Calling Out Sedition.

At Campaign for America's Future, Sara Robinson says if it looks like sedition and acts like sedition, maybe we should call it sedition. (h/t to Talk to Action):

These two events are a wake-up call for progressives. They're telling us that it's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of constitutional democracy in America. When they're in power, they mismanage it and defund it. When they're out of power, they refuse to participate in running the country at all -- indeed, they throw all their energy into thwarting the democratic process any way they can. When they need to win an election, they use violent, polarizing, eliminationist language against their opponents to motivate their base. This is sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater.

This long assault has gone into overdrive since Obama's inauguration, as the rhetoric has ratcheted up from overheated to perfervid. We've reached the point where you can't go a week without hearing some prominent right wing leader calling for outright sedition -- an immediate and defiant populist uprising against some legitimate form of government authority.

Moderates and liberals are responding to this rising threat with feckless calls for "a return to civility," as if all that's needed to put things right again is a stern talking-to from Miss Manners. Though that couldn't hurt, the sad fact is that we're well past the point where it's just a matter of conservatives behaving like tantrum-throwing spoiled brats (which they are). When a mob is surrounding your house with torches and telling you they intend to burn it down, "civility" really isn't the issue any more.

At that point -- and we're there -- criminal intent and action become the real issues. Progressives need to realize that the right began defiantly dancing back and forth over the legal line, daring us to do something about it, quite some time ago. And it's high time we called it out -- and, where appropriate, start prosecuting it -- for exactly what it is.

What is Sedition?
Before we start throwing around inflammatory terms like "sedition," it's essential that we understand the strict definition of the word -- and use it carefully and precisely, lest it lose all meaning.

(That's what happened with the word "fascism," which has been distorted into meaninglessness by hyperbolic overuse on the left and willful redefinition on the right. Once a word is abused and distorted this way, it's very hard to recapture it and restore its original meaning. And that's no small thing, because losing the word makes it functionally impossible to even discuss the political idea the word represents. Worse: as Orwell told us, when we no longer have the language to describe what we're dealing with, we also lose our ability to deal effectively with fascism at all. That's a real danger with loaded words -- so, please, let's be extremely careful about how we brandish this one.)

Here's the defining line we need to hold on to. People who promote subversive ideas, no matter how dangerous those ideas might seem, are completely protected under the First Amendment. Even calling for the overthrow of the government is protected (though not benign, as we'll see later, because it creates justification, permission, and incitement to seditious acts). That's why the conservatives have been safe -- so far.

It's only when those people start actively planning and implementing a government rebellion that it turns into criminal sedition. In this case: the weird rantings on the Hutaree website -- not seditious. The group's allegedly operational plans to assassinate a police officer, ambush the resulting funeral, and thus bring on a national militia uprising -- absolutely seditious, if the charges stick.

This bright-line distinction, which has been part of American sedition law for the past 50 years, parallels closely the line drawn by terrorism analysts in sussing out which groups are benign and which ones are headed for trouble. As I've noted before, one of the cardinal signs these experts watch and listen for is a fundamental shift in rhetoric. In the early stages of dissent, groups establish the lines of conflict by obsessively focusing on their enemies and loudly denouncing their essential evilness. You hear this kind of talk in politics all the time these days. It's always ugly, but not inherently dangerous.

Impeach Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.

Bill Berry at Madison's Cap Times calls for the impeachment of Justice John Roberts:

If you’ve been around long enough, you can remember the highway billboards of the 1960s demanding “Impeach Earl Warren.”

Appointed chief justice of the United States by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, Warren went on to anger conservatives for high court rulings, especially in the areas of police arrest procedures, separation of church and state, and civil rights.

The John Birch Society paid for those billboard messages, and while Warren was never impeached, he served as a convenient whipping boy for those who claimed to want a constructionist, not an activist, Supreme Court. My, how times have changed. Current Chief Justice John “Screw the Little Guy” Roberts and his four black-robed sycophants have proven every bit as activist as the Warren court.

The Roberts court’s frightening 5-4 ruling that corporations and unions may spend freely from their treasuries to influence elections is a monumental decision, as in monumentally wrong. Those scrambling to defend it note that the decision might lead to full disclosure of who or, in this case, what is spending money to buy political office. Sure, as if we didn’t know the names of the robber barons that Robert La Follette and Wisconsin’s early 20th century progressives fought.

Krauthammer, Global Warming, and "The New Socialism."

I usually stay away from Charles Krauthammer's columns, finding them often the skilled work of a spoiled child who wants more chocolate and has refused the fact that the colorful box is empty - because he's eaten them all.

But his December 11 column make unfounded claims that can't be ignored; his display of willful ignorance regarding international politics, empty phrases like "socialism," denial of global warming, and blatant adherence to disproven policies (and historical analysis) is an enormous disservice, via syndication, to a nation that is once again trying to find its way in the world with conscience.

Before I get to the krapola he asserts, I think it's worth noting that Krauthammer is from another era, like the sweet old lady who still uses the word "gay" to mean happy and romanticizes, for instance, a time when society was moral and just. The world has gone to heck, he asserts. People just aren't good and honest - like Thatcher and Reagan - any more. No matter than they never were; no matter that ideologies the individual adheres to have been disproven by time and history.

Krauthammer represents the Cato Institute ideologues of the 1980s and 90s. Though they still spew out their dated concepts in a contrived "fresh" fashion, their simplistic positions are obsolete, disproven and meaningless in a world that has proven to be more complicated than the one they want(ed) it to be. Quoting Ayn Rand is not even quaint any more; it is self-deceptive, and destructive at that.

Because Krauthammer is, in this latest blinder, discussing what one could call world entitlements, let me quote a hideous article from the Cato in 1998 by David Kelley. I think it demonstrates what I'm getting at:

...human beings have only recently, in certain parts of the world, taken definite actions to create wealth. Against the backdrop of millennia of human history, it is wealth that stands out and calls for explanation. Poverty is simply the absence of wealth. It is the natural human condition, which persists in the absence of efforts to overcome it.

Kelley asserts that the West has essentially won the wealth race because those in the developing world have been lazy, coddled, become accustomed to hand outs. And like others on the deluded Right, unwilling to acknowledge the privilege from which he makes this observation. Now hear Krauthammer:

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

That environmentalism is a ruse (a religion) to suck as much wealth out of the West as possible, "the new Socialism," is a new Right saw. It denies the existence of damaging climate change and ignores why that change has come about. It demonizes non-Western countries for being subject to Western excess - essentially blaming the victims. Statistically, the West continues to suck resources out of undeveloped countries (uh, that was the purpose of colonialism, constructed by empires and now maintained by corporations) and gives back pollution, paternalistic dictates, guns for more violence, and ignorance.

"Third world kleptocracies" indeed have worked to capitalize on Western aid - and why not? Often non-relief aid is offered in ways that are benign and meaningless to populations ravaged by war, corrupt governments, and monopolization. What incentive does a dictator have to educate his population, to manage incoming aid, to develop "wealth-creating" industry, or to distribute wealth (beyond the vote-culling goat now and then) when money flows in and keeps him fat?

And because of the corrupting effects of capitalism, his subjected people admire the accumulated wealth at their expense. Oh he has two Mercedes Benz, he has been so smart to get so much from the West. He's a big, rich man who deserves his wealth.

The West has pursued and instated dictators for its own purposes - easy control, access of industry, even "insurance" against the spread of communism, markets for second rate products and other regulated items like weapons - with little consideration for the rights of citizens. Instead of blaming foreign policy for the poverty and lack of development in these countries, Krauthammer ignores their modern history and the West's role in it.

He's an egregious mouth-piece for the excesses, privilege, and discriminatory paternalism that have guided Western foreign policy for more than two centuries. Arguing that some cultures contribute more to world society - nee, our Western society - is to see the world from a shoe box, having never moved out into it. Unfortunately, Krauthammer speaks to an audience that as well is susceptible to such rantings. As the national economic crisis squeezes more Americans and encourages them to look for a bogeyman, "the other" has always been a good target. Isolationism has been proven a disaster, but it continues to rebound. The "free-market" has delivered none of it's promises and, without necessary regulation, has proven a perpetrator on individual freedom and wealth both here and abroad, yet some still scream for deregulation. And socialism, as Krauthammer uses the term, stands for communism; yes a failed system but as performed, never socialistic in any way.

I'm actually surprised that he continues to get leverage for the Socialism claims any more. As he uses the term, it never existed. As the EU enacts the term, it has proven a superior form of raising quality of life for even "the least of" citizens. Application of the term to both Communism and, say, Medicaid, is a stretch beyond understanding. But socialism is an old straw man for the myopic Right, bound to get a rise out of those who don't know better.

In short, the governing structures that Krauthammer hangs the flaccid skin of his rant on are hollow definitions, emotionally disturbing to those who don't know better and are under economic constraints, looking for a source of blame.

This column is an excessive example of irresponsibility. Ignore the horrors and damaging legacies of colonialism (by both empire and industry); deny the watershed of facts about global change that will, of course, destroy first those living unprotected in developing countries; pretend that those dirty little countries have no influence on the global environment nor economy; forget the discriminatory role the West has played in installing and supporting corrupt governments around the world; and prey on the insecurities of challenged Americans.

It's a win, win, win, win argument, unless you wish to exert a proper and honest analysis of Western foreign policy and science. And that's, well, beyond Krauthammer's reinforced and small-minded objective. He's got a column to write and emotions to stir, facts be damned.

Majority Rule and Gay Rights in the US

On the same day the House approves a measure to include anti-gay violence as a hate crime, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life announces the results of their recent survey on gay marriage. A clear majority of Americans (57%) support civil unions for lesbian and gay couples, yet:

Over the past year, support for civil unions has grown significantly among those who oppose same-sex marriage (24% in August 2008 to 30% in 2009) while remaining stable among those who favor same-sex marriage. At the same time, opponents of same-sex marriage continue to outnumber supporters overall. An August 2009 Pew Research Center survey finds that 53% oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, compared with 39% who support same-sex marriage, numbers that are virtually unchanged over the past year. [Emphasis mine.]

The study finds that age, sex, education, race, religion, and region all contribute to public views on gay marriage.

Which leads me to the following comment on majority rule and the rights of minorities:

But majority rule, by itself, is not automatically democratic. No one, for example, would call a system fair or just that permitted 51 percent of the population to oppress the remaining 49 percent in the name of the majority.

In a democratic society, majority rule must be coupled with guarantees of individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities and dissenters — whether ethnic, religious, or simply the losers in political debate. The rights of minorities do not depend upon the good will of the majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions protect the rights of all citizens.

Minorities need to trust the government to protect their rights and safety. Once this is accomplished, such groups can participate in, and contribute to their country’s democratic institutions. The principle of majority rule and minority rights characterizes all modern democracies, no matter how varied in history, culture, population, and economy.

From “Democracy in Brief,” by the Bureau of International Information Programs,
U.S. Department of State, http://usinfo.state.gov

Many on the right continue to tout the constitution and majority opinion when they argue against rights of minorities, including those of women, gays, and the elderly, albeit inconsistently. When public opinion reached a majority approval for abortion, opponents skirted majority opinion discussions, citing activist judges and a "culture of death."

Yet, history has shown that democracies, particularly antiquated ones like our own, neglect the rights of minorities. When public opinion fails to protect minority rights, our courts are left to correct the injustice. The success of Proposition 8 in California in November 2008 proved that minority groups will continue to be suppressed, violated, and subjugated if public opinion is relied on for their protection.

The other lesson of Proposition 8 is that fear and out-of-state monies can be used to influence public opinion against minorities.