Our Own Vines and Our Own Fig Trees: a Post-Independence Day, Post-Hamilton-Watching Sermon

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Like plenty of other Americans (and, given likely demographics, probably in particular like plenty of readers of this blog), my family and I watched the musical Hamilton over the July 4th weekend. Our second-oldest daughter, who was home to join us yesterday, had actually seen the show in 2016 on Broadway; for the rest of us, as familiar as we were with the music, watching the show was a new experience--and it was a lovely one, a wonderfully funny and dramatic, visually and aurally compelling, and historically challenging (in more ways than one), piece of filmed theater. It was three hours very well spent.

Most of all for me, I enjoyed spending time in the virtual company of Chris Jackson's stylized portrayal of George Washington. All the musical's theatrical depictions are hyper-stylized, of course (it's fundamentally a work of fan fiction, after all), but there was, in my view, an astonishingly deep and consistent core to what Lin-Manuel Miranda put into the figure of Washington, brought to beautiful life by Jackson's presence and baritone voice. That core connects with something mythic, something, frankly, scriptural. Appropriately so, since Washington's central song in the musical, "One Last Time," in which Washington instructs by example the unfortunately mostly unteachable Alexander Hamilton the decency and wisdom of knowing when to walk away from power and the contests over power it always involves, is the only line in the whole libretto which quotes the Bible--Micah 4:3-4, specifically. It reads (from the NRSV):

He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

This is a messianic passage, and generally speaking, folks in contemporary democratic (or at least democracy-aspiring) states don't like associating politics, and especially not specific political figures, with messiahs. And yet we do, constantly, all the time. After watching the music, my only comment on social media was to quote the devastatingly dark and funny (and, I think, fundamentally true) line given to the hilariously arch King George III, in the song "I Know Him," immediately following Jackson's rendition of the above song, when he learns that Washington was retiring from the presidency and John Adams had been elected to take his place: "Oceans rise / Empires fall / Next to Washington, they all look small." In response to which, a commenter linked to this command performance of the song:



Many of the mostly self-identifying liberal readers of this blog will likely find themselves touched by this moment, especially in light of the Trump years which have followed it. Yet at the same time, many of those same readers--to say nothing of those few of my fellow leftists out there--are likely to find themselves, as I see it anyway, in a bit of a contradiction. Isn't this kind of sympathetic idealization, which is really a kind of idolization, basically kind of wrong? Don't we want to avoid getting all romantic about those who stand before us in leadership positions? Aren't we obliged to respond to any kind of hero-worship, however wistfully expressed, with thorough-going critique, if not outright rejection? Shouldn't we be, as one of my By Common Consent co-bloggers recently suggested, iconoclasts, tearing down images which presume to situate some felt ideal in the body of some invariably flawed (and, unfortunately often in our history of public statuary, affirmatively racist and criminal) person?

If you don't see or feel this contradiction, more power to you; it may only manifest itself to people like myself who flirt with dangerous philosophical ideas. And I'm not being ironically self-deprecating when I call them "dangerous"--there is a lot of history which proves the danger of reading passages like Micah's above and believing, as I do, that's it's not just poetically describing a hopeful vision of peaceful rest, but is also communicating the holiness, the sacramentality, of being in a place of peaceableness and rest. Start thinking that way, and soon you're thinking: "where can I find such a place?" Or, "how can I make such a place?" And then, eventually, worryingly, "who can make such a place for me?" Could have President Obama? Despite his self-association with the old activist phrase "we are the ones we've been waiting for," he hardly governed in a manner which rigorously avoided any attempt to embody certain ideas for and on behalf of the American people. Nor has President Trump, for that matter. I mean, he did promise to "Make American Great Again," right?

The perversity of linking the actions of President Trump--who has basically never made any serious effort to pretend that his administration reflects or represents or embodies any kind of general civic ideal--with this idealization simply shows up the problem, I think. The very fact that so many will criticize Trump for being unpresidential underscores that most of us think, most of us want, presidents of the United States to be presidential, even if our critical sensibilities tell us otherwise. (The same goes, though obviously to much different and often much lesser degrees, for pretty much all leaders of all communities, I suspect.) Some part of us wants them to embody something! And while many might articulate it differently, I suspect that that wished-for embodiment might best be described as a identification with a longed-for place, or way of being in a place--in the case of the president of the United States, an "Americanism," if you will. A sense that, in other words, this person is making for us, showing us, the way it is supposed to be here. Here, under our own vines, under our own fig trees: it should be like this. Which means, I think, that while the substantive content is radically dissimilar, the phenomenology of putting on a MAGA hat may not be all that different from watching Hamilton and mourning that moment of classiness back in 2016. Especially when we think about it in connection with, and through a stylized and powerfully sung representation of, Washington at the moment of his Farewell Address, with such a thoroughly problematic yet aspirational phrase as "I want to warn against partisan fighting"! (It shouldn't have surprised me to learn from my daughter that there was a gospel remix of this song with Obama speaking lines from the address.)

I write all this not to critique this, but to sermonize on behalf of it. I like, and more importantly actually believe in, this part of politics (which means, this part of living in society with other people, no matter what the organization of that society may be). I like and believe in this admittedly dangerous sentiment; it has always--at least for as long as I can remember thinking about any of these matters--appealed to and made intuitive sense to me. I think it is not only a very human thing, but also, at least always potentially, a very good thing. I was up early this morning with a headache; it was still dark out, and the lines of "One Last Time," and particularly Jackson's gorgeous and plaintive singing of them, kept ringing through my head. And I found myself reflecting upon all the ways in which I've felt myself spiritually pulled towards feeling some real truth in, and thus wanting to defend, this conceptualization of our life as embodied, historical, dialogic, relational beings over the decades. Traditions, holidays, civil religion, public expressions of faith, presidential rituals, civic associations--they've all been part of this decades-old argument I've been having with myself (and others) over what it means to intentionally (and thus more often than not romantically) make, and then consequently to be in and belong to, a place. These vines, these fig trees, and being able to find in them, or having them revealed to us or invoked for us as, a peaceable place that is our own. My thinking about those places have changed over the years. I was much more willing to think nationally about places in the past, whereas now I think much more about local places, and the peace of the home and the neighborhood they can bring. That's a holy thing, I believe.

It is also, unfortunately, always potentially an exclusionary thing as well. Our vines--go away, they're not yours, they don't belong to you! That's a dangerous sentiment, or at least as a Christian and a man of the left I can't help but feel that way. The holiest--and thus, if you'd prefer I use the secular terms I consider to be equivalent, the most empowering and equalizing and democratic--approach to this messianic passage of scripture, the truth within it that calls to us, I think, no matter what the scale of the communities we live within or the character of the leadership which exists within them, is this one:



When Miranda put into Washington's mouth the lyric expressing a retiring president's wish to be "at home in this nation we’ve made," think, I would suggest, not of nation-states, but of the original meaning of "nation": natio, or as we might say today, a "peoplehood." It is both reasonable and even moral, I think, to long for, to look for the embodiment and instantiation of (and, yes, to memorialize through song and statuary, with the understanding that statues can come down and, just as Hamilton did, songs can be resung), one's people and place, one's vine and fig tree, one's home. But that longing has to co-exist with the imperative to enable all of God's children to have their people and place, their vine and fig tree, their home. Maybe their and our homes will turn out to be--will constructed to be, will be sung by someone like Christopher Jackson so as to be revealed to be--one and the same. As the hippies used to say, maybe all us critters have a place in God's choir--or in the Hamilton ensemble, for that matter. I won't presume to think that I could take Washington's place under his vine and fig tree. But maybe he can make space for me, and vice versa, all the same.

We Were Eight Years in Power, and Other Thoughts from Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi was on NPR this morning, talking about his latest Atlantic essay, "The First White President," as well as his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, and President Trump, and many other sundry things. It was a good interview--but the book, the epilogue for which is a version of the just published Atlantic essay, was even better. It's the best thing I've ever read from Coates, in fact, despite the fact that the bulk of the book is a collection of eight major essays by Coates written during the eight years of Obama's presidency.

What makes the book so good is not just the mostly excellent, well-sourced but always introspective journalism those pieces provide (including reflections on the achievements, limitations, and legacy of such individuals as Bill Cosby, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Malcolm X, as well as Barack and Michelle Obama), but also the fact that he has strung these articles together with multiple, context-and-reflections-providing mini-autobiographical essays. The book, then, is a record of a writer finding himself, struggling, through his engagement with his subjects (the endurance of black conservatism, the question of reparations, the legacy of the Civil War, the costs of mass incarceration, the cultural impact of the Obamas, and more), to interrogate and understand his own hopes, ambitions, and limitations in turn. It is a great record of a public intellectual at work, and much worth your time.

But what about the epilogue, that Atlantic essay? Coates is harsh in his judgment of both the president and the country which elected him, but that harshness is earned, backed up as it is by a strongly constructed historical argument, on that moves from immediate post-Civil war America (the title of the book--"we were eight years in power"--was taken from an 1895 speech by Thomas Miller, a bi-racial South Carolinian who identified as African-American and was able to build a brief political career for himself in the Reconstruction-era Republican Party) all the way up to the endless--and, I think, mostly, if not entirely, fruitless--arguments over the role of the white working class in the 2016 election. (I think they're mostly fruitless because what those arguments are fighting over is understanding the actions of fewer than 80,000 voters in three states, and as Jacob Levy put it, "an 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations.") Coates sees the Obama administration has having accomplished the one thing American adherents to white supremacy (here he quotes W.E.B. Du Bois) fear even more than being subject to what they imagine to be the irresponsibility and corruption of "bad Negro government"--namely, "good Negro government." The fact that Obama conducted himself--by the admittedly corrupting standards of the office of the presidency in an era of state violence, bureaucratic overreach, and imperial economics--in a basically responsible and moderate way was, in Coates's view, unacceptable to a critical mass of white voters. That, and only that, in his view, was enough to make a ridiculous man like Trump a viable presidential candidate:

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint....

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy--to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible....

Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new--the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific--America’s first white president.

Do I think Coates's race-centric interpretation of Donald Trump's rise to power is correct? If by "correct" you mean "the entire story," then no. Obviously I don't carry with me the burden of the exploitative, oppressive, and violent racial history Coates knows and weaves into his journalism so well; there are things which I simply don't see, and whose significance I don't automatically incorporate into my judgments. Reading people like Coates is an important way of compensating for that. But similarly, anyone schooled in the history of American political parties, the construction of our political culture, and the institutional structures which politically motivated individuals both perpetuate and are shaped by in turn can recognize patterns of interest which others may not notice. The Republican party in the U.S. is, indisputably, a party, in part, of white identity politics. It is also many other things--some of which, most particular the upper-class-multiculturalism-friendly globalist capitalism which more than a few of its most powerful corporate and Wall Street donors accept as essential to modern life--are hardly friendly to the interests of white people qua white people.

And yet, that itself is part of the argument, isn't it? Regarding the mostly fruitless arguments I mentioned above--the part of them that are not fruitless is the fact that they oblige us to struggle with the way class is interpolated with race throughout American history; the way lower-income and working-class white people are the recipients of a kind of capitalist valorization, accepted as carriers of authentic labor, while lower-income and working-class people of color by and large do not receive the same sort of cultural construction. (One of the reasons Coates, despite his suspicions about and disagreements with Cosby, couldn't help but write, back in 2008, somewhat sympathetically about the man is because he understood his career as involving, at least in part, an effort to provide black people in America some portion of this myth of American capitalist authenticity.) The whole visible structure of Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign revolved around working-class job-providing factories, businesses, and towns which had suffered from globalization, with globalization being coded as "those things which Wall Street elites do too you." There's no actual economic reason why that kind of argument couldn't have been equally persuasively embodied through campaign events in majority African-American communities and job sites. Coates is relentless on this point:

It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.

The long and the short of it is simply this: Coates's journalistic achievements, highlights of which are organized and presented in this book as if a single argument, climaxing in a ferocious attack on President Trump and those who voted for him, are making me reflect deeper upon, and change some of my thinking about, how I put race and class together in my head and in my political preferences. Does that mean I'm taking a position on (the latest round of) arguments about identity politics on the left today? Coates definitely has his opinions--mostly very negative--about the liberals (Mark Lilla, George Packer) and leftists (Bernie Sanders) that have stirred up the most animosity in suggesting that the actions of Black Lives Matter, or the idea of transgender rights, or the defense of President Obama's DACA order, or simply a lack of rural small-town or mid-sized-city respect, have all conspired to deprive Democrats of (white) votes that they needed to win. I'm not sure his opinion are my own (and I don't know how much his opinion guides his own political actions; if you read his book, you'll see three times as many criticism of Hillary Clinton and "Clintonism" in general as you will of Sanders--who, please note, Coates voted for in the Democratic primary). This is partly because I think there is probably something to the complicated rural-urban divide in the U.S. which cannot be entirely reduced to race, and partly because--as I alluded to above--I am unconvinced that this is actually a politically meaningful fight to have anyway. And even if it is a meaningful argument, it is, I suspect, an argument that has far less to do with the evolution (or deformation!) of the liberal tradition of equality, and far more to do with the structural causes of party polarization in America today. After all, in an environment where political elites usually find rewards in sticking as close as possible to their respective ideologically (and, yes, racially, ethnically, and economically) pure electoral bases, and usually find failure when they attempt to employ a language or advance an agenda which is nominally designed to appeal across all those ideological (as well as racial, ethnic, and class) groupings, then why wouldn't we expect tall those same groupings to go all in finding argument to advance their specific identitarian interests? (What do we think the Tea Party was doing with the Constitution, anyway?)

In the end, I think that in so many ways these arguments, whatever their intellectual merit, are incidental ones, retroactive arguments over strategy and intention, which arose almost solely because of the larger phenomenon that Coates is a superb chronicler of: namely, the many social and cultural questions which the eight-year administration of President Obama over a (still, for now!) majority white country gave impetus to, and the big historical question of how much President's Trump's administration should be understood as a bitter response to those eight years. His detailing of those questions, the small ones and the big one, make me, I believe, a better thinker about class and race, about economics and culture, and for that I'm grateful. Coates himself is obviously thinking about them too, so I'm in good company. I finish with a quote from the epilogue, which didn't make it into the Atlantic version:

There can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and by the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and calling for single-payer health care. They are related--but solving for one does not automatically solve for the other. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and so on finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane.


Me too, Mr. Coates; me too.

Obama, Immigration, and Why I am Not (Much of) a Constitutionalist

So, if you haven't seen the SNL video which this image comes from, go watch it here right now. I'll wait.

It's a simplistic and unfair--what did you expect? it's Saturday Night Live!--depiction of the debate over President Obama's executive order on immigration last week, but it gets the heart of the whole legal and political argument. Executive orders have been around as long as the American presidents have, but as our national government has increasingly broken down and executive orders have--predictably--grown in size and scope to fill the gap, more and more people have paid critical attention to the way they allow presidents to, in essence if not in actually, make law. Regarding Obama's order, plenty of people's opinions are quite clear: the president has crossed a Rubicon and become "an elected Caesar, a Cheney for liberalism, a president unbound." Do I disagree? Partly, but only partly; I really do think his action, however beneficial on its merits or legal on the basis of relevant statutes, was unconstitutional--or at the very least, involved what I called elsewhere "a rather, shall we say, impressive expansion of presidential authority."

My comments sparked a fair amount of debate on my own blog and, particularly, following a very thoughtful and critical post by my friend David Watkins. To respond, let me try to explain myself more clearly by way of a few key questions:

1) What is the difference between constitutionality and legality, and do I think one is prior to the other?
2) What does procedural traditions, norms, and precedents have to do with either of those?
3) What specific norms do I think Obama's action violated, in light of the actually existing history of executive orders?
4) Isn't it irresponsible to toss around terms like "unconstitutional" in our current political climate anyway?

So let me try to work some of these out, beginning with the first two put together:

1 & 2) "Constitutionalism" is usually used to denote the idea that those individuals and entities in possession of governmental authority are circumscribed in their use of governmental power by and agreed upon rule of law. In the American case, the rule of law is--for most citizens anyway--understood as very much bound up with the idea of popular sovereignty, so much so that it becomes easy for most Americans to identify the U.S. Constitution, as supposedly that which provides the means by which the will of the people, with the rule of law itself. Obviously there are some who disagree; for example, a small but not insignificant minority of Americans see the Constitution as properly reflecting the rule of law in a Biblical or explicitly Christian sense. But either way, the assumption is usually that constitutions are a function of the rule of law. I disagree. As David noted in his post, the idea of law itself is an "essentially contested concept"; I would say the same for constitutionalism, which I see as rather distinct from, and likely actually parasitic upon the idea of law. My guiding lights here are such radical democratic--and Arendtian--political theorists as Hannah Pitkin, Melissa Williams, Douglas Lummis, and especially Sheldon Wolin. For all of these folks, to one degree or another, a close study of the history of constitutions--both American and otherwise--seems to suggest that the last thing they involve is a concern with what David called "the interactions of the different parts of government with the governed," and instead focus overwhelmingly on establishing preventative rules so as to protect individuals and property from invasive government action. Here's Wolin:

Stated simply, American thinkers conceived a constitution primarily in terms of legal limits and procedural requirements for a selected set of institutions which were then identified as "government" and declared to be formally separated from social institutions of class, status, religion, and economy. Ideologically, the formal separation was justified on liberal grounds; that is, it promoted political equality, toleration, and private rights, especially those of property....

[A constitution] becomes one only when it is put into practice. Practices consist, first, in offices that designate the location of authority and, second, procedures or formalities that legitimate the exercise of power. There is, however, more to "high offices." They are publicly visible, and those who hold them not only are said to discharge an office's responsibilities but also to perform the office. High political office is a symbolic per(form)ance. Those who hold them are expected to display public virtues and to preserve public formalities. The authority of [constitutional] office is, therefore, both a right to power and a rite of power....

Modern constitutionalism, from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Nozick, has developed its notions of citizenship almost exclusively through the language of contract. Although that tradition of political argument puts great stock in the notion of "performance," what it means by performances is the virtual opposite of its political-cultural meaning. To perform a contract is to complete it....It is not a question of special skills but of knowing what a promise is and then of discharging it. (Wolin, The Presence of the Past [1989], pp. 13, 85)

So what do I take from all that? I conclude that whatever the popular imagination invests in our Constitution, in function what it really does is serve to discipline the democratic wishes of the American people so that their expectations that their rights and property will be protected depend upon the procedural performance of those invested with high office. David makes use the arguments of political philosopher Jeremy Waldron to claim that the law, as something which is both knowable and reliable, is empowering of the freedom of citizens, and I don't dispute that reading at all (as David knows, I'm quite a fan of Waldron). But I think it's beside the point. When we speak of "unconstitutional acts," we're invariably speaking of whether or not someone in high office has performed an act in such a way as to show that she or he has respected the distinct and limited (and limiting!) terms of our supposed contract with them.

I don't think speaking in that way is itself a bad thing; on the contrary, I recognize that constitutionalism, as the above makes clear, has historically been an enormously powerful tool in promoting the liberal imagination and providing substance to basic individual rights and protections. But I don't think it's the only such tool available to us in the history of political thought; I think fundamental guarantees of personal liberty can be realized just as well in more parliamentary or populists contexts--and with the added advantage that such "uncodified" governing frameworks are far less likely to get caught up in myths about the rule of law and the will of the people than is the case with our founding document. However, for better or worse that's not the regime which we have--despite changes in party, electoral, and legislative structures pushing us in those more democratic directions, we are still governed by a constitutional framework, with all its attendant expectations. To insist, in opposition to the logic contained within this conceptual package, that an action which is allowable within existing statutes but which is performed in a way that violates symbolic precedents and procedural norms which that come to be assumed over the passage of time must nonetheless be defended as "constitutional" is to, I think, work against the grain which shapes the whole appeal of constitutionalism for many in the first place. It seems to me, to the contrary of this position, that it is entirely possible (indeed important, stuck as we unfortunately are with our present system of government) to insist that an action can be both legal and unconstitutional. That is it may, on the one hand, fulfill our democratic concept of law--as in this case, by making the administration of immigration policy more knowable and reliable, lessening its ambiguity and increasing the policy's clarity and match to widely recognized preferences--but also, on the other hand, show disrespect for (admittedly, always evolving) informal expectations and procedural rites that, however frivolous they may seem to those in favor of the administrative improvement, are nonetheless entirely a piece in the way both parties employ (and have always employed) the rhetoric of "unconstitutionality."

3) So, having written at length about procedural rites, symbolic precedents, and other stuff which many commenters dismissed as so much "woo," let's get to brass tacks: what is it that makes this particular executive order such an impressive and challenging leap in administrative authority? The simple fact that it was taken in wake of a midterm election where President Obama's party suffered numerous defeats, and in the face of fierce (and, let it said, essentially incoherent) opposition from the party which will take control of Congress in less than two months' time. Yes, of course I know we don't have a parliamentary system and that the president's executive authority stands independent of Congress; and yes, I also know that Congress has been abandoning its legislative responsibility for decades. Still, like it or not, the contorted fiction we tell ourselves about the will of the people has created assumptions about what we mean when we speak of something being "constitutional" or not. To make use of a common example which many who have supported Obama have invoked--when President Reagan and the first President Bush ordered extensive administrative changes (though, it must be said, not as extensive as Obama's) to just who was and was not going to be subject to America's immigration law in 1987 and 1990, it was following immediately in the footsteps of the 1986 comprehensive immigration reform passed by Congress and signed by the president. And so it goes back through history, or at least 20th-century history (the Civil War is obvious a pretty unique and precedent-setting case on its own): the president is presumed to be able to responsibly take direct executive action, however outrageous (and President Roosevelt's orders, for example, were often very outrageous), in conformity with recent popular, political, and/or partisan support. This isn't a democratic defense of those executive orders, but simply an observation that I think is indisputable: whatever theories we employs to shape our conceptions of government, our regime--like many other constitutional democratic regimes--our quick to swallow abuses of constitutional limits if they are done in a way which conforms with symbolic representations of the people's supposed will. (Does this mean that I think that the push-back against Obama would have been less if he'd taken this executive action before the election, or ideally immediately after the last failed attempt by Senate Democrats to get House Republicans to allow a vote? I certainly do.)

4) Finally, about the appropriateness of this kind of language: shouldn't those of us who are critical of the president's action, but supportive of its administrative consequences (and even, in my case at least, supportive of its legality) stop using the term "unconstitutional," since that is just red meat for the president's opponents? Perhaps...but then again, how can we make our point otherwise? We've seen a major executive reach into the administration of our immigration laws, done on the authority of one man and one man alone. That's not good for democratic self-government. Those kind of administrative invasions into the substance of our laws can be made acceptable and legitimate, if our governing institutions reflected the contesting interests of the voting population in a more populist or parliamentarian manner. But as we don't have those kind of institutions, those who dislike legislative overreach--even if legal!--have to content themselves with falling back on the ritual language of "unconstitutionality." That is, Obama certainly isn't a tyrant in any substantive sense (yes, I was engaging in hyperbole), but he's been forced and/or incentivized into disregarding constitutional norms, however flaky the relationship of those norms to democracy actually are, and those flaky traditions are one of the main controls we have left. Should Obama be able to point to the fact that, in regards to immigration at least, Congress has become far more dysfunctional, and the parties far more uncompromising and therefore legislatively incapable, than was the case 25 years ago? I absolutely think so. But, given the norms we have, I think he should also be obliged to recognize the legitimacy of those who say what he has done as unconstitutional, if only to press the case that, given how our electoral and party systems are ruining their own ability to govern, it was inevitable that unconstitutionality would increasingly become a norm for presidents, if it hasn't already.

Rank Your Favorite Presidential Tyrants!

With only hours to go until President Obama presents his executive order that will--unless he pulls a fast one on his Republican opponents--remove the threat of deportation from the lives of up to 5 million illegal residents of this country, the political and legal arguments are lining up. Sadly but predictably, the policy arguments, by contrast, are not. In terms of our overall immigration problem, this ordered action by the president will be fairly small potatoes; additional opportunities for many of the children of illegal immigrants--the "Dreamers" who benefited from Obama's previous executive order, the DACA program--but very likely nothing for their parents, nothing for undocumented itinerant farm workers, and no ACA benefits for anyone. But since the only bill which the Tea Party-spooked congressional Republican leadership has allowed to come forward for a vote ever since Senator Marc Rubio withdrew is own proposal is a ridiculous Dreamer-deportation non-starter, it seems reasonable to assume that the national Republican party will simply describe anything the president orders as "amnesty!" and prepare their government shutdown or defunding or impeachment proceedings.

But as everyone must surely recognize, that's exactly the point, right? The partisan dysfunctions of our federal government--which, I don't deny, President Obama makes every bit as much use of as anyone in Congress of either party--have presented the president, when it comes to immigration, with an opportunity that he considers to be both politically expedient (a correct conclusion, I'm sure) and within his legal prerogatives as chief executive (about which I am far less than certain). Smart pundits like Ross Douthat and Damon Linker have made I believe a pretty solid case claiming that while what the president is proposing may not necessarily explicitly contravene any legal rule on where the president's executive authority ends, it does appearing to be throwing the sort of "norms, precedents and judgment" that ought to guide "how things are done" by the chief executive in a presidential democracy out the window. Which, ultimately, just echoes what other conservative thinkers and rabble-rousers have been claiming for years: that Obama, as everyone knows, is a Constitution-flouting tyrant! (That's assuming, of course, that he ever had a legitimate claim to the office in the first place.)

Now realistically, if you actually drill down and examine the real history of the number and scope of presidents issuing Congress-circumventing executive orders over the years, Obama's record is far more ambiguous. But the heck with that! The die has been cast! Now those who have long been critical of this president really do have a genuinely credible basis accusing him of acting beyond the scope of his Constitutionally-delegated powers. So I say, this is as good a time as any: let's rate just how tyrannical President Obama really is! Below, I list my top five presidential tyrants. Let me know if you agree or disagree, or provide rankings of your own!

(Quick note: it should go without saying that my list should be taken for a grain of salt, for at least two reasons: one, because on the level of theory I actually don't care all that much for either our current system of government or even the principle of constitutionalism in general; and two, because I'm a fan of the War Powers Resolution, and thus basically believe every president that has denied it's controlling authority since it's passage--which is all of them--is acting like a tyrannical war-monger anyway. Also, note that I am just focusing on the past century here, thus leaving aside the always sticky issue of Lincoln's blatantly unconstitutional actions during the Civil War, and as well as the obvious clear winner of the tyrant sweepstakes, Andrew Jackson, the only president we've had who--you've got to give him credit for honesty!--just out and out told the Supreme Court, when it issued a decision he didn't like, to go screw themselves.)

#5: Barack Obama. Look, I'm not going to belabor this. Has this president found himself, for structural reasons mostly (if not entirely) beyond his control, dealing with congressional opposition that is unprecedented...or at least, unprecedented in this century? Yes, I think that's pretty clearly true. So I suppose you could say he's been forced into an abusive position in regards to his executive prerogatives. But that doesn't change the plain that what he's likely going to announce tonight is of a piece with his recess appointments, his targeted (and, shall we say, "extrajudicial") assassinations of both foreign nationals and even American citizens, and more. The man clearly takes presidential power to unconstitutional extremes. Though he hasn't done so as much as...

#4: Ronald Reagan. We remember Iran-Contra, yes? Specifically evading the Boland Amendment, so as to be able to continue to fund--though channels that were also illegal all on their own--a conflict that made use of American resources and advisers without Congressional approval? Not to mentioned the executive orders given by President Reagan which became the building blocks of the NSA's 4th-Amendment-circumventing data-collection activities (though is was executive orders from a later member of this list which through those into overdrive). Clearly, the man was a at least a little bit of a tyrant. Though honestly, probably not as much as...

#3: Lyndon Johnson. Not a lot to argue about here. It's well known that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was obtained at least in part by President Johnson outright lying to the American people about what had transpired that August night off the coast of Vietnam. One can make all sorts of apologies of dishonesty, of course, especially when dealing with delicate matters of state--but this was a matter of war, and specifically whether to get into one or not, and I can't think of any situation which mandates greater honesty on the part of elected leaders than that. But still, if you're willing to forgive his lying to get us deeper into Vietnam (and his ordering of the CIA to disrupt student protest movements across the country), then clearly you're probably willing to forgive the tyrannical actions of...

#2: George W. Bush. First of all, there was his rampant abuse of signing statements to shape the enforcement and implementation of laws before they even technically fell under his jurisdiction as chief executive, essentially giving himself the unconstitutional power of a line-item (this is one of the--unfortunately too-few--bad precedents set by Bush which President Obama, to his credit, has not followed). Then there was his expansion of the NSA's authority to engage in the widespread surveillance of American citizens without obtaining a warrant, and then of course everything associated with the Iraq War: the military tribunals, the summary arrest and denial of habeas corpus and basic due process to anyone suspected of terrorism, and, most of all, the knowing presentation of false or at least incomplete information--in other words, lying--while making a case for war (though he never actually sought Congress's permission, as arguably Johnson did; only their approval). All in all, that makes George W. Bush about a Caesarish as modern presidents can get. Or would, if it wasn't for...

#1: Richard Nixon. Not infrequently, I run across people and writings that, for any number of reasons--pure contrarianism, a particular kind of Republican revisionism, a stylized kind of anti-democratic "realism" that likes to self-consciously prioritize policy accomplishments over political legitimacy, etc.--present Richard Nixon as a great president, or at least an unfairly misunderstood one. Please, people. You're not losing any hipster cred or letting down your chosen political party or selling out to the Baby Boomers to recognize that Nixon was, in addition to an admittedly smart and effective president in many ways, a crook. And not just some sort of tragic figure who finds himself constitutionally trapped and thus embraces a crooked defiance (that might arguably apply to Obama), but no: an actual, real, Constitution-violating nogoodnik. He aided and abetted in the commission of felonies: breaking and entering, theft, intimidation, bribery, and more. He was a liar, and--given his actions during the 1968 peace talks--arguably a traitor to his country. All that, and the man wanted to turn White House Secret Service officers into his own palace guard, complete with snappy uniforms. If Obama's expansions of presidential power ever get anywhere near to any of that, do give me a call.

What Happens When Parties and Elections Change, and Constitutions Don't

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

Yesterday, Ezra Klein summed up the Obama presidency thusly: "Obama [has] pushed more change through the political system than any serious observer expected....[b]ut he's done it by accepting--and, in many cases, accelerating--the breakdown of American politics. Judged against the rhetoric of his [2008] campaign, his presidency has been both an extraordinary success and a complete failure." That's not an unusual claim in these days of partisan absolutism, but it is a little surprising to see a wonky liberal like Klein to make it. Even more surprising--or perhaps it isn't--is to realize that Klein is making pretty much the same point that Ross Douthat has been making over the past several days in the wake of the news of President Obama's consideration of exceptionally wide-ranging executive actions to address the humanitarian crisis that our dysfunctional immigration policies have helped to create. Says Douthat: "what the White House wants to do on immigration...would be lawless, reckless, a leap into the antidemocratic dark." It would, in other words, be a case of Obama responding to a genuine problem by, Caesar-like, breaking through the laws by which presidents are supposed to act. I see the point of Douthat's fear, and agree with it--but I don't think Douthat is being honest about the causes that have brought our country to this point.

(Before I get into this, a quick aside: plenty of folks on the left side of the political aisle are quick to dismiss Douthat as a partisan hack and a close-minded prude. I can't do that. Admittedly, what I see as his tendency to either condescend towards or simply be oblivious of those issues and people that don't fit into his somewhat privileged moral boxes often drives me nuts. But for all that, he's a smart, wonky conservative, and not an anti-Obama crazy; when, in reference to those who "think that this president has been violating basic norms of constitutional government since the earliest months of his administration," he writes that "I am not and have never been one of them," he's describing his own commentary accurately. His observations are often--as in this case--genuinely challenging, and deserve a careful response.)

The heart of Douthat's charge is that not simply that Obama, in suggesting several possible executive actions (mostly revolving around a reprieve from legal limitations and deportation for upwards 5 million law-abiding undocumented immigrants who are closely related to American citizens or have been long-time U.S. residents, essentially a major expansion of the Deferred Action protocol which Obama put into action through executive order two years ago), is going beyond normal executive "latitude and discretion in legal enforcement" and moving into "a de facto rewrite of the law." No, what he thinks is worse is that the president, in his view, is embracing this "power grab" in such a way as to violate basic norms of constitutionality. Douthat does not deny that we are years into an era of unprecedented party polarization and congressional dysfunction; the incentives as they presently exist (gerrymandered Republican House members that find themselves in an endless race to prove themselves to be more anti-Obama and ideologically pure than any possible primary challenger) have created a fatalistic, "'let the policy happen, just don’t make me vote for it' dynamic," which of course creates a space for even more unilateral action from the White House. But he is convinced that there is, somewhere in the greyness, a Rubicon-type line which is being crossed, separating dubious constitutionality from outright caesarism:

But the absence, as Al Gore might put it, of a clear controlling legal authority only strengthens the importance of norms, precedents and judgment in these matters. And my judgment is as follows: Given....[that] it’s pretty reasonable to describe DACA itself [as a] moderately-but-not-grossly lawless, moderately-but-not-extraordinarily abusive of the president’s powers... then to describe a mega-DACA as something more extraordinary, reckless and (yes) caesarist, and therefore more worthy of outcry and opposition. I can’t prove, citing statute and verse, that this judgment is correct, and I can’t tell you exactly the moment (1.17 million work permits? 2.88 million?) when moderate abuse shades into something more extraordinary. But I think my basic judgment on these matters is a lot more credible and responsive to the facts than the “nothing to see here, just discretion as usual” argument offered [by the president's defenders].

I can't say I dispute this--but then, I think President Obama (like every president since Nixon) has acted unconstitutionally through their refusal to formally acknowledge the War Powers Resolution, so perhaps my opinion isn't surprising. Douthat thinks the fact that this is a domestic issue makes it even more frightening an omen for our country, as traditionally "domestic power grabs are usually modest in scope." Which, when you think about it, is an odd thing to claim in defense of one's position: are we supposed to believe that under our system of government power grabs are routine enough to be incorporated into institutional norms, and so the real crisis is that this president, at this time, is making this sort of power grab, as opposed to some other? That seems to be the upshot of Douthat's complaint.

Consider, for example, how important he thinks it is that President Obama and the Democratic party had taken legislative actions which were apparently responsible for making his political opponents become unwilling (due, no doubt, to the aforementioned partisan dysfunctions) to compromise on the issue of immigration:

[I]n the spring of 2012, Marco Rubio started working on a variation on the DREAM Act--one that wouldn’t go as far as the bill the White House favored, but seemed to have some chance of passage, not least because the context of a presidential election (and Mitt Romney’s struggles with Hispanic voters) gave Republicans a reason to seek compromise. At which point the White House, in a move that (to quote Ed Kilgore, no conservative) ”was universally understood as a preemption” of Rubio’s potential bill, released its own executive order--the precedent for the one being currently considered [that is, DACA]--legalizing the population in question, which (as the White House no doubt expected) made it politically impossible for Rubio to push forward with legislation that would have effectively just ratified that move.

From the point of view of Douthat's columns, this is evidence of the president's incipient caesarism, a willingness to score political points in an election environment by unilateral actions which would appear to only strengthen his own executive discretion in the future, by undermining the possibility of some actual, you know, law making. But of course, that's only looking at the Republican and congressional sides of the equation, isn't it? After all, is the White House, or the Democratic party, to be blamed for the Republican party having built, through so many years of effort, an electoral structure which is so closed to compromise and views the sitting the president as so toxic that any act of genuine legislative deal-making which isn't done from a position of either total conservative victory and complete conservative absence is accepted by Rubio & Co. as electoral suicide? Of course they can't be. One might, of course, claim that we need to expect the president to have higher standards than the average, vote-grubbing member of Congress; that the norms which have evolved to govern the significant powers of the presidency reflect such an expectation. But it seems to me the obvious response to that is very simple: why on earth would the party in power, the one in the White House, be any different kind of political animal than any other party? Just because President Obama doesn't have to win an election in a congressional district in Chicago doesn't mean that he somehow isn't a creature of the exact same dysfunctions which are currently poisoning Congress--on the contrary, the all-or-nothing partisan mentality which the White House apparently counted on to make Rubio and other congressional Republicans too angry/scared/weak to move forward actual immigration reform permeates our electoral system as a whole, from top to bottom. Non-power-grabbing norms don't emerge out of thin air: they depend upon institutional forms, and those institutional forms have to serve the needs and beliefs and practices of those who built them--and when they no longer do, the forms are abandoned, or at least disrespected, and the norms will, of course, follow. So if, on some level, Obama and his team saw in 2012 an opportunity to see Rubio trapped between his own political self-interest and the ideological and electoral infrastructure which he'd helped to build, is that really a power grab? Or is it, instead, the only game in town?

I'm not defending that game at all; on the contrary, it depresses me, so much that sometimes I genuinely despair. Unlike Eric Posner and other defenders of the president's contemplated measures whom Douthat attacks, I want to believe that the United States doesn't have to and shouldn't descend into what Sheldon Wolin described nearly 20 years ago as “plebiscitary democracy.” Rather, I believe in legislative supremacy and deliberative democracy (on the level of principle, at least), and I prefer to read our constitutional order in such a republican or populist light as to maximize its potential in that direction. But I can also read history, and see what what it tells us about the roots of our present paralysis. The institutional forms set up by our Constitution came to life and gave rise to governing norms through and the midst of party coalitions and a political culture much more regional, much more elitist, much less disconnected, and much less ideological than America became through the 20th century. All through the transformative rise of the American conservative movement (and sometimes as a result of it!), we became a more alienated, more globalized, more liberated, more diverse, and generally more "winner-take-all" country than we used to be, for reasons both economic and social and cultural. The Republican party of Marc Rubio, the Democratic party of Barack Obama, the electoral strategies which put them in power, the campaign financing which enabled them to make use of those strategies, the ideological and socio-economic framework upon which that money did its work--all of it over the past half-century has changed to the point of near unrecognizability. If it really does turn out that Obama feels he has no other option that to turn to--or indeed, that he is even now busily calculating the political advantages of employing--a little presidential caesarism in response to a serious domestic problem, Douthat needs to fault more than just the man in the White House: he needs to also fault the constitutionalism fetishism which refuses to seriously contemplate that our present system of government depends upon democratic and legislative norms that no longer have much good reason to exist.

Burkean? Maybe, In a Sense. But Left Conservative? Not at All

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

Ryan Lizza posted a short note today, about the new limitations on the industrial production of carbon emissions which the Environmental Protection Agency, under the direction of President Obama, has just proposed. It's a good piece, explaining how these new guidelines had their start in a 2006 court case, Massachusetts v.  Environmental Protection Agency, which--by a 5-4 decision--agreed that the EPA had an obligation to consider the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants which need to be restricted. And while I think Lizza is being ridiculously optimistic when he writes that "a statement...from the President might just make it more likely that the public...will begin to think of carbon pollution in the same way that it thinks of other kinds of toxic substances spewed into the air," I can't really disagree with anything he says; while he manages to avoid ever mentioning the Keystone pipeline, which probably is the largest environmental albatross around the president's neck, he's certain correct that Obama has moved very cautiously and deliberately in building up his environmental agenda, and it's not wrong to see that as reflecting his approach to government in general. But then comes his concluding paragraph:

It’s hardly unheard of for a President to be cautious about pushing social change, and it would be more surprising if a President didn’t move in the direction of shifting public opinion. Obama and his aides like to see him as someone who plays a long game. They sometimes suggest that his movement on these issues is all part of a grand plan. More likely, Obama is what might be called a “left conservative,” a phrase that Norman Mailer briefly popularized when he ran for mayor of New York, in 1969. Obama obviously shares the outlook of the left on these cultural issues, but he’s temperamentally cautious and rarely believes that it’s worth his effort to act until his own liberal base has moved the country along with it. And, even then, he sees his job as moderating the passions of the activists.

I have to register a strong dissent to this, however pedantic my protest may be. Mailer's actual line, as he put it in his book The Armies of the Night, was that he called himself a "left conservative" because he wanted to "think in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." Or, in other words, to make sense of this claim in the context of the 1967 March on Washington (the anti-Vietnam War protest which Mailer both participated in and made the centerpiece of his novel), he talking about how he thinking and acting radically against the abuses of the American state, its Manichean self-image, and its global economy, in the name of being able to enjoy the sort of life and priorities associated with Edmund Burke's defense of home, neighborhood, and tradition. Lizza, by contrast, is using the term to communicate almost the exact reverse of this: that Obama is on the progressive left when it comes to issues of environmental protection or same-sex marriage or any number of other cultural, social, and economic issues (policy positions that may have any number of ramifications, but would also never be described primarily in terms of defending "tradition), but nonetheless is procedurally "conservative" about how he supports those issues. He thinks like Burke supposedly would have--and the notion that President Obama is a careful thinker who moves slowly and respects the historical and organic dimensions of the obstacles which face him is an old, much-disputed claim--and thus doesn't try to act like a radical, instead waiting for others to come around, before he weighs in with his presidential authority.

Not many people are going to care one way or another about Lizza's appropriation of this terminology, but I confess I'm one of them, because the "left conservative" framing of how one thinks about capitalism, equality, social change, and much more has been very helpful and clarifying for me over the years. Particularly when it comes to the way he has handled environmental issues, President Obama has been an almost perfect example of progressive neoliberal mangerialism, seeing catastrophes like the BP oil spill and festering disputes like the aforementioned Keystone pipeline not in terms of radically rethinking those critical structures in play in how we produce energy or engage in trade or grow our food or live our lives, but rather in simply identifying the financial and bureaucratic fractures in those structures, and patching them as best as federal money and state incentives can. The radical rethinking of the sort Mailer gestured toward may, in this case, be socialist (for example, moving away from leaving energy production in hands of private corporations, and instead subjecting it to diverse and democratic controls), or it may be conservative (for example, rejecting the excess and waste of the automobile-based economy, and re-engaging in systems of local production and trade), or maybe it's actually both. Hence, "left conservative."

Obviously, at each and every point along either such hypothetical path there would need to be constant policy reforms and tweaks, and that means there will be a need for good, cautious management; no one disputes that. And while the usual coal-gas-and-oil-apologists are, of course, screaming bloody murder over these new carbon emission regulations, anyone who isn't a climate-change denier very likely sees them for limited positive steps which they are. For all his (many) faults, Obama is actually a fairly decent administrator of our oversized and unwieldly liberal state. But label that what it is: neoliberal (maybe even sometimes outright liberal!) pragmatism, or managerialism, or something. Don't poach from a label few know, fewer respect, but which, I think at least, is desperately needed.

Once More (About Syria), With Feeling (and Editing)

The Wichita Eagle ran today a much condensed (and, I suppose, perhaps much improved) version of my post from Monday on my wish/hope that Congress will, in fact, send President Obama a "no" on Syria. For anyone who can't get enough of me, here it is:

Sometime in the next week or so, Congress will vote on whether to authorize President Obama’s plan to bomb military sites in Syria as a response to President Bashar Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, supports authorizing the attack, but he has made it clear that he wants a “much more robust” plan of action in Syria than the president has suggested. That implies that he might vote down any resolution that he doesn’t believe provides enough strength for America’s position. I think such reasoning is wrong--but if it gets him to vote “no,” I’ll take it.

Why? Because if Congress votes “no,” for a good or bad reason, it will mean two very good things: The United States will be less likely to involve itself in yet another Middle Eastern conflict, and (much more important) Congress will have taken at least one tiny step in the direction of perhaps standing up against the imperial, war-making powers that our presidents have routinely used and expanded. So however it comes, a “no” vote is what I’d like to see.

As I said, there are both better and worse reasons for doing this. Pompeo’s neoconservative talking points, which suggest that Obama and his team are simply too weak to manage any kind of proper military action, are a lousy way to get to my preferred end. All they really mean is that if Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Pompeo were in charge, bombing Syria would be a fine idea.

It absolutely isn’t, for many reasons: We have no international support for doing so; bombing one country because it violates an international convention while we continue to support another country – Egypt – that is also in violation of international conventions is terribly hypocritical; providing support for the rebel cause in Syria will position us on the side of organizations with a history of anti-American terrorism; there is little evidence that the Syrian government particularly cares about U.S. “credibility” anyway.

Still, I look at these things as someone who is worried about the dysfunction and corruption of our constitutional order. As much as I am opposed to much of the libertarian ideology, at least the isolationist, anti-war position of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has the same crucial political concerns. In this case, I truly wish Pompeo, beyond enjoying the money and influence of Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity, would actually take their point seriously – that the U.S. is not, and should never act like, an empire, no matter what course President Bush may have set us upon.

Of course, I am not naive here. Bush was only continuing the long tradition of presidents assuming for themselves an expansive reading of their authority as commander in chief. The War Powers Resolution may be the law of the land, but every president since Richard Nixon has dismissed it as unconstitutional, and there is little chance of it emerging as a legal cause to tie the president’s hands at this time.

Still, I believe in legislative supremacy. One vote won’t achieve that. But while a “yes” would just license power that Obama – like every president – has grabbed, a “no” just might become a line in the sand that those of us who want to limit America’s role in the world could build upon. So give me a “no,” please, for whatever reason.

Dear Congress: Please Make President Obama Look Bad on Syria (Even if Your Reasons for Doing So Are Wrong)

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

To Senators Roberts and Moran and Representative Pompeo,

Sometime in the next week or so, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will schedule votes on whether or not Congress will give its authorization (or, depending on who you talk to or what the language of the coming resolution may include, "support") for President Obama to go forward with the plan which he and his security team have clearly already decided upon: to strategically bomb certain military sites in Syria as a response to the information (which they, at least, are certain of) that the Syrian government of Bashar Hafez al-Assad has used, in violation of widely accepted principles of international law, chemical weapons like sarin gas to kill hundreds of civilian supporters of the rebellion against his rule which he currently is fighting. Since you're my senators and my local representative here in the 4th congressional district in the state of Kansas, I thought I'd share my opinion about this upcoming vote with you. I think you should embarrass President Obama, and give him a big "no."

Some part of all of you, I strongly suspect, already wants to do this. After all, this is something President Obama wants, and agreeing with him on really anything at all is a guaranteed loser with a decent chunk of the Kansas electorate. This suggests that voting against whatever the resolution ultimately says is plain old smart constituent service, not to mention a way to burnish your bona fides as solid and faithful conservative Kansas Republicans. All you need to do is cook up some talking points which explain why Obama and his team don't understand what you think they should understand about the war in Syria, and hence can't possibly be trusted to manage any kind of military action at all, and you'd be good to go. That's justification isn't, in my view, remotely accurate, but if you want to run that way, it'll at least mean you'll be voting the way I think you should, so I won't complain.

Of course, that will put you at odds with your own party leadership, with Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor climbing on board the president's bandwagon, and Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham warning all their fellow Republicans of the "catastrophic" consequences of a no vote. I suppose one way to negotiate this would be to follow along with the lead that you've already laid out, Rep. Pompeo; make all the appropriate neoconservative noises about the need for the United States to develop a "more vigorous, much more robust" plan of action in Syria, one that presumably would go beyond Obama's stated intention to become the world's international-law-enforcer and would likely instead militarily obligate us to real action in the Syrian civil war, and then vote against whatever the resolution actually says, because it doesn't go far enough. In my view, this justification is even worse than the previous one, but at least it would result in a no vote, so I'll accept it.

I suppose it's possible that you may feel inclined to vote no because you've been tempted by the isolationist, anti-war position of Senator Rand Paul & Co. This probably isn't something you'll want to admit to, because while the Kansas Republican Party obviously values the libertarian money and influence of Koch Industries and Americans For Prosperity, actually identifying with any of their ideological principles--in this case, that America shouldn't be an empire, and that no large institution (including the U.S. military and/or our intelligence community!) should ever be trusted--can complicate things when it comes to striking deals in Washington, or maintaining your image in the Kansas public eye as a mainstream, patriotic, socially conservative Republican. As for myself, well, I'm not at all on board with that whole movement, but there's more than a little of it which I have come to admire, and so if that's what leads you to vote the way I'd prefer, I'm all in favor.

What kind of reasons am I more in favor of? Ones that acknowledge that the situation in Syria is a tragic, terrible mess, with neither side representing the sort of interests or ideas that warrant American military involvement. Ones that recognize that labeling the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" which no civilized can cross without suffering retributionary punishment is, without a united international community, an arbitrary and essentially unenforceable standard, one that no nation which doesn't claim (as I should hope the United States has gotten tired of claiming by now!) for itself full-fledged imperial responsibilities for the world ought to make. Ones that admit--as I, a former liberal internationalist hawk, someone who will probably always find Wilsonian humanitarianism at least faintly appealing, has nonetheless learned to admit--that while of course inaction is itself an affirmative choice, one that carries with it all sorts of what-might-have-been burdens, that fact isn't alone sufficient reason to feel impelled to do something (anything!) in response to an obvious evil. Invoking the "responsibility to protect" rightly directs us towards an engagement with a distant tragedy; it does not require any particular response to said tragedy...especially when, as is the case with America's track record towards military adventures, there is good reason to believe such a military response will not only fail to be thoughtfully limited, but will also be corrupted by our own oversized, wanna-be-but-not-really imperial baggage.

Most of all, I'd like to see a no vote in Congress based on a refusal to continue in the decades-long abandonment of Congressional responsibility for the military actions of our national government. I am not naive here; I realize that as much as I might wish to have a political culture and a constitutional order which takes carefully and literally the idea that the legislative branch, and the legislative branch alone, carries the responsibility for authorizing when and how American soldiers will kill and be killed, I'm not going to get it. Presidents have been assuming for themselves an expansive reading of their authority as commander-in-chief since the beginning of American history--and even they hadn't, the global powers and obligations which presidents have trafficked in since WWII makes a strong logical case for them to do so now. Congress's mad grasp to clarify their role in the midst of burgeoning presidential powers, the War Powers Resolution (a hastily and confusedly written piece of legislation, I know!), may be the law of the land, but every president since Nixon has dismissed it as unconstitutional, and there is little chance of it emerging as a legal cause to either tie the president's hands or--more likely--complicate the funding which President Obama will ask for when he goes forward with the bombing, whether Congress gives him a resolution "authorizing" (or, as Secretary of State Kerry insists, just supporting) the use of force or not.

In the end, this is a political stratagem on the part of the president. So why don't I think Congress should just play along and go on to other things? Because, silly as it may seem, I really do believe in legislative supremacy; I really don't want the United States to continue along the imperial course which George W. Bush put us upon; and I really do think military adventurism is one of the primary causes for the executive's endlessly expanding power. Unwinding all that will take far more than any single vote (especially since, once American equipment and manpower are committed, Congress will almost certainly find itself politically incapable of exercising any budgetary restraints of any further adventurism--"supporting the troops" is just too potent, and poisonous, a bloody flag to wave). But in this case, a "yes" vote will be more than meaningless...while a "no" vote might, just might, become a line in the sand which those who want to limit America's role in the world could build upon. As actually serving politicians in Washington DC, my dear senators and representative, it's unlikely that you're really interested in such limits. But with any luck, for whatever reason occurs to you, perhaps you'll vote in a way to provide those who are so interested with a start. That's my hope, anyway.

Orson Scott Card, Unoriginal Fantasist

So, I see exploding all over the internet the news that science-fiction author Orson Scott Card has waxed lyrical (at nearly 3000 words) about a "silly thought experiment" in which President Obama--who is a vicious and contemptuous tyrant at heart--uses his backroom Machiavellian flunkies to destroy Hillary Clinton's incipient candidacy for the 2016 Democratic nomination by pinning the Benghazi on her, after which he orchestrates Michelle Obama's election to the presidency, effectively allowing him to maintain power behind the scenes. So far, so typical, insofar as far right-wing fantasies go. But Card (who I will still defend as having once been one of the greatest science-fiction short-story writers of all time) isn't stupid. He knows that if he wants his "game of Unlikely Events" to actually have the sort of rhetorical legs he obviously wishes it to, then he's got to do more:

As a student of history, allow me to spin a plausible scenario about how, like Augustus Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama could become lifetime dictator without any serious internal opposition...Obama needs to have a source of military power that is under his direct control. Like Hitler, he needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any opposition that might arise....He needs Brown Shirts -- thugs who will do his bidding without any reference to law. So, Obama will claim we need a national police force in order to fight terrorism and crime. The Boston bombing is a useful start, especially when combined with random shootings by crazy people. Where will he get his "national police"? The NaPo will be recruited from "young out-of-work urban men" and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities. In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama's enemies.

This is the passage everyone is--rightly--focusing on, because this is where the crazy gets serious. And that's all fine and good; no doubt Glenn Beck is kicking himself for not having latched onto this little bit of anti-Obama fictionalizing already. But while everyone rolls their eyeballs (or, I suppose, gobbles it all up as The Honest Truth), no one seems to have pointed out that someone has already told this exact same story. That, in short, Card, once a tremendous fantasist, is trotting out some fairly lame and well-worn paranoia here. How well-worn? Well, how about the fact that this plot twist was the climax to a popular British television program, also a story of a chief executive's grasp of completely power, twenty years ago? Behold:



So, this is what I think. Card, stewing about the collapse of Western civilization and American power and traditional marriage from his home in North Carolina as he is apparently somewhat want to do, was playing around on Netflix, and stumbled on to To Play the King. "Oh my gosh," he thinks to himself, "this is it! Obama is actually Francis Urquhart! I've got to get this in print--no one has imagined this parallel before!!" And so off he goes, spinning out his tale. The problem, of course, is that every minimally literate Tea Partier, whether or not they ever watch the BBC (and I guess, why would they? it's socialist, after all!), has long since imagined this and numerous other lurid scenarios, the stories which lay out such political fantasies having been long since absorbed into the popular imagination. Which, in the end, is my only real beef here. Look, if you're the sort of person who believes that an unfortunately moderate-progressive liberal president who is manifestly friendly to Wall Street and the corporate powers that be is actually a charming, faux-patriotic secret fascist who is plotting the overthrow of the United States of America--or at least the sort of person who enjoys entertaining such notions to keep you fired up during the day--more power to you. But if you're Orson Scott Card, professional writer, couldn't you at least come up with something a little more original? I mean, honestly.