Sunday, June 21, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, June 21, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” and reading Newsweek’s cover story “The Capitalist Manifesto.”

Salit: Newsweek ran a cover story titled “The Capitalist Manifesto,” with a lead essay by Fareed Zakaria. Basically, “The Capitalist Manifesto” says that it’s not capitalism that is in crisis, it’s finance that is in crisis, due to the unregulated/greedy/irresponsible behavior of the financial industry, all of which was legal. After laying out an overview of the crisis and the signs of seeming recovery, Zakaria concludes by saying that whatever your take on this crisis, over the last 30 years of globalism crises have occurred at a more frequent rate and that overall instability needs to be addressed. How? At the core of any recovery, and at the core of any stable system, has to be a higher standard of morality and ethics. He says the big question raised by the crisis is the question of public trust. Who holds the public trust? Obviously, there’s a lot to unpackage here. Tell me your thoughts about his argument: capitalism works, but it needs a greater morality and ethics at its core.

Newman: Let me put it this way. You could probably make the case that if you have a serious moral and ethical core, almost anything works. But the deeper point is: Is there a way of systematizing human life such that it gives expression to any sense of a moral core? Hasn’t that been the everlasting question of philosophy, religion, politics and everything else? People are people. People behave the way people do. Now, can you construct a system without corruption that people conform to? This is a philosophical question, which doesn’t mean that it’s impractical. I think what’s being raised here is very practical. But, I don’t know if you can raise it fruitfully in the way Zakaria is raising it. To me, the more serious and practical question, although it might seem terribly abstract, is: Are human beings capable of constructing a human system?

Salit: OK.

Newman: I don’t know the answer, but I’m not convinced that the answer is obvious. Why is it that so many systems in the history of the various cultures of the world have always tended to bring in something external to human beings – whether it’s gods, or laws of history, or laws of the free market or laws of class struggle. Why is it that we, meaning we, the people of the globe, have this need to appeal to something other than us to construct a coherent world system? I don’t know if there’s an answer to that question, but the answer might be that we have to make such an external appeal because human beings, in and of themselves, are not capable of doing without it. So we have to appeal to something other than human beings. Have there been advances over the course of history? Yes, I think so. Have there been moral advances? That’s questionable.

Salit: There’s a lot in what you said here. You’re pointing to the fact that human beings create systems where something external to us is an organizing principle, but of course, while it’s external to us, we also created it.

Newman: That’s the very point. We created it as external to us.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Ergo, alienation.

Salit: Alienation, OK. So to stay with the system we human beings created called capitalism, Zakaria says: ‘Capitalism has its flaws.’ He reframes the famous Winston Churchill statement about democracy: ‘Capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for all the other ones.’ Its capacity to create wealth is unmatched and he cites countries with huge populations and great poverty, like China and India – one communist, one capitalist – that have used capitalism and markets to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This is what capitalism does. But, Zakaria says, it goes off the rails because of greed. So, the challenge of the 21st century – and Newsweek created a very grand cover with the words, “The Capitalist Manifesto” to underscore this – is to figure out how to expunge, control, and moderate these kinds of excesses where the profit motive drives the system beyond sense. Zakaria thinks it requires a kind of “reform” of morality. President Obama is focused on regulatory reform. Obama has just presented a plan where the Federal Reserve will regulate financial institutions considered “too big to fail.” They’ve set up a Consumer Protection Agency so that mortgages and credit cards are not weapons of mass destruction (my term, not his), so that the American people are not so dramatically at the mercy of lenders. Zakaria would argue, I presume, that regulatory reform is fine but the society has to develop morally and ethically, for this all to work. We know we want it to work. We know we need it to work. But we have to find that moral center to make it work.

Newman: What if it’s unfindable, given the materials that we have to work with, namely people?

Salit: Well, that’s a problem.

Newman: I would say so.

Salit: Yes. And, you’re saying, what if it’s the case that the very thing that we need to make this thing work can’t be done, or can’t be done now, that it can’t be done at this stage of human development.

Newman: Alright. Let’s agree that that’s what I’m saying. What about that?

Salit: Well, I go back to President Obama who says: We’ve got to create a regulatory system that does the best we can.

Newman: Is that a question?

Salit: No, it’s a description of what some progressive-minded people, including the president, are saying about what we need to do. I don’t know if they’d say “given that we can’t do this other thing.” But they’re saying we need to do this now. That’s the best we can do. Or, that’s what we can do and we hope for the best.

Newman: Of course, it’s pragmatism. You do the best you can. You try to find the thing that works best. Of course, it’s less than clear what “works” means. The evidence seems to suggest that what “works” includes what many people consider to be the continuance of an unfair distribution of wealth. So, do you consider that to be “working?” You’re back to a moral question. But, maybe that’s what human beings can accomplish. One way of looking at human history is that it has been a continuous vacillation between these different extremes. The closest thing to a relatively stable compromise, some argue, is the United States, where we don’t have the extreme disruptions of human life that take place in lots of places. There are endless theories as to why that’s true: natural resources, democracy, the two-party system. There’s still a desire on the part of many, many people to come to the United States. The standard of living in the United States is still spectacularly better than anyplace else in the world. The United States has been hit very badly by this current crisis and yet, relative to other parts of the world, we still have a high living standard, higher than many, even most, places on the globe. And even so, many people – from me, to the president, to most Americans – want to find ways to move things forward and make things better. But that has to be tempered by, perhaps, a greater consideration of the gap between what human beings are able to create and what human beings are capable of understanding. I think that gap is, in some ways, more pronounced now than ever before because of the extraordinary creativity of human beings. Our capacity to understand the complex world we create is lagging behind.

My response to Zakaria’s piece is that it seems to be a hodge-podge of economic information without anything resembling an answer to the very question he’s raising. And, yes, it’s an interesting headline on Newsweek. But he doesn’t do much by way of proposing how to achieve the very solution he offers, does he?

Salit: No. And, it makes me think of a question we received from a Talk/Talk reader, Jeff Roby, about the discussion we had last week about Richard Posner’s book “The Failure of Capitalism.” You commented that you thought that the crisis that we’re in now is worse than a depression.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: Jeff wrote in and asked what you mean by that. What is it, if it’s not a depression? If it’s worse than a depression, what is it that’s going on that makes it worse?

Newman: Jeff is an old leftist and it’s always good to hear from him. “Depression” is an economic term from a simpler period in American history. Part of what “depression” means is that it’s a phenomenon which can be overcome. I’m not utterly convinced that what’s happening right now can be overcome. Does that mean that I think there has to be a revolution to save America? No, I don’t accept that. That’s an element of Marxism that I’ve long rejected and the key term that I reject in that formulation is “has to.” I don’t think there “has to” be a revolution, as much as I consider myself a revolutionary. No. I think that this limbo reality we’re living through could simply be the ongoing state of human affairs. It needs reforms. It needs changes. And I hope that they’ll be good ones. So I’m rooting for Obama to do some good stuff. Do I think he’s going to come up with a solution to the fundamental contradictions of this crisis? I do not. Do I think there is an ultimate, abstract, ideologically constructed answer to this whole thing? I do not. You asked the question earlier of who should hold the public trust.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: The answer to that question is both impossible and obvious.

Salit: The public.

Newman: Yes, the public should hold the public trust.

Salit: But?

Newman: But the public might not be trustworthy. What if the people are not trustworthy? The evidence for that does not seem slight. So what do we do then? Maybe the question for the Left has evolved from Reform or Revolution? to something like: Reform or Reform? There are differences between some reforms and other reforms. Maybe the 19th century notion of revolution is not what this species of ours can accomplish. I don’t think that’s an anti-revolutionary position. It’s trying to turn that concept into something that lives. It’s a more serious consideration of revolutionary transformation. So, maybe we, the people of the world, have to begin a more extended process of coming to understand this other notion of reform, and maybe, to answer Jeff’s question, we’ve come to a point where we have to re-conceptualize that whole process, consistent with what has been manifest in the history of the last several hundred years and what our species has been able to do. Which is not to say we’re not going to go forward, whatever that means. But, at times, the process of going forward – I think science teaches us this – requires significant re-conceptualization.

This is roughly what I mean by postmodern Marxism. I don’t think it’s an abandonment of the revolutionary spirit. I think it’s an abandonment of the revolutionary “ideal,” in the worst 19th century sense of the word. This has been my lifetime project – one I’ve worked on with many other people. Because I’m as polemical as any leftist, I’ll say straightaway that the knee jerk Marxist will call my position an abandonment of Marxism. I don’t think it’s an abandonment of Marxism. I don’t think Marx can be abandoned. He was a great thinker and he’s had a huge impact on the world. But I think we’re at that point in this particular scientific evolution – in the science of revolution – where there has to be a reconsideration of what fundamental concepts mean. This is an attempt to advance the science of change so we can go on to a new stage, taking into account actual human history which everybody, including Marx himself, took to be fundamental to such considerations.

Salit: This is kind of a pop culture note on what you’re saying. I saw the new Woody Allen movie, “Whatever Works.” In the opening scene, the main character, played by Larry David, is sitting at restaurant in Greenwich Village, in our neighborhood, with a bunch of guys. He’s a classic Woody Allen protagonist. He’s an “almost Nobel Prize physicist” who’s a real misanthrope and very bleak about the world. At one point in this opening scene, he says, ‘You know, Marx was 100% right. Marx had it absolutely right. Great ideas…From each, to each, and all that kind of stuff. The one problem is that it was premised on the idea that human beings would go for that kind of thing. But they don’t.’ He’s making a point about human behavior. There is an ideal, it’s been out there, about how to organize a society, a country, a world that draws upon people’s strengths and talents and creativity and takes care of everyone, but we just can’t get there because people won’t behave that way.

Newman: With all due respect to Woody Allen and Larry David, I don’t think that’s the end of the discussion. After all, there has been a lot of energy given to the question – leave aside child rearing – of what we, as a society do when people don’t behave in a social and responsible way. Are we able to change people’s behavior? Yes, we are. Some ways of doing so involve development, the decent and humane ways of doing it. Other options are totalitarian and ugly. But we know we can change the way people behave. So the issue is much deeper than that. Woody Allen gives Larry David an intelligent remark to make. But it’s still a remark made for movies. And there’s more than movies in this world.

Salit: Yes. There’s also sports.

Newman: There’s also sports, yes.

Salit: How’s that for a segue?

Newman: I think I’ve come a long way. I used to think there was only sports. Now I’ve reached that level of development in life where there are some things other than sports.

Salit: OK. So we have Mary Fridley’s sports question. She says, ‘As you know, LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson just won his 10th NBA championship, which makes him the most successful coach in professional basketball history. In the conversation following the championship, there were a number of sports analysts who questioned how good Jackson really is, given that he’s worked with some the greatest players in the game, including Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.’ How would you respond to these comments about Jackson and, more generally, Mary asks you to talk about the role of the manager or coach in professional sports. ‘What, in your mind, makes a good manager and coach and who are some that you have admired?’

Newman: How do you evaluate Phil Jackson, given that he’s had the best players? Let’s grant that’s true, though on a statistical basis, there’s probably a more precise analysis of the distribution of talent in basketball. But, I can even concede that he’s had very good players, maybe the best players. I think Jordan and Bryant are two of the best basketball players. But Jackson’s played a role, after all, in shaping that. He’s put together a team and then led the continuous process of shaping that team. I think he handles that exceedingly well. That’s his greatness as a coach. To put it in traditional sports language, he gets the best players together and lets them play. Some coaches are more directive than others. But I think the best coaches recognize that this is a player’s game and not a coach’s game and you have to let the players play and their job is to create an environment in which they can maximize their chances of playing well. When he played basketball Jackson was, in some ways, the originator of the 6th man, your first substitute. He would come in and give a burst of energy to the starting five. It seemed to me – this may be too philosophical – he would recreate the team relatively instantaneously. Not that he was better than the team, because he would have been the 3rd man instead of the 6th man, if that were true. But sometimes the team wasn’t congealing on the court. All the talent wasn’t gelling. So Jackson went in and he was a spark that changed that totality. There were specific ways in which he would do that. He was tall enough to add another rebounder, just fast enough to add another guard-like player. He couldn’t shoot very well (not as well as any of the other five on the starting team). But he could do what he did with some consistency and make that totalistic change of the team for a short period. Then you’d get him the hell out of there and put the starting five back in. Then the starting five would build off of this new history.

Salit: That’s fascinating.

Newman: Jackson does that as a coach, too. He watches the team play. He knows basketball inside and out. He’s very perceptive. He knows his players. But most important, he knows his team. And he knows when they’re off. So he puts in a new combination and sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t. It works enough to have won 10 championships. That’s impressive. He’s a very, very good coach.

Who are other coaches I admire? Joe Torre had that quality with the Yankees. Who are others? The first manager or coach who did this thing of constantly figuring out how to get a new totality was, of course, Casey Stengel of the Yankees. He did it, literally, on almost an hourly basis and he called it the “platoon system.” Now it’s done all the time. Stengel succeeded in creating new totalities and the Yankees won five consecutive world championships. It’s never been done in the history of baseball, before or since. Interestingly, hardly anybody ever talks about it. When the Yankee announcers or the sportscasters talk about the great Yankee teams, generally speaking, that’s not one of them.

Salit: Isn’t that amazing?

Newman: I think this is a common trait of great managers and coaches. You constantly look at what you have and say, “How do I reorganize this today so as to produce as much as we can.” This is something I’ve tried to learn and tried to practice as a political coach, of sorts.

Salit: And, I’ve seen you in action, Fred. Thanks.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, June 14, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: Today we’re going to touch on health care, foreign policy, and capitalism. A few minor subjects! Let’s start with health care. The Obama administration is starting to roll out its health care plan and, by that, I don’t just mean the contents of a proposal, but a political map of how the process might go. Here is a brief description. There will be a bill in the House that will be what some are calling “the most progressive” – meaning that it will have the elements of a government-sponsored health care option. The Senate is going to come up with another package that will be less “progressive.” The White House has gotten more involved in the process of drafting the plan. And, President Obama has given a green light to grassroots organizing around health care reform by the organization he created off of his campaign, Organizing for America. As we’ve mentioned before, it is housed in the Democratic National Committee building in Washington, but its organizers contend that it is an independent organization. This is the first time that Obama has mobilized this base in conjunction with a national policy issue, and it just held thousands of meetings around the country where people came together to talk about health care and the kinds of things they’d like to see reformed. Let me start with a basic question. Is this something different from other reform attempts?

Newman: I don’t see anything different.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Do you see something different?

Salit: I’m not sure. I’m not sure whether this organized grassroots participation through Organizing for America changes the environment or the chemistry.

Newman: I don’t think so. I think it was Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, a right-wing think tank, who said that the grassroots campaign will not impact. I think his view is essentially correct.

Salit: So, it’s just another round on a long term issue that the country’s been dealing with, not dealing with, trying to deal with, failing to deal with, whatever.

Newman: Right, in the midst of a crisis which is, at least a depression, and probably worse.

Salit: That’s important because the negative impact of not solving this problem, or not moving things forward, is more acute than it’s been in the past.

Newman: Obama’s general plan – this is true for health care as well as everything else that he’s doing – is to stimulate the economy by spending a lot of money. And the health plan debate comes down, in my opinion, to the same thing. If more spending is what’s needed to jump start the economy, then these expanded programs will be good things. If he’s wrong, they probably won’t be. They’ll just contribute to a larger and larger debt. That’s what the Republicans, not altogether unreasonably, are trying to turn the health care debate into. Obama has made his perspective plain. He’s going to keep throwing more and more money at the problem and hope that it does the job. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not really a health care debate at all. They call it a health care debate, but these discussions keep reducing – almost immediately – to a debate about American capitalism. Do you solve the problems of capitalism by having the government become the financial backer of last resort or do you let the markets take their course? Whatever path is chosen, it’s a risky business.

Salit: What would a real health care debate look like? It’s been so long since we’ve had one that I don’t even know if I would recognize it.

Newman: It would involve looking at the whole health care system from the vantage point of trying to make people healthier. That’s what a health care debate would look like.

Salit: I imagine that some of the more committed health care advocates would say that they agree with what you are saying, but that the issue of how you pay for everything is so overriding that you can’t really have that debate in a meaningful way.

Newman: I wouldn’t disagree with that. But “overriding” doesn’t mean the same thing it meant in 1993. “Overriding” now has to be located in the context of national and, indeed, international economic crisis.

Salit: Since we’re talking about the failures of capitalism, I’d like to ask your thoughts about Charlie Rose’s interview with Richard Posner, who wrote the newly published book “The Failure of Capitalism.”

Newman: I think the title is misleading to the public. Because Posner made plain in the first several minutes of the interview that it’s not about the failure of capitalism at all. According to Posner, capitalism can’t fail because all the alternatives have already failed. So, the story is not about the failure of capitalism. It’s about the efforts of capitalism to rehabilitate itself in this current situation. And, I would add, it’s one of the few author interviews that I’ve seen Charlie Rose do that made me want to skip reading the book entirely.

Salit: I’m definitely in that camp. Two things struck me in the interview, which I found confusing and alarming. Posner identifies two failures. The first is the failure to anticipate the depression, and he calls it a “depression.” He says, “I know that the politicians don’t want to call it a depression, but it is a depression. I’m going to call it a depression.”

Newman: I think it’s worse than a depression. But since you raise his anticipation critique, I have to say that his comment that we should have been better at anticipating these surprises is somewhat ridiculous. That’s what a surprise is. You don’t anticipate them.

Salit: Mine is a slightly different point. Posner argued that we have a history of not seeing warning signs, for example, as with Pearl Harbor, which he called a surprise attack. I found this to be bizarre because, in the case of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese decided to attack us. Now, we either did or didn’t see warning signs on that. But that’s one world power, Japan, deciding to attack another world power, the United States, and we were surprised. The economic crisis is not somebody or some bodies sitting in a room deciding to attack the United States. It seemed such a bizarre comparison.

Newman: In a way, I agree with your underlying point, although I actually would tend to argue that the other way.

Salit: Meaning?

Newman: There were consistent and ongoing signs that Japan was angry and antagonistic towards us and one of the things that happens when nations are angry is that they start wars. That’s what they did. The surprise was the target and the ferocity with which they went to war against us, but it wasn’t as if it came out of nowhere. It wasn’t as if we were best friends with Japan. They were fighting for hegemony in the Pacific. We were the primary opposition. If there was any element of surprise it’s how well prepared they were and how ill-prepared the United States was.

But in this economic disaster that we’re in right now, endless high level people in finance and in government have been saying “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble.” Well, one of the things that every child knows about bubbles is that they burst. Was that a surprise? No. Maybe in the levels of how much they were able to steal, though I’m never surprised by any amount of money that capitalists are able to steal.

Salit: Posner says that the other failure is the failure of the economics profession to realize the limits of their own knowledge. Would you care to comment?

Newman: One could discuss that as a failure of human beings.

Salit: Yes. It did seem funny to ascribe it to the economics profession. OK, moving on. Chris Matthews has an endless fascination, one might call it an obsession, with the nature of the Clinton/Obama relationship.

Newman: Actually, it’s an obsession which we independents share to some degree, because the relationship between Obama and Clinton is about more than the relationship between two people. It’s also about Obama’s relationship to the Democratic Party. Given that, you’d think Matthews and others would go deeper into it. For example, let’s just take the most superficial level, to keep this very simple and clear. If you put your so-called independent operation in the building that houses the Democratic National Committee, people are going to be suspicious.

Salit: As to how independent it is.

Newman: Yes, this is a man – namely President Obama – who raises money the same way that most people sneeze. But he can’t raise enough money to have a separate place for that operation in Washington? What can I tell you? I consider myself a supporter of Obama and will give him as much rope as he needs. The reality of how independent of the Democratic Party he truly is, is not going to be determined in this phase. He needs to be close to everybody right now to get all this stuff passed. The test will be the next time some major elections come up, major primaries for example. What should he do now? Not align with the Democratic Party to pass this huge package that he’s trying to pass? Of course he has to keep those things together for this moment in the process of governing. Chris’ obsession, as you correctly call it, stops short. There’s no probing here. There’s just the obsession. So he shows a lot of video of Hillary saying what she’s supposed to say and he says, ‘I would have thought there was going to be a public fight.’ Why would you have thought that? And why would we even believe that you actually thought that? That’s preposterous.

Salit: On to our Talk/Talk sports question of the week.

Newman: Let’s get down to serious business.

Salit: Again, from Mary Fridley. She says: ‘I was watching a sports talk show recently and they were talking about clutch players.’

Newman: Clutch players.

Salit: For example, Mary says, ‘Derek Jeter is viewed as a clutch player while Alex Rodriguez is not. What do you think it takes for a player to be “clutch” and why are some clutch and others aren’t?’

Newman: To say the obvious, clutch playing means performing well in a situation where that moment makes a difference in the game that they happen to be playing. Now, the commonplace statistics in baseball, the ones that you know best: home runs, batting average, rbi, etc. don’t, in any way, indicate that. And that’s what baseball puts forward as what you should look at. So, you have to at least wonder, if clutch playing is so important, you’d think it would become a standard measure. But I don’t think “clutch” is all that important to the game and to the people who play the game. It’s definitely important to the people who write about the game. That’s who really likes clutch.

Salit: The writers, yes.

Newman: That said, do some players, psychologically speaking, handle situations of certain kinds – namely tough ones, difficult situations, games on the line – better than some other players? I think so, but I don’t know that it’s measurable. It has to do more with expectations, which are very difficult to measure, relative to performing in the way that the people who made up the expectations would like you to. For example, I think Rodriguez gets nervous sometimes, and, as often as not, that nervousness translates into his not performing at his peak. His overall peak is, in many ways, higher than Derek Jeter’s. Jeter doesn’t have 560-odd home runs in career. He has about 215. Now, I can see people saying that Rodriguez gets more nervous, and underperforms, compared to Jeter. But there are higher expectations for Rodriguez than for Jeter, certainly as a hitter.

Salit: As a hitter, exactly.

Newman: As a fielder, oy, both of them are a little shaky.

Salit: I suppose you could, and I’m sure somebody has, do some kind of statistical analysis of a big home run hitter like Alex, for example, where you analyze the number of home runs that he hit from the 1st to the 7th inning…

Newman: They have those statistics. They’re just not the major statistics that they focus on. That’s got to mean something, too.

Salit: Yes, as in, they don’t focus on how many home runs you hit when it was the bottom of the 9th and the bases were loaded and you were down by 3.

Newman: They have those stats. They just don’t make that much of it. What they mainly look at is how many home runs you hit in a season, how many you hit in a career, what’s your batting average, how many rbi’s. Those are the major things. That’s the triple crown.

Salit: Mary has another question here: She says the talk show hosts were also discussing Kobe Bryant and Lebron James and who was the better team player. Lebron generally comes out ahead in this regard. Mary says ‘Though I’d love to hear your views on Kobe vs. Lebron, my general question is: do great players necessarily need to be team players?’

Newman: If you want to get the recognition as a great player, you’d be better off playing on a great team, a team which wins championships. Kobe is a bright guy. So is Lebron. But Kobe is in a position to say, Lebron has great acclaim. I have four championship rings.

Salit: You do the math. Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, June 7, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: We started with an interview that Chris Matthews did with Richard Wolffe, who has a new book out about Obama called “Renegade: The Making of a President.” I started reading it and it turns out that Wolffe got the idea for the book from Obama himself. He was on the campaign trail with Obama for Newsweek. And at some point, Obama said to him ‘You know, you should write a book like Theodore White’s book, “The Making of the President.” So he did. Chris Matthews focused on the sections of the book where Wolffe gets into Obama’s relationship to the Clintons. Wolffe describes a private clash on an airport tarmac between Obama and Hillary in December of 2007. It was before the Iowa caucus, before any votes had been cast. Wolffe saw it from a distance and saw only the body language. But his description was that in that moment, Obama saw something about Clinton’s vulnerability. It wasn’t just that her position on the war made her vulnerable with the Democratic Party ranks. Wolffe says that Obama saw that the fact of his candidacy was getting to Clinton, and Obama saw that he could take her. What is your perception of the psychological aspect of the contest? Matthews likened it to being a prizefighter and being in the ring and seeing something about your opponent wherein you realize that you’re going to be able to get in there and overpower them.

Newman: I don’t think it’s psychological.

Salit: No?

Newman: I think it’s purely political.

Salit: How so?

Newman: She and her husband wanted to be in a position to say We’re not impediments to the election of the first African American president of the United States. How can they make that claim? If Obama didn’t stand a chance of winning. But, by that point in the process, it was clear that he did stand a chance of winning. So the Clintons were somewhere they didn’t want to be. And that political fact produced subjective reactions and whatever tensions Wolffe thinks he saw on the tarmac. And, it was a big setback for the Clintons. They had not lost at that point, but if they were going to win, it was going to be at Obama’s expense.

Salit: They were going to have to defeat an African American candidate who was within striking distance of the White House.

Newman: Yes. Now, the Clintons are tough players. But even so, Democrats are strategically polite with each other, because if things go too far in a primary, there are internal problems for the Democratic nominee. But, the Clintons play hardball. Hillary didn’t have to be the least bit polite with Lenora Fulani and with the independents. There was no holding back. The dealings with us were minor, but nonetheless they were even more revealing of Clintonian hardball. What’s more, Fulani is a leftist, so Hillary felt she had the moral high ground to be vicious. So we’ve seen the Clinton attack mode firsthand. I don’t think there was anything psychological. I think it’s mainly political.

Salit: After the scene on the tarmac, in a handful of weeks they were in Iowa, which Obama won, then on to New Hampshire, which Hillary won, and then to South Carolina, where the drama you’re talking about came to the surface.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: In South Carolina, Bill Clinton calls the Obama campaign the biggest fairytale he’s ever seen, he took off the gloves. And that’s the point at which the African American community closed ranks for Obama.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: But, at the time of the scene on the tarmac, Clinton was up among black voters by 15 or 16 points over Obama.

Newman: And therein lay the conflict. The Clinton-type liberal, including both Bill and Hillary, have produced a fairytale – namely that black people can achieve everything, if they play ball within the Democratic Party system. Obama wasn’t putting out a fairytale. He was running an election campaign about turning the page, about moving beyond the old political games. And he was doing quite well, thank you.

Salit: And at that point, it’s clear Obama can go the distance.

Newman: And he might well win. Every boxer knows this, if you go the distance, there’s no telling who’s going to win.

Salit: We watched the Charlie Rose interview with attorney David Boies.

Newman: It was interesting.

Salit: Boies and Ted Olson, who’ve been on opposite sides of the fence on many political cases, including the famous Bush v. Gore case, have joined forces now to get to the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Prop 8, which just passed in California overturning the legalization of gay marriage there. The basic legal argument that Boies and Olson are putting forth is that marriage is a fundamental right, and they have an extensive case history in which various prohibitions against marriage, between blacks and whites, between prisoners and non-prisoners, etc. have been overturned as unconstitutional. In these contexts, the courts, including the Supreme Court, have affirmed that marriage is a fundamental right. Once you accept that, which the courts have done, then the argument is that you cannot deny that right to any American, which is to say that you can’t deny lesbians and gays the right to marry. And so it’s fundamentally an equal protection and a due process argument. What do you think of the building blocks of the legal argument?

Newman: Well, I think they’re strong. However, I think that Boies may have been disingenuous when he said he didn’t know what the opposition was going to argue. He can’t not know what they’re going to argue. They’re going to argue that gay people aren’t people. Just as they argue that the fetus is a person, the Right is going to argue that gay people, according to the Bible, are not human beings. They are Americans, but, the argument will go, they’re not human beings. So how can Boies not know that?

Salit: Well, wouldn’t the counter-argument be that the Constitution doesn’t make those distinctions, because they’re Americans.

Newman: Right, but the Right will argue they’re not people.

Salit: And what’s the legal basis for arguing that they’re not people? I assumed the anti-gay marriage claim was going to be that all of the prior case law still involved marriage between men and women and that the courts implicitly accepted that and any notion of marriage being a fundamental right took as a given that marriage was between a woman and a man.

Newman: That will be a part of their story, yes. And, Boies and Olson will answer that at every juncture in those cases, the fundamental question was whether the partners involved were qualified, as human beings, to marry. And that takes the argument back to the threshold.

Salit: In which the right wing argues that homosexuality opts you out of personhood.

Newman: I assure you that will be the core of their argument.

Salit: What do you think about some of the tactical objections that have been raised to Boies and Olson pursuing this?

Newman: Which are?

Salit: Let’s not go to the Supreme Court with this, because if we lose, it will be an utter disaster. Let’s engage in the state-by-state long-term fight to change the culture, because that’s really where you win it.

Newman: I think that’s very important. I don’t know how to assess that argument. I think it’s valid. In pragmatic terms, who wants to take that chance?

Salit: Staying on the subject of the courts, obviously the Sonia Sotomayor nomination has been a big story for a couple of weeks. Members of the Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina and Ben Cardin, Democrat from Maryland, discussed the nomination on the NewsHour. Graham, the Republican, says ‘Here’s what I’m dealing with. When Judge Ginsburg was confirmed’ and he named several others, ‘these judges were confirmed with 98 votes in the Senate.’ Basically, he said, you had a process whereby a consensus was reached among the members of the Senate relative to the legal qualifications. But, now it’s the case, and he lays this at the doorstep of the Democrats, including Obama, now it’s the case that the empathies and the sympathies of the judge have become the litmus test and that’s why Obama, when he was in the Senate, voted against Alito and voted against Judge Roberts.

Newman: Look, I’m not a lawyer. But as I understand it, the law doesn’t establish the criteria by which the Senators vote. All it establishes is that the Senators vote.

Salit: Right.

Newman: So that’s the beginning and end of this issue, it seems to me.

Salit: In other words, the Senate can set whatever criteria it wants.

Newman: As can each individual senator, because he or she has a vote and that is prescribed by law. The other stuff, the culture wars, the smulture wars, the vulture wars, are not real issues. So, Graham is just talking politics. Now, the Democrat, Cardin, lost a great opportunity I thought.

Salit: How so?

Newman: He could have said something very Lincolnesque, like Senator Graham, I’ve always respected you, I’ve always valued your opinions and so on. But you’re caving in to what is obviously Republican Party strategy, to turn every issue in the world into a political attack. But that undermines your very own position.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: And then he should have said Feel free to do that but I will not participate in that.

Salit: Even Graham, who I think is a bright guy – said at one point, ‘This is a game.’ He even added, ‘This is a game that has hurt the country.’

Newman: And Cardin could have said to him, Yes, and you’re playing it right now.

Salit: Now to a new feature of Talk/Talk which is a sports question, which has come to us via a longtime Talk/Talk reader, Mary Fridley. I’m going to present her question to you.

Newman: Mary Fridley is a big sports fan, particularly a big baseball fan.

Salit: Mary describes a Charlie Rose interview with Selena Roberts, the author of a book on Alex Rodriguez and a writer for Sports Illustrated and Bob Costas, the sportscaster and commentator about baseball, in which they discussed the use of steroids in baseball. Mary says that while Roberts and Costas are probably two of the more reasonable sports media figures, she describes their “hysterical morality” about steroid use, and calls them “gatekeepers” of the game. So she asks ‘What’s the “gate” that sports journalists are acting as the gatekeepers for? Why is it so important to them?’ And ‘Is there something in particular about baseball that promotes this kind of moralizing?’

Newman: Well, I’ll tell you what the “gate” is for the moralists.

Salit: OK.

Newman: It’s the gate.

Salit: As in the tickets sold.

Newman: Yes. As in the gate, the money that is made. That drives baseball as a sport and a lot of other sports also. It’s no more complicated than that.

Salit: OK.

Newman: That’s the gate they’re protecting. Now, why is the moralizing about baseball so extreme? Because baseball has a long history as the pure American sport. And, it has a long history of being susceptible to being negatively affected, both financially and in every other way, by signs of impurity.

Salit: Examples?

Newman: Take the “Black Sox Scandal” in 1919. It devastated baseball at the gate and in the minds of the public. In contrast, football comes later in American history. It’s kind of a postmodern sport where the general principle is anything goes.

Salit: On the field, in the locker room…

Newman: But not in baseball. It has a different history.

Salit: Mary also asks whether you think sports coverage has changed, since the sportscasters have become very moralistic and are playing this gatekeeper role. Do you think that sports coverage has changed?

Newman: I don’t think that’s changed. I think America has changed. And sportscasting reflects that.

Salit: Finally, she’s asking for your comment on steroid use, on Costas’ comment that players who get into the Hall of Fame while on steroids, should have that fact noted on their plaques.

Newman: Oh, I don’t agree with that at all. Should their plaques also include the fact that they played for a franchise that had ten times as much money as the other franchises, and that they had certain advantages that went along with that? No one is arguing that point.

Salit: True enough. Thanks.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, May 24, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: Let’s start with Andy Stern* and the new labor movement. Have you seen Stern interviewed before?

Newman: I don’t think so.

Salit: I haven’t either. He’s a controversial figure in the labor movement and his controversy stems from the fact that he took a huge chunk of member unions out of the AFL-CIO and set up a separate federation.

Newman: And he doesn’t smoke a cigar.

Salit: And he doesn’t smoke a cigar, at least not on TV, because he’s creating a new image of a labor leader. So, Charlie Rose says to him, what’s the difference between you and traditional labor leaders, between you and John Sweeney, for example. And he says, ‘Well, we’re all for struggling, we’re all for mobilizing, but we also want to win, and my vision for the labor movement is that we try to adopt new strategies and new ways of looking at issues so we can win.’ What does that consist of? Well, says Stern, being able to seek common ground rather than confront the corporations, the employers. On his model, you probably don’t call them “the bosses” anymore.

Newman: He’s essentially saying that labor has to be more cooperative with management, which was not the old posture of labor.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: We have to cooperate with management if we want to maximize the benefit for everybody. Isn’t that what he’s saying?

Salit: Yes. We have to act like stakeholders in this society. We’re the co-creators of wealth, and we have to assert our interests in corporations doing well and cooperate to create better conditions for working people. He would argue that this strategy is the approach that you have to take, given the changed circumstances in the world. What do you think of that argument?

Newman: Well, I think it’s perfectly reasonable. To state the obvious, it’s not just a tactical difference that he’s raising. He’s raising a strategic difference. The trade union movement has its roots, not just in a tactic of struggle, but in a strategy of struggle.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Put another way, it has its roots in the progressive movement, in the socialist movement, in the communist movement, whatever language you want to use. So, the strategic struggle was over who’s going to have power, Labor or Capital, and that impacted on the labor movement’s posture for hundreds of years. But that has changed. Not for everybody. But in general, that’s changed. You can consider that either a great victory or a great loss.

Salit: Meaning?

Newman: You can see it as capital having won but only by making very substantial concessions to labor.

Salit: Right.

Newman: Or you can see it as both sides having recognized that you’ve got to change the model for the good of everybody.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But in any event, the model has changed. Some people are screaming at Stern – and at Sweeney, too – because the model has changed. Some on the left, not just crazy leftists but even cigar-smoking union bosses are saying that, ‘Labor is all about struggle. Whatever benefits we have come from struggle.’ And there are some who say ‘Not any longer. The struggle has gained us a certain position and now we have to make a paradigm shift to a certain level of cooperation. Not because we’ve lost, but because the world has changed.’ So, I think Stern represents the best of this new kind of labor leader. How to evaluate where that goes? It’s hard to say. We’ll have to wait and see.

Salit: Stern’s Change to Win Federation made a very, very big play with Obama. As I recall, the SEIU didn’t make a national endorsement in the primaries. They let their locals do what they wanted to do around the country, and numbers of them supported Obama. But in the general election they put $85 million dollars on the table to campaign for Obama, and they have a big stake in the Obama White House.

Newman: Obama’s their kind of president. They’re simpatico on this question of the new vision of the world.

Salit: And how would you characterize that? What is Obama’s thinking on organized labor as part of a strategy for economic recovery?

Newman: A lot of commentators are asking that. I don’t think it’s so complicated. It’s a vision which goes beyond the old paradigm of seeing the choice, in the end, as either socialism or capitalism.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Obama’s new paradigm is that significant elements of both are going to be turned into a new world synthesis, a synthesized version of capitalism and socialism and that’s not far away from what Stern and many others believe and what many in the world believe. And Obama thinks that he has both the responsibility and the capacity to play a significant role on the world stage in creating it. At some level, Obama must think that his role is to shape this new paradigm into a pragmatic workable one. And he wants to do that everywhere in the world.

Salit: Interesting.

Newman: With the full recognition that that’s going to be hard to do in numbers of places, particularly in the Middle East, but nonetheless that is what he’s looking to do. And, it’s a new day. By the way, I’m not agreeing with this. I’m just trying to describe it.

Salit: How would you characterize what is going on in the world?

Newman: That’s what I’m characterizing, what’s going on.

Salit: Are you agreeing that it will work?

Newman: I’m not agreeing that it’s going to work.

Salit: OK.

Newman: But that’s what’s going on. And it might work for some time, and I’m even agreeing that it might be what’s needed right now to get the world over the hump of the current crisis. But I don’t know that it’s where things have to wind up. I think the interests of capital are, in some fundamental sense, antithetical to the interests of labor.

Salit: So, in other words, it’s not clear there can be a workable synthesis?

Newman: Yes. But that’s a different discussion.

Salit: So Charlie says to Stern, ‘Why do we need unions?’

Newman: Answer: Because we can’t trust management.

Salit: Well, I guess Stern’s answer was to say that it’s been the best mechanism for distributing wealth. There are three ways through which wealth is distributed: through the market, through government and through unions. The unions, Stern says, have been the most effective long-term anti-poverty program in the history of the modern world. I suppose that’s another way of saying we can’t trust management to distribute wealth fairly on their own.

Newman: Obviously. And it’s another way of saying that unions are compatible with poverty.

Salit: We watched an interview with Jon Meacham who just interviewed President Obama. It was featured in last week’s edition of Newsweek. The talk all week long on the shows has been about Obama’s handling of national security issues, his decision to close Guantánamo, setting up some form of “prolonged detention” to handle the detainees once they’ve been moved out of Guantánamo, etc. and the troop buildup in Afghanistan. Obama gave a talk this week in which he said we don’t have to sacrifice basic American values for our national security, nor do we have to sacrifice our national security for basic American values. Former Vice President Cheney responded, in a polemical way, ‘There’s no middle ground. The president’s looking for a middle ground, but there really is no middle ground on these issues. You’ve either got to protect the country and do whatever you have to do to protect it or not.’ Can Obama find – I’ll use Cheney’s word here – a middle ground that holds on to basic premises of the American experiment and judicial system and still protect the country?

Newman: He’s already found the middle ground.

Salit: OK. And, the middle ground is?

Newman: He got himself elected President of the United States. And now he’s the commander-in-chief. So, case by case, situation by situation, he decides what is to be done, and the policy emerges from those varied and complex decisions. It makes me think of David Frost’s now famous interviews with Richard Nixon, in which Nixon says, ‘If the president does it, then it’s legal.’ Well, Nixon was wrong. It’s not legal because the president does it. The president must adhere to the law. But, it is the case, if you’re commander-in-chief, that you don’t have to adhere to any laws of consistency.

Salit: True, you don’t.

Newman: You can just make decisions. People might say of any decision Wait! That’s inconsistent with what you said last week. And he can respond, That’s what the commander-in-chief does. He faces different situations and has to make specific decisions.

Salit: I support him doing that 100%. Is there a problem with that? Because part of the discussion is that there’s a problem with it, a moral problem or a political problem or something, but that there’s something wrong with that.

Newman: Well, if you elevate consistency – and some people do – to a position of extraordinary importance that overrides everything, then you can think it’s a problem. If you think “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,”* then you don’t worry about it that much.

Salit: Charlie Rose said to Jon Meacham, you spent a half an hour with Obama on Air Force One, what were your impressions? And one of the first things Meacham said was that Obama was more hawkish than he was expecting. He made the point that there’s a difference between being a candidate running for president and espousing a philosophy and a view saying “I’m going to get out of Iraq” and saying “The war was a mistake” and then finding yourself to be commander-in-chief. He describes that as more hawkish. Perhaps Meacham was looking for a kind of consistency.

Newman: He was. But, Obama is something of an enigma. He does not want to be limited, even by his own commitments.

Salit: Right.

Newman: He’s self-reflective. Yes, he’s very liberal in his posture. He’s dovish in his posture. But he has a very intelligent recognition that you can’t do that with any kind of consistency given the position that you’ve managed to get yourself into as Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: So, can you rule the greatest power in the world today and perhaps ever in history, the United States of America, with that posture? Well, Obama is extremely self-confident. He thinks that he can. I don’t know if anybody else can.

Salit: That’s a very good point.

Newman: It’s like asking the question in 1861 Will Abraham Lincoln get away with a civil war? Well, he did. Could anybody else have gotten away with the Civil War? I don’t know.

Salit: So connected to this, they got into a discussion about Obama’s vision. And Charlie Rose said to Meacham, ‘Where is he going? Where does he want to take the country?’ Meacham answers ‘He sees himself as a transformational president.’ And then Charlie says, ‘Transformational to what?’ And Meacham says, ‘To paraphrase another president,’ (Bush 41) ‘to “a kinder gentler nation.”’ He wants to try to move America to a place where the majority of the population have their needs taken care of so that they can live their lives as they choose and that America is an environment that fosters that and participates in the world in that way. You haven’t met Obama, but how would you answer the question Transformational to what?

Newman: Well, I would say Meacham’s answer is a part of the answer. But, I would say that it’s mixed with an equal amount of another answer. Where does he want to take us? Answer: in the sense of the old Negro spiritual, To the other side.

Salit: OK.

Newman: To the other side. I think Obama does have a vision but he has an awareness that his vision, like all visions, is long-term, and he has to deal with what’s going on in the world and in this country right now.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, we’ve got to be taken to the other side. It’s a mixture of those two.

Salit: Small question to wrap up. I was struck when Meacham said of Obama, ‘Well, he beat the Clintons. We tend to forget that.’ And, as you recall, I blurted out at the TV, ‘No, we don’t.’

Newman: Basically, your response indicates that Meacham is right.

Salit: Because?

Newman: If we have to always remind everybody of it, there must be some element of truth in saying everyone’s forgotten it.

Salit: Good point. Thank you.

FOOTNOTES:
* Andrew L. “Andy” Stern is the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest and fastest growing union in North America. Stern was elected in 1996 to succeed John Sweeney.
* The quote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series. Self-Reliance. (1841)

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, May 10, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” and a Charlie Rose interview.

Salit: I want to start by asking you about some of the ideas that Charlie Rose discussed with Joshua Cooper Ramo, who wrote “The Age of the Unthinkable.” Essentially Cooper Ramo focuses on the disconnect between what he calls old ways of thinking and the very significant changes that have occurred in the world. He underscores the dangers inherent in that disconnect. For example, he says the old way of thinking was to spread capitalism and democracy all over the world, creating a new set of circumstances from which problems could be solved. But, he says, it turns out that the spreading of capitalism has expanded the wealth gap. To use his terms, capitalism is the most inefficient system for creating equality ever. He gives other examples: There was a terrorist attack. We responded with a war on terrorism and our response has created more terrorists. One of the lessons we have to learn from this is that we have to focus on resilience, not deterrence and we have to learn to give away power. So, this kind of reframing is something that you have spent a great deal of time working on, thinking about and developing. How do you respond to his framing of that disconnect?

Newman I like it.

Salit: OK.

Newman: I mean, it’s an old idea.

Salit: An old idea?

Newman: Well, it can be summed up as follows: Capitalism, variously understood, creates much more money. Democratic socialism, variously understood, distributes it better. That’s what Ramo is picking up on – that’s what I’m calling the “old idea.”

Salit: That capitalism doesn’t distribute wealth well.

Newman: Its distribution produces chaos. Competition and chaos.

Salit: And instability.

Newman: I think what Ramo said is very intelligent, very useful and very helpful. However, how you can have that length discussion with Charlie Rose about the crisis of capitalism without mentioning Marx is almost “unthinkable,” no pun intended.

Salit: That’s life. Or, more probably, that’s marketing. He actually mentions Marx twice, though in passing, in the book.

Newman: But Ramo’s a smart guy and he’s right on the money. What he’s saying is essentially right on the money.

Salit: Implicit, and even explicit, in what Ramo is saying is that we do have the capacity to get to a new way of thinking about things.

Newman: The capacity?

Salit: Yes. In fact, he says, ‘Here are some new ways of thinking.’

Newman: He’s saying more than “the capacity.” He is saying by virtue of the fact that we have to, we are. If you want to call that capacity, feel free.

Salit: You’re calling it “necessity.”

Newman: It’s closer to necessity.

Salit: Alright, there’s a necessity to develop new ways of thinking, and so we are.

Newman: Right.

Salit: He’s proposing a set of new paradigms or new ways of thinking.

Newman: OK, but that’s not my language.

Salit: What’s your language?

Newman: I think we have to move beyond paradigms.

Salit: When he says things like we have to focus on resilience not deterrence, what he means is you can’t stop terrorism. You can respond to certain incidents and you can prevent certain incidents but terrorism is a fact of life. His argument is that there are certain facts of life in the modern era, and they include different forms of instability, and we should stop trying to make things stable because we can’t. We should focus instead on developing new kinds of things, what he calls resilience or new ways of negotiating, and so forth.

Newman: Or new ways of looking at things.

Salit: OK, new ways of looking at things that are more suited to the actual circumstances as opposed to a set of wishful circumstances.

Newman: No. That are suited to resolving the problems that are created by the actual circumstances.

Salit: What are the new ways of looking at capitalism given the problems it has caused? It creates wealth but it creates inequality. So what are the new ways of looking at that?

Newman: How could you know?

Salit: How could you know what?

Newman: What the new ways of thinking about that are in advance of the actual building of what it is that we have to build to intervene on the problems that are happening. If something new or alternative which gives you a different vantage point hasn’t been built, you can’t know the answers. That’s why I take the “knowing” issue to be fundamental to this whole thing. Because you have to abandon “knowing” and the traditional understanding of that conception as a condition for creating the changes.

Salit: What’s the relationship between that and resiliency?

Newman: That’s the essence of resiliency.

Salit: That’s very interesting. So, necessity in itself doesn’t create resiliency, doesn’t create new ways of looking at things. It establishes a need for that. Then there’s the issue of what you do, what you’ve got to build in order to be able to see things differently. Yes?

Newman: Yes, although I think that language is a little bit modernist, the notion of “then you discover what you have to do.” I’m not so sure that’s the proper description for an emergent process. I’m not so sure you know what you have to do. It’s that you do what you do absent any notion of knowing, in the traditional modernist sense, what you have to do.

Salit: Ramo talked a little bit about chaos theory and looking to chaos theory for some ways of seeing the world differently. And he uses the sand pile metaphor – that even while a sand pile appears to be a stable formation, it is actually volatile. And a single grain of sand, added to the pile, can cause an avalanche. To Ramo, the contemporary world is like a sand pile. Capitalism appears stable. And yet, with the world becoming more and more complex, with millions of factors, including a huge inequality that has been created by unleashing the forces of capitalism, things are becoming more and more complex and more and more complicated and the seemingly smallest of factors can cause a disruption. If I were to combine what you and Ramo are saying, I’d say the world, as we “know” it, is incomprehensible.

Newman: Right. I’d call it “undecidable” as in Gödel’s undecideability.

Salit: So Ramo says we’re not having a financial crisis, we’re having an existential crisis.

Newman: Right.

Salit: So you agree with that?

Newman: I couldn’t agree more. In some sense, it’s inevitable that this would have happened. I don’t even know if it’s a crisis at all.

Salit: And why are you saying inevitable? What’s inevitable about it?

Newman: Well, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s simply the way things are. To call it a crisis suggests it’s outside of what one expected to happen. I just think it’s what happened.

Salit: Let me ask you about the connection between all of this and the debate over charter schools as it was depicted in the Lehrer NewsHour segment that we watched. Obviously, one of the things that happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, in which the entire physical infrastructure of the city was demolished, is that some people were smart enough to figure out that you could take advantage of that to introduce some reforms, to build some new infrastructure, including in the school system.

Newman: Right.

Salit: So in the education movement some enterprising people figure out now we can come in here and advance a charter school movement at a much more rapid rate than we’ve been able to do anywhere else in the country because of the resistance of the institutional players is gone, for the moment.

Newman: Well, Katrina leveled everything.

Salit: Exactly. OK. So, the charter school movement comes in and it makes a big push and develops all these charter schools. Meanwhile, the public school infrastructure is still there and still operating. It gets refurbished.

Newman: Right.

Salit: So, now they’re having a fight. What is the fight would you say? Is it just a fight over funding?

Newman: That’s part of it certainly. But, the charter schools can do things that the traditional schools can’t.

Salit: So, it’s a fight between old forces and new forces, between old ways of looking at the education system and new ways.

Newman: Between centralization and de-centralization.

Salit: OK. That connects to the discussion about new ways of thinking about the world, because that’s also an issue. Centralization vs. decentralization.

Newman: Yes. As you saw, for example, Ramo described the debate going on in China about how to reform the Chinese Communist Party.

Salit: Yes. Everyone recognizes it needs to be reformed. But how? How centralized can its power be while still allowing it to connect to changes on the ground. But, as Ramo said, when he talks to his friends in China about the future of China, they agree that China always has been and always will be a great power. They say, well, out of the last ten centuries, China has had the biggest GDP for nine of them or something like that.

Newman: And if you look towards the next 10, they’ll have it for all 10.

Salit: Exactly. We just have a couple of minutes left. I want to ask you about the specter of Specter.

Newman: Specter is obviously a somewhat authoritarian loose cannon.

Salit: Yes. I was talking to some independent leaders in Pennsylvania last week and they’re having some discussions about open primaries with Specter’s team. We were talking about the decision that the Senate Democratic Caucus made to strip Specter of his seniority, and his contention basically was, ‘I was elected to the Senate in 1980 by the voters, and my seniority derives from the fact that I’ve been in the Senate for 30 years. That’s why I have seniority.’ And basically the Democratic Party said, ‘Oh no, your seniority is tied to your position relative to the party, not relative to the government and not relative to your contract with the voters, and we’re going to assert that, and basically now you’re at the bottom of the ladder. You’re going to have to work your way back up.’ And this is interesting. As I said to the folks in Pennsylvania yesterday, this is about an issue that independents care about a lot, which is the too-cozy-relationship between government and parties, the conflict between representing the people and representing the interests of the parties. It’s just very, very embedded in the Washington culture.

Newman: Yes. And if Specter wanted to make that argument, and followed it consistently, he wouldn’t have become a Democrat. He would become an independent.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: If you’re playing their game…

Salit: You play by their rules.

Newman: You play by their rules.

Salit: Thank you.

Sunday, April 28, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, April 26, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” a Charlie Rose interview and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Salit: I hate to torture you with the torture issue but I’m going to.

Newman: If you insist.

Salit: Here’s the story. We used interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva Convention and are illegal in the United States. It was sanctioned by Bush administration officials. The Obama administration says they’re putting a stop to it. They’ve released CIA memos that authorized it. But, they don’t want any kind of Truth Commission to investigate what happened, why it happened, how we got there, whether there were violations of law, etc. Obama wants to move forward. You said to me earlier, there’s a problem here, because in real life situations on the ground, whether you have military intelligence or CIA agents or whatever, certain kinds of techniques are used to extract information. You can put guidelines in place that limit that, but when you’re in the middle of Afghanistan and you’re talking to a prisoner that you’ve picked up and you’re looking to get some intelligence from him, I presume that what you’re saying is that people do what they do.

Newman: Forget Afghanistan.

Salit: OK.

Newman: When you’re in the middle of trying to get somebody to tell you something and your job depends on getting something out of them, you don’t have to be in Afghanistan.

Salit: OK.

Newman: You’ll do all kinds of things that you wouldn’t normally do.

Salit: Well, there are basically two arguments to address what you’re pointing to. One is that the information that you get when you torture somebody is not good intelligence. And, two, if we want to prevent it from happening in the future, we have to take a hard public look at why it happened in this last round.

Newman: No we don’t.

Salit: Because?

Newman: It doesn’t make a difference.

Salit: It doesn’t make a difference if you understand what happened and why?

Newman: It doesn’t impact.

Salit: Because?

Newman: This is how human beings are. Don’t you watch soap operas?

Salit: Sometimes.

Newman: Soap operas often dramatize this part of human behavior. The guy shouts at his girlfriend You tell me what the hell you did or else…. And the woman says, Alright, I’ll tell you…. True confessions are the essence of soap opera.

Salit: OK.

Newman: So, what does that portray? How male rage and threatening behavior can get a woman to say whatever they want to hear. And it works on men, too. If you threaten people, and you do it under certain circumstances, they’ll say whatever you want to hear. The statement doesn’t have any value, except the personal value of satisfying the interrogator’s need to get them to talk and the tortured person’s need to get them to stop. None of it’s reliable. And yet no commission or investigation or laws will deter it. It will continue to happen.

Salit: But, we are a society of laws and we live by the law.

Newman: We’re also a society of human behavior. And we live by the rules of human behavior.

Salit: Yes. But, sometimes we make laws to try to civilize ourselves and prevent ourselves from engaging in certain kinds of behavior that is anti-social or anti-human or destructive because of the very thing that you’re saying, which is that human beings, in certain situations, will do those kinds of things.

Newman: Right, and relative to some modes of behavior, the laws don’t appear to work at all. This is one of them – not the only one, but one of them.

Salit: Take the issue of domestic abuse. You’re not allowed to beat up on your spouse. You’re not allowed to beat up on people in general – but you’re not allowed to beat up on your spouse. And if you’re at home and you’re having a fight with your spouse and you call the police, the police will come into your house, and let’s say it’s a woman who made the call, they’ll arrest her husband for domestic abuse. That doesn’t stop what’s already happened, but it could prevent it from getting worse. Maybe it never stops people from doing it, because if a husband and wife are having a fight and the husband starts to get physical, he doesn’t stop and say Oh gee, I really shouldn’t do this because it’s illegal. He does it out of rage, he does it out of frustration, he does it out of all the reasons that he does it. And then the police come in afterwards and they arrest him. So, maybe I’m making your point, that these laws are really not a deterrent.

Newman: I’m not saying that the police don’t stop it in some immediate sense of stopping, and that’s good, because it gives the woman something to do to stop the violence. Now, does it deter in the future? I don’t know what the statistics are, but I’m inclined to think not. It’s a deterrent if you put the man in jail because if he’s not around for 12 years, he’s deterred for 12 years. But the system of laws and punishment in these areas has been notoriously unsuccessful. That’s why our prisons are so full and our rehab centers are so empty.

Salit: But, take the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed – the number two guy in Al Qaeda who was apprehended and was waterboarded 183 times.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: It’s hard to imagine this, but they kept doing it, I presume, because they thought that every time they waterboarded him they were going to get some other piece of information that they needed about Al Qaeda. But, we did outlaw waterboarding. You’re not allowed to use that technique.

Newman: That’s been true for a long time.

Salit: Right, but it was done, and in this case it was done with the authorization of higher-ups in the Justice Department.

Newman: Right.

Salit: But the country can say, if you work for the government, you’re not allowed to do that. That’s what Obama just said.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: So, I’m trying to understand how you see the issue. Because I thought the issue was, what are the laws that we need to have in place so you minimize the chances or the opportunities for that kind of thing happening.

Newman: I guess what I’m saying is that laws are of value to varying degrees and in varying ways. And laws which attempt to alter behavior which is endemic to a whole system or culture characteristically don’t work. That’s all I’m really saying. So, you can make laws and you can crank them out on a fax machine all day long. But it doesn’t make a difference if the behavior patterns you’re trying to prohibit are part and parcel of a whole system. And these are. So until that changes, the laws aren’t going to make much of a difference. Now, you may say, maybe they’ll make a slight difference with some forms of behavior. Well, maybe they will – but long term success, I think is virtually out of the question. Are laws going to eliminate racism in this country? No. Were they part of a whole complex process which has led to Barack Obama becoming president? Well, yes, I would agree that they were. But they were only a part of the story. People sometimes think about laws as if they were laws of nature, written down. But they’re not laws of nature. They’re man-made. They’re made about men and women, by men, and a few women. But to be effective, they have to have a certain complex, even organic relationship to the broader social system of which they are a part. A lot of people assume that if you make a law, then a problem is taken care of. But, it’s not. That’s not accurate.

Salit: Maybe Obama’s reluctance to do the Truth Commission investigation had to do with a recognition that if you were to do something like that, it would be politicized immediately and so it’s not clear that you could have an “independent” review of this kind of thing, and that it’s not clear that kind of thing does make a difference.

Newman: I’d like to think that’s what he thought. I hope he’s not so jaundiced by Washington that he’s totally political. But I don’t know.

Salit: Can you get jaundiced in 100 days?

Newman: Well, he’s been there for more than 100 days. He was a senator before he became president.

Salit: OK, let me ask you about the new focus on volunteerism. Obama signed a bill this week that expands AmeriCorps and the call to public service. The level of volunteerism in this country is very, very high.

Newman: It is.

Salit: And it didn’t just happen with Obama.

Newman: That’s true. But he’s certainly a great publicist for that kind of thing.

Salit: The press is now trying to analyze why this is the case. Why do so many Americans volunteer? They say ‘Well, the economic crisis has made people more aware of the shortcomings in publicly-funded social services.’

Newman: Right, and I suspect that’s true for some people because some people are very nice people. It’s also the case that the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or any of these things are not bad to put on your resume, particularly when you can’t find a job anyhow. I’m not being cynical. That’s just being accurate.

Salit: OK. The press says ‘In this economic climate, non-profits are hurting. They’re doing less well in terms of their ability to fundraise. People have less money and so they contribute less charitably.’

Newman: Well, let me comment on your “law” – that if you have less money, you give less money. If you have less money, for some people, what you do is you re-evaluate what it is that you’re really committed to and you change your budget accordingly. People don’t stop eating because they have less money unless they’re very, very poor. They figure out how to make their budget work overall. And the same is true with their charitable giving.

Salit: Do you think this kind of economic situation stimulates people to think more about systemic changes that have to be made as opposed to – and I’m not putting these things down – Meals on Wheels or programs that provide short term survival-related services to people.

Newman: Well, those kinds of programs are charitable, but they also prevent people from doing just that.

Salit: Doing what?

Newman: From thinking about more systemic things. After all, that kind of safety net, amongst other things, does have the effect of keeping people from saying Let’s change the whole system! We need a revolution! I’m not even criticizing that. I’m just saying that’s how it works. So far, it’s been pretty effective.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Even though, in “classical” terms the conditions for social revolution have grown enormously, I’ll bet the number of people in political parties advocating revolution has not gone up dramatically during this profound economic crisis.

Salit: I’m sure that’s true, but that is certainly connected to the fact that so many of those parties are “classical,” or rigid, in their thinking and tactics. Their concept of revolutionary transformation hasn’t evolved.

Newman: Let’s say it has little to do with the American situation.

Salit: On the subject of non-revolutionary parties, we watched several discussions of “What does the Republican Party need to do to reinvent itself?” What does it do about the fact that its success over the last 40 years was tied to the strength of a conservative wing of the party?

Newman: Well, it’s curious that only one significant conclusion came out of all that discussion, it seems to me.

Salit: Which was?

Newman: It all depends on how the Democrats do.

Salit: But, it does, of course.

Newman: Yes, but, interestingly the Republican pundits didn’t give an answer premised on the Democrats doing well. They discussed what happens to the Republican Party if the Democrats do badly. But I’d like to hear what those people have to say about what happens if the Democrats’ program essentially works. I would suppose it would mean that the Republicans go the way of the Whigs. Even on that scenario, I don’t think it’s the end of the social problems that face America. But, I do think it’s the end of the Republican Party.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, April 19, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” a Charlie Rose interview and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Newman: What do I know? To me, the pirates are in Pittsburgh. That’s all I know about pirates. I don’t know about pirates on the Horn of Africa.

Salit: The main thing is that what we did in the Somalia situation was an operation, not a policy. It was a successful operation because it stopped the pirates and got the captain back home to Vermont.

Newman: And the bad guys got shot.

Salit: Yes. The Navy Seal guys did the job. The larger question in the discussion on Charlie Rose was about the proliferation of failed states in that part of the world, on the Indian Ocean and in Africa. Obviously, everybody’s making the connection between piracy and failed states. Piracy is organized crime at sea. It’s not ideological. It’s business. An illegal business, but it’s a business. The analysts point to the potential for these failed states being platforms for transnational terrorists, which is certainly a threat. But how the world and how America is going to deal with the extreme poverty and destabilization in many parts of Africa is one of the harder problems that Obama has to tackle.

Newman: To me – and I’ve been talking about this since 9/11 – the underlying issue is whether these events are criminal acts or acts of war. This was a criminal act, part of a criminal enterprise.

Salit: More broadly on the international front, Obama is in Trinidad and Tobago for the Organization of American States summit. A number of things are happening there. He’s putting forward a different statement and a new vision for U.S. relations with Latin America. He’s reaching out to countries that we have had very bad relations with, like Venezuela, for example. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez.

Newman: And said, “How’s the oil business?”

Salit: Right. “Can you spare a few billion barrels for us?” And then, there is the issue of Cuba and the potential for normalizing relations.

Newman: They will do it.

Salit: How does Obama look at that, do you think? What does the U.S. get out of doing it at this point? Is it as simple as that the old policy was preposterous?

Newman: That’s a big factor. But it’s also about enhancing U.S. economic strength in the region.

Salit: But Cuba is a small country with a small population. It’s not like doing business with China, which has a billion consumers. It’s about more than just opening up the market, isn’t it?

Newman: Yes. It’s about changing the image of the U.S. in the entire region. That has broad economic ramifications for us. Look, the history of U.S. intervention and imperialism in Latin America is still there. It’s been a big part of the Latin American experience, from the Monroe Doctrine on. Japan is still the country that bombed Pearl Harbor in the eyes of Americans, even though we are now the closest of allies with Japan. Germany is still the birthplace of the Nazis. Latin America has had a particular view of Washington, DC. And with good reason.

Salit: Yes. And, there is a lot of excitement about Obama and the change he represents.

Newman: When you look at the picture on the front page of the Times where Chavez and Obama are shaking hands, it seems to me that the first thing you see is that two people of color are shaking hands.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And that overwhelms any of the substantive issues that they may or may not discuss in Trinidad. It’s a very big change for them. And for us. That’s a big cultural, human, psychological factor.

Salit: I had a similar thought when I looked at the photograph.

Newman: One’s a communist. One’s part socialist, part capitalist. But they’re both people of color. One has enough oil. One has too little oil. But that’s not the issue.

Salit: You say it is a big change in human terms, in psychological terms. Does that translate, in the short term, into new policies?

Newman: Well, it already has. These are new policies. Can they immediately go to ending the blockade? No, for a variety of complex reasons. But they will. The standoff with Cuba is over.

Salit: Is there a winner?

Newman: Not really. Except that the Cubans outlasted America’s 45-year plan to overthrow or destabilize their government. They’ll get back into the Organization of American States. Latin America is on a course towards having a growing number of socialist-style states. This has not played out as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara envisioned it. But it is playing out nonetheless. Does that threaten Washington? No. I don’t think it ever did. And it doesn’t now.

Salit: We talked a number of months back, before Obama was elected, about the changing international economic and political environment. The “World Without the West” paradigm, where developing economies, including in Latin America, together with China and India, relate to each other without the West as the intermediary.

Newman: And it could be added, in cultural terms, without the white West as the intermediary.

Salit: So there are a new set of terms with a world that is becoming more independent of America.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: That’s a big change.

Newman: Cultural changes are so much bigger than other kinds of changes, but that’s not always easy to see.

Salit: As we listened to the discussion on Charlie Rose about Somalia and about the failed states in Africa, it reminded me of the many decades during which the whole international paradigm was organized by the superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Newman: That’s how the superpowers organized it.

Salit: There was so much destruction that occurred in the underdeveloped world as a result of that.

Newman: I don’t think that’s an altogether useful way of talking about it. I don’t think it ever was. The millions of people starving to death in central and southern Africa, living in squalor…do you think it was really a major part of their consciousness as to whether or not they were in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union or the United States?

Salit: No.

Newman: Do you think it made any difference in their lives?

Salit: No, not at all.

Newman: Those are political terms that the Western world has imposed. I don’t know how much value they had, even then, and I’m even less sure they have any value now. But, what you’re saying is accurate, given that language. But, at the level of human life, of psychology, of culture, of the things that make a difference in the daily lives of poor people and not-so-poor people the world over, it didn’t make a difference.

Salit: When you say cultural changes are so much bigger than other kinds of changes…

Newman: In terms of the impact on the daily lives of real human beings.

Salit: They’re harder to see? They’re harder to characterize? They’re harder to…what?

Newman: It’s not that they’re harder. It’s that these other categories, like “the conflict of superpowers” which I think are abstract and imposed, are easier to speak of. Because they’re made to be spoken of. They’re not made to be lived; they’re made to be spoken of. You come to use that language and think that it has a kind of august meaning. Actual life is not like that. It’s not fundamentally descriptive. It’s fundamentally lived. It’s fundamentally used. It’s kind of nice to see that changing.

Something else I was struck by today in looking at the coverage of the Latin American summit. It’s a cultural phenomenon, a minor cultural phenomenon, that I would call “the silliness of white people.”

Salit: Yes?

Newman: On PBS, we saw the experts, in some ways the most sensitive white people, reduced to giggles when reviewing all of what Obama did this week. It’s unbearable, really. They’re talking about how many things are on the table for Obama. Well, yes. There are many things that are on the table for Obama. There’s a reason for that. Because you’ve had eight years of George Bush, who was an indecent, outrageous, insensitive disaster. And all that’s got to be changed. But given the bureaucracy, you can’t just have an up or down vote on the ex-president and his administration. It would be nice if you could, and all those things would just go away. But you can’t do it that way. The white people giggle over all these things, “my God – so much to deal with – ha, ha.” And “Obama is the president, ha, ha.” It’s an embarrassment to be white sometimes, a cultural phenomenon of some interest.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: The Obama election was not silly. That’s the nicest thing about it. It was real. The experience on Election Day, when he won, was the country, for a brief moment, not being silly. This is serious business. We took it seriously and we went out and we voted in huge numbers for him. And now we have a smart, progressive, black president of the United States of America. Wow. And I think the rest of the world immediately started taking us more seriously. And that’s good. I don’t know if it will all work out. History is history, after all. It doesn’t follow a script.

Salit: Did you see the new Obama dog?

Newman: Yes, I have seen the new Obama dog. What kind of a dog is it?

Salit: A Portuguese water dog.

Newman: A Portuguese water dog.

Salit: Yes. Named Bo.

Newman: Named Bo.

Salit: Bo Obama.

Newman: And Bo’s writing an exposé for the Washington Post, I’ve heard.

Salit: Really?

Newman: That’s what I’ve heard. It’s the first “tell all” story coming out of the new White House. Bo is going to spill the beans on what it’s like to be the official dog.

Salit: We’ll have to follow that. Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, April 5, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” a Charlie Rose interview and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Salit: Let’s talk first about the economy. The news reports are showing a 660,000 job loss from last month. There’s some haranguing going on in response to these figures: The stimulus package isn’t working, we’re going down the wrong road! We thought the economy was getting better, but this shows it’s getting worse. Tell me your thoughts about the latest statistics and the way that these things are being discussed.

Newman: They seem to underscore that if there is to be any improvement, the first place it would show would be the first place the biggest investments were made – namely, in banking and finance.

Salit: Where the first emergency measures were taken.

Newman: Yes. And that sector would come back first, it seems to me.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I’m not an economist, so I’m just using their language and I don’t really trust them, but what the hell, I have no other way to communicate to you. Manufacturing jobs are not only going to come back last, they might not even all come back, because ours is no longer dominantly a manufacturing economy.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: The economy is being permanently transformed. When Obama says Change (with a capital “c”), no small part of what he anticipates is change of that kind.

Salit: The economy is going to change.

Newman: Yes. Now, people are losing jobs, and there has to be a sensitivity to that. Obama has to and, I think, will figure out plans to help this part of the workforce as he transforms the economy. He has that on his agenda. If you’re making the economy greener, if you’re bringing in universal health care, combined with technological transformations, there are going to be real changes in the nature of the economy. Of course, there are some, like Pat Buchanan, who want to return to a manufacturing-based economy. That’s how he won New Hampshire in 1992, after all.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But, that’s not going to happen. We are no longer a manufacturing-based economy. It’s not 1910, it’s 2010.

Salit: Obama’s move to force Rick Wagoner out as the head of GM has been controversial. Some people have praised Obama for doing it. They thought it was a hardball move, asserting a certain set of standards and representing the interests of the taxpayers in the negotiations with Detroit.

Newman: Those are the left-wingers.

Salit: OK. Some people were upset about it. John McCain called it an unprecedented and dangerous action. Never happened in the history of this country.

Newman: Those are the right-wingers.

Salit: OK. How do you pass judgment on the action that Obama took?

Newman: It’s consistent with what Obama’s doing. He’s a socialist and a pragmatist. But what he mainly is, is a pragmatist. So he’s going to transform – or try to transform – things in a moderate way. And, this is an example. What’s more, I’m sure this was worked out in advance. I don’t think Wagoner was taken by surprise. And I don’t think he’s going to have to sell any of his houses.

Salit: We listened to the conversation between David Brooks and Mark Shields, and Brooks had a cautionary tale relative to the Wagoner thing. He says that it’s the politicization of the industry, that when the government starts to pick winners and losers in the private sector, it’s a problem. This point has been made before, relative to Lehman Brothers being allowed to go down vs. the other investment banks. But Brooks introduced this notion of politicization.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: As he said, politicization without nationalization.

Newman: That’s what Obama stands for. That’s what he believes in.

Salit: Yes?

Newman: Look, you start that sentence, When the government starts picking winners and losers, but the full thought actually begins a half sentence before, as in When the private sector is picking only losers, then the government starts picking winners and losers. I don’t think that’s an unfair pragmatic arrangement.

Salit: And, what about the idea that Brooks suggested that once you get into that game, given the nature of the political process itself, you’re subject to making certain kinds of decisions about which company is going to be bailed out and which company isn’t, by virtue of pressure from the Democratic elected officials in a particular state, or the influence of Democratic Party donors from a particular part of the country. He didn’t say that Obama was making these decisions on that basis now, but one implication of his argument is that this makes Obama vulnerable because he’ll have to choose on the basis of political pressure.

Newman: But that’s missing the point, isn’t it?

Salit: How so?

Newman: Well, I think that’s what Obama believes in. It’s not that he’s more vulnerable. It’s a change that he’s looking to effect.

Salit: And the change that he’s looking to effect is…?

Newman: To have the government more politically involved.

Salit: OK. But that’s different than the government being more economically involved.

Newman: It’s not so different.

Salit: OK, maybe that’s where we’re heading in this conversation. It’s one thing if the government needs to be more economically involved. But, if you do that, it invariably opens the door to the government being more politically involved in its economic decisions.

Newman: Right, that’s what Obama supports.

Salit: I thought what Brooks was saying was that you might end up making choices based on political considerations rather than growth considerations, or something like that.

Newman: I know. But Obama wants to connect them.

Salit: OK.

Newman: It would be a problem if you weren’t looking to do that. But, you can’t call it a problem if that’s what you’re looking to do.

Salit: So, in his architecture, why is he looking to do that?

Newman: To be most generous to Obama – his populism gets expressed as the government acting more directly to give expression to the will of the people. So, if you’re being kindest to him, which I’m willing to be, he wants the people to have more of a voice, and this is his way of doing that.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Now, if you counter, But what happens if the Republicans regain power, well, Obama’s saying Don’t let ’em.

Salit: Right. But in Obama’s formula, it’s the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party superstructure and infrastructure that are the vehicles for expressing the will of the people.

Newman: Well, he’s counting on transforming the Democratic Party in to a more populist left-wing party.

Salit: Got you. So, he goes to Europe and he says to the European leaders, the era of U.S. dominance is over, we need to work together to solve the international economic crisis. He says, “America is changing, but it cannot be America alone that changes.” What’s your take on how that message is being received?

Newman: I don’t know. It depends so much on what is meant by change in different places.

Salit: And?

Newman: In a sense he’s saying to the Europeans, Look, America is being forced to be more socialistic. And, we’re doing so. We didn’t do it out of free will. But we’re doing it because we realize that the lack of a socialist element in our overall economic design put us in a disastrous position.

Salit: Right.

Newman: In some sense, it opened the door for greed.

Salit: For greed? Yes.

Newman: It’s harder to be greedy in Europe because they do have a socialist underpinning. It’s not as good a model for maximizing capitalist gains. It’s a bad model for that.

Salit: Or a limited model.

Newman: Yes. But now the U.S. has to change that because there’s been too much greed and that brought on a collapse.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, he’s saying, there has to be more of a balanced deal with Washington. And the deal I think he’s offering connects to a combined battle against terrorism.

Salit: How?

Newman: He’s saying there has to be more support for the U.S. playing the role of the primary military power. If we’re going to play that role, and if we have made concessions relative to the economic situation, Europe is going to have to play more of a role in following the U.S. on dealing with terrorism, because the U.S. can’t have the full burden of that mandate.

Salit: It’s not a bad deal. And it has big economic implications because America foots the bill for our military and that’s an expensive proposition.

Newman: I think Obama is saying Economically speaking, we’re moving to a position of being more closely aligned to the kind of things that you’ve been doing for a long time. And, we’re still the world’s biggest and most powerful military force. But we can’t carry that alone for a variety of reasons – economics being one of them.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: So, says Obama, we have to get a little bit more from you folks on that front. That’s the impasse, or the unresolved issue. It’s a compromise and I don’t know if the Europeans are ultimately going to want to do it.

Salit: One other question. We watched Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard Goodwin talking with Charlie Rose about presidents being great – about a president wanting to be a great president. At one point, Charlie said, ‘Can you be a great president without a war?’ What do you think about that? He’s obviously talking about Obama. Is Obama going to emerge as a great president? Can he do that, and can he do that without a war?

Newman: This might sound like a conservative position but, if you move the U.S. a little more towards socialism …

Salit: Yes…

Newman: …or maybe even a lot more towards socialism, and you do something significant about terrorism, and if you somehow find a way of, at least, neutralizing the Middle East situation, you can be a great president. I don’t know if you can be the greatest of presidents. You don’t need a revolutionary war or a civil war to be a great president. But, actually, when you are living through an era of nuclear weapons, as we are, you probably can’t be a great president with a war at all.

Salit: Thanks, Fred

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, March 22, 2009 after watching selections from “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” two Charlie Rose interviews and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Salit: We watched Barack Obama on Jay Leno. Obama is pretty reassuring.

Newman: He is.

Salit: For example, every time he asserted the need to approach the situation with the AIG bonuses as a structural problem, as a long-term problem, the audience reaction was very supportive of him. As he said, we want to get out of the mode of “lurching from thing to thing.”

Newman: True. Lurching from thing to thing can leave you in the lurch.

Salit: In discussing the bonuses and whether AIG broke the law, Obama observed that most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal and that we have to focus our attention on the kind of regulatory reform necessary to protect the interests of the American people. And, he commented that 40% of our recent economic growth has been in the financial sector and, as he put it, it turns out that that growth isn’t real. A lot of it was “on paper” and it evaporated. These are both devastating problems, but he was upbeat and confident. Were there things that struck you in Obama’s conversation with Leno?

Newman: Those same things. He’s very bright. He’s eminently sensible. And the issue – and the Republicans know this is the issue – is whether or not this approach will work. It’s not as if there’s an absolute history of this kind of stimulus approach to a troubled economy working. There’s a mixed history. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. It depends, in part, on the depth of the crisis and on the capacity of leadership to carry it out. That’s what’s still up in the air. There’s no way of knowing that. It’s like going to a doctor when you have a serious illness and the doctor says that the treatment he’s prescribing works 65% of the time.

Salit: You could be in the 65%. You could be in the 35%.

Newman: There you go. You don’t know. So, we’ll see.

Salit: Obama has a feel for the “bubble” and the need to stay outside of it, even while he knows that he’s got to work inside of it. He told that funny story about getting off the helicopter and wanting to walk the 750 yards to where they were going and how the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. But he understands that government, particularly government in Washington, and the whole media circus that surrounds it, is very much a bubble and you have to get outside of it and not let it predetermine or over-determine how you respond.

Newman: Yes. In a word, he’s trying to do his job.

Salit: Exactly.

Newman: That’s how he comes across. A regular guy trying to do the job that he got elected for.

Salit: We watched an interview that Charlie Rose did with Gwen Ifill about her book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” She talked about the changing nature of black politics, attributing the changes to generational shifts and to tactical shifts. She described how Obama began his political life as a community organizer and how his route to becoming a player, and ultimately becoming president, was not the traditional route. He didn’t go through the civil rights arc. He didn’t go through the traditional political machine, in Chicago or anywhere else. To use her term, “he created another way into the process.”

Newman: It was another time, too. I’m sure if he’d been around X years earlier, he would have been involved in the civil rights movement, or in other traditional political routes. If you’re progressive-minded and right-thinking, as he is, you get involved in what is at hand to be involved in.

Salit: And if those options have played themselves out, you create a new way. If you can. Ifill’s characterization of the changing conversation about race is that Americans, black and white, want to talk about race, but they want to talk about it in a way that is not blaming and not about grievance. She also points to people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who see their role more as agitators. They’re not necessarily looking to move the conversation beyond grievances because those grievances are still there, they’re still legitimate, and you have to keep agitating. So they see themselves in a different mold, playing a different role. What are some of the things that you think about when you hear these discussions about the conversation on race changing?

Newman: It makes sense. I think it’s a little bit parochial, in this way: having non-blaming conversations is something that the entire civilization has yet to learn about everything, not just about race. That’s a huge undertaking. Our movement is playing some kind of role in engaging that, but it’s a long-term business. I doubt any of us will live long enough to see a new bible written without blaming. Basically what Ifill said is sound. I don’t think it’s very insightful, but I think it’s sound.

Salit: In more political terms, what do you think about her commentary on those black leaders who still see racial politics in terms of grievance?

Newman: As she said, there is plenty of room for an Al Sharpton or a Jesse Jackson. They play an important role, but there are new and more varied options for black political expression. There’s room for playing it lots of different ways.

Salit: Including the numbers of African Americans who are now political independents.

Newman: Yes. That in itself is a sign of a generational development and growth.

Salit: Next we watched an interview about science, really more about the teaching of science, with Shirley Tilghman, the president of Princeton. She was focused on the ways in which, to use her terms, “science has been denied” to influence public policy in certain kinds of ways. Then she and Charlie Rose got into a discussion about Darwin and Darwinism, about Darwin’s influence 150 years down the road. Darwin was right, Tilghman says, and ‘with very little evidence, what an extraordinary insight.’ Darwin opened the door on a whole new paradigm of understanding species development, including human evolution.

Newman: That’s true of early modern science, in general. Early modern science had shockingly little evidence of the kind that is now available and made some brilliant guesses on how the universe works. Some were wrong. But what’s remarkable is not how many were wrong. What’s remarkable is how many were right.

Salit: It’s so interesting. The common understanding about scientific breakthroughs is that a body of evidence is accumulated and then new conclusions or new paradigms are introduced off of all this evidence.

Newman: That’s exactly what didn’t happen. Almost exactly what didn’t happen. No. The key element – and I’ve written about this and talked about this extensively – was not that there was so much new evidence, but that there was mathematicalization. That was the key to modern science. Most of the breakthroughs are based on that.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: It’s easier to teach that discovery is based on evidence. It’s like teaching people that the sodium atom is looking for a beautiful chlorine atom. Chlorine is over here looking for a guy to go out with on Friday night. They get together and suddenly we have salt. That’s an easy story to tell. That’s fine. Stories are a part of it, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for a relatively accurate understanding of what took place. Actually, in pre-modern science, so called Baconian science, the model was essentially a very strict deterministic empiricism. Find this evidence and, boom, next thing you know you have a discovery. That’s not how it works at all. Never worked that way, even in Baconian science. The role of insight in all of this is critical to understand. And the major tool for insight itself was the mathematicalization of science.

Salit: I know you have talked about this for quite a long time and written about it. For Talk/Talk readers, is there a short way to characterize what the mathematicalization of science is?

Newman: The application of mathematical models for explaining physical phenomena. The capacity for and the interest in looking at things that are happening by way of saying, well, here are a set of mathematical formulas which bear a critical relationship to those things. And then using that seeming relationship to create further tests, modest as they might be, and discovering that those tests turn out positive for a new framework, a new paradigm. You know, I’ve read a number of books over the last 10 years about the role of clocks and the mathematical applications of understanding how clocks work as they apply to the universe. In one sense, in retrospect, this is not surprising. But to have seen that, to have recognized that, is extraordinary. Yes, in some ways, pre-modern science had a simple notion that the universe is like a clock. Well, the universe is like a clock, but it’s also not like a clock. And other mathematical models were necessary for understanding its other features, even in the earliest days of modern science.

In some ways, all the argumentation that I offer around Gödel’s* work is about that. And there’s a way in which part of my critique of the anti-postmodernist Alan Sokal** is that he understands this, but he wants to say there are certain mathematical discoveries which don’t have the same applicability as earlier mathematical discoveries. I don’t agree with that. I think there’s an unfolding series of mathematical discoveries which should be continuously attended to, to determine whether they give us insights into new models of both physical and social reality. In a sense, at a sophisticated level, that’s what Sokal’s and my debate comes down to. I don’t think it’s a question of the fundamentality of mathematicalization and I don’t think he’s a great scientist. But he’s at least competent enough to appreciate that.

Salit: What is science struggling with today? I mean that at a methodological level.

Newman: When you say methodological, do you mean philosophical?

Salit: Yes. Philosophical.

Newman: There’s a one word answer to that, in my opinion. Cosmology.

Salit: Science is struggling with cosmology?

Newman: Yes, meaning it’s continuing to struggle with achieving greater clarity in the area of cosmology. That’s the highest level theoretical work, where philosophy is most applicable. A great deal of science, like a great deal of everything else, turns naturally into engineering. A great deal of science is applied engineering. That’s good. But, the most creative new areas of thought, in my view, are in the area of cosmology. Some people would argue that it’s more in genetics. That’s certainly a reasonable contender, microgenetics. I don’t know much about the area. My knowledge of genetics is roughly Gregor Mendel.***

Salit: Mine, too.

Newman: But the truly esoteric, cutting edge stuff, in my opinion – and I might just not know what’s going on in every field – is in cosmology.

Salit: And what are the questions that those scientists are asking?

Newman: The questions that we asked as children, basically. How did the universe begin? How did it all get started? How do you go from nothing to something?

Salit: From non-existence to existence.

Newman: Yes. There are a lot of theories, the Big Bang and so forth. And they’re highly reputable, and there is a lot of work that’s been done in those areas. But I think there are still a lot of underlying philosophical, methodological questions about cosmology. I don’t think they’re unanswerable. I don’t have any desire, or need, to turn to religion to answer those questions because I think there are discoveries to be made, both in the mathematical arena and in the empirical arena.

We talked the other day about fusion power. The whole concept of what fusion power is, and perhaps we’re only halfway there technologically, is still being clarified. There’s still a question of whether you can make it work. Again, I’m the furthest thing from an expert on fusion power. But, an amazing feature of the experimentation on this alternative energy source, is that it appears to require humongous tunnels to create the experiment, to create the action that produces the fusion. So for starters, I don’t know if you can solve the problem of where the hell the tunnels are going to be built, never mind harnessing the results of the experiments. Those are very, very complex problems. Is that amount of space required for it? If so, it might just be beyond the level of practicability. What I’m raising is silly in comparison to the level of sophistication of their actual questions. But it’s still very real stuff. There are processes out there of which we, meaning our species, have not even an inkling. That’s part of why cosmological work is so important.

So, if I had to do it all over again and I were to become a scientist, I’d definitely become a cosmologist. That’s what would most interest me, as someone who is philosophically inclined. I like the study and the analysis of big things, as opposed to the analysis of little, tiny things, like genetic things. I don’t know why. I think they’re both terribly important. And we’re seeing results from both. I couldn’t agree more with those who advocate for more money being invested in scientific research. We should spend every penny that’s available. At the same time, we need to spend money on other research, which is more directly applicable to human health and development. So, we need a lot more money…but good money, healthy money, as opposed to the unhealthy money that we’ve spent over the last batch of years.

Salit: Maybe we need discovery bonuses.

Newman: Discovery bonuses. Yes.

Salit: To incentivize scientific discovery.

Newman: Of course, one problem is that the same corrupt investors would apply for these bonuses because they’re always looking for new ways to defraud the public at a level unknown to humankind. I don’t know if you want to call that a discovery bonus.

Salit: Good point. I know this is a big question, but how does the development of postmodernism fit into, or connect to, the further development of science?

Newman: The question is not how it fits in. It’s a question of does it fit in. That remains to be discovered. These things don’t just fit in. So it’s a question of what evolves from the postmodernists, in terms of positive, creative developments of dealing with these questions. There’s nothing fixed about postmodernism. It’s far less fixed than science is. I think that as we’ve looked at this, we’ve been very concerned to use postmodernism to further our creative capacity to discover things, not just for the sake of postmodernism, but for the sake of the world. There’s nothing particularly significant about discovering abstractions for the sake of abstractions. The same thing is true of science.

So, postmodernism has to prove itself. It’s not just one single idea. And nothing’s going to happen off of it, except what it is that we make happen off of it. But to rule it out, in the manner in which some people like Sokal have tried, is, amongst other things, unscientific and not particularly helpful. If you want to write a critique of every postmodernist article that’s ever been written, good, feel free. If it’s a good critique, we should respect it. If it’s a bad critique, we shouldn’t. If it’s halfway good, then it should get mixed reviews. But ruling out a whole modality of thought which, I think, has direct roots – it must – in the history of everything that has come before, including the history of science, is too McCarthy-esque for my taste. And we know something about this, first hand. Our overall work in this field, after all, which is very tiny – it’s so tiny, it’s almost insignificant, but nonetheless, real – has been systematically looked upon with nothing but prejudice. And that’s not good. That shouldn’t happen. If it’s all wrong, show it to be all wrong. It shouldn’t be so hard. But if it’s not, it should be, in some manner, shape, or form, attended to. It has in some small ways. But there’s obviously a bias against it. And, in my opinion, that’s not good for the further advancement of the world.

Salit: Yes, Fred. Thank you.

* Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was the Austrian-born mathematician, logician, and philosopher who obtained what may be the most important mathematical result of the 20th century: his famous incompleteness theorem, which states that within any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system; thus, such a system cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent.

** Alan Sokal (born 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University who works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996.

*** Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Augustinian priest and scientist who is often called the father of genetics.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Every weekend CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, March 8, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and a Charlie Rose interview.

Salit: The story of the week was about Rush Limbaugh.

Newman: It’s kind of funny.

Salit: Do you think it’s a sideshow that is kind of entertaining? Or, even if it is entertaining, is it about an ideological divide in the country that continues even with Obama having won?

Newman: The divide is not in the country any longer. That’s not the main issue. It’s a divide in the Republican Party. It’s all about the fight for the future of the Republican Party.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That’s who Limbaugh is laying down the gauntlet to. Limbaugh’s message is We got creamed. And I’m saying we got creamed because we wouldn’t go all the way with conservatism. And we can’t take them on – the Democrats, the liberals, whomever – unless we are willing to go much further with that. And he might be right. I’m not supporting that. I’m not a Republican. But, he might be right.

Salit: He might be right that you can’t compete with the Democrats by trying to play at the middle?

Newman: Yes. Limbaugh’s advice is Don’t go back to New England-style moderate Republicanism. That’s exactly the wrong direction. We have to go the other way. Who was it who said today – and they’re right – that Limbaugh doesn’t represent the Republican Party?

Salit: Larry O’Donnell said it on Hardball.

Newman: Right. Limbaugh represents conservatism. And a conservative regime, which lasted eight years, did disastrous things to the country. Limbaugh’s point is that conservatives have to go even more firmly to the right, and likewise for the Republicans, to be major players. Going to the center is futile, in his view. I think that’s what he’s doing and that’s a fun fight to watch.

Salit: I liked when he called himself a “fuzzball.”

Newman: Yeah, I’ll bet. It’s nice to see Lawrence O’Donnell and Pat Buchanan together again.

Salit: Yes, they used to be the big stars on The McLaughlin Group, but they’re never on together anymore. Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University was a guest on Charlie Rose.

Newman: I liked when he remarked, ‘Whatever you say about Kissinger, you wouldn’t say that he’s a fool.’

Salit: Exactly. And Charlie Rose seemed surprised that Khalidi would agree with anything Henry Kissinger had to say because Khalidi’s a radical.

Newman: And Khalidi said, ‘Who said I’m a radical?’

Salit: Well, he’s got something of a reputation.

Newman: As a radical?

Salit: Yes, and as an Arab nationalist.

Newman: OK.

Salit: Khalidi is trying to offer a roadmap to normalizing U.S. relations with Iran. He argues that there are certain patterns that the U.S. established during the Cold War that over-determine our contemporary foreign policy; that, in some ways, Iran has supplanted the Soviet Union as the strategic enemy of the United States that has to be contained, defeated, overthrown, whatever. And he talks about missed opportunities to develop a new architecture for our relationships in that part of the world. In his view, much of the potential for success in the Obama administration, in terms of its foreign policy, turns on its ability to examine the failures of the last three administrations, basically the post-Cold War presidencies: Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43. Examining those failures is part of figuring out how to move beyond them.

Newman: It’s an insight but I think it’s a little bit of a platitude. That goes without saying. What else should they be looking at?

Salit: Maybe implicit in the question is he’s not sure that they will?

Newman: I think what’s implicit in the question, more importantly, is that many of our foreign policy approaches, strategically speaking, have not been very good.

Salit: Relative to the Middle East, Khalidi argues that the American obsession with defeating Communism, with defeating the Soviet Union, led us to pursue certain policies in the Middle East that were dangerous and for which we have paid a terrible price. He gives the example of Iran and the U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, on the grounds that it was too influenced by the Soviets and our drive was to contain Communism. But, he says, that was ridiculous because Communism wasn’t going to take root there. So, his starting point is that, because we were playing the superpower game and playing it stupidly, we undercut our own national interests in the region.

Newman: The assessments made about Iraq prior to the war, which were profoundly mistaken, were not the first set of mistaken assessments by Washington about the rest of the world. Our “reads” have not always been bad, but they’ve often been problematic. And so we’ve gotten locked into positions that are hard to get out of. U.S. policy in the Middle East is a hodge-podge. We support Israel. We are allied with the oil-producing Arab nations. It’s hard to piece together all of the interests into a coherent and positive policy in the world, in general, but particularly in the Middle East. It has left the U.S. in a weak position. If that’s essentially what Khalidi is getting at, and I think it is, I definitely agree with it.

Salit: He thinks there is an opportunity to strike or to develop what he calls a “Grand Bargain” in the region, centered on Iran. To get there, however, you have to talk to the Iranians and you have to, for example, explore with them why it is that they want nuclear weapons in the first place. His argument is that they feel threatened. America has military bases in every country that borders Iran. The U.S. has a $1 billion covert program to destabilize them. But, if you dial back the hysteria and the propaganda around Iran and you actually engage in Kissinger-style politics – as he said, ‘Kissinger might be a lot of things, but he’s not a fool’ – which is to identify the interests and needs of the different players and figure out how you meet them, then we can get somewhere on this.

Newman: I would add that to do that you have to, first of all, establish who’s doing it, who’s striking the bargain. There are enormously complex interests in the picture, each of which is pursuing influence with Congress and with the White House for their own thing, whether it be Arab oil or Israeli security or whatever it might be. But, you have to be able to find a way of establishing a U.S. policy, in the interest of our country as opposed to simply accommodating high-powered interests. Because of the way U.S. policy is constructed, because of how policy is formulated domestically, the U.S. doesn’t often have a coherent foreign policy. Instead, we respond to a range of influences and try to satisfy so many people that it’s hard to put it together and come out with a coherent policy.

Salit: So, do you have to get rid of the practice of responding to interest groups in order to come up with a policy, or do you come up with a policy and then you fight the fights that you have to in order to implement it?

Newman: You can’t get rid of that practice. That’s what American politics is. But to change situations for the better in many areas of the world, there has to be, in my opinion, a clearly stated U.S. policy.

Salit: We watched James Baker and Lee Hamilton interviewed by Jim Lehrer. They’ve jointly put together an alternative to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, initially adopted by Congress over the objections of then president Richard Nixon. Baker feels that the 1973 Resolution is unconstitutional, although its constitutionality has never been tested. The Baker/Hamilton alternative requires a higher level of consultation between the president and Congress and gives Congress somewhat more power over the president, with respect to going to war. Basically their argument is that the 1973 War Powers Resolution hasn’t worked, a reference to the fact that we’ve gotten into wars that ended up being unpopular.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: Do you think there’s a little bit more of a temperament or an inclination, both in Congress and, more importantly in the country as a whole, for dialing back the president’s capacity to rush into military conflict?

Newman: What Baker and Hamilton are saying is that with Obama as president, there may be an openness to protecting the country from falling into actions, including military actions, which don’t represent the best interests of the U.S. I think they see in Obama – and I think they’re correct – that Obama might be better able to stand up to some of these lobbying interests (not all of them, but some of them) and shape a pragmatic, but nonetheless coherent, U.S. policy in various parts of the world. Is that true? I don’t know. I think there is some indication of that. Whether he is really able to do that will come out in the detail and practice of his presidency. Not only don’t we know whether new approaches are going to work, we don’t even know if they’re going to be carried out. But it could be an opportunity for big changes, both domestically and in foreign policy. We always have to remember that the inertial pull in all these things is towards conservatism, not towards big changes. We’ll see. Will there be universal health coverage for all Americans? A decent quality health plan instead of our having one of the worst-for-the-price medical systems in the world? We’ll see. That will get determined in the practice, in the carrying out. Are we able to reposition ourselves in the Middle East? We’ll see what Hillary can do. We’ll see what Hamilton can do. I think there are some intelligent people out there and Obama is relating to them in a way which starts to make maximal use of their intelligence.

Salit: Why are you so cautious?

Newman: You’re always a little wary, at least I am. I’m always a little wary of gradualistic approaches to major paradigm changes. On the one hand, these things can’t, and I don’t even think they should, happen overnight. On the other hand, I think they should happen. And, in my view, revolution is the engine of social development. In some sense, it all comes down to this question, if you follow the logic of this. Can there be a restructuring of revolutionary change? Is there a way to have a revolution which is not as destabilizing and potentially dangerous as the way it’s been done in the past? Obama is trying, I think, to construct that. If he’s about anything, I think that’s what he’s about. I think he believes in it. I’m more cynical than he is. I’m certainly open to seeing another way you can deal with bringing in new societal paradigms. At the same time, I remain both a Marxist and a revolutionary. I’m not ready to convert to being an Obama-ite Democrat. Not at all. But I’m certainly open to whatever positive development can come from what he’s doing. Yes, if he can bring about something resembling universal health care at a reasonable standard of quality in this country, I’ll applaud him. I think it’s a big step in the right direction. I don’t think it’s socialism, but it would be nice if it were at least on par with Western European democracies. Can that be done? I don’t know. Many, many people I’ve talked to, bright people, don’t think so because they think that our not having that is part and parcel of what has been America’s edge economically. But then we’re having to re-examine the question of what America’s core strength is economically. We have to keep our eyes open in the next few years.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.