Sunday, January 31, 2010
Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, January 31, 2010 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” CNN’s “Rick’s List,” “The Chris Matthews Show” and “The McLaughlin Group.”

Salit: The Charlie Rose panel with John Podesta, Chrystia Freeland, David Brooks, Al Hunt and Jim Fallows discussed the State of the Union late into the night. Charlie was in London. It was 4:00 a.m. there while he was doing the show.

Newman: He looked a bit tired.

Salit: Yes. And it was an interesting discussion. It focused on two interconnected issues. (1)The contradictory nature of the problems that have to be fixed on the economic side and (2)the inability of our government, as it’s currently – not just operating, but designed – to meet that challenge. To begin, the basic problem for the Obama White House: unemployment is at 10%, joblessness is looking dangerously incurable, even more so because the economy “is recovering,” but the jobless picture isn’t. Government has to act. Government has to take initiative. Government has to spend money to address that problem.

Newman: So sayeth the Democrats.

Salit: So sayeth the Democrats, yes. Other side of the problem: We have to stop spending money because the deficit and the debt are so gigantic. There isn’t a word in our language that seems big enough to describe the deficit and the debt.

Newman: That’s not an uninteresting formulation because it’s only a small slip-slide between that formulation and saying the deficit doesn’t matter, which some economists – left and right – say and I rather lean towards. That’s why you can’t find a word for it.

Salit: I hear that. And there are economic advisors who are telling Obama that very thing.

Newman: What?

Salit: The deficit doesn’t matter.

Newman: Yes. But, other things do matter, of a more political nature, namely our position relative to the rest of the world in terms of economic power. But the deficit, per se, is not the issue.

Salit: Alright. But these discussants seem to all agree that this may be an insurmountable contradiction, meaning the imperative for government to act and spend money to deal with joblessness combined with the size of the deficit and, at least, the perception on the part of the American people that the deficit is way out of hand. Add to that, the risk that the global economic community reacts to America’s deficit spending and accumulated debt by being less and less inclined to loan money to the United States.

Newman: Put them together and what do they imply?

Salit: What?

Newman: A presidential ticket of Ron Paul and Ross Perot.

Salit: How so?

Newman: No single political figure has emphasized and spent more money railing against the deficit than Perot. And Ron Paul, with his history as an independent, as a Libertarian, who favors structural changes in the political process, could get us working on the government breakdown side of it. Put the two together and, if the American people were rational and there was enough money behind them, they might be the team that would come to Washington and start working to solve the twin problems: economic instability and political dysfunction. The team on Charlie Rose had no solution because they didn’t even consider reforms of the political process. As long as you don’t do that, there is no solution to this problem.

Salit: I take it part of your point is that the contradiction on the economic policy front is one of the things that is being politicized by the partisans. So, the deficit becomes a popular issue…

Newman: It’s not quite a popular issue. It’s a usable issue in this context. When Perot raised it, in 1992, the government laughed hysterically.

Salit: It’s usable because it’s a battering ram against government spending, against the Democratic paradigm of government intervention into the economy?

Newman: Yes, you can use it to make political points against the Democrats. When Perot raised it, they laughed at him and said that he was a silly guy from Texas who didn’t understand anything. Which he was. But, that’s neither here nor there.

Salit: So, the Rose panel pointed to the inability of the government to act in response to this. David Brooks says, ‘The government is institutionally weak.’ His account of why the government is institutionally weak is because the size of the entitlement budget is so huge and so fixed that, essentially, Obama’s hand is stayed. He can’t do anything without a combination of raising taxes and cutting costs. You raise taxes, you piss off the 50% of the country that doesn’t want taxes raised. You cut the budget, you piss off the 50% of the country that doesn’t want entitlements cut. And Brooks says, ‘I don’t see a way out of it.’

Newman: Right.

Salit: And even Obama’s seems to be saying: Given our system of government, I have a big majority in Congress and I still can’t get any big changes.

Newman: Well, the system of government requires a super majority in the Senate.

Salit: So, what’s the way out?

Newman: There isn’t any. That’s the point.

Salit: When you boil it down, the Democrats and Republicans, regardless of their approach, are saying this: If the global economy recovers, then we can make this work out, because the economic situation will be healthier. There’ll be a bigger tax base. There’ll be more revenues. And more jobs. There will be less unemployment. And we’ll grow our way out of this problem.

Newman: Right. The way out therefore, is largely out of their control. But, what about this? What if the economy grows and the deficit grows along with it?

Salit: Because we’re always going to spend more than we have. And paying down the debt is not going to be high on the list of what the government is going to do, presumably.

Newman: Well, we paid down the debt in the 1990s. And then we started borrowing again. Americans love credit.

Salit: We do indeed. So, if you’re on a steady growth trajectory and things are looking fairly stable and growing, then there’s no problem with the deficit and there’s no problem with the debt. But, when Clinton took office, he brought Bob Rubin of Citigroup in and made a series of profound structural changes in the regulatory system, in trade policy, etc. That grew the economy. The deficit shrunk and when he left office, there was a surplus. Then, surplus in hand, a new administration…

Newman: …but the same country…

Salit: Yes, the same country. The Democrats say the problems occurred because of a new administration, but who knows what would have happened if a Democrat had been elected at that point. The de-regulation of the financial industry that took place in the 1980s and ’90s flung open the door to the current financial crisis. That de-regulation had bipartisan support under Bill Clinton and continued under President Bush.

Newman: It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s Democrats or Republicans.

Salit: No. The Democrats opened the door and the Republicans rushed through it. They cut taxes. They took us to war. Twice. We put both wars on a credit card and now we have these huge deficits.

Newman: Well, yes. But on the business side, the government cut taxes and said to the private sector, Do what you do best. Go make money.

Salit: Make money.

Newman: Make money. So, they cheat and swindle, “legally.” They extend credit like crazy. Every once in awhile, they make a product.

Salit: Then this bad stuff happens.

Newman: It’s not “this” bad stuff. It’s the same bad stuff. That’s how the country works.

Salit: OK. But there’s an underlying process at work here. Maybe that word is a silly word.

Newman: What? “Underlying?”

Salit: Yes.

Newman: It is. There’s nothing underlying about it.

Salit: Let me put it another way. There’s a non-viable situation developing in the midst of all of this.

Newman: Which is?

Salit: Which is that in order to recover, the economy has to grow in certain kinds of ways. And it’s not. So, government has to intervene. But it can’t.

Newman: Right.

Salit: And that’s where we are.

Newman: Well, not quite. There is a rest of the world. And the rest of the world, recognizing all of that – they’ve read Keynes, too – sees this as an opportunity to change the order of things in the world. So the United States gets incrementally more unstable and loses its position at the top of the heap.

Salit: True.

Newman: That has an impact on everything, including on the U.S.

Salit: The U.S. is no longer a lender. It’s a borrower.

Newman: And nations, like China, can say to the U.S., You’re more dependent on us than ever. That impacts on lots of other things.

Salit: Lots of other things from the standard of living, to the kinds of foreign policy you can execute, and so forth. Interestingly, in his speech Obama made a point of saying, ‘America is #1. I will not let this country become #2.’

Newman: Well, that’s a great speech. But that moment has come.

Salit: Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’s now the president of a #2 country, not the #1 country. Rich, powerful, huge military, infrastructure all around the world. USA, USA, USA, all of that. But, it’s just not the same USA.

Newman: The U.S. has always been richer than its competitors – let’s leave out whatever China is these days – because even in the best of times, the business sector has been less generous to working class people. The United States has allowed higher levels of unemployment…

Salit: …and a smaller safety net…

Newman: …than the European countries. During the best of times. Now is not the best of times. The normal unemployment rate in this country is about 6.0%. Today it’s 10%. That’s just not tolerable in a lot of European countries. I really wish I could be a fly on the wall of some of the discussions going on, maybe behind closed doors in Davos. I think what I’d hear from some people is, Well, 10% sounds like a terrible number and the Republicans can really nail the Democrats with that number. But I don’t know if 10% is all that bad. It depends on what 10%.

Salit: Which 10%. Meaning, what level of voice they have?

Newman: No, who cares about voice? Voice doesn’t mean anything to these people. Obama just got into office with the loudest voice behind him and he can’t do anything. What means something is: Is this 10% due to our being in a transition from one version of the American economy to another version? Is it a change of design of the U.S. economy and the jobs are shifting to new industries? If that’s the case, then it’s just a transition and you have to put up with the Republicans’ form of opportunism, as opposed to the Democrats’ form of opportunism, while you wait it out. Some people are saying that, or hoping that, because you can’t go back to the old jobs. If you listen to Pat Buchanan, he wants to return to our old manufacturing base. But what if we can’t return? And what if it’s not even good for us to return? What if that’s not, from capital’s point of view, where the real wealth creation lies? What if the real money lies in these new fangled green, techno service jobs and it just takes time to capitalize them and get people in a position where they can be employed in them? Otherwise, the capitalists say, We’d be paying people for “busy work.” And we will not pay people for busy work. Let the Democrats pay people for busy work. Then, the Republicans will attack that “busy work” approach. And there’s something to that argument. Yes, you can make the claim that the country’s highway system was constructed during times of depression. But what if we don’t need superhighways? What if the communications structure of this culture and society are so transformed that we don’t even care that the automobile industry is crippled? Because there are new industries that are going to make up for that job loss three times over or ten times over. There are no traffic jams, at least that I know of, right now in virtual space.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: Is that being talked about? It must be, by some of those people.

Salit: Here’s another conversation. Government leaders are right now meeting with business leaders who are saying, Look, this economic crisis is the best thing that happened to us. It pushed the productivity issue. We’ve had to shrink our work force and make it two or three times more productive. We’ve done that. Now you’re coming to us and you’re saying you want us to start hiring again. Well, guess what? We don’t need to.

Newman: We don’t need to and, therefore, we won’t.

Salit: Exactly. Our bottom line is getting better.

Newman: We are not a social work agency.

Salit: We’re not. We’re private enterprise, remember?

Newman: If you in government want to function as a social work agency, feel free. But don’t come to us. Which is what Obama is doing.

Salit: They have a case because it is private enterprise. They do have their bottom line.

Newman: They have a very strong case. Exactement!

Salit: I didn’t know you spoke French! John Podesta, who was White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, a Beltway aficionado, says, ‘Here’s the deal. Obama tried to play an inside game on healthcare. That was his strategy on this.’ Podesta says: ‘He looked at the picture. He looked at his majority. He looked at the political dynamics and said, Alright, we can do this.’

Newman: And he looked at the Democratic Party, who he thought controlled those 60 votes in the Senate, cold.

Salit: Exactly. And he said, We can do this as an inside game.

Newman: Right. Forget the independents. Forget the people who got him elected. We can do this.

Salit: Yes. Forget the coalition.

Newman: Right. This is our shot.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I’m not even saying this harshly. It just didn’t work.

Salit: So, is he ready to talk to us now?

Newman: I don’t hear the phone ringing off the hook.

Salit: No.

Newman: But that’s not the issue. That’s the wrong conclusion.

Salit: What’s the right conclusion?

Newman: The issue is what we have to do to accelerate our effort to talk to him. He’s not going to come to us.

Salit: We are accelerating our efforts.

Newman: I think we’ve grown sufficiently – although it’s not as much as I’d like – such that we have some plays to make that have a slightly better chance of being heard, given the circumstances, in a slightly different way than is “normal.” That’s a lot of “slightly.”

Salit: Yes. Here’s one example of the kind of development we’re seeing. Right now we’re in a fight in Kentucky. We, the independents, just elected a new Republican state senator. Independent Kentucky, led by Michael Lewis, made it happen. So newly-elected State Senator Jimmy Higdon goes to the legislature with an open primary bill that Michael asked him to sponsor. And the Democrats…

Newman: Maybe, here’s where we differ. I think this is important. I think all the work in the states is important work. But I think it’s work for the long run. I think our road to Obama right now is more directly to Obama, not through the states, per se. I don’t see any way in which those things that you’re talking about can happen fast enough to impact on the current situation.

Salit: You might be right about that. But, what I was going to say is that the Democrats stood up in the legislature and accused Independent Kentucky of using this issue to build the independent movement.

Newman: They’re right.

Salit: Absolutely. And they’re trying to block the bill. Their position is, Hey, we’re fighting the Republicans for hegemony in Kentucky. We don’t want you in here muddying the waters.

Newman: That’s who our fight is with.

Salit: With the Democrats.

Newman: With the Democrats. That’s where it is. They’re aware of that. And, I think they’re somewhat frightened of our growth. But, I don’t think that’s going to impact on the immediacy of the situation. I think they’re afraid of it in the long haul and justifiably so. That’s why I think we have to keep that up intensely. But I think we have to do some other things if we want to intervene relative to what’s happening in Washington. You might be saying, Forget about taking a shot at what’s going on now. That’s out of the question anyhow. I don’t think that’s true.

Salit: I wouldn’t say that.

Newman: I think we have to do both.

Salit: I agree, Fred.

Sunday, January 24, 2010
Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, January 24, 2010 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “PBS NewsHour” and “The Chris Matthews Show.”

Salit: In the Charlie Rose discussion about rebuilding Haiti, Pamela Cox from the World Bank said a number of things that I thought had a subtext. Though it was contained in a “forward looking” perspective – how the World Bank and other key financial institutions are mobilizing to help Haiti – the subtext was “I don’t know if we can do anything about this.” She talked about how the world community mobilizes, money comes pouring in, aid comes pouring in, and then she says, ‘But you have to ask: six months down the line, where is the sustained interest? We’ve been here before. There have been crises in Haiti before. The world community has responded before.’ She calls Haiti a “fragile state.” She says, ‘The question is: how do we pay for development? How do we cover the cost of development for Haiti if we constantly have to go back in to rebuild because, essentially, the infrastructure keeps collapsing for one reason or another?’ She and the World Bank don’t want to say We can’t get anywhere in Haiti. But I thought that was what she was saying.

Newman: I agree.

Salit: And then Ray Kelly, who is currently the New York City Police Commissioner and who has spent time in Haiti…he was sent down in the mid-1990s as Director of an International Police force responsible for ending human rights abuses and establishing an interim police force during the political transitions there, spoke concretely about some of the challenges. His argument was that Haiti has to become economically “self-sufficient.” Ultimately, Kelly argues, referencing the kinds of corruption in Haiti, that Haiti has to take responsibility for itself. Maybe what I’m reflecting on here, and I would ask you to do the same, is that a terrible tragedy happens, it tears the country apart and tears the people apart. At one level, the world community says, “We have to help. We have to help.” And it does, in the most immediate sense. But very quickly you get to the issue of whether we can we do anything developmental here. They don’t seem to be saying, “Yes.” They seem to be saying the opposite.

Newman: I agree with you completely, that’s their subtext. And it pointed me in a particular direction, and Ray Kelly came closest to saying it directly when he brought up the issue of corruption. It’s the old Latin American problem, or at least one understanding of the Latin American problem, that the corruption is so entrenched and the capacity for development so weak that the “developers” can never get their hands on enough money to buy off or compete with the “corrupters.” So things remain fundamentally corrupt. How do you deal with that? One way that’s been attempted and met with some success is through ideological revolutions, though it’s a mixed record.

Salit: In Cuba, the revolution threw out the mob, the gangsters and their cronies. But other revolutionary forces in Latin America turned to drug dealing to finance their cause and then became common criminals.

Newman: Yes, ideological revolutions have come closest to cleaning out the corruption, but I don’t know what the evaluation of that process would be today. Has Cuba done away with corruption or is Cuba the corruption that’s not been done away with? Not surprisingly, there is a debate about that. But, can anything be done about corruption in the long run? I’m not convinced. In a worldwide system which is grounded so heavily in varying degrees of corruption, it almost follows logically that one of the most corrupt places would be Haiti. It’s almost a logical truth that you’d have the most pronounced and unadorned version of the thing that permeates Western culture in the most “fragile” states. It also seems to me to be a logical point that the only way to deal with that is to change the world.

Salit: That’s a terrible and tragic situation for the Haitian people, if what you’re saying is accurate. Because what it really comes to is things are not going to get any better for those living in the poorest and most corrupt sections of the world until the world has changed.

Newman: And who’s ready to change the world? Hard to say.

Salit: Hard to say.

Newman: I’m ready.

Salit: Maybe that takes us into the latest rounds of discussion of American politics and the mandate for change coming off the 2008 election. Here are some things that struck me watching the analysts talk about the results in Massachusetts. On the PBS Newshour Gwen Ifill says, trying to distill the dynamics down to the simplest form, ‘Americans are angry. The country isn’t working. People are angry. It was that anger that swept Obama into office in 2008. It’s the continuation of that anger that sweeps Brown into office in Massachusetts.’ She turns to the panelists and asks, ‘Is that right?’ So, the first thing that happens in this conversation is that the Republican state chairwoman from Massachusetts answers, ‘Here’s why Brown won. He talked about the right issues: terror, taxes, spending, jobs.’ Immediately, she’s into the Republican spin on the results: People are angry. The Republican Party has the answers. I know that she’s the head of the Republican Party and her job is to sell it. But, to me as an independent and also as a longtime builder of the independent movement, I was struck by how quickly the conversation about this thing that’s going on in the country resolved to a partisan pitch. What is it about? Answer: the Republicans know what to do. Of course, if you talked to a Democrat…

Newman: You get the mirror image of that.

Salit: Exactly. You get the mirror image of that. So you have: Things aren’t working, people are angry, Republican answer, Democrat answer, and it’s all roughly within the standard paradigm, which is connected, obviously, to why people are angry. What an incredible manipulation.

Newman: I’ll say.

Salit: I guess my bottom line here is how difficult it is to have the conversation about anger and change without it plugging right back into the old ways, the old language, the old alignments.

Newman: I think there’s a serious misunderstanding here in the whole way this situation is talked about, a serious and deep psychological, social and political misunderstanding. Of course, the American people are angry. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. If they weren’t angry, they’d be dead. But anger – by itself – is not usable to understand events – be it for individuals or for states or for worlds. What’s required to understand how all of that operates and gets translated into various forms of action is the combination of anger and the vehicles, psychological or social or whatever, for giving expression to anger. And that’s left out. So they make it seem as if anger, boom, a Republican is elected. Anger, boom, a black man is elected. Anger, boom, an election ends in a tie. That’s not how it happens. What’s most frustrating is the anger, on the one hand, combined with the modest means by which the American people, in this case, or an individual, in those cases, can give expression to the anger. That produces stalemate, frustration, and so on. Anger expressed within the existing forms for expressing anger in this country leads to paralysis because the things that you do to express the anger within our two-party system move us a little bit this way and then, as soon as that happens, and it fails, we move a little bit that way. Going this way and that way is not adequate. These efforts, from the tea party bellow to the outcry against the banks, are inadequate for getting to any kind of transformation. That’s because of the absence, not of another paradigm, but of other ways in which one can give expression to anger. And that’s true across the political spectrum.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: For me, it’s that mistaken understanding of how this works, of how anger works, that leads to shallow analysis. It’s generally true of all emotions. Emotions cannot be fully understood unless you understand emotions as in a relational situation with the existing – either personal or social – means for giving expression to those emotions. That’s what an emotion is. Although you can speak of them, and people frequently do within this culture, as having an independent existence, but they don’t. Or, probably more accurately, they do, but that level of emotional existence or presence is profoundly non-developmental. And can lead to all kinds of things best called, to use a popular term, either personal or social neurosis.

Salit: The inability to give expression…

Newman: …to emotions in ways which are developmental…

Salit: …leads to neurosis. Yes. I did an interview with a reporter in Florida the other day which he conducted in front of a live audience. He asked to interview me after he read the statement that we put out about the Massachusetts results, which strongly admonished the Obama team for its inattentiveness to the independent movement and its political dynamics and, in some sense, for its supposition that independents having aligned with Obama in 2008 meant that independents were permanently affixed with the Democrats. Then they woke up the morning after the Massachusetts election and discovered that that’s not true, and there are a lot of reasons why that’s the case. This reporter asked me about Massachusetts, but quickly the discussion got to how do you bring independents together, since they’re so diverse. This question comes up all the time when you talk to people about organizing an independent movement, organizing independents to participate as a cohesive force. How do you bring them together given that they’re so different? I answer in the way that I typically answer – which is to talk about what we do, which has been successful – namely, that you bring independents together because of and by emphasizing their concern with the way the process works, the way the process operates. I discussed various political reforms and restructurings of the political process that independents want. The interviewer, and some members of the audience, were up in arms about this. Essentially they’re argument was: That’s not real. The issues are the issues. We know what the issues are. You can’t participate in the political process of what’s going on in this country unless you’re dealing with issues and, if you’re dealing with issues, you’ll be divided. The conversation was my going up against their insistence that what’s going on in the world is the issues. And the idea that, to use your term, the mechanisms for political expression are inadequate to the anger…whether you’re on the left, whether you’re on the right, wherever you are, was provocative to them. There’s not a lot of disagreement about the fact that the American people are angry. But, the pushback in this context was very pointed, that the process issues, the mechanism issues, aren’t real. What’s real? Issues. And we’re divided on the issues. So, the conclusion was that Whatever it is that you’re doing, Ms. Salit, trying to build an independent movement, you call yourself a progressive, presumably you believe in certain kinds of things…whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’re not going to be able to do it. Because the issues are the issues and the people are divided on the issues.

Newman: More divided than our country was on the issue of slavery for the first 80 years of our history do you think?

Salit: No. They’d be hard pressed to say that.

Newman: What moved that situation forward, for the better part of a half a century? Decisions on the process.

Salit: I see what you’re saying. Yes, the debate about slavery was for decades a debate about the process. Should we discuss slavery in Congress or not? Should states come into the union, slave or free?

Newman: Are some people morally offended by that? Yes, myself included. But, did it move the conflict forward for that period of time? I would argue it did. The claim that process and issues have no relationship to one another is simply historical ignorance.

Salit: I think of it as some combination of ignorance, and, as you were saying earlier, the neurosis.

Newman: Yes, exactly.

Salit: Those two seem very connected right now in American politics.

Newman: Exactly. The people who are saying, “the issues, the issues, the issues, we have to come up with solutions to the issues” are, by virtue of their neuroses, contributing to the problem. Their neuroses are rooted, as far as I’m concerned, in the failure to have created a system which gives full and democratic expression to the people. Not having that makes the people frustrated.

Salit: It does.

Newman: So, if I were being interviewed on these matters, I’d say Let me ask you this question, now that I’ve dispelled your argument that there is no connection between process and the issues. Which would you think is more important: to resolve the issue of abortion once and for all (whatever that might mean) or to pass an amendment which allows for the direct election of the president and vice president of the United States? Which of those two is more important?” One is a process, one is a so-called issue. Which is more important?

Salit: It’s such a great question because if you go down that road and have that discussion, you not only are addressing the connection and the fact that process issues are paramount, but you’re also addressing the fact that there are so many barriers, there are so many mediating institutions, so many mediators along the way that the American people can’t get through to express themselves.

Newman: Right.

Salit: There’s the primaries, there’s the parties, there’s…

Newman: …the money.

Salit: There’s the money. Exactly. There are so many things and they’re so deeply rooted in American political culture.

Newman: The Constitution of the United States handles a number of things directly and then says, ‘All the things not covered by this Constitution are in the hands of the people.’ Sounds good. But here’s a practical question: how are people to deal with those matters? Through what mechanism? We, the people, are influenced to a very large degree by those factors, the money, the parties, the pundits. They determine how the people will speak. How is that a democracy? If the people are not allowed to determine how they are going to speak, how can we speak about having a democracy? I’m aware that the counter argument is Well, we have to have stability. I agree that we have to have stability, but not at the price of democracy. Not at the price of development.

Salit: If stability turns to paralysis, you’re in trouble.

Newman: If you’re constructing a system in a social science laboratory, there are variables that you have to take into account in creating a good system. You can’t construct a system that is so strong on one side that it rules out other things which are equally important. That’s not a good system.

Salit: We watched a pundit discussion about Obama’s first year framed as “expectations vs. reality.” It’s a funny framing, because it makes it seem as if expectations aren’t a part of reality. But, that aside, the point to be made, is that Obama said to the American people, ‘I can make this system work for you. I can do it. We can come together and…’

Newman: And frustrated Americans said, ‘Let’s take a shot.’

Salit: Yes, people said, ‘Let’s take a shot.’ Now, we’re a year down the road and I think part of what’s going on is that the American people – including the president himself – are experiencing the difficulty in that.

Newman: Well, I don’t think Obama fully realized how difficult it would be to achieve even an approximation of his ideal in a system so over-determined by existing institutions; for example, the Democratic Party.

Salit: Yes, absolutely.

Newman: Obama never really ran as a Democrat. What I mean by that rather extraordinary remark is that it was virtually a foregone conclusion that the Democrat was going to win the 2008 election almost no matter who the Democrats put up. So Obama ran as a popular figure, with all the support that he got from independents, not to mention all the support that he got from pissed off Republicans, not to mention the support he got from everybody else, because everybody was so frustrated that people were really quite open to interpreting him and what he stood for as an emancipation from the narrow restrictions of the party system.

Salit: So he didn’t really run as a Democrat.

Newman: He didn’t really run as a Democrat but once in Washington, he was a Democrat.

Salit: The Democrats came knockin’, alright!

Newman: Hello, hello! And he didn’t recognize that they had to come to him, not him to them, and he played that weakly.

Salit: Yes, he did.

Newman: He didn’t have to go on some ultra-left tear.

Salit: He just had to stay independent.

Newman: He just had to maintain that position and say, I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a leftist. I’m not a rightist. I’m the President of the United States. And just keep reminding everybody of that.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: Does that mean he would have gotten everything he wanted? No. But he’d have had a better chance than he’s given himself to date.

Salit: Yes. Thank you.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, January 17, 2010 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “PBS NewsHour” and “The Chris Matthews Show.”

Salit: Did you know the story of the South African World Cup before the movie “Invictus” came out?

Newman: Yes.

Salit: There were two things that struck me in the interview that Charlie Rose did with Morgan Freeman, who plays Nelson Mandela in the movie. One was that Morgan Freeman talked about how, as an actor playing a living person, you can find the inner energy of that person. And he spent a fair amount of time with Mandela over the years getting to know him and discovering his “pulse” or his temperament. Freeman and Rose seemed to agree that Mandela’s contained, even quiet temperament, in addition to his political skills, enabled him to handle a very complicated and dangerous situation when Apartheid was dismantled and he became president of South Africa. The other thing that I found interesting, and this is what the movie is about, is how the World Cup was a turning point in post-Apartheid South Africa. Mandela succeeded in motivating both the team and the public – across the very divided communities that made up South Africa at that time – to root together for the South African team to win the World Cup. And Freeman says, if you talk to anyone in South Africa today who was alive in 1995, they remember that, they talk about that the way Americans talk about the Kennedy assassination. He says South Africa never went back to its own self after that, that it was a game-changing
experience.

Newman: Well, it was a nation-changing experience.

Salit: When you create plays that have historical figures in them as characters, do you think in the terms that Freeman and Rose used, as in having to find the “slice” that defines a person?

Newman: No. Nor do I think of people in those terms.

Salit: How do you think about creating a character from history for a cultural piece?

Newman: I think of who a person is as largely determined by how they are related to by the “other” and if they are a political figure, as Mandela was, by the people. I don’t think it goes from inside-out. It goes from outside-in. But, I thought that one problem with how Freeman and Rose talked about the ways that Mandela’s prison experience shaped his character is that they assumed that because he was in prison he wasn’t dealing with the political and human issues affecting South Africa. But that’s ridiculous. While he was in prison for those 27 years he was both a political force and was personally impacted upon by all that was going on. I presume there were other people who were in prison for those 27 years who didn’t get elected president upon their release.

Salit: Have you ever thought about writing a play with Mandela as a character?

Newman: No. I don’t know that that’s my play to write.

Salit: Then we watched the coverage of Haiti.

Newman: The Haitian crisis is a terrible disaster. My thoughts were Haiti never gets a break. But if you think about it a moment longer, it’s like what happened in New Orleans. This is the face of international poverty. And it’s a human disgrace that this poverty exists anywhere. It doesn’t handle normal times very well. And, equally, it doesn’t handle hard times very well. But the bottom line is we can’t allow masses of people to live under those conditions. Not just the conditions from the quake.

Salit: But conditions before the quake.

Newman: Yes. But we do. Human beings do. And so, don’t blame nature. It can’t do any differently. It simply does what it does. What about us?

Salit: Turning to the investigation of the causes of the financial crisis by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, they asked the head of Goldman Sachs, ‘How can you reconcile the bonuses you’re giving with the current economic situation?’ Essentially, Lloyd Blankfein’s answer was, ‘The bonuses are tied to earnings and to profits. That’s always been true, and there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be true today.’ If you were on that panel, would you ask that question? Do you think that is a useful question to ask?

Newman: I’d probably ask it. But I’d answer it differently if I were the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Salit: How would you answer it?

Newman: I would answer it by saying, “This system has been created and sustained by leaders who wanted that relationship to be, roughly speaking, exactly what it is. So don’t blame me for being the person for whom it’s true. And don’t blame me for the president having so much power. That’s the way the Constitution was written.”

Salit: In other words, “I’m just operating within that system.”

Newman: Yes.

Salit: I guess what you’re saying is that you would kick it back to the political leadership of this country.

Newman: No, I would respond by kicking it back to the history of the country, of what the country is. I wouldn’t kick it back to the political leadership. I’d kick it back to the framework the elected leaders are following. In being the elected leaders, they’ve sworn to do that.

Salit: So, the commission is charged with finding out the root causes of the crisis. Leaving aside the politics of that for the moment – maybe you’ll say you can’t – but can you find the root causes?

Newman: Yes. The root causes of the crisis are the system as constructed.

Salit: And the investigators would say, OK, but we’re trying to discover what aspects of the system don’t work. By this, they mean, the regulatory system. Are you saying something different than that?

Newman: Something different than what?

Salit: The commission agrees with you. They’re saying The structure of the system doesn’t work. The structure of the system produced this crisis. We want to restructure the system so that it doesn’t…

Newman: No, you don’t. That’s a lie.

Salit: Alright.

Newman: You don’t want to restructure the system.

Salit: The reformers would argue that. They say There has to be more accountability in the financial industry. The levels of accountability and regulation were eroded. By acts of Congress, by both political parties, but in any event, the industry has been allowed to function in a freewheeling and unchecked way and that’s what produced this crisis and now we have to install some kind of accountability and regulations to make sure that same thing doesn’t happen again, that the system doesn’t get overleveraged.

Newman: Well, maybe if I were Blankfein I’d say I’m not so sure you do, because if it’s a system, and it is, which creates substantial wealth, do you want to eliminate that? Because that feature of our system will be undermined if you do what you’re suggesting. Don’t forget that the system overall, by your own account, and by the account of most of the public, has prospered dramatically for all people. If I’m still doing their voice, I’d say I’ve taken pride in referring to our system as the wealthiest in the world. It’s not just the wealthiest for wealthy people. That goes without saying. It’s the wealthiest for all people.

Salit: That’s their argument, certainly.

Newman: So, why would you want to change it? Or do we want to change it? Or do you really want to change it?

Salit: Their answer would be No, we don’t want to change it in its entirety, but we want to eliminate the bottoming out that we saw because that’s too dangerous to the system.

Newman: Answer: Systems have ways of being totalities. It’s not so transparently obvious that you can change this portion and not have that change affect the rest of the system as a whole.

Salit: How much of a political tinderbox do you think this situation is?

Newman: I’m not sure I know what you mean by the question.

Salit: Well, Obama comes out with a set of strong statements about wanting to impose taxes on the financial industry and the “back story” is he has to do that because the American people are very on-edge about how the banks are going to be related to. We just gave them all this money, and the country has taken a too-big-to-fail attitude toward these institutions and now they’ve been restored to health. They’re making significant profits. They’re giving bonuses to their people, at what most Americans think are unimaginable levels. And so the story is that this thing is explosive politically.

Newman: What’s the explosion going to look like?

Salit: This takes us back to what we talked about last week, to the Independent Paralysis. What’s the explosion
going to look like? I don’t know. In the short term, it might look like electing more Republicans just to punish the Democrats because they’re in power.

Newman: Oh, some punishment.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: Are you asking is this going to lead to a serious and deep change of the overall structural system which produced it? Apparently not.

Salit: No.

Newman: If Obama was going to do that, he would have done it already.

Salit: Your question is such a good one: what does that explosion mean? What would it look like? What it
would mainly look like is some kind of anti-incumbent movement which would hit Democrats where the Democrats live and Republicans where the Republicans live and you would basically throw a bunch of people out of office and largely replace them with people from the other party. Now, what is the net effect of that?

Newman: Well, the net effect is Bush vs. Obama. And people have different feelings about that, different interpretations of what that means. But, no one’s talking about changing the overall system which produces that.

Salit: No. But, there are some forces who are talking about – and maybe it is the difference between Bush and Obama –bringing the financial industry to heel. They’re saying, if you’re going to make that level of profit it has to be taxed at a higher level. There’s going to be a higher tax rate and that’s going to be the price of doing business in the United States of America. And roughly speaking, you could say that’s the difference between Obama and Bush.

Newman: Oh. It’s also the difference between the United States and Belgium.

Salit: Yes, the cost of doing business in Belgium is more expensive than the cost of doing business here because of healthcare and other levels of taxation and so on.

Newman: And so we’re wealthier than they are.

Salit: Yes. We’re the wealthiest of all. Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, January 10, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, January 10, 2009 after watching selections from “PBS NewsHour,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

Salit: They say Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader, had a bad week. Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd is not going to run for re-election. Harold Ford might challenge Kirsten Gillibrand in New York. Other Senate Democrats are retiring. The early January talk about 2010 is that the Democrats, who’ve had a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate, are going to lose that. They won’t lose majority control, but they’ll lose practical control. Now the pundits are asking what happened. Just a year ago, the Democrats won the presidency and huge majorities in Congress, sweeping into office with talk of a new political alignment. But, here it is a year later and, as Amy Walters from Hotline said, the Democrats are nervous. They’re going into the 2010 election and they’re nervous. They don’t know what’s out there. Of course, the Republicans are nervous, too. On the one hand, if you do a state by state analysis, you see lots of opportunity for Republican “pick-ups,” as they’re called, for narrowing the Democratic majority in the House, eliminating the 60 vote majority in the Senate, etc. But, as some pundits have noted, if you take a closer look, the Republicans are in trouble, too, because the Tea Party movement, (which as far as I can tell is a new name for an old movement, the conservative movement) is leveraging for a more right-wing agenda inside the Republican Party. The concern is that’s going to produce Republican nominees who are too conservative to win in swing districts. So, while it might look good for the Republicans on paper, if that base is active in the primaries, it will make the Republican Party unviable. So, is that, in “electoral map” terms, a fair characterization of what’s going on?

Newman: I think it’s the same old picture.

Salit: The same picture as before Barack Obama was elected?

Newman: Don’t you think?

Salit: Maybe. But maybe what’s making the commentators nervous is the idea that it’s different. Gwen Ifill asks, ‘What does this all mean for Obama?’ And Amy Walters says, ‘Well, here’s the fundamental issue,’ she didn’t use the word contradiction, but that’s what she meant. ‘Obama ran his campaign with a message of post-partisanship and he won popular support with that message…but…’

Newman: Oh, that’s nonsense. You don’t really believe that, do you?

Salit: Well, he ran his campaign with that message. Whether it was serious or not is another matter.

Newman: What did it mean that he ran on the basis of no partisanship? It means that he wanted everyone to vote for him.

Salit: That’s true.

Newman: Well, that isn’t a political position.

Salit: OK.

Newman: That’s never meant anything. The country remains split about 50/50.

Salit: It is.

Newman: You could consider why the country’s split 50/50. But, 50/50 is simply the political epiphenomenon. That’s the reality we’ve had now for some time. Bush and Gore tied, remember? So, what are we talking about here? Nothing has really changed in recent years.

Salit: Except that there are more independents.

Newman: Yes, there are more independents. And, there are all kinds of things to look at, politically and historically speaking. But, the epiphenomena called “the voting patterns” mean nothing. That’s why the reporters are nervous. Because they’re making things up. This “nonpartisan” thing with Obama is absolute nonsense. Nobody wants post-partisan. People want partisan. On their side.

Salit: That was where Amy Walters went with her argument and maybe she’d agree with you. She said, ‘The problem for Obama is that he projected as post-partisan, but, there’s no such thing as post-partisan.’

Newman: Of course not. There’s no such thing structurally. How could there be?

Salit: There can’t be, if you have a party system.

Newman: Given the structure of the party system, what would it mean to make Washington nonpartisan?

Salit: Going into 2010, what are the things that you see that you might call political trends of interest? We’ve mentioned some. The growth of the number of independents.

Newman: Right.

Salit: Presumably that’s a sign that there is, at least, a constituency for post-partisanship. There is a potential movement that wants to…

Newman: Wants to what?

Salit: Be able to find solutions to problems that don’t get endlessly tied up in partisan drama.

Newman: Everyone wants to solve problems. And how do they want to solve problems? In their own way.

Salit: In their own way.

Newman: There we go. This is the understanding of three-year-olds.

Salit: Maybe we are a nation of three-year-olds.

Newman: Well, actually, we’re a nation of ordinary people who aren’t divided politically, but for a partisan system. And it’s been partisan since 1800, last time I looked. By the way, did you know that James Monroe, our fifth president, was elected unanimously? He had no one running against him.

Salit: No, I didn’t.

Newman: Yes, I just heard that yesterday. Where’d I see that? On some quiz show.

Salit: The only thing I know about James Monroe…

Newman: …is the doctrine…

Salit: …Other than the doctrine is that there’s a high school in the Bronx named after him that my dad went to.

Newman: See, if you’re old enough and you watch enough quiz shows, you learn all of these things.

Salit: So, I’ll ask you the question that Gwen Ifill asked some of her panelists. What does this mean for Obama?

Newman: What does what mean for Obama?

Salit: This situation, the 50/50 split. I assume it means he needs to figure out how to get 50% plus 1 in 2012.

Newman: That’s what it’s always meant. As I read him, I think Obama is holding off on even thinking about what it means for him, because that’s one of the advantages you have in being the incumbent. You can start your campaign later than the other guys.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: They are actually obliged to start earlier.

Salit: Because they’re the challengers.

Newman: Yes. They’re the challengers. So, Obama can wait for them to come at him, and formulate his response then. Until that point, things have reached something of an equilibrium state.

Salit: I know what you’re saying. It’s kind of like things play out because the structure and the partisan divide is what there is.

Newman: Well, there is content to this, Jack. I mean there was a time when this country was dominantly Democratic. For an extended period of time.

Salit: That’s true.

Newman: But today, it’s the early stages of some kind of independent turn, which means things swing, which means 50/50. That’s what it is. Obama will run as a Democrat. Will he win? Probably. Most incumbents do. Will he win with anything resembling the hoopla of the first time? No. Obviously not. I’m not trying to make light of what you’re doing in asking these questions. But, I don’t think this is the stuff of what needs to be understood in our world today. I think there are bonafide issues, but I don’t think that they regularly or easily translate into electoral results, either micro or macro, in a way that’s informative. I think they translate in a way that’s completely epiphenomenal.

Salit: Meaning on the surface.

Newman: You want to look at the education issue. You want to look at the health issue. You want to look at our foreign policy. There really are people who are out to blow up the United States. I mean, these are serious issues. But, in some ways, ironically, this structural thing is on our side.

Salit: What do you mean by that?

Newman: Meaning, on our side as independents. Because it’s kind of reached a point where, in terms of the electoral scene, I’m inclined to think it can’t go on like this indefinitely. Maybe it can, I don’t know. But, for the moment if I were giving a name to this phenomenon, I’d say it should be called the Independent Paralysis.

Salit: Really?

Newman: That’s kind of what we’re looking at. Which doesn’t mean a lot of things don’t go on. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t still dying in Afghanistan. But electorally, in one sense, there’s nothing much going on. Now, insofar as there is anything that’s going on, it’s stuff happening with independents on the ground that we’re enormously familiar with, but they never talk about. That’s very small.

Salit: It is.

Newman: Too small for the big people we watch on TV these days to know or see. But we see it. We know it. Does that mean it’s more important than what they’re talking about? No. It just means that it has some modest element of importance while what they’re talking about has none. So, our stuff is more important than theirs for that reason. I don’t know how you feel about that, if you feel good about it or bad about it.

Salit: I feel differently on different days.

Newman: But that’s life. What can I tell you?

Salit: Well, you and Frank Sinatra agree on that. There are two things that I’m thinking about from this conversation so far. One, your point, that there’s kind of an equilibrium that exists.

Newman: Everybody knows that.

Salit: At the same time, which you also observe, things can’t go on forever like this.

Newman: I’m not so sure. Maybe it can go on forever. Or, maybe this is the end state of American experimental democracy with parties.

Salit: And?

Newman: Maybe we’re in an endless spin into independent paralysis. I’m hoping it’s other than that. We’re both working to see if we can do something about that.

Salit: We are.

Newman: Have we accomplished that so far? Well, I don’t know how to appraise that. An African American man was elected president and it’s related to that. But does anything happen off of that?

Salit: Not so far. Let me ask you a question about the term you used “independent paralysis.” I want to break
that down a little bit. The system is in a state of paralysis.

Newman: Electorally.

Salit: Electorally. Independents are the reaction to that paralysis? The way out of that paralysis?

Newman: No, they’re the electoral form of that paralysis.

Salit: They’re the form of that paralysis because independents are the swing element that goes back and forth.

Newman: That’s what it means to swing.

Salit: So, in essence, the paralysis is the 50/50 split and the narrow margins of who controls what for some period of time, determined by what the independents do and that total thing is the thing we’re calling the “independent paralysis.”

Newman: Yes.

Salit: We’ve talked about this a million times but I’ll ask you how you’d express it at this moment. What’s the relationship between moving beyond that paralysis and being able to address progress in education and healthcare and foreign policy?

Newman: But that’s the very point. When you say “moving beyond that paralysis,” I don’t know if there’s a functional relationship between that paralysis and engaging any of the real problems or any of the real issues in this country, because that paralysis is so determining of everything. It’s a force in opposition to history.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Electoral politics is in a state of entropy. It’s paralyzed. This is our constant issue, isn’t it, even on the most elemental micro level? We work on the Bloomberg campaign, this campaign, that campaign. Well, how can electoral politics do anything about it? If we are doing electoral politics simply to keep in the game, then where is the game at? Well, all the houses and hotels are on Broadway and Park Place on the Monopoly board. And the dice are gone. Nothing’s happening. It’s still. It’s quiet. But, electoral politics hovers over everything as an important element. But it’s fallen into an entropic state. It’s played itself into insignificance. Now, we take that to be a potential opening to swing it in the direction of left independents. Maybe we’re right. Maybe we’re wrong.

Salit: Yes, and others have different ideas.

Newman: In fact, others take it to be organizable substantially to the right. Most people think of it, which I think is most ridiculous, as organizable to the center. The reason I think of that as so ridiculous, is that’s where it is already.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: So what does it mean to move it to the center?

Salit: Nothing. It’s already there.

Newman: But is it going anywhere, historically? Are things going to budge off the paralysis? I don’t know. What the pundits are saying, in effect, is first the left wins, then the right wins, then things get thrown up for grabs. Everybody’s unpopular. Popularity goes down, down, down for everybody. Popularity’s up for Bush when he wins, then goes down. Popularity up for Obama when he wins – landslide – then down, down, down. It’s in this entropic state. Meanwhile, everyone wants to be independent. And where are the American people en masse? They’re 50/50. But 50/50 what? Hard to say.

Salit: Center-right, center-left, lean Democrat, lean Republican. There are a million different ways to describe it.

Newman: Yes. You can take a look at the swing left that independents took by supporting Obama and say That’s a big swing left, that’s interesting. We’ll try to capitalize on some things. But everybody knows that a year from now, it will swing the other way. Where will it wind up? Well, some people would say it’s going to wind up left or right. But, that’s not knowable. It might wind up left. It might wind up right.

Salit: It might wind up swinging.

Newman: And meanwhile, life goes on, not only for the individual but for the country. I think if Axelrod and these people in the White House started thinking about their 2012 campaign at all, they might be giving some initial thought to how they retain the presidency with the country paralyzed. They’re asking themselves: How do we turn that into a set of accomplishments?

Salit: That we can sell to the American people.

Newman: That we can sell to the American people to get one more vote than the Republicans. That’s kind of an interesting challenge. He has the incumbency. That’s still a good thing to have. He still has a modicum of popularity. He’s still black.

Salit: And he’s still well-regarded.

Newman: He’s still known as a bright enough guy.

Salit: He’s serious, he’s bright, he’s working hard.

Newman: I think, ultimately, that’s where they’ll go to sell him. I think they’re going to go to his intelligence, that he’s worked hard, that he’s done as good a job as you could expect anybody to do. I think they’ll run him on that basis. And he’ll probably win on that basis. Because most people will vote on that basis, it seems to me. Given the whole world situation, why would you want to change in the middle?

Salit: Yes, keep the same hand on the tiller.

Newman: Keep the same hand on the tiller. He’s not going to do anything ridiculous. That’s clear.

Salit: Such as?

Newman: He’s not withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. If he had done that, if he had gotten troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it would have turned 2012 into an interesting war vs. anti-war vote. Now, how would that come out?

Salit: 50/50.

Newman: There you go.

Salit: If you’re a Republican strategist sitting in the room right now with a potential candidate, what’s the best Republican argument against Obama? If the Obama strategy is he’s smart, he’s hardworking, he’s done the best he could, what’s the Republican argument?

Newman: Well, it’s hard to say. You haven’t told me who they’re going to for their candidate. But, I would guess
they’re going to go to someone who looks as much as possible like Obama.

Salit: A moderate Republican.

Newman: Something like that.

Salit: Like a Tim Pawlenty or one of those guys.

Newman: And how would he or she do? Ahhh. I don’t know. It’s hard to say, except in general, it’s going to be close to 50/50.

Salit: As you see things right now, in that context, is there a rationale for an independent candidacy that’s not a
fringe candidacy, but something of a Perot-style campaign?

Newman: If someone has billions of dollars to spend you can always crank something up. But, in general, I don’t think there’s any room at all for a populist uprising, ironically, though you’d think that there might be because of all this swinging. But the swinging is a very narrow swinging. Money is the issue in this regard. How much money? A lot. Probably twice as much as Perot was willing to spend…

Salit: …in 2012 dollars.

Newman: If you’re asking what I take you to really be asking, namely, is there the probability three years down the road that there’s going to be any logical “third way” position that’s going to emerge, I think not. I find that almost unimaginable. But, you know, history is the queen.

Salit: And how do you think about an anti-ideological third party candidacy?

Newman: What do you mean?

Salit: Well, not to overly identify with the Unity ’08 concept, but this idea that you look for a fusion ticket, a viable fusion ticket where you draw somebody from the “Liberal” Democratic side of the aisle and somebody from the Republican “Conservative” side of the aisle.

Newman: I think it has virtually no chance at all. I think the Obama model is a better model of what can break through, namely someone in one of the major parties who has something extreme about them. Americans are extremists, so this is a hard time for Americans since the basic structural arrangement in play is not extremist. Look at the leaders in the Democratic Party. They’re against extremism. So a good solid extremist like Obama…

Salit: …who has fairly traditional positions…

Newman: Yes. And that was something we were fully aware of when we supported Obama. But you have to support him anyway because we’re playing off of history. Historically speaking, it was meaningful that the country elected its first black president. But, if the question is, can anyone beat Obama in 2012, you’d have to use the Obama model to do it.

Salit: I liked your comment earlier that one way to describe the paralysis is that it’s working against history. And, I don’t know if this is too metaphysical, but do you think history is – you might not like this language – trying to move forward, or, is moving forward?

Newman: Don’t worry about history. History doesn’t give a damn about American election law.

Salit: Or what sentence structure I use to describe it.

Newman: Right. It’s rather oblivious to all of that.

Salit: Fair enough.

Newman: So, feel free to say anything you like.

Salit: OK. But, it can’t be healthy for a civilization to have its fundamental political infrastructure working in opposition to history.

Newman: Well, it’s not healthy. It’s obviously not healthy. But human beings, not infrequently, both on a macro and micro level, create things which they can’t turn off and which aren’t healthy for them. It’s not such an unusual thing to do.

Salit: Well, Happy New Year.

Newman: And to you, too.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, December 6, 2009 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and “The McLaughlin Group.”

Salit: Barack Obama is conflicted about Afghanistan and his Afghanistan policy. Many commentators said they saw that conflict in his West Point speech, and that in expressing that, he brought himself into line with where the American people are at on Afghanistan, which is conflicted. On the other hand, some said that this is contrary to what the history, tradition, and culture of America going to war or expanding war is supposed to be like, namely that you can’t be.

Newman: Can’t be what?

Salit: Conflicted. Ambivalent. Is Obama ambivalent about expanding the war in Afghanistan?

Newman: Yes.

Salit: OK. And he’s ambivalent because it’s unclear whether there’s a winnable strategy there, it’s unclear what winning means? What’s his ambivalence?

Newman: There’s virtually nothing that can be counted as a success there. I’ve been saying for a long time that what was needed from the start was essentially a police action against the terrorists. There’s no military action that can be successful there. If we’re after Al Qaeda, they’re probably not there. And if they were there a week ago, they’re not there now because we’re sending in 30,000 more troops. They went off to Pakistan, just across the road, and they’ll stay there until July of 2011.

Salit: When we leave.

Newman: Right.

Salit: Presumably Obama knows that’s a real possibility.

Newman: Everyone does.

Salit: So the decision to go to war or to expand the war – we’ve already been at war for eight years – rather than convert to a counter-terrorism strategy, which we know some people were urging him to do, is based on what, do you think?

Newman: Politics.

Salit: Politics meaning domestic politics?

Newman: Yes.

Salit: And, in the simplest terms, the domestic politics of it are to play to the center-right because the left won’t desert him.

Newman: In chess terms, it means he’d rather delay the path of the knight than of the bishop, meaning he would like to cool out the hawks. He thinks the left will stand still for this position and the right will cool out some.

Salit: The right will cool out. The right in the country or the right in the Democratic Party?

Newman: The right in the country. And, if he does get out in July of ’11, he’ll be out in time for the left to forget about this before the presidential election. After all, you can almost certainly predict that in July of 2011, he’ll have a victory. No matter what happens, it’s going to be declared a victory.

Salit: He’s got time with the left and he wants to cool out the right. So he “rolls the dice” on it, as somebody said. “Rolling the dice” basically means that you send in 30,000 more troops and what you’re doing is building up Afghanistan’s capacity to conduct its own police operations.

Newman: Right. That’s what you’re saying.

Salit: Yes. That’s what you’re saying you’re doing. And you’ll blow up any Al Qaeda and Taliban networks that you can get your hands on while you’re there…

Newman: In my view, Al Qaeda won’t be there.

Salit: So, you’ll go after the Taliban.

Newman: You’ll go after the Taliban. You’ll have some battles. We’re going to lose some people. It’s very sad, very bad. We’ll also kill some people. I find that very bad also. We’ll essentially maintain roughly the status quo and then in July of ’11, we’ll say We’re bringing everybody home. We’ve done as much as we can. We’ve won. Karzai, carry on from here.

Salit: Then what’s the problem with that strategy?

Newman: No problem. Does there have to be a problem?

Salit: Some commentators seemed to think that there is a problem. I’m leaving aside the moral problem of war. Dexter Filkins of the New York Times said, ‘Being in Afghanistan is like walking through the Old Testament. It’s a country that’s been broken and shattered. You can’t make anything happen in 18 months.’

Newman: You can get pregnant and give birth in 18 months.

Salit: That’s true.

Newman: I don’t agree that there’s a problem. I think it was an OK speech by a good orator about a situation that simply doesn’t merit a lot of passion. It’s a response to Al Qaeda because they’re bad guys. But there’s nothing much to say about it.

Salit: Other than it’s become Obama’s war.

Newman: It’s been his war from the get-go.

Salit: Unlike Iraq.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: So he’s basically taking responsibility for it and trying to finish it.

Newman: And now he’s going to wrap it up. This is how he’s wrapping it up.

Salit: David Brooks of the New York Times saw, to use his term, the “emotional” side of this. Obama is trying to project a “sense of limits.” Our goals are limited, our time is limited, our commitment is limited, the results we’re expecting are limited. This is what we’re doing. Brooks is suggesting that there’s some problem with that being the framework.

Newman: What is that problem?

Salit: He doesn’t explain it, but I guess what he’s saying is that’s not how America goes to war. America goes to war the way we did in World War II.

Newman: I think the president of the United States is in a better position to say how the United States goes to war.

Salit: Than a columnist for the New York Times.

Newman: Well, yes, given the fact that Obama decides how it’s done. In some ways, this whole debate is a non-event.

Salit: You might not like this question because it’s a contrary to fact conditional, but if the right were less mobilized against Obama and the left were more mobilized, would Obama do something different with the situation?

Newman: No.

Salit: He would not. So, when you said earlier that this strategy is a political choice, it’s not as if another set of circumstances would produce another set of choices?

Newman: No. Who are the Republicans going to run for president in 2012?

Salit: I don’t know.

Newman: Well, he’s not worried about Sarah Palin.

Salit: No.

Newman: I suspect she favors nuking the entire Middle East.

Salit: Yes, since she can’t see it from her living room.

Newman: If the Republicans ultimately decide to come to their senses and go more moderate, whoever they run for presdent will take roughly the same position on Afghanistan that Obama is taking. So, what’s to worry about?

Salit: What are the risks for Obama then? The guy from the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, says, ‘The risk is, what happens if you get to July 2011 and none of the Afghan capacity has grown?’

Newman: But that doesn’t matter. The troops are going to be withdrawn because they succeeded. Failure is not a possibility.

Salit: But Haass is saying, ‘What if it doesn’t succeed?

Newman: What would happen to count as not succeeding?

Salit: The Karzai government falls apart and the Taliban controls more territory? Though even if the Karzai government does fall apart, the Taliban won’t gain control over more territory while U.S. troops are there.

Newman: Yes. And do you think everything succeeded in Iraq? Iraqi soldiers and police are being killed morning, noon, and night in Iraq.

Salit: Right.

Newman: So are we reconsidering whether we really did succeed in Iraq with the surge? There’s not a word of that. You don’t try these things and fail. You always succeed. All Obama is saying, in effect, is that by this strategy, we’re going to do as much as we can to help eliminate the Taliban and build up the Afghan army and police by July of ’11. How can you fail at that?

Salit: You can’t because you’ve done all you can do. And that’s what you’ve said you’re going to do.

Newman: He’s not going to give a speech in July of ’11 saying we killed every Taliban member in the history of the world. He’s going to say, We did all that we could. Things are somewhat stabilized. We slowed down the momentum of the Taliban…

Salit: And we’re getting out.

Newman: …and now we get out. Goodbye.

Salit: Sounds like a plan.

Newman: It’s a modest proposal. If you’re strategically willing to accept war – which all the critics do, left and right, except for fringy anti-war people like myself – it’s going to satisfy everybody. What does he have to worry about, you ask? Jobs.

Salit: Yes. What the economic indicators are showing is that the downturn in jobs, the job depression, is slowing down. We’re not in a job recovery, but the depression is slowing down. Presumably, everybody takes that to be a good sign because you have to do that before you start to cross over to the other side.

Newman: In general, that’s true. If you’re down 10 runs, you have to score 3 before you can score 10.

Salit: Exactly. So where do they go from here on the jobs front? As many people have pointed out, they haven’t spent any stimulus money on job creation. They spent stimulus money on saving the banking system. The popular will for spending additional stimulus money, putting the country further and further into debt, may be pretty weak. How does Obama think about that?

Newman: He’s going to do several modest things. He’s going to pass a modest health bill and make modest moves with unemployment insurance.

Salit: Extend benefits, keep the safety net in place.

Newman: By the time the next election comes around, he’ll claim – and probably correctly – that he’s done what he could do because it was a very deep recession and that SOB George W. Bush and the bankers got us into it. So we did all that we could do. And now give me four more years and I’ll show you prosperity.

Salit: Not a bad argument.

Newman: It’s sensible, if modest. But he’s a progressive man, a moderately progressive man. He has related to the war in Afghanistan as if it were a necessity. Why? Because we got attacked and we had to do something. Everyone believes that. So he’s having his war of necessity. People say he’s not passionate about it. Why would he be passionate about it? He’s pissed off about it because some guys got together and schemed to blow up the World Trade Center. And they pulled it off. We had to do something. We didn’t do, in my opinion, what we should have done which is an intensive and extensive police action and get the masterminds, as in Osama bin Laden. We didn’t do that. We got some of his lesser people. Then, we stupidly sent them to Guantánamo where we punished them illegitimately. So that turned much of the world against us, even though everybody hated these people as killers, but they were effectively turned into victims. I guess we’ll get them out of Guantánamo eventually. We’ll put them on trial, which will take forever. And somewhere down the road they’ll be punished. The whole situation is botched, in my opinion. But everybody agrees that we have to smack somebody in the face because they messed with us. So, we’ll do something which may or may not be that, but we’ll call it that.

Salit: And then we’ll finish it.

Newman: Yes. And we’ll even mess with a few people who probably had nothing to do with it, like Saddam Hussein. But who can say that he doesn’t deserve it? He’s a bad guy anyhow, so what the hell. And, to make a bad joke, c’est la vie.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, November 29, 2009 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

Salit: Art and politics, political theater. We watched a Lehrer Newshour piece on the dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones and some of the history of his work and his company. He has a show currently on Broadway called Fela! I want to hear your thoughts about the interview and about the collaboration that you and he did a number of years ago called “Requiem for Communism.” Bill describes himself as a political artist, an artist for whom idealism and the expression of a set of political ideals are central to who he is. When the interviewer asked ‘Why are you interested in these kinds of themes and these kinds of stories,’ Bill looked surprised and said, ‘Well, as far as idealism is concerned, without it there’s no reason to live.’ He is interested in the challenge of how to create popular art that deals with important issues of the time, race and class being two of them. He’s very committed to the idea that you can expand theater-going audiences with that kind of enterprise, with socially-conscious political art in a popular form. I know your work in the theater is about that in some respects. How do you think about creating theater that is popular and political?

Newman: I don’t know that I work with that assumption. I think I work in the community, in the world. Theater is simply an element of that. I don’t particularly consider myself someone who “works in the theater.” Theatrical performance, poetry, music are most important, as I understand it, insofar as they are disconnected from the theater, but present in the world. And I think the theater, and whatever it is that I participate in the creation of, is in the world and not in the theater. So, I think that’s a big difference between Bill and I.

Salit: Yes. Bill works in the theater.

Newman: Yes, and he’s a great theater artist.

Salit: He talked about his interest in “tackling history through dance.” Do you feel close to that?

Newman: Well, I don’t want to overwork a theme here. But, I don’t tackle history. History tackles me.

Salit: You let history tackle you. Actually, you encourage it to tackle you.

Newman: It’s a little different.

Salit: So, you don’t think of yourself as being “in the theater.” Do you think of yourself as an artist?

Newman: Yes. Because I think of revolution as an art form. So, I do think of myself as an artist.

Salit: Part of Bill’s vision as a political artist is that theater and dance can contribute to a certain social consciousness. How do you see that?

Newman: I think it’s more the case that theater and dance and music of a certain kind, and Bill and I would agree on many of the features of it, are produced by history. History has certain moments when it produces certain kinds of art. For example, Bob Dylan didn’t speak for the ’60s, even though he was, in some ways, the voice of the sixties. He didn’t speak for it, but he was certainly a product of it…

Salit: …an expression of it.

Newman: Those are easily confused. Dylan tried to make plain that he wasn’t a spokesperson for the sixties, for the politics of that decade. But, he was a product of the social, political and cultural turmoil of the decade.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That’s why I hesitated when you asked if I think of myself as an artist. I do, but the art that I’m creating is revolution. It’s not just revolutionary. It’s revolution.

Salit: What was it like working with Bill T. Jones on the piece “Requiem for Communism” that the two of you did together in 1993?

Newman: I wish I had known more about and felt closer to creating theater when I worked with him because I was very much an amateur, theatrically speaking. I was good, but still something of an amateur. It’s silly to make comparisons, of course, but Bill was and indeed still is, an amateur at revolution. But, I thought there was a common ground of respect. I think he respected me and I’m certain that I respected him. And I think we still do.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That gap, or difference, was a constant dynamic. So, what was it like to work with him? Well, we mainly worked with the dancer Amy Pivar and her collaborator Freda Rosen. In a way, they had a similar gap between them – between interest in art and interest in revolution. They mediated Bill’s and my relationship in a way, which I think distorted it. I don’t think Bill understood the concept of “Requiem for Communism,” an artistic expression of bidding political farewell to the old and birthing the new, but his dancing was utterly magnificent. I’ve seen him perform several times over the years, and his dancing for “Requiem” was as good as anything he ever did. Of course, he was cast to be V.I. Lenin and he had no idea who Lenin was. And I don’t remember at any point him ever asking me about who Lenin was. Which is OK, but that’s what I mean by the distance between us being greater than I would have liked. I would have liked to have talked to him about that.

Salit: I can see that.

Newman: But, he’s a dance genius, so he did things in the way that geniuses do. He looked at a scene and choreographed it. I saw him teach an actor who performed in the piece, David Nackman, how to dance his part. Nackman wasn’t a dancer. But after a half hour with Bill T. Jones, he became one. It was kind of mind-boggling. It was like boom, boom, boom and David was dancing. It was a pleasure. And in some ways, a treasure even more than a pleasure. It’s a treasure to work with a genius in dance. And I think “Requiem for Communism” was a beautiful piece.

Salit: I saw it. It was. It was very layered – politically and aesthetically.

Newman: Well, there were complicated relationships in the production of it. Pivar was the dancer and she brought Bill to the project. But Bill really adored Freda. The dancers working with Pivar at the time, her troupe, were extraordinary. And Freda played a big role in helping them create that part of the performance. In some ways, it was their work that I most enjoyed. But I loved how mixed up and confused it was. I wasn’t looking for and still don’t look for coherency in creating theater.

Salit: I know that about you.

Newman: Ironically, given the subject matter, “Requiem for Communism” was an uneventful production. It really should have been more eventful, meaning it should have created more controversy in the dance world. But I was very happy to participate in it. As you said, Bill is a progressive artist who is trying to hold on to something. But you don’t hold on to revolution. It holds on to you. Otherwise, it doesn’t go anywhere. I think Bill is making a valiant struggle to hold onto a vision. I think he’s one of the best dancers in the world. But, when you look at what he’s doing, it looks almost outdated. I respect him for that because the “date” he holds on to is one that is very dear to me, namely the ’60s. But, as I said, it’s got to hold onto you.

Salit: We watched Charlie Rose interview Thomas Friedman, the columnist and author. Speaking of “Requiem for Communism,” Friedman seemed fairly intent on making the case that China, because of what he calls a lack of creativity, is not going to own the 21st Century.

Newman: I don’t think that was quite his point.

Salit: How would you characterize it?

Newman: I think he was saying that the United States was not going to automatically lose the 21st Century.

Salit: To China.

Newman: Right. He offered two standards: one, creativity and imagination. And the other, the capacity to realize that creativity by virtue of the structures in which the creativity is located. He gave the U.S. the big edge in the former, and China the edge, if not a big edge, in the latter. And he said that was because of the fact that China is a communist totalitarian state. It was kind of a classic backhanded compliment.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I think Friedman is one of those intellectuals who comes up with fascinating ways of looking at things, but I never know how much anything he has to say about how to look at things, has to do with how to do things. It seems there’s an infinite number of interesting and clever ways to see things.

Salit: There are.

Newman: But I don’t know what any of it has to do with teaching people or helping people to understand how to do things.

Salit: I’m with you on that. Here’s one example. The conclusion he reached about how America has gotten off track, is that American government isn’t working. He points to California, calling it the first failed American state. And he ticks off things that are breaking down in the American political system: the extreme influence of money, gerrymandering where the legislators choose their voters before the voters choose their legislators, the influence of media and cable TV on public opinion, the role of the internet in spreading extremism, and the business community being, to use his term, “AWOL” in American public life. He believes that business is not playing a positive role in helping to resolve the country’s major problems. And then he said that ‘A great power that only achieves sub-optimal solutions,’ which is his characterization of what we’re doing, ‘will not remain a great power.’ Then Charlie says to him, ‘How does this country fix this system?’ A good question, I thought. Friedman says, ‘Well some people say we need better leadership. I don’t think this is the case, I think we need better citizens.’

Newman: From which it follows for me that he has no particular grasp of the notion of citizen leadership.

Salit: A good point, for starters.

Newman: Which is what, I take it, we mean by democracy.

Salit: Democracy. Exactly. Not a concern of Friedman’s apparently. His argument is that the solutions to our problems are known. We just can’t achieve them. And then he gives an example of the gasoline tax, the $1 gasoline tax. You allocate it in such a way as to reduce the deficit, to pay for healthcare, to do this, to do that, all good, all good, all good. But we can’t get there. Because a new gasoline tax is off the table.

Newman: Interesting plan. I have another one. Why don’t we just eliminate the military? I think it will accomplish roughly the same thing.

Salit: Well, speaking of things that are off the table. That’s not even on the planet.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: My reaction to him is somewhat conflicted, in this way. I think it’s positive when intellectuals of Friedman’s stature are saying things like government isn’t working and pointing to various aspects of the political process that are dysfunctional. At the same time though, there are things to be said about what to do about that. There are people who are working on those issues. But, I feel that his argument is basically disingenuous. I don’t know him. I don’t know whether he’s genuine or disingenuous. But, when I hear people talking about these issues, which on the one hand I’m glad to hear, I worry about how superficial the discussion is. If you’re talking about aeronautical engineering, if you’re talking about the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, you don’t talk about the mechanics or how they operate in a superficial way, because it’s a serious enterprise. To me, if you say The government isn’t working, the political process isn’t working in America, that seems to me to be fairly serious.

Newman: Yes and no. What’s the term they use to describe the companies we bailed out?

Salit: Too Big to Fail.

Newman: Yes. Too Big to Fail. I presume the government falls into that category, too.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Well, if that’s true, then the system is not not working.

Salit: There’s a logic to what you’re saying, surely.

Newman: You see, what bothered me was Friedman’s complaint about how the citizens aren’t smart enough. But insofar as citizens aren’t participating it’s because they believe the system isn’t working. So, presumably, if that’s what Friedman himself thinks is happening, then that would make them pretty smart.

Salit: Another way people respond to the system not working is by becoming independent. And, there was a kind of interesting connection, an interesting relationship between this part of what Friedman was talking about and the pollster Charlie Cook’s discussion with Chris Matthews on Hardball. They were doing yet another analysis of the independent voter and Cook said ‘Look, the independents really like Obama. They don’t like the Democratic Party. Independents’ support for Obama remains strong. What you’re seeing now,’ he says ‘is the cleavage’ and Matthews echoed this, ‘between how independents feel about Obama – which is positive – and their feelings about the Democratic Party, which are at an all time low.’ That’s interesting to me, because that seems to be a statement connected to the idea that government isn’t working. We like this guy, we like the things that Obama has expressed and stands for, but we don’t like this institution that he is connected to.

Newman: But being connected to this institution is the only way that he could have been elected president.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: They don’t add that.

Salit: The people or the commentators?

Newman: The commentators don’t add that.

Salit: True.

Newman: You have to articulate that entire thing to appreciate the full dilemma that the country is in right now.

Salit: What you just said hits the nail on the head as to what bothers me about Friedman. He doesn’t fully articulate the dilemma that the country is in. It sounds like he’s articulating it, and as you said, he has lots of creative formulations and metaphors and so forth that help you “understand.” But he doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the dilemma, he really doesn’t.

Newman: Well, nobody wants to, because otherwise they’d have you on the show. But they don’t want to have you on the show. And you’re not going to be on the show until those “dumb citizens” force the issue. Then you’ll get on the show. And that’s fine with me.

Salit: That’s fine with me, too. By the way, one other thing that Friedman said stayed with me. In discussing the relative strengths of the U.S. vs. China, he said China’s problem is they’re short on creativity but they’re strong on implementation. Our problem is a huge amount of creativity, difficulty translating that into action. But in characterizing the American situation, he said something like ‘Our problem is that John and Susie can’t read, but Sammy, who has a nose ring, just invented a 100 new apps.’ OK. But you almost want to say, Can we go back to the fact that John and Susie can’t read for a minute? I don’t think we get to skip over that in this discussion of what’s wrong with America.

Newman: Well, I agree with you completely. But there’s something else he skipped over.

Salit: OK.

Newman: That whatever an app is, its function – in part – is to make it possible for people to navigate the world without learning how to read.

Salit: OK.

Newman: So, what do you do with that in this picture?

Salit: Well, maybe this is my version of what you were ascribing to Bill T. Jones earlier about being stuck in the past. Is it the case that people don’t need to know how to read any more? Is the nature of communication and language and so forth changing in that way? People used to need to know how to milk a cow or ride a horse or plant a field to get along. And most people really don’t need to know how to do those things anymore.

Newman: Right, that’s my point.

Salit: Do you think reading is one of those things now?

Newman: No, I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s very difficult to say what we do need and what we don’t need to further develop. But, I don’t think you can just say we need “reading, writing and arithmetic” and get a pass on whether that’s accurate or not. I think things are that much up in the air.

Salit: So that we don’t know what is needed.

Newman: For example, education people talk about the importance of learning mathematics. So, let’s agree that mathematics is important. But for whom? For how many people? How many people in this society need to know mathematics for the society to function effectively? That’s not an uninteresting question. Does everybody need to know mathematics? Well, certainly they do to score the appropriate marks on tests so that politicians and policymakers can be happy that they have high enough scores. But how many people actually need to know math? They wouldn’t even allow you to study that. It would be un-American to even allow that to be studied. But that’s what you have to really look at – and much more – to have a sensible answer to the question, do we need to know math? Does that mean everybody needs to know math? Does that mean a lot of people need to know math? And, if so, what’s your evidence of that? Very difficult question.

Salit: Maybe what every American school kid needs to know is how to speak Chinese, if the criteria is how you prepare a population for what the world is going to be like.

Newman: Don’t forget that I studied Chinese for two quarters when I was at Stanford! But, I figure Friedman would probably say that the Chinese have a much better chance of teaching English to every single person in China, than we do of teaching Chinese to everybody in this country. And for all I know, that project is probably already underway there.

Salit: May well be. Thank you.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, November 15, 2009 after watching selections from “The Charlie Rose Show,” “Meet the Press” and “The McLaughlin Group.”

Salit: We watched Charlie Rose interview the…

Newman: Whiz kids.

Salit: Whiz kids. Thank you. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who wrote “Freakonomics” and “SuperFreakonomics,” and Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point,” “Outliers” and “Blink.” His latest book is called “What The Dog Saw.” All three are cultural commentators who are exploring aspects of the ways that we see and understand different phenomena. They’re trying to go up against some conventional wisdom.

Newman: I see them as going up against paradigmism.

Salit: OK. Going up against paradigmism.

Newman: That’s what I find interesting about them.

Salit: In both interviews, they talked about the importance of asking the right questions.

Newman: Who was the first guy who spoke?

Salit: Levitt.

Newman: The curly-haired guy?

Salit: The curly-haired guy was Dubner. The solo interview was Gladwell, who also has curly hair.

Newman: Dubner was the one I was especially struck by. But I think they’re all three very interesting.

Salit: They all said that asking the right questions is absolutely fundamental. One of them – I think it was Dubner – said that breakthroughs and creativity in science are tied to asking the right questions.

Newman: I think that’s the case.

Salit: And that there’s an art to asking questions. Certainly, it’s being smart. It’s being interested in pursuing something. But it’s also an art.

Newman: Related to this notion of asking the right questions is also an attitude towards political correctness that one of them made note of.

Salit: It was Levitt.

Newman: To ask the right questions, you have to be very willing to say the wrong thing, which is not at all easy. Those things seem very connected to me.

Salit: Connected how?

Newman: Saying the non-politically correct thing, in the broadest cultural sense of that term, is not only saying the wrong thing. If you’re not willing to say the wrong thing, you rule out a vast number of questions you might ask. Personally, I go through a process – this happens a lot in therapy, but also in teaching, in giving lectures – where I’ll get to a certain point and then I’ll be aware of the right thing to say next. And – whatever these words mean – I’ll self-consciously tell myself, No, don’t stop there. Go further. Try to think of the wrong thing to say.

Salit: The wrong thing to say?

Newman: That’s the process which sometimes, though not always, results in discovering an interesting question to ask. I do this fairly self-consciously. With the focus on “conscious” not “self.”

Salit: You’re in a therapy group and there’s a discussion going on and people are talking about different things and you get to a point and you have an instinct about what the right next thing is to say, but you reject that…

Newman: Right. Often I reject it with the help of the group, because they’re busy doing it.

Salit: They’re busy doing the right thing, so you can do the wrong thing.

Newman: I’ll give you a concrete example from a recent group. I won’t mention names. Someone in the group says, ‘I can’t stay where I am. I want to leave the situation I’m in. I feel trapped.’

Salit: In other words, I’m very unhappy.

Newman: Yes. And the group goes to ‘What makes you unhappy? What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ And on and on and on we go. So I think about it and I think that those seem like reasonable things to ask. But I am also thinking, ‘No, there’s something more here.’ But, it’s not something esoteric. And it occurs to me that the wrong next question – although I think ultimately the right next question as it turned out – was the one I asked: ‘Where do you want to be?’ It’s simple enough, but it’s not a question that you’d normally ask.

Salit: It’s not even quite politically correct to ask that question.

Newman: That turned the whole group around. I was silent for 15, 20 minutes before I said that. But then I said, ‘Where do you want to be?’ Because when a person says, in this therapeutic context “I’m feeling trapped,” in some existential sense they’re being disingenuous.

Salit: Disingenuous because they can pick up and go, if they want?

Newman: Right. After all, millions upon millions of people leave when they’re feeling that way. This person hasn’t. And, I think you want to find a way, not provocatively, but caringly, challengingly pushing them to go to, not a deeper reality, but to a less proscribed formulation of what they’re “plight” is. In this case, at a minimum, what we discovered off of my question is that she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Salit: She didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Newman: Right, although she felt thoroughly trapped. And both of those were honest formulations. I think that’s often the state of mind that people can get themselves into.

Salit: So, if you come to that discovery, does that change the way you approach feeling trapped? Or, am I asking the wrong, as in really wrong, question?

Newman: I think the problem with your question is its assumption, namely when you speak of “coming to that discovery.” I don’t think it’s a discovery in the sense that this light flashes and now you know this. It’s more mundane than that. It’s getting into another discussion, another conversation. And this new conversation is more liberating than the other one. No matter how many questions the group asked – and they were trying to be helpful – asking why do you feel this way?, etc. it further entraps this person. Not cognitively, but because of the practical need to answer those kinds of questions. It’s like putting more nails in your own coffin. To help people, you’ve got to give them a road out. For me, that’s the essence of helping people. You’ve got to give them a road out. That doesn’t mean they’ll take it. But you’ve got to give them one.

Salit: Is the road out talking about their situation, or whatever, in a different way? What is the road out?

Newman: I don’t think it’s just purely behavioral, in the sense of talking about it. It’s almost like you’ve got to give them an injection of possibility into the paralyzed state of actuality that they’ve managed to lock themselves into. Do you know what I mean?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: It’s not so much another way of talking. It’s both bigger and smaller than that. It’s closer to Oh, there’s another way of living for me. I can think about life differently. I think that makes a big difference.

Salit: One of the things that Gladwell said which interested me was, ‘It takes an outsider to see what’s beautiful or interesting in somebody’s life.’

Newman: Absolutely. How many times have I said that?

Salit: A gazillion. Talk to me about that. It takes an outsider to see.

Newman: I think it takes a collection of outsiders. I think it takes a group. It takes the group that you’re in, who come to know who you are in a way that you could never know yourself. I’ve been in an ongoing diatribe with the Greeks, for a very long time, about this “know thyself” business. You can’t know thyself. Thyself is unknowable.

Salit: But others can know you.

Newman: Yes, others can know you vastly better…well, it has to be vastly better. They have greater access to who you are than you do by virtue of the limitations on your capacity to know who you are.

Salit: What is it about self-knowledge that is so undependable?

Newman: Well, it’s “self.”

Salit: Is it just egocentricity?

Newman: I don’t think it’s egocentricity at all. I think it’s a fact of life that to understand something, there has to be some kind of comparative or relational analysis. And there is no comparative to self, virtually by definition. Where a great deal of Western culture has gone with that is to say, Well, there’s a deeper kind of understanding. It’s a direct understanding. It’s like the understanding of sense datum. There’s no intermediary. But the fact that there’s no intermediary makes it impossible to understand it at all, because that’s how we understand. I don’t believe in this notion of direct…

Salit: …perception…

Newman: …of whatever it is that is the object of your attempt to understand. I don’t think we can ever get so close to it that we have a special kind of understanding of it, whatever it is. It’s quite the contrary. And I don’t think it’s a question simply of getting further distance from it, since “self” is not something you can get distance from, unless you want to check in to the local asylum. What that takes me to is the notion of how others can know you vastly better than you know you, in ways that are profoundly insightful, not just behavioral. We’re not just talking about how they can see the look on your face in a way that you can’t without a mirror, although that’s a part of it. I think it’s more of a logical issue. Logic embodies a truth that’s very fascinating to me.

Salit: Which is?

Newman: Good question. Which is that empiricism is not the be all and end all of understanding. There’s something more going on and I think you can discover it in logic. In logic, there is this “truth,” that’s always fascinated me.

Salit: That something else is going on, other than empirics.

Newman: I would say the human mind has a capacity greater than, other than, different than the reading of reality by the use of empirics. We have a greater capacity. I keep saying “greater,” although I mean to be saying “another.” Probably, I really mean “greater.” I think it is, in some ways, greater because empirics are profoundly limiting, because of this logical feature of the world. The way to understand reality, if you could really understand it, would be to compare it to something else. But there isn’t anything else. All we have is the one thing. It’s that old Platonic point. I think he’s wrong about much, but I think Plato’s right about that. From my study, it’s contained most profoundly in The Theaetetus, which is one of his best dialogues. There are a lot of other dialogues where he effectively denies that understanding. But there, it seems to me, he understands something very special.

Salit: Stepping away from Plato, perhaps, Gladwell talked about not being interested in the gifted and talented. As he said, there are people out there who are enormously gifted and talented and…so what? What fascinates him is the process of what it takes to learn something, to become proficient at something, to become outstanding at something, which is more of a work process, a creative process, than a gift.

Newman: Where I go to, in not being interested in the gifted – and I’m equally not interested in the gifted – is what I think of as a more radical step than the one he’s taking. I go to the collective. That’s where I distance myself from the gifted, because the gifted is always an individual. I’m much more interested in the study of and the understanding of the group and what the group can do that the individual, gifted or otherwise, can’t do.

Salit: Gladwell said he was interested in failure, also. It was an interesting moment in the interview because Charlie Rose said, ‘Well, you’ve written so much about success. Your book “Outliers” is all about success.’ Charlie seemed averse to failure, as in, who wants to talk about failure? But then he caught himself.

Newman: I’m big on failure.

Salit: Yes, I know. Deeply so. And after the topic of failure was introduced, Gladwell went to big failures, famous failures. Maybe that’s a response to a commercial demand, as in, your editor says, If you insist on writing about failure, at least write about big failures, failures of famous people. And Gladwell does. He uses them to illustrate the difference between two different kinds of failure – the difference between choking and panicking. Panicking is when you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have the skills to handle what’s going on. Example: JFK, Jr. flying the plane to Hyannis where he loses the horizon and the plane goes out of control and he doesn’t have the skill to adjust. The plane crashes and everyone onboard dies. For choking, the example he gave was Greg Norman in 1996 at the Masters tournament. Golfer at the top of his game, best player in the world, falls apart in the fourth round, starts to play like he’s a 12-year-old. That’s choking.

Newman: When Tiger starts to play like a 12-year-old, he wins by seven strokes.

Salit: Right. That shows you how the game has changed.

Newman: No, it shows you how different Tiger is.

Salit: I meant to say it shows you how much Tiger has changed the game. Anyway, the stories were interesting and I did find his distinction between panicking and choking, in some ways, insightful. But, I was also thinking about little failures, the little failures of life that go on, that accumulate, that are more like what most of us have to deal with. How you incorporate that into your day or your sense of yourself.

Newman: Most of us neither die in a plane crash nor lose the Masters.

Salit: Exactly. The rest of us are just mere mortals whose marriages fail, or who don’t have nourishing careers, or who gain weight over the holidays. I don’t know if you would say that you love failure, but I know for you, failure is a creative building block.

Newman: I’ve always been in love with that famous quote from Karl Marx when he says that the road to successful revolution involves failing and failing and failing and failing, until you win. That’s a generalized picture of the struggle.

Salit: Do you think that revolutionaries know how to fail both at a social level and also at an individual level and if you have a way to respond to failure, you can continue to build? Some people are very depressed by failure, very demoralized by failure, and so forth. But there are different ways to respond to failure.

Newman: In the case of revolution, which I think is what is really being talked about here, you can’t, in some ultimate sense, succeed because to “succeed” is so over-determined by the definitions of what you’re trying to overthrow. So you always have to fail in some way. But then ultimately that’s what produces a paradigmatic or what I prefer to call a post-paradigmatic totalistic transformation. In the case of revolution, you’re sort of doomed to that being the case. But I also think it expresses itself in all things. I don’t think that you can fully succeed, even at the most mundane things, if your perception of the smallest of things doesn’t include a proper understanding of the relationship between it and the total scheme of things, because the transformation of the total scheme of things, which is revolutionary, changes your way of understanding everything. So as long as you haven’t overthrown, overcome, gotten beyond that, you’re still going to be stuck in seeing even the very littlest of things in accordance with the existing way of looking at things. In that sense, there’s always going to be a failure, or mistake, component in even the smallest of perceptions of our actions.

Salit: There’s always going to be a mistake component because?

Newman: Because whatever it is that you’ve done hasn’t succeeded in transforming the totality. In a way, it goes back to what I think of as a Leibnizian conception, from the philosopher Leibniz, this notion that there is no such thing as an isolated particular. The particular is comprehensible in the infinitude of the totality and connected to it. Unless you deal with the infinitude of the totality, you’re never really engaging the particular. The unit of the particular is the smallest element you can imagine or perceive or whatever. You can’t engage it fully unless you engage it totalistically. It is incomprehensible independent of the total framework in which you see it or relate to it or perceive it.

Salit: This reminds me of a conversation I had earlier this week with someone who is part of this new generation of new paradigm thinkers.

Newman: The new intellectuals.

Salit: Yes. We were talking about the independent political movement, and about the issues that come up for independents in different fights that we’re involved in around the country.

Newman: And?

Salit: He asked about what kinds of reforms independents are interested in. He said, ‘What’s the one issue that, if you could popularize that issue and win it, would meet your goal?’ I said that at this stage of the process, there isn’t one. That what there is, is building a base; that’s what we have to do. Tactically, the movement is sometimes focused on a national campaign, for example, our leadership in independents’ support for Obama in 2008. But, I told him, much of the work at the grassroots is building a base around things that, at one level, seem either highly technical or very, very small.

Newman: Or particularized.

Salit: Very particularized, exactly. So I told him about the fight in Colorado in response to the requirement that if you leave a major party and become an independent, you have to wait 18 months to run for office. You can hardly get more granular than that. But that one tiny issue is expressive of a total cultural and structural bias that pervades the entire system. And we engage in those fights on that basis to build a base.

Newman: I think everything you’re saying is tactically right on the money. But I have an answer to that question.

Salit: To his question, that if we could pick one issue, one cause, that achieves our goal…

Newman: I don’t know that I’d call it an “issue,” but I call it a slogan. If I had one slogan that I’d like us to have, it would be He or she who writes the rules, rules. That’s my one slogan. And I’d properly footnote Douglas Muzzio and Omar Ali.*

Salit: Yes, exactly.

Newman: Who writes the rules, rules. And who has to write the rules, in my opinion? The American people. But that’s not the situation we’re living in right now. I think it’s our strategic perspective. Yours is our tactical perspective.

Salit: This is a ridiculous question, in a way, but nonetheless…

Newman: That’s good. I’ll give you a ridiculous answer.

Salit: What’s the difference, in your view, between searching for new paradigms and being anti-paradigm?

Newman: Paradigms, in a way, are utilitarian. They help us to get a glimpse of totalities. But I’m looking for something more than a glimpse of totalities. Following Marx, I’m not looking to interpret the world, I’m looking to change it. That’s the difference. If you want to change the world, you have to go beyond paradigms because paradigmatic understanding is still an interpretation. Changing it is an activity. For all his brilliance, I’ve discovered only in my later years, Donald Davidson, my mentor in philosophy at Stanford, was interested in giving a perfect interpretation of reality. That’s the difference between him and me. I’m not looking to give an interpretation of any kind, including even the perfect one. I’m looking to change reality. Indeed, not even quite to change it, but as I’ve come to understand it, to develop it. Davidson held on to philosophy. He did it extraordinarily well in the belief that he could use it to come up, if not with a perfect interpretation, with a near-perfect interpretation. And, true to his word, he spent his life trying to do it and, in my opinion, came rather close. Came rather close, at least in the areas of reality that he was dealing with: actions and causes, intentionality and subjective human behavior. It’s a very, very sophisticated interpretation that Donald has written. Yet, the body of his work, extraordinary as it is, is still an interpretation.

Salit: Thank you, Fred.

Newman: You’re welcome. Thank you.
____________
* Douglas Muzzio, professor of public policy at Baruch College in New York City, stated “He who makes the rules, rules” in an article by Diane Cardwell in the New York Times entitled “Political Party of Outsiders Has Come in From the Cold,” August 27, 2002. Omar Ali, professor of history at Towson University in Baltimore, wrote an article entitled “Those Who Make the Rules, Rule” which was published in BlackElectorate.com on October 14, 2002.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, November 8, 2009 after watching selections from “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

Salit: Independents are the talk of the town. So, let’s talk about how independents are being talked about. The analysis of the vote on Tuesday is that the Democratic Party lost the independent vote. They’re looking at the Virginia governor’s race and the New Jersey governor’s race where Democrats lost. Charlie Cook, the pollster and analyst, says ‘Well, forget about all this stuff that the Republicans are saying, about this being a referendum on Obama. It wasn’t a referendum on Obama. It really had nothing to do with Obama. What it did have something to do with, though, is the Democratic Party.’ A solid admonition, in my view, since the Democratic Party higher ups were so sure that Obama’s victory meant that Democrats had won the hand of independents in perpetuity. Charlie went further though. He said, ‘Independents are independent for a reason. They’re not rooted in a political party.’

Newman: They actually don’t like political parties.

Salit: They don’t like political parties, correct. A few years ago I met with Cook and we had a fight about this very issue. At the time, Cook took the position that many Beltway people continue to take, which is that there’s no such thing as an independent. I told him there is and that people who call themselves independents do so for a reason. He didn’t buy it. His argument, roughly speaking, was ‘People might call themselves independents, but they are really Democrats or Republicans, because that’s who they vote for.’ Anyway, here it is several years later and Charlie is now saying something different about independents. He’s saying what we taught him. To me, that’s one of the most interesting things to come out of Tuesday’s election, that Charlie Cook is noting that ‘Independents are independent for a reason. They’re not rooted in a party.’

Newman: And the general posture within the major parties is The hell with independents.

Salit: Yes. Though the “takeaway” from people like Cook and others is Ignore them at your peril, Democratic Party, ignore them at your peril.

Newman: That’s what we’ve been saying for decades.

Salit: We’ve been saying it to both political parties.

Newman: Yes. But we’ve seen a very acute example of Democratic Party arrogance towards independents in New York. Their attitude is We have a majority.

Salit: And, We don’t need anything else. We don’t need the independents. What you’re saying about the New York City story, obviously, is monumental, where the Independence Party supported Mike Bloomberg. This is a fusion state. Independence was a major theme in the campaign and a popular way to vote in this election. The Independence Party produced 142,817 votes on its line.*

Newman: New York is more than a fusion state. It’s an organized state.

Salit: Yes. Independents are organized.

Newman: You put those two together and you produce a breakthrough of the kind we had in New York City. That’s not true yet in many parts of the country. Unlike the way these traditional pundits see it, the independent vote is up for grabs – from an organizing point of view. And, it’s the organized independents which are a major factor.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: The punditocracy’s analysis doesn’t know from organized and unorganized. That’s not one of their categories. They don’t understand the meaning of the process of grassroots organizing, of something “becoming.”

Salit: I buy that completely.

Newman: There’s a methodological error in the way that they report, for the most part. They want to speak of the independents, of what the independents are doing, but the way that they define independents is solely on the basis of who they vote for.

Salit: Correct.

Newman: So, there’s a contradiction there, because they don’t identify independents as anything other than the way they vote. So, then, what is the meaning of the sentence The independents voted this way, if, on the pundits’ definition independents are who they vote for,.

Salit: Why bother to call them independents at all?

Newman: They don’t believe in the concept of independents having independent existence. And that means they don’t believe in the process of independents becoming organized. That’s why they never cover that. They don’t think it will turn into anything unless a Ross Perot comes along and turns it into something. They don’t see anything separate from that.

Salit: My experience of listening to these commentators talk about all of this is that on the one hand I’m struck by nuanced changes in Charlie Cook’s political geography, but on the other hand, it’s another universe from what is happening in terms of the process of independents becoming organized. Hundreds of independent activists from over 40 states come on my national conference calls and most of them are involved in organizing independents, in fighting for their inclusion and leveraging their emergent power.

And so, when I hear the “trending” analyses by the punditocracy, I’m interested but I’m not sure it has anything to do with what’s going on, on the ground. I know it’s post-Election Day and it’s what they do. They look at the trends. Maybe there are new trends that you can point to, maybe not. One of the more interesting things that happened on Tuesday, as somebody pointed out, was the number of young voters who stayed away that had participated in the Obama election.

Newman: Who were saying, quite obviously, we love Obama. We don’t like the Democratic Party.

Salit: Exactly. That’s part of what prompts the pundits to say Well, the Democrats have to pay attention to this. They ignore this at their peril.

Newman: They’re wrong. Obama has to pay attention to this.

Salit: Alright, say more about that. That’s obviously about the distinction between Obama and the Democratic Party.

Newman: Which the independents were very tuned in to. That’s what they saw in Obama. He was taking on the most traditional liberal Democrats, meaning Hillary and Bill, and they came to view him as an independent.

Salit: That’s why so many independents voted for him.

Newman: Yes. But it’s very hard to function in Washington as an independent once you’re elected. So he’s between a rock and a hard place.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: He’s personally very popular still, But people see that he’s governing like a Democrat even though he ran as an independent. He has to figure out what to do about that.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I don’t know what he will do about it, but he better figure out something.

Salit: We’re organizing on the ground as rapidly as we can. My experience is that there’s so much out there to be organized. And, when I think about Obama, I think, if our movement were bigger, not just bigger quantitatively, but if it had more power, he would have something to go up against the Democratic Party with.

Newman: I don’t even know if the conditional language of “if it had more power” makes sense.

Salit: Because?

Newman: Because I don’t know what “it” is and I don’t know what “power” is in this context. Look, you have what you have. That’s what you have. And you organize what you have.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: When I say I don’t know what “it” is, I mean that it’s still very embryonic, very new. And it’s emerging at the rate that it’s emerging at. And it does the things that it does. So, when you say that they’re looking for trends, that’s not quite accurate. They’re looking for trends which they take to be comprehensible and possible, but only from a two-party point of view.

Salit: True enough.

Newman: So, they’re not looking at trends at all. They won’t look at our trends. They’re not even looking at trends in the same way that we consider trends. We know that there are two dominant major parties. But we also know that there’s something else going on. It’s a “becoming,” if you will.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And they don’t consider that when they analyze what the elections are all about. It’s all swing, swing, swing, swing. Last year they swung one way. This year they swung another. Well, what if what you’re calling a “swing” is the emergence of a new kind of political movement?

Salit: I’d say it is.

Newman: Some interesting metaphors come to mind. Let’s say you had a camera that allowed you to take time-elapsed photos over millions of years. And you’re looking at the process by which chimpanzees turn into Homo sapiens.

Salit: OK.

Newman: It happens over millions of years. But even if you’re looking at the millions of years, you could look at different points, different snapshots, of what’s going on in this process of evolution, and perceive That chimpanzee is swinging to the right or that chimpanzee is swinging to the left.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But at some point, while you’re looking at the swing, you might say to yourself, You know, I’m not so sure it’s a chimpanzee any more.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, if you want to stay with mainstream kind of thinking, that’s not the reasonable way to look at it. But we’re seeing something that’s evolving, that’s becoming and I think that’s what’s happening.

Salit: Yes. And it’s not a third party.

Newman: Correct, and it’s a misnomer to call it a third-party movement. It’s as much an anti-party movement as anything, at this point in that process. But those are the trends that we’re focusing on and those are the trends that the official pundits are either not interested in or not looking at, or both.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But there’s a slight shift even in their talk, because these trends that we’re talking about are happening in real historic time. They’re taking place in discernible ways.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: So, some are saying, independents are delivering a message to Democrats. Why would you suppose that independents would be sending any message to the Democrats? They’re not interested in the Democrats or the Republicans. They don’t send messages. They’re trying to make change.

Salit: That’s closer to what we’re seeing.

Newman: History includes having a way of understanding history. I think what I’m describing is a closer characterization of what’s going on than simply the cyclical swing of a bloc of voters. And this means there is an historical/logical dilemma for these pundits. In some respects, they can’t or won’t or are not allowed to think in these terms.

Salit: I assume if they do, they’ll be out of a job.

Newman: They only can see things in terms of parties. That’s been the American conditioning process for people who do. And it makes sense. I’m not saying they’re wrong or they’ve been brainwashed. I’m saying that’s just what has happened. George Washington was against parties from the start.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But no sooner had Washington spoken out against parties than four years later, we had the dirtiest, most partisan election in the history of the United States of America.

Salit: Right.

Newman: He was trying to fight the anti-party fight and he lost, cold. And the parties took over, boom. And they’ve been entrenched for well over 200 years.

Salit: But that is going through a transformation.

Newman: Yes. But you don’t so easily see transformations because most of the “looking” is based on what was there before. As radicals, we’re trying to see this whole process, not abstractly, but while reorganizing it, from the vantage point of where we believe it’s heading towards.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That’s important to understand. You said some things to Charlie Cook a few years ago. And history took care of the rest. And that’s what I think is going to be going on or is going on or will continue to go on with different kinds of shifts. It’s an organizing question.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And the critical issues in this organizing process, are the governance issues, because that’s what’s going to make it possible to see alternatives. And once it’s possible to see alternative ways of voting for example, the result could be a deluge of independent votes, explicitly. I mean millions upon millions of people would shift in a second. I really think that’s true. Because people just don’t know. We see that. As soon as we tell people they can do something independent, they say Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m going to do.

Salit: It’s what we saw at the polls on Election Day in New York City. We had our Independence Party volunteers and poll workers out around the city running a kind of public information campaign, letting people know as they were on their way into the voting booths that they had the option of voting on the Independence Party line for Mike Bloomberg. And not only did people take that information and say Oh, OK, I didn’t know that. Can I do that? They came out of the voting booth and thanked the person who told them. There were countless stories of this. ‘Thank you for letting me know that. I didn’t know that I could do that.’

Newman: Exactly. Maybe I’m expressing my own grassroots bias, but you say, and I know what you mean by it, that you were leading a public information campaign. But in a way, it wasn’t a public information campaign, because it wasn’t coming from some institutional authority. It was coming from other human beings standing in the streets.

Salit: From organizers of the Independence Party. And, the deliverer of the message makes a huge difference in how the message is heard.

Newman: Absolutely. That’s why, in this age of super advanced technology, I’m still a believer in grassroots organizing.

Salit: Me, too.

Newman: So, we’re making headway. I think we made more headway in this New York City campaign than any campaign we’ve ever done.

Salit: This is why, as I told you, the exchange I had with a reporter at the New York Times really made me laugh. In a fairly succinct way I put in front of him a summary of the New York City results, and what, by any standard, was a momentous new development in the history of minor parties and in the performance of independent voters. It is, after all, a climate where everyone is saying, It’s all about the independents. I got back a one-line response that said, ‘I put it in, but they cut it.’ I broke out laughing!

Newman: Disposed of by the stroke of a pen!

Salit: Or a “delete” button. Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, October 3118, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, October 31, 2009 after watching selections from “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

Salit: We watched a Charlie Rose interview with Sam Tanenhaus, who has written a new book titled “The Death of Conservatism,” in which he examines the history of intellectual thought in the conservative movement, and the history of conservatism in the Republican Party. First, he argues that the essence of conservatism as an intellectual trend goes back to Edmund Burke and the concept of “conserve and correct.” You conserve the existing order and you look to correct its flaws and continue to find ways to progress. In the dialogue with Charlie Rose, Tanenhaus observed that one could say that conservatism lives on today in Barack Obama, that Obama is, in many respects, a traditional conservative, a “conserve and correct” conservative, someone looking to revitalize the institutions of the society while “tamping down” the imperial presidency. Now, leaving aside for a moment what Tanenhaus describes as the contradictions in the Democratic Party or within liberalism that Obama has to deal with, let me start by asking for your thoughts about Tanenhaus’s description of Obama as a conservative in this intellectual and political tradition.

Newman: Well, it suffers from all of the defects of “labelization.”

Salit: No doubt.

Newman: But that said, I see what he’s talking about. I think it’s an intelligent observation. Although, even on his own terms, there’s something of a contradiction. He identifies Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most imperial of presidents and as the most revolutionary. Arguably, Obama is simply following him.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: So, if what you’re preserving is a revolutionary transformation of the government, what does that make you? A conservative or a revolutionary? It’s hard to say. But, insofar as Tanenhaus is saying that Obama’s temperament is more conservative – although radical – than it is revolutionary, I agree with him.

Salit: Interesting.

Newman: Roughly speaking, Obama believes that the system – as modified by the course of history and by the likes of various people including Roosevelt – can reconstruct itself in ways which lead to substantial changes. In that sense, he’s a conservative. Or that’s his conservative dimension.

Salit: Tanenhaus suggested that Eisenhower and Clinton are the two great modern conservative presidents of the 20th Century. Like Tanenhaus’ interpretation of Obama, they only built off of what came before. They didn’t come into office and attempt a kind of massive restructuring of government, of the social contract or anything of that kind. And consequently that qualifies them as conservatives.

Newman: I see what he’s getting at. And it’s kind of interesting to me that the two people he considers conservatives were, in one case, the leader of the largest army in the history of the world, and in the other case, a draft dodger.

Salit: I never would have thought of that. That’s very interesting.

Newman: You could say it shows two faces of conservatism.

Salit: And they are?

Newman: The desire to effect an outcome through massive force. And the desire to avoid having to personally participate in the institutions that carry that out. Conservatives vehemently want things to be exactly as they have been. Except when how things have been is not consistent with whatever else they commit to, for example on the moral front. To me, that’s the contradiction of conservatism. If I were writing a book with the title “The Death of Conservatism,” it would be about how that contradiction ultimately produces conservatism’s demise. That’s the internal contradiction.

Salit: What you’re saying connects to my next question. Let’s go back to Obama and the idea that Obama is, in certain respects, a conservative. As president, he’s faced with an enormously complex financial collapse that began before he took office.

Newman: There’s no such thing as a simple financial collapse.

Salit: Fair enough. But, one of the debates that’s going on now is over what kind of restructuring the country needs to undergo, including whether the social contract needs to be rewritten to protect the American economy and the American people in the face of what just happened. There are different voices in this, obviously, and some are arguing We have to keep things as much the same as we possibly can relative to financial regulation, but we just have to make sure that the excesses don’t happen or that we have better triggers to respond to warning signs and give the government authority to intervene more quickly than we have before. And other people, some regulators, some representatives of the labor movement, some chaos theorists, are, in effect saying, This is a moment to rewrite the social contract, there’s an opportunity here. How does that debate connect to Obama’s conserve and correct posture vs. the opportunity to do something more radical?

Newman: Well, pardon me for putting it this way, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? One person’s excess is another person’s rational reform. And that’s the mix that we have in the country today. Do you view the fulfillment of the Rooseveltian agenda that never got completed as a kind of conservatism? Or do you call that the completion of a radical agenda? Now, Obama might say the issue is how he wants to complete it. What makes him a conservative, Tanenhaus might say, is that Obama is trying to complete it within the confines of traditional institutions. But those traditional institutions have themselves gone through a huge number of radical transformations. So, it’s hard to know what the ontology of the entity is that you’re talking about.

Salit: Because the history of those institutions includes radical transformations of themselves?

Newman: Look, most conservatives, at least the ones you hear about, don’t want to bring back slavery.

Salit: Correct.

Newman: That was a very radical victory, to eliminate slavery under Lincoln and, of course, through the Civil War.

Salit: Yes. That radical restructuring is now a part of America.

Newman: So, the question is, when do you stop the clock, so to speak?

Salit: On what you’re trying to conserve and correct?

Newman: Exactly. So, it’s a very complex and perhaps, in some ways, irresolvable argument.

Salit: We watched a Hardball segment where Chris Matthews talked to Howard Fineman and Harold Ford about what’s going on with Obama and the liberal left. Is Obama losing support within his own base? This is all relative to the 2010 elections. But the problem is it’s a “broad brush” conversation about a phenomenon that really hasn’t engaged yet.

Newman: Very hard discussion to have. After all, when you say is he losing his strength within his own base, you have to quickly add, it seems to me, his is a base that formed itself ten seconds ago.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: So, what is that supposed to mean? If you accept the notion, as I do, that the country is in a very fluid period relative to base development, it’s not so clear what that kind of statement could mean. There are new bases coming into existence almost every week. And Obama’s brilliance and his extraordinary accomplishment was to take all of those emergent elements and create a new base large enough to beat a very traditional opponent. This, of course, was mainly in the primary, because I think it was a foregone conclusion that whoever won the Democratic Primary was going to be elected president. George Bush was so unpopular that even Michael Dukakis could have gotten elected president. Obama figured out a way to label Hillary Clinton correctly, as traditional and conservative.

Salit: As behind the times, really.

Newman: And he put this new coalition together. And swept into office with it. But what does it mean to hold on to that base? I don’t know. I don’t know that he ever consolidated that base. It might have fragmented as soon as people came out of the voting booth.

Salit: Maybe to put Matthews’ question in a slightly different way – this is what I thought he was trying to get at – is Obama’s base going to support him on the basis of a vision which is going to take a longer time to play out and be materialized or are we essentially looking at a situation where the base, however amorphous it might be, is going to say, Well, what are you doing for me now? That’s what Harold Ford was saying. Ford said, ‘Look, there’s all these issues that are out there. Guantánamo. Afghanistan. But, here’s the real issue. It’s about jobs, and it’s about healthcare. But it’s mainly about jobs.’

Newman: Well, let’s be even more precise here. That kind of analytic chopping that you’re doing, correctly, requires that we chop even further. It’s a huge mistake to think that the major issue that the American people are struggling with is jobs.

Salit: Because?

Newman: Because what individual Americans are struggling with is their job. I don’t know that “the issue of jobs” is a broad generalized issue for the American people. I don’t think that’s the case. If Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, was slightly more honest or intelligent, he’d have to say the failing status of the trade union movement is that it became preoccupied with jobs for the people who were in their unions. To the exclusion of everyone else. Now, a shift in that might be the lasting change that comes out of all this.

Salit: Trumka was featured on the Lehrer NewsHour and he says there’s an opportunity here, maybe to go in the direction that you’re saying. Basically, the interviewer says to him, ‘Look at the labor movement. When you first came up in the labor movement, you were a mineworker. Forty percent of the workforce was unionized. When you became an official in the union it was 26% and today, it’s 18%. And, so where is the labor movement?’

Newman: Well, the message of those statistics, and the actual history if you look at it more carefully than just statistically, is that the union movement in America has failed. And it’s failed for this very reason. It never was able to construct a social policy around key issues, including most of all, jobs, as it affects all the people of America. It addressed it in an exceedingly parochial way, as my job, my union’s job, my, my, my, my, my, my. That’s what it became concerned with. That’s not where the union movement started out. It started out being much more socialistic in character. But it corroded over decades and these statistics reflect that.

Salit: So, is there an opportunity for the growth of a new labor movement?

Newman: Could be. I don’t know. This is an opportunistic moment and the trade union movement has as good credentials on opportunism as any institution in this country.

Salit: Back to Tanenhaus. He points to a historical problem of traditional conservatism, as it plays out in the Republican Party, namely that much of its philosophy is elitist. He talked about Bill Buckley for example, and how the trend in American conservatism, and American Republicanism, is elitist. And so a challenge that those conservative thinkers have had, is to find a populist voice to make that connection, to take that elitist philosophy and translate it into a philosophy that appeals to the masses. And in this discussion they talked, of course, about Joe McCarthy and about how much the conservative elites valued McCarthy because of his ability to do that. Tanenhaus quotes Buckley as ultimately saying ‘I wish Joe McCarthy had never lived.’ But I guess he didn’t get to that position for awhile. And, says Tanenhaus, that’s who Sarah Palin is today. She’s the populist figure who takes elitist ideas, elitist Republican conservative ideas and transforms them into a form that is appealing to the masses.

Newman: That sounds accurate. My way of putting that would be to say that conservatism in its traditional form, going back to Burke, and thereafter, has been not only elitist, but also highly intelligent. And so they’ve been compelled to turn to some of the most stupid spokespersons to make their case.

Salit: Like McCarthy.

Newman: Yes, McCarthy was more than sufficiently stupid to accomplish that. And so is Palin. But some people aren’t. Take John McCain, for example. McCain is an intelligent guy, so there are some things he just can’t get to come out of his mouth.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: So, what you need is someone who’s totally at home with stupidity, like a Rush Limbaugh.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But then, in some ways, that’s a problem also, because it gives away the elitism of intelligence to the liberals and that puts the conservatives in a bad position, too. So, it’s a longstanding problem with conservatives. You know, people want to wave the flag with Limbaugh and be stupid, but then at a certain point they want to reserve the right to say Oh, now that goes a little too far.

Salit: Right.

Newman: That gets you in big trouble. After all, you can make a case that the German people felt that about Hitler.

Salit: As in, we want a man who will take things to certain extremes.

Newman: Yes, coming out of the history of Versailles and being mistreated as a major power, Germany was looking for something to raise their spirits – a substitute for raising their standard of living – which they weren’t able to do for an extended period of time. And so this guy comes along and he’s doing just that and they sort of know that he’s very, very stupid, and when it came time for them to say, This is where we stop, it was too late. There was no stopping him. It’s a traditional human problem in terms of rule, in terms of who you’re going to be ruled by.

Salit: When you say it’s a traditional human problem…?

Newman: Well, if you will, it’s the dialectic between, do you want someone who’s moderately intelligent or do you want someone extremely popular? And they don’t always coincide. Longtime human problem, as far as I can see, in various cultures.

Salit: Well, Obama is that.

Newman: He’s that? What do you mean, that?

Salit: Popular and intelligent.

Newman: Well, he is for the moment. But going back to what we were discussing earlier, how many moments is that going to last?

Salit: I guess we’ll see, Fred. Thanks.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, October 18, 2009 after watching selections from “The Chris Matthews Show,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Salit: Charlie Rose interviewed Michael Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher. You interviewed him years ago on the Fulani! Show and he’s been a prolific author on subjects having to do with democracy, civic life, and the need to reinvigorate a civil discourse. He’s now teaching a popular course at Harvard called Moral Reasoning 22: Justice, where he tries to examine, as he puts it, the big issues that philosophers have dealt with from the very start of philosophy and how those issues are still rumbling around the political arguments that exist today. I want to talk about how he is framing these issues, and how he sees the intersection between politics and philosophy.

So, let me start with a basic question. Do you think that the “big issues” framed by the earliest philosophers can be “seen” in the political arguments that galvanize our country and the world today?

Newman: No.

Salit: OK. To flesh this out for our readers, Sandel would identify those core philosophical issues or concerns as utility; freedom and choice; and virtue and the common good. So, when you answer ‘no’ to my question, does the ‘no’ mean those philosophical issues are not kicking around the political discourse, or are you disagreeing with the idea that philosophical debates, ancient and otherwise, kick around the political discourse, whatever they might be?

Newman: I’m saying neither. I’m saying the society in which we live has not been structured so as to make possible that level of political debate.

Salit: OK.

Newman: And so it’s not here.

Salit: It’s not here.

Newman: Right. Maybe it’s at Harvard. But it’s not in the world in which we live, perhaps with the exception of Harvard.

Salit: My first thought after hearing this discussion with Sandel was that he seemed like a very nice person, but that the political class would eat him for breakfast.

Newman: Yes, the political class would make mincemeat of Sandel by virtue of simply saying You’re out of order.

Salit: Even so, let me pursue the particulars of his idea that classical philosophical questions live on in contemporary politics. Sandel says that the question at the heart of the healthcare debate is a moral question: Should all people living in a society have, relatively speaking, equal access to quality healthcare? And, he says, the political mistake that Obama made in trying to sell this healthcare program over the summer, was that he forgot to address – these are Sandel’s words – he forgot to address the fundamental moral issue. Charlie Rose says to him, ‘Well, did he forget to address it, or did he make a pragmatic decision along the lines of I can’t get there with a moral appeal – I can’t get to where I’m trying to go with a moral appeal.’ Sandel answers, ‘Well, there is a pragmatism that wants to avoid controversy, but because Obama did that, and the cause languished.’ So, the core of his argument here is it’s a moral issue and that’s what you have to go to the American people with, a moral appeal. He’s saying something more than this would be a good marketing approach. He’s saying that there’s something inherently relevant about a moral appeal based on the architecture of philosophy.

Newman: Alright, this is my language now. You can construct a language game, a system of language games in which you can make that point.

Salit: Right.

Newman: Presumably, one can do it at Harvard. But in the political life of the vast majority of the American people, it can’t be done. It hasn’t been structured or created that way. Should it be? That’s another question. But can that happen within the existing structure? No.

Salit: Why not?

Newman: The structure’s been created in such a way as to leave no room for that. That’s not what political life is.

Salit: Sandel brings up the issue – or the meta-issue – the meta-philosophical concern called utility. The functional definition of utility is that it is the premise that we search for the greatest good for the greatest number, and he pegs this to the debate about torture. The argument for the use of torture is you can torture one individual terrorist for information and if torturing this one individual gets you information that helps you save the lives of many individuals, then it is just. So even though it causes pain and represents inhumanity to an individual, it’s a utilitarian trade-off between the life of this one individual and the lives of many more individuals. This is simplistic but he’s saying Well, the history of philosophy includes a 2500-year debate on utility, and lo and behold, we’re still debating that very question in the debate on torture.

Newman: That’s not the debate on torture in the real world. The debate on torture in the “real” world is other than anything Sandel even considered worthwhile mentioning in his hour-long interview.

Salit: And that is?

Newman: It turns on power. The serious debate on torture turns on power.

Salit: OK.

Newman: As we saw, the United States of America was torturing prisoners at Guantánamo under George Bush.

Salit: Right.

Newman: And as soon as Barack Obama took over the power, it stopped. It’s an issue of power. But that’s not a factor for Sandel. Because he’s concerned with – I don’t know – higher, more abstract things, which have little to do with the actual issue of torture, because they have little to do with the actual issue of power.

Salit: I’ll ask you one more of this genre of question.

Newman: Feel free.

Salit: He talks about Aristotle and the philosophical questions of virtue and the common good. A question that Aristotle raised is how should a society distribute recognition and honor. Sandel says the debate on same-sex marriage is the Aristotelian debate on how the society distributes recognition and honor, because the state’s recognition of gay marriage is a form of distributing recognition and honor. Those who want gay marriage legalized are saying That is a fair and just distribution of recognition and honor, and that’s what we want. And so Sandel says, look deeply into this debate on same-sex marriage and it’s the old Aristotelian debate.

Newman: And I say, don’t look more deeply into it. Look at the actual history and it’s a debate on political power. I think Aristotle was a very bright fellow. And, I think in the context of the structure of the society that both he and Plato operated in, philosophy had a different relevance, because it was structured that way by the forces that were operative in ancient Greece. That has very little to do with the forces that determine and develop the conditions under which these concepts function within modern America.

Salit: True enough.

Newman: I like Sandel. He seems a bright enough fellow.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: If I had the chance to interview him after this Charlie Rose interview, I would ask him one question and that would be How do you grade?

Salit: How do you grade your students at the end of the term?

Newman: Yes.

Salit: And why would you ask him that?

Newman: Because I want to know whether what he’s doing in his limited context bears any relationship to what he’s talking about. I wouldn’t ask him that in order to be provocative. I just want to know that. Leave out America as a whole for a moment. Let’s just talk about Harvard. How does this work there? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a pass or fail course, I don’t know, but I would like to know. That’s an exercise of power question, how you grade the students in your course.

Salit: So, he argues that one of the things that he’s doing is teaching his students, not ordinary people because Harvard is elite, but he is teaching students to philosophize. Actually, the interview closes with him talking about class stratification at the country’s leading universities, how of the 145 top colleges and universities in the country, only 3% of the students are from the bottom 25% income bracket. But, that aside for the moment, he says ‘What I’m trying to do here is teach the students to do philosophy. I’m trying to teach them to use philosophy and to ask the big questions about ordinary life, to train them to do that.’ You believe in teaching people to philosophize, to practice doing philosophy in ordinary life, but you’re raising your eyebrows at my saying that so maybe you don’t quite agree with my characterization of what you’ve said. But, even if I’m correctly characterizing words that you’ve said, I know that you mean something different by that than what Sandel means. What does that mean to you?

Newman: Well, the difference in what we are saying is roughly the difference between Sandel at Harvard and me teaching philosophy with people who have created a different environment.

Salit: OK.

Newman: People often take this to be a trivial distinction, but it isn’t. Let’s talk about social therapy for a minute. People in social therapy come in to a group saying they want a cure. But the group responds: we’re not going to give you the cure.

Salit: Alright.

Newman: We’re seeking to create an environment in which one, which might be you since you’re one of the ones, could be cured, because that’s what we can do. At most. Sandel, in part because he’s at Harvard, has to come up with the cures. Do those cures have a relationship to what’s going on? In a way they do. Of course they do. Cambridge is in the world.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But the environment in which you create is an enormous influence on what it is that you are creating.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And that ultimately, in my opinion, comes back to a power question. You have to satisfy certain conditions and do certain things to make it possible for you to do other things in a way that you, roughly speaking, would like to see them done. Sandel seems like a well-intentioned guy, a well-intentioned liberal, humanitarian, and I’m sure he thinks that he’s doing the best he can at Harvard. I’m sure he wouldn’t be adverse to hearing criticisms of Harvard. I’m sure he would say, privately if not publicly, I’m doing what can be done at Harvard.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But does that activity have anything to do with the things that he’s talking about, namely changing society and the world? No.

Salit: If he were to make his best case for the fact that it does make a difference, he would say that his operating premise is that the biggest difference leaders can make in this society is to change the terms of political argument. That’s what political leaders can do. That’s what Obama is trying to do. And that’s what leadership is, presumably, given the nature of the crisis that we’ve been living through. I presume he would argue that training young people to philosophize, to grasp more about the history of philosophical debate, is part of the process of doing that. But, leaving aside whether it is or isn’t part of the process of doing that, how do you respond to his claim that that’s what leadership is, that’s what leadership can do, change the terms of the political argument?

Newman: I don’t think that’s ever happened.

Salit: Sandel would say that to bring about the kind of changes that you and I and many people who consider themselves progressives might want, we have to change the terms of political argument, that if we allow the current terms of political argument to continue, we won’t be able to achieve certain kinds of progressive goals.

Newman: I agree. But that simply leads you to the next question.

Salit: Which is?

Newman: How do you change the terms of political argument?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And I think the power relationships in which he is performing his activity dictate that it is a place from which you cannot do that.

Salit: How would you answer the question that Charlie asked him, ‘Do we have a just society?’ Sandel replied that we have an imperfect just society, or a just society that hasn’t fully realized its capacity to deliver justice. How would you answer that?

Newman: How would I answer it if I were Sandel?

Salit: No, if you were you.

Newman: We’re not far enough along in the process of social revolution, social development and social transformation to even consider that question.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Nor is he. That’s how he should have answered it too. How could I possibly know? My project at Harvard has barely begun.

Salit: I wanted to ask you a question about Sandel’s Trolley Car Lecture. Sandel tells this story to hundreds of students. You’re driving a trolley car, going 60 miles per hour down a track. The brakes have failed but the steering works. Down at the end of the tracks, you see five workers who are on the track and you realize that the trolley car you’re driving is going to plow into these five workers and kill them. But you suddenly notice there’s a sidetrack that you can steer the trolley on to, at the end of which there’s one worker, and so if you steer the trolley on to the other track, you’ll kill only one worker rather than five. And so he asks the class to talk about what they’d do. The majority – he does a poll – the majority say that they would steer the trolley onto the sidetrack, in essence making the judgment that it’s preferable to kill one person rather than five people. And I take it that this is a teaching tool to get into the utility argument, seeking the greater good for the greatest number, etc. A small minority, but nonetheless an identifiable minority, said that they wouldn’t turn the trolley car. Is there a sensible argument for that?

Newman: Why you would choose the track that will kill five rather than one?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: There are many. Do you want to hear some of them? Arguably, the five people who were together on the track might have been more aware of the dangers and took on the work that they do there with this risk in mind, while the one on the sidetrack might be a newly hired worker who didn’t know the risks when he took the job and so that changes the whole moral question. Circumstances continuously change the moral equation. I think he’s looking for something resembling a general law. But for the most part, there aren’t any.

Salit: There aren’t any general laws.

Newman: No. All moral decisions, in my opinion, are situational. Suppose, for example, the one person on the sidetrack was you.

Salit: “You,” meaning the person answering this question.

Newman: Yes. Then what would you do? You say, well, how can that be? Aren’t there two separate people here? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. If you want to make up these things, why not make up epistemologically strange things to go along with it?

Salit: OK.

Newman: Suppose the one person was your mother.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Suppose the five people working together wore swastikas on their arms?

Salit: How would you feel about your choice then?

Newman: You don’t know. It’s all circumstantial.

Salit: It appears that the motive for Sandel’s enterprise here is that the religious right, as he says, grew very, very substantially and gained power in this country by asserting a set of moral principles. He faults the liberals and the left for not having done the same, for having shied away from a kind of secular moral and philosophical vision, from bringing philosophical debate about virtue and the common good and freedom and all of this into the public square. And so from the point of view of power, this seems the most explicit thing he has to say. The right did that. Now the left has to do that. His book, his course, and his lectures are all done in the hopes of facilitating that.

Newman: I think that’s a fairly profound distortion of history.

Salit: How so?

Newman: The obvious answer to the riddle of which came first, socialism or fascism, to put it in the most black and white terms, is that socialism came first.

Salit: And?

Newman: I think the left gave answers from which the right learned to develop its answers to those questions afterwards. The left had a broad and explicit moral vision. Was it ultimately corrupted? Yes. But was there a profound moral and philosophical vision at the heart of socialism? Yes. But as things progressed, the left was told if you give those answers, you’re a goner. That’s the history of the situation, roughly speaking.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: What relationship does that have to the philosophical issues? Well, that’s something that needs to be addressed. It’s very hard and very complex, and I think that we’re addressing them to some degree. But in order to do that, you first have to create the environment where everyone can address them. It’s very complicated and hard to do. In the last 40 years, we’ve created an environment where we can begin to do that.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.