strategy, all by itself, would be taken off. Right now, critics charge the Bush scheme with (for example) not being able to adequately replace today's survivor and disability benefits, or not being able to keep its promise to lock in benefits for those currently 55 or over.

Such worries would very likely vanish if the top-1-percent tax cut were rolled back and the proceeds were funneled into the Social Security trust fund.

Likewise, part of the tax-cut rollback could be used to finance a special fund to indemnify those unlucky individuals whose personal accounts tank.

But the main appeal of oldstyleliberal's "do both" approach would be that both sides in the debate would have to give ground. The liberal Democrats would have to get on board with privatization, and all the President's men would have to get jiggy with raising taxes on the wealthy back to pre-Bush levels.

In other words, the "do both" approach nurtures the art of compromise — something sorely lacking on both sides in today's political climate.

Privatizing Social Security, Part 1

oldstyleliberal is interested in trying to follow the debate (if you can call it that) between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over President Bush's plan for "privatizing Social Security" via personal retirement accounts. Mostly, oldstyleliberal wishes to cut through the rhetoric to glimpse "the truth," whatever that may be.

Part of the truth seems to be that, unless something is done, Social Security can be expected to slowly start going broke. At some point in the next couple of decades, the benefits paid out to retirees and their survivors — not to mention those receiving disability benefits — will start to exceed contributions from current workers. Due to inexorable population trends, the number of workers will shrink as the number of retirees goes up.

Then, after another decade — or two, or three, depending on who you ask — the Social Security trust fund will finally run dry, like a reservoir that for ages hasn't seen enough rainfall.

For the Social Security fund is very much like a reservoir. Normally, there's an inflow (precipitation routed into the reservoir; payroll taxes routed into Social Security) and an outflow (faucets being turned on; benefits paid out). As long as the inflow tends to exceed or match the outflow, no problem. If the outflow exceeds the inflow briefly, again, no problem. But if the outflow outstrips the inflow chronically for a long period of time, the reservoir runs dry. That's what will happen to Social Security unless something is done.

Bush wants to do something. He wants to lock the current system in place for those 55 and over when (and if) his privatization plan goes into effect (starting, if Bush gets his way, in 2009). For those younger than 55, some of their payroll taxes would be diverted to worker-selected personal retirement accounts (PRAs) instead of reaching the Social Security trust fund. Workers would continue to feed their PRAs until reaching the age at which they would normally retire and draw Social Security. Then (assuming they are eligible for Social Security in the first place) they would draw a reduced amount of Social Security benefits. They would also start tapping into their PRAs to make up the difference.

It would be this reduction in the money amounts paid out to beneficiaries that would keep Social Security afloat.

So one of the key questions about the Bush plan is this: would retirees' PRAs actually make up for their reduced Social Security benefits?

A recent column by personal finance expert Eileen Ambrose, appearing in The Baltimore Sun, said this:

A senior administration official told reporters that workers would come out ahead if they earned more than 3 percent above the rate of inflation annually in their private accounts.

But it also said this:

But markets are hardly predictable. What if you don't earn 3 percent over inflation, which could be difficult if inflation roars back?

Accordingly, it would seem as if the 3-percent-over-inflation target for a PRA's yield is the "figure of merit" here. If PRAs generally manage to achieve that figure, the Bush plan could be workable. If not, then nothing else need be said. The Bush plan will, in that case, not work.

Let's say, temporarily — purely for the sake of argument — that PRAs will generally earn 3 percent over the rate of inflation. What are the other potential pitfalls of the Bush plan?

Ms. Ambrose points out several. One is that there's no certainty yet what the Bush proposal portends for survivor and disability benefits, as distinct from retirees' benefits.

Another is the risk that PRAs will not always meet the 3-percent-over-inflation goal. Since the PRAs will be invested in securities such as stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and so forth, they could run into dry spells and not manifest the intended growth.

If the markets swoon while the investor is still young, there will be plenty of time for them to recover their health. By retirement age, if the inflation-plus-3-percent target has been met overall, the retiree will be fine.

But what if the investment market goes into a coma just when our worker retires? According to Ms. Ambrose:

... the president promised that the government would provide good options to protect accounts from sudden market swings on the eve of retirement.

So, taking Bush at his word, we still need to know what happens if the PRA of any one particular John or Jane Doe tanks, while most PRAs are doing fine.

If one particular PRA loses money, or if it simply fails to beat the rate of inflation by 3 percent, oldstyliberal has so far been unable to learn what insurance, if any, would be in place to offset such a disaster. He encourages liberal Democrats, instead of simply trying to shout down the President's proposal, to work to make sure some form of "account insurance" is incorporated into the program.

There are of course, many other issues. oldstyliberal will go into those in a future installment.

Man of the Center

Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President—1972 , of Sen. Edward Muskie of Maine, who tried for the Democrats' presidential nomination in that year, that he "could say, out of his own life, 'I have an ancestral belief in this system. I inherited it from my father. I'm a man of the center, but the center gradually moves left, and it's the Democratic Party that does it.'"

oldstyleliberal agrees with Muskie in part, and disagrees with him in part.

Yes, it is good to be a "man of the center." There are too few men or women of the center in politics today.

But no, I don't think the center "gradually moves left."

What actually happens, I think, is that change happens at the center. It emerges from the center, and over the long run that change tends to be good. If there once was slavery and now slavery is no longer, that is change, and it has been for the good. If grinding poverty was once the lot of most human beings and now the majority enjoys middle-class economic aspirations, that is change, and it has been for the good.

The change which emerges at the center and tends to be for the good makes it seem like the center "gradually moves left." Why? Because for the most part the good change that gradually emerges at the center has originally been advocated by the left. If there was once racism encoded in Jim Crow laws in the Old South, it was "liberal" agitation by Martin Luther King and others that called it into question and paved the way for change.

Thus, while change must emerge from the center, it has to be summoned forth by action at the ideological extreme.

Here's where the situation gets tricky. Sometimes the extreme gets its way too much.

That's what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. The left grabbed so many levers of power — though it never won the hearts and minds of President Nixon's "silent majority" — that America was not coaxed but jerked leftward.

In reaction, the movement we today know as neo-conservatism was born; neo-conservative pioneers said they were "mugged by reality" as the peace-love ideals of the mid-1960s degenerated into violence, and the so-called New Leftists of the day revealed themselves as anarchist proto-dictators. The late-'60s radicals — Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the rest — wanted to disrupt "the system" so they themselves could seize control over it.

With the 1980s Reagan Revolution, neo-conservatism summoned forth a healthful, center-seeking response from the American politcal system. But then it was the conservatives' turn to overreach in the mid-1990s. Remember when Rep. Newt Gingrich wanted to shut the government down rather than give Pres. Clinton the budget he wanted?

Gingrich was trying to jerk the country rightward. Oh, he was for the most part quite clever about it, claiming he and his fellow neocons had signed a "Contract with America" to do so. It took a while for some citizens to see through that, but see through it they did.

The moral here is that we need the political extremes, both of them, to summon forth constructive change when it is needed, and to keep the pendulum swinging. But, more than that, the message is that the polity as a whole makes best progress when it is centered.

Not statically centered, that is, but dynamically centered. Think of your hips when you walk. Unless you walk like a fashion model, with no hip sway all, your weight shifts from hip to hip as you march forward, and your hips wiggle. Maybe not a lot. Maybe not in an exaggerated way. But they move from side to side.

That's how God-blessed America ever moves into a better, brighter future: dynamically centered, with a fair amount of hip sway.

You Go, Hillary!

TIME magazine for Feb. 7, 2005, has as its cover story an article on what President Bush "owes" Christian evangelicals for helping re-elect him. A sidebar, "The Democrats: Trying Out a More Soulful Tone," accessible here, features coverage of Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York's address to abortion rights supporters on the occasion of the (what, 32nd?) anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

(Before going any further, oldstyleliberal would like to make clear that he thinks of Sen. Clinton as "Hillary," and he will refer to her that way not out of any disrespect, but to distinguish her from "Bill," also a noteworthy American political figure ... and in his case, of course, a former President. As oldstyleliberal is about to reveal, he favors Hillary for President in 2008 ... so let no one say that his use of her first name alone is meant to cheapen her or belittle her.)

Hillary noted in her address:

While affirming her view that women should continue to have the right to choose, Clinton urged Democrats to support measures to reduce the number of abortions—encourage abstinence among the young and force insurers to cover contraceptives—and surprised some by saying the goal was not just making abortions rare but eliminating them altogether. She even sought to get on the right of Bush on the issue by noting that abortions have risen in eight states under his presidency.

Her tone did not please many liberals. Ellen Goodman, op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe (link to her archives here), wrote in "Whose common ground?":

Hillary Clinton, in a speech that was widely described as a retreat, said, "There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate -- we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished, and loved."

That, on top of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's (D-MA) recent

"Surely we can all agree that abortion should be rare and that we should do all we can to help women avoid the need to face that decision."

provoked Ms. Goodman to gripe:

Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?

oldstyliberal disagrees wholeheartedly with Ms. Goodman's attitude. He thinks Hillary Clinton is onto something in her attempt to close the gap on abortion between liberals and conservatives.

For background on her political instinct to reconcile the differences between ideological extremes, see the transcript of her speech/interview at the Panetta Institute on June 28, 2004. Her lecture on "Women and Leadership in the 21st Century" was followed by a Q&A session led by former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. Scroll about three-quarters of the way down to find a segment on the topic of "How does any President govern when this country is so split apart?"

In response, Hillary bemoans the loss of a spirit of compromise and bipartisan consensus in Congress today, an attitude that was typical in her younger days, when as a teenager from a Republican family background she even supported Goldwater for President:

That's not what we currently have in Washington. I think that's a great loss. It breaks the continuity of bipartisan consensus that really did move us through the last half of the 20th century.

You can disagree with the direction of the country, but the majority of people are a little beyond the center to the right or to the left, but basically within a kind of boundary where the disagreements took place.

But there was always a minority on both sides of the political spectrum who were not satisfied with that. They wanted to jerk the country to the left or jerk the country to the right.

Now, Hillary says, there is "increasing intolerance" among Republicans and they are jerking the country to the right. Gone are the days when "you had the Senate on a bipartisan vote passing a budget which included the old fashion concept of pay-as-you-go," with cooperation from the leadership of both parties needed to get the budget passed.

That spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship at the end of the politcal day, after all the back-and-forth rhetoric is done, is sorely needed now, oldstyliberal thinks. And if angling for such a center-seeking climate requires a Hillary Clinton to soften her erstwhile hard-line support for abortion rights by shifting the emphasis to unwanted pregnancy prevention and contraception, oldstyliberal believes Ellen Goodman and others ought to cut her some slack.

It's Hillary Rodham Clinton's wisdom in seeking common ground at (or at least near) the political center that makes oldstyliberal say, "Hillary in '08!"

From the Edge: Postcards from Buster

The latest controversy in the culture wars is reported in this piece in today's The Baltimore Sun. The article by TV critic David Zurawik is headlined "Despite denunciation, 'Buster' episode to air."

It seems the traveling, 8-year-old, asthmatic cartoon rabbit who is the title hero of the PBS children's series Postcards from Buster is scheduled to make a stop in New England, where he will visit — uh oh — "a home with lesbian parents."

Zurawik tells us that "the controversial segment — 'Sugartime!' — takes Buster to Vermont where children show him how maple syrup and cheese are made. The focus is on the children except when Buster is invited to dinner by two families headed by lesbian mothers." These women are, that is, the mothers of children who are Buster's friends. (And they are real, live women. Postcards from Buster is a combination of animation and live action. oldstyleliberal assumes Buster's friends are the women's real, live children.)

Not Buster's friend, apparently, is Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of the Department of Education. She "denounced the use of federal funds for" producing Postcards from Buster. Zurawik writes, "Most of the $5 million financing for Buster came from the federal government."

A sizable number of PBS stations have either refused to air the episode or postponed it pending further consideration. When the headline states "'Buster' episode to air," it refers to the 18 or so local PBS affiliates such as WGBH in Boston, New York's WNET, and KQED in San Francisco who will air the episode as scheduled.


oldstyliberal, this blog's proprietor, feels it is "culture war" issues like this one than most challenge his intention to find his way back to ... well, to "old-style liberalism." This is certainly the kind of controversy which never would have arisen in the period from, say, 1960 to 1968, the heyday of the Kennedys and of Martin Luther King.

So he will just have to explore the issue a bit further.

TV critic Zurawik tells us that a strong supporter of the "Sugartime!" episode, Peggy Charren, "a WGBH board member and pioneer in children's TV," claims that "it's about the children, not the parents. What you learn about is maple syrup — how its made — and that cheese comes from cows."

To which defense of Buster oldstyliberal feels he is forced to say, get real! The pre-schoolers at whom the series is aimed have antennae that will unfailingly lock in on the fatherlessness of Buster's friends' families.

In fact, that's what's another Buster defender, Dr. Michael Brody, a psychatrist and expert on children's TV, lauds: that "the very idea of this series was to show diversity." That doesn't mean different kinds of cows, folks. It means different kinds of people.

And it segues into reason number one why oldstyliberal thinks Secretary Spellings was wrong to raise a fuss. Per the article:

The Department of Education grant that funds Buster specifies: "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society."

If that's true, then Spellings hasn't a leg to stand on. The mandate to "help children understand and respect differences" doesn't stop at the doors of same-sex households.

So Spellings is technically wrong to overlook the stated rules. But is she wrong in a broader, more overarching sense? Cultural conservatives will, of course, uphold her stance. oldstyliberal, however, will not. He feels the politics of liberty and opportunity extend also to lesbian cheese and syrup farmers in Vermont.

Limits on the tolerance of oddity and diversity, upheld in the name of cultural conservatism, hold people back in our society. They keep people from maximizing their opportunities for making good and getting ahead. Specifically when it comes to gay and lesbian couples, the political fruits of cultural intolerance block legal recognition of the economic rights, such as those of inheritance and community property, that heterosexual couples — formally married or not — routinely enjoy.

oldstyleliberal thinks that's the decisive factor here. We need Buster and "Sugartime!" to help our children become more tolerant than we adults are, to move the society toward letting gays and lesbians alone so they can, in the old Star Trek expression, "live long and prosper."

Admittedly, the cultural conservatives might be in the right, and oldstyliberal wrong, if exposure to tolerant attitudes on homosexuality might lead children into adopting a gay lifestyle of their own, one day. Which it might, if people choose their sexual orientation. If people are non-heterosexual by choice, then we need to think really carefully about possibly influencing them, and thus the culture, away from "straight" sex.

But oldstyliberal has never seen any convincing evidence that people do choose their sexual preferences. In which case, he insists that TV programs that promote "lifestyle" tolerance are just fine for America.

Leveling America's Playing Field

According to this story, "Meritocracy in America," recently published by the conservative British publication The Economist:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.

The article went on to quantify how dramatically income inequality in America has risen:

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.

Along these same lines:

[M]ore and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter.

President Bush has often (justly) been criticized as exacerbating the rise in inequality in America with his tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the richest among us. But the underlying problem precedes the Bush Administration, as The Economist's article shows.

Cynthia Tucker, a liberal columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, agrees in this column, which quotes The Economist's article, that it's not all Bush's fault: "President Bush is not responsible for the hardening of class status; social mobility has been limited by a range of trends, including the demise of manufacturing jobs that guaranteed middle-class wages and lifelong benefits."

But she also faults Bush and his "so-called Ownership Society." She says it

... will make things worse for those stuck in the bottom half. His policies help those who already own stock, bonds and real estate; they do little for those who don't have much. As just one example, Bush has done little to help working-class and poor students pay college tuition (except to offer them the chance to serve in the military).

oldstyliberal, this blog's proprietor, doesn't think the Ownership Society itself a bad idea ... but he also agrees with Ms. Tucker that "if America is to live up to its ideals as an egalitarian nation where any child can grow up to be president of the United States or CEO of her own software company, we're going to have to level the playing field."

One way to level the playing field is to take Rep. Harold Ford, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee, up on his proposal to create American Stakeholder Accounts. In an op-ed column in the Washington Post of Jan. 25, 2005, the congressman wrote:

The time has come for a national strategy to give every child an ownership stake in America's future. In the tradition of the GI Bill and the Homestead Act, Congress should act on a bold initiative to introduce more middle- and lower-income Americans to the financial markets.

New Deal and Great Society programs have had great success reducing poverty. But these programs are not oriented toward wealth accumulation. To renew America's tradition of upward social mobility, we have to find new ways to help those living on modest incomes save and invest.

To do that, according to an online press release here, Ford proposes "the creation of American Stakeholder Accounts, savings accounts established at birth to give all children 'an ownership stake in America's future.'"

These investment accounts would be financed something like IRAs, with tax-free contributions. The accounts would be established for a newborn child by its parents; they would receive regular tax-free contributions from the parents thereafter; they would be restricted to relatively "safe" private investments, not wild speculation; and they could not be touched until the child is 18.

Then, after age 18, money could be taken out of the accounts, tax free, for a limited list of purposes such as paying college tuition.

These American Stakeholder Accounts would make even children born to families of limited means active participants in the Ownership Society. They would help America level its playing field, and that's all to the good.