Bultmann and Blair

In the lastest LRB, there is a collection of snippets from the magazine’s coverage of Margaret Thatcher (“the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud”), including this aperçu from Tony Blair:

What makes things even worse for radical, progressive spirits is that the ultra-right appears to be even more in control of the Conservative Party this year than it has been previously. Mrs Thatcher clearly regards herself as a dea ex machina, sent down from on high to ‘knock Britain into shape.’ She will wield her power over the next few years dictatorially and without compunction. On the other hand, there is a tremendous danger–to which Dr Owen has succumbed–in believing that ‘Thatcherism’ is somehow now invincible, that it has established a new consensus and that all the rest of us can do is debate alternatives within its framework. It is essential to demythologize ‘Thatcherism.’

In retrospect, it’s clear that Blair didn’t go far enough — he needed to overcome the inherent limitations in Bultmann’s project of demythologization and embrace a Bonhoefferian religionless interpretation of “Thatcherism.”

Boston Hunger Games: Guest Post from Rebekah Sinclair

This post is by Rebekah Sinclair and it was originally posted at her website.

A Hunger-Games-like enthusiasm best characterizes the coverage of last week’s “man hunt” after the Boston bombing. Okay, so they aren’t really the Hunger Games, and perhaps that comparison may even seem too soon and too cruel, but the similarities ought not be lost on us.

Unlike the people of Boston, who immediately chose to emulate the best in humanity—to decry violence and serve one another—the rest of America has not followed their example. Emulating instead the violence at the epicenter of the explosions—the will to do harm and failure to see life through the eyes of and with compassion for its victims—we have turned a tragic and unfortunate chase into a disturbing man hunt. We have uniquely combined the seductive retribution of Bin-Laden-chasing with the nail-biting and immanent excitement of last minute plays at a tied Super Bowl.

My radical pedagogical program

First, you need to read good books. To get the most out of those books, you need to talk about them with other people who are also trying to work their way through them. In addition, you need to write about them in a disciplined and focused way. Both of these tasks require supervision and guidance by more experienced learners — preferably those who have already gone through an educational program that takes both discussion and written analysis to the highest level.

Second, for some types of skills — such as language acquisition, mathematical manipulation, and technical lab skills — there’s no way around requiring carefully targetted and supervised exercises. Preferably, these exercises would be developed and overseen by someone with a high degree of technical proficiency and experience in the field in question, as such a person would have the best view of which skills were most valuable.

Finally, for command of facts, limited use of rote memorization can provide a baseline, but the main focus should be on learning how best to search for information and assess the trustworthiness of the sources found. All of this is best done in close dialogue with someone who has a lot of experience with research.

I believe that the pedagogical research would bear all this out, and my own experience at an institution that embraces this model shows me that it works.

Starting from these premises, certain natural consequences inevitably present themselves.

Neoliberalism and Real Socialism

It’s often said that socialism is the arduous path from capitalism back to capitalism, but Blood and Treasure suggests that neoliberalism is the arduous path toward Eastern bloc-style “real socialism.” His focus is on “urban renewal” projects in London, but one can make a similar case for the mantras of deficit-cutting and “education reform” in the U.S.

Eastern bloc socialism had to keep going through the 1970s and 80s, inspite of lagging growth and failed ideological hegemony, because nobody knew what else to do. This is the stage neoliberal policy-making has now reached. The difference is that there is still one area of our economy that is still moving and changing, namely the money economy, with corporate profits high and financial innovation ongoing. What seems to have changed, post-2008, is that the price paid for this monetary dynamism is that the rest of us all have to stand completely still. In order that ‘they’ in the banks can cling on to their modernity of liquidity and ultra-fast turnover, ‘we’ outside have to relinquish our modernity, of a future that is any different from the present. Finance is to our sorry stagnanat societies what the space race and the Cold War were to the Eastern Bloc countries of the 1970s and 80s, the cost that we are offered no choice but to carry collectively, with the result that our cities and economies start to become tedious processions of the same.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

James KA Smith On Being Beyond Left and Right

So James KA Smith has often been a proponent of Radical Orthodox Christian political theology being “beyond left and right”, you know like Benedict XVI was. In recent days on his twitter feed he has come out against gay marriage. That is not surprising, though he’s of course couching it as a question of who gets to define marriage and doing so in an utterly idealist manner (so the state doesn’t get to in his view, but no discussion of how the state supports marriage and how that plays out in terms of equality). But he has also come out in support of the state of emergency provisions imposed by Michigan Governor Synder (R, of course) upon the City of Detroit. Suspending its democratically elected city government and installing an unelected “business manager” (we all know what this means…). He will bristle and sneer at this being called fascist, but this is exactly fascism. The state and capitalism coming together under a state of emergency. And the Christian witness to that fascism is a sneer at critical voices and an expression that the installed, unaccountable leader be a “catalyst for indigenous change”.

So, once again we see that beyond left and right always means right-wing policies plus a few token remarks about community and poverty. Or, like I said with Benedict, Bonoism but no gays.

Weaponized debate and the limits of proceduralism

Sometimes I suspect that the fillibuster was invented specifically in order to support Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal proceduralism. First, the fact that the pretense of debate would be “weaponized” and turned essentially into a brute-force power play represents the ultimate bankruptcy of the fiction of parliamentary politics as a realm of reasoned deliberation. Second, it is a textbook example of an attempt to create rules to govern exceptional situations — in this case, the determination of a minority to obstruct the normal course of legislation. As with all such attempts, it was only a matter of time before someone discovered a way to benefit politically from insisting on the letter of the law (demanding cloture votes on everything) rather than its spirit (reserving fillibusters for things that are a “really big deal,” whatever that’s supposed to mean).

In my opinion, there should be no rules governing the exceptional situation of a minority determined to refuse the outcome of the regular voting process. A minority in that situation, instead of hiding behind some kind of parliamentary technicality, should simply violate the rules — for example, they could refuse to cede the podium, or use non-violent resistence to physically impede the process of voting, or barricade themselves in the legislative chamber. As with all civil disobedience, they should be willing to take the punishment as well.

In such a situation, there would be a genuine political conflict for the moral high ground. As it stands, no clear conflict can emerge. According to the rules, what the Republicans are doing is perfectly “fair” insofar as they are entitled to demand as many cloture votes as they want. Whether it’s unprecedented or abusive or whatever doesn’t matter — the rules are the rules. If you don’t want the legislative process to be constantly short-circuited, then you shouldn’t have a rule that explicitly allows that to happen. If people feel strongly enough about an issue that they’re willing to put themselves on the line by breaking the rules, then they should go ahead and break the rules and see how it plays out.

(This is not an idea I just thought of — I published a letter to the editor in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2006 advocating that Senate Democrats (then including Obama) physically shut down the Senate if a fillibuster against the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court did not hold.)

Obama’s submerged sovereignty

In all the discussion of the debt ceiling, I think a really simple point is often lost — namely, that if the debt ceiling is not high enough to account for the debt required to spend all the money Congress has legally obligated the executive branch to spend, there is a contradiction in the law. What the president is doing when he requests an increase (or, in a different way, what the Treasury secretary is doing when he takes “extraordinary measures” to put off exceeding the debt ceiling) is politely asking Congress to resolve the contradiction in a face-saving way. If Congress doesn’t do that, then we are in a self-induced state of exception where the law does not provide guidance — and we all know who makes the decision about how to handle the state of exception!

A potential New Year’s resolution

I’ll confess: I was following the “fiscal cliff” story. One of my Twitter followers worried that it was going to drive me nearly mad, like the debt ceiling drama of 2011, but it was a different sort of thing — in this case, I was anticipating a kind of perverse glee if they did wind up going “over the cliff.” Now it appears that they are reaching a last-minute deal that involves setting up the conditions for a couple more last-minute deals (over spending cuts, the debt ceiling, and a potential government shutdown).

What information have I gained from following this story as it developed, rather than simply waiting until they reached a final agreement and noting what was in it? I’m going to venture to say that the time involved has been essentially a total loss.

My crackpot theory about Petraeus

I have been following Gen. Petraeus’s career with concern and dismay ever since he became the most recognizable face of the U.S. military late in the Bush administration. His role in the “surge,” his supposedly amazing doctrine of “counterinsurgency,” his appearance on the Daily Show (where Jon Stewart was absolutely fawning) — all this resulted in presidential speculation among our media elites. For reasons of general anti-militarism, I did not find the prospect of a President Petraeus appealling, especially when he appeared to be inappropriately opposing Obama’s foreign policy early in the term.

Thus I was relieved when Obama appointed him to head the CIA — i.e., pushing him out of the military and into a role where a public profile was obviously inappropriate, tainting him in the eyes of maniacal Republican primary voters, and basically making a 2012 presidential run impossible. My assumption is that the plan was to keep him around until they could find some bullshit reason to get rid of him altogether, and lo and behold, mere days after the election we find out that Petraeus has committed a heinous crime almost unheard-of among powerful men: marital infidelity! Surely he must resign in disgrace!

What do you think, dear readers? Am I reading too much 11-dimensional chess into this series of events? Does it smack of the “Chicago-style politics” that — in our heart of hearts — we can only wish Obama were actually capable of?

Ever-expanding health care costs

We’ve all heard it before. A Republican says that Social Security and Medicare are going to bankrupt us, and then a clever liberal says, “Aaaaaaaaaaaactually, Social Security will be fine with minor adjustments — the real driver of deficits is exploding health care costs!” Whenever I hear a cliche explanation like this, I tend to assume it must be bullshit to some extent — and lo and behold!

Now of course there’s the question of why I would give credence to the Federal Reserve study summarized in the link post over the absolute lock-step consensus of liberal commentators that the deficit is of course very important and we of course need to get health care costs under control. I think the problem as I see it is that this “nuanced” approach basically accepts the Republican premise — namely, that we should be building government policy primarily around artificial accounting artifacts such as “the deficit” rather than actual human need — and shifts the terrain toward comfortable liberal positions. The need to get health care costs under control is, indeed, a position that both neoliberals and paleoliberals can enjoy: the neoliberals get to tinker with their wonky models for “nudging” market incentives, and the paleoliberals get to impotently point out that single-payer is obviously the best way to control costs.

What fun! We get to be smart and nuanced and really engage with smart conservatives, and fantasize about our favorite policy solutions! No wonder no one bothered to question the math!