Why Massachusetts Voters Saw Red
By now virtually every American journalist, amateur and professional alike, has commented on the stunning (but not totally unexpected) victory of GOP senatorial candidate Scott Brown in the bluest of blue states. I’ll be no different, but I’ll try to root around for some less obvious reasons behind the Democrats’ debacle in the land of the Kennedys.
First, the obvious reasons for Brown’s victory:
1. Democrat candidate Martha Coakley ran a poor campaign. She was overconfident, even arrogant — balking at the idea of pressing the flesh, making some unfortunate gaffes (like the crazed notion that Red Sox pitching great Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan), and even taking a week’s vacation during an extremely brief one-month campaign. Remember the tortoise and the hare? Coakley had the long ears in this race.
2. Republican candidate Brown ran an expert campaign. He’s bright, dynamic, upbeat, telegenic — all the elements that add up to instant voter appeal. As the “red” contender in a blue state, he had to try harder than his rival — and did. Even more important, he appealed to the voters’ sense of alienation from the Washington establishment. (More about this later.)
3. Voters used the election as a referendum on the president. And Obama has had the misfortune to preside over a very bad year. Of course, the president shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of blame for the recession, the snarled healthcare mess and other snafus not of his own making. But the perception is that he’s not taking charge. Nearly everyone agrees that he’s smart, decent and conscientious, but so was Jimmy Carter.
Now let’s look at some less obvious reasons for the Republican victory:
1. The people of Massachusetts aren’t especially concerned about healthcare reform. Governor Mitt Romney (a Republican, mind you) left them with nearly universal health coverage, so why would they care if their senatorial candidate planned to quash the national bill now struggling for life in Congress? The voters of Massachusetts were more concerned about carefree government spending and high unemployment.
2. Half the voters in Massachusetts characterize themselves as independents. Yes, the state generally skews to the left, but it’s more a matter of personal philosophy than party loyalty. The Democrats forgot that independents can swing either way.
3. Brown appealed to populist rage and alienation. I can’t stress this point enough. It’s not just the crazed right-wing tea party fanatics who are angry and resentful these days. Most of us (including moderates like me) are fed up with government of the moneyed elite, by the moneyed elite, for the moneyed elite. Even Obama, feared by the right as a closet socialist, has apparently bowed before the power of Wall Street honchos and insurance industry lobbyists. We’re looking at an electorate that has reached the limit of its patience with the status quo.
4. The Democrats now represent the status quo, believe it or not. They’ve been ruling the roost for a year and we’re still unhappy. Voters saw Brown as a rebel and a small-D democrat who would work on their behalf. (Yes, Virginia, even Republicans can be democrats.) The result: Mr. Brown Goes to Washington.
Hell in Haiti: a Post-Mortem
We Americans can’t pretend to grasp the terrifying, cataclysmic, hell-on-earth disaster that struck Haiti this past week. We’ve caught the televised glimpses of ruined buildings and imperfectly shrouded corpses; we’ve read the stories. But we haven’t stood upon a street in Port-au-Prince to hear the cries, smell the smells, dig beneath the rubble or look into the despairing eyes of our fellow humans.
I’m writing about the earthquake from the safety and comfort of my desk here in Philadelphia. I’m not Anderson Cooper; I don’t enjoy his budget or salary (or, I admit, his reporter’s penchant for diving headlong into swirling whirlpools of peril), so my earnest deskbound observations will have to do.
1. We’re looking at what could be the single most devastating disaster ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Estimates of the dead are now soaring toward 200,000, a capital city lies in ruins, and the second-oldest republic in our hemisphere has suffered a setback that has essentially broken its back as a nation. It’s difficult to think about Facebook, “American Idol” or even healthcare reform at a time like this.
2. Haiti has endured a wretched history of calamity and suffering for the past 200 years. By citing Haiti’s “pact with the devil” (in exchange for winning its independence from France two centuries ago), Rev. Pat Robertson added more fuel to the speculation that he’s an evil (or at least senile) maniac. But he got it right in one respect: Haiti seems to be cursed. Yes, it sits astride a major earthquake zone and regularly takes the brunt of brutal hurricanes, but so do at least a dozen other Caribbean island nations. Haiti has long been the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, apparently singled out for chronic misery. Why?
3. Haiti’s poverty reinforces itself on an endless repeating loop. Why are the people of Haiti so unfortunate compared with, say, the Dominicans who share the same island? Haiti’s history is a prime culprit. The Haitian government owed a staggering debt to France in exchange for its independence: a sum of $21 billion (in today’s dollars) to compensate the French government and slaveholders for the loss of their “property.” That debt took 120 years to repay, and it left the country bankrupt. To make matters worse, corrupt leaders like the infamous “Papa Doc” Duvalier robbed the nation’s treasury to enrich himself and his cronies. The people of Haiti were essentially abandoned by their government.
4. Are Haitians partly responsible for their own misery? It seems cruel to blame the victims, but that hasn’t stopped the blamers from weighing in. Here’s a sampling of the many derogatory comments I found on the ABC News website in response to a story about Haitians’ growing frustration with the relief effort:
This is what happens to a society that is based on superstition, lacks education and is overpopulated. Things in Haiti will likely get much more nasty.
Has anyone suggested that they get up off their backsides and help themselves? Could they not go to the airport for themselves?
Wow—what a sense of entitlement! I’m glad we have the resources to help the Haitians get through this disaster, but the fact of the matter is that we owe them NOTHING. If they’re going to get angry and nasty with the people who are there to help, we should simply leave and see how well they can clean up this mess themselves.
They have been a slum land forever. To be brutally honest, this is by far the best thing to ever happen to their country. There is so much cash coming into that country, and they are used to impoverished conditions. … They need to clean up their country, or else the U.N should just take it over, considering the U.S taxpayers will have so many hundreds of millions invested, we SHOULD own it. Then let Trump or someone take it and make a resort/vacation spot like the Dominican [Republic]. They simply do not have the ability to take care of themselves, not now or ever.
Again, it amazes me how stupid those poeple are. If your country is in such bad shape (before the earthquake) and you are so poor to even take care of yourself…… why are you dumb enough to breed and bring other human beings into that kind of poverty. So no, I feel no sympathy for that country right now.
Leave it to the fortunate to gloat over the miseries of the unfortunate. But aside from their utter lack of human sympathy, these merciless pronouncements aren’t entirely unfounded.
Haiti was a paradise once. It boasted an abundance of natural resources. It used to be a major exporter of sugar, rum and coffee. Today it’s virtually a desert. Why? The desperately poor population denuded its own land, burning trees to make charcoal, leaving the once-green hillsides vulnerable to mudslides, flooding and other natural disasters. 98% of Haiti’s trees are gone.
So yes, Haitians had devastated their own country even before the earthquake finished the job. Still, I have to wonder how much differently we Americans would behave if our government, economy and infrastructure suddenly crumbled. Deprived of gas, oil, electricity and money, we might be burning wood for charcoal, too.
5. This is no time to be divisive. Leave it to Rush Limbaugh, that Rajah of Right-Wing Radio, to use the Haiti disaster as an opportunity to snipe at President Obama. Quoth El Rushbo:
This’ll play right into Obama’s hands — humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community — the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country.
All right, Rush was still smarting from the Harry Reid flap, wherein the eminent Democrat eluded the noose for his much-publicized “light-skinned/no Negro dialect” remarks. But only a partisan hack would use the Haitian earthquake to pick away at Obama and undermine his authority. If a colossal human tragedy can’t bring us together for at least a couple of weeks, we’re polarized beyond repair.
6. Here’s what we can do. Donate. Not to the Haitian government, but directly to the nonprofit agencies that are offering hands-on relief. Some groups have requested bottled water as the most urgent donation, but money still ranks right at the top of the priority list. I’ve named three of the most effective organizations below, with direct access to their Haitian relief efforts:
American Red Cross: Call 1-800-REDCROSS or donate online at their website. You can also donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting “HAITI” to “90999.”
Doctors Without Borders: Donate here to aid the medical relief effort.
UNICEF: To help the children of Haiti, donate here.
The Other “N-Word”
Hear that loud squawking noise emanating from the vicinity of Capitol Hill? The feathers are flying in an especially heated dust-up over the latest case of White Politician Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome (WPFIMS).
If you haven’t heard the news, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was quoted in a newly published book, Game Change, as having described a certain presidential candidate named Barack Obama as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Of course, Reid was simply telling the truth. Obama is relatively light-skinned (having had a white mother probably helps in that department). And true, he does speak standard non-ghetto English, at least in part because he was raised by a white family with small-town Midwestern roots.
The most curious portion of Reid’s remark, that Obama had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” also rings true: having immersed himself in the culture of Chicago’s African American community as a young adult, Obama can move effortlessly into the distinctive cadences of black preacher-speak when the occasion demands it. (Of course, when you come down to it, there’s no such thing as a “Negro” dialect; African American, yes… Jamaican or Haitian or Trinidadian, definitely. But we’re splitting semantic hairs.)
It also helps to understand the context of Reid’s remarks, which Republican operatives are conveniently ignoring in their collective call for Reid’s resignation. Apparently Reid was impressed by the young senator from Illinois and spoke with enthusiasm about Obama’s prospects as a presidential candidate.
Why would Reid make a point of Obama’s racial palatability to a predominantly white electorate? Remember, we’re talking about a nation that, during the past 220 years, had elected only WASPs, a handful of Irishmen and an occasional Dutchman to the presidency. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a midwesterner of Swiss-German stock, was the most ethnically exotic individual ever to hold the office before Obama. No Italians, Jews, Greeks, Poles or even Scandinavians had ever made the cut. It almost goes without saying that, given the narrow historical parameters of presidential ethnicity, white Americans would be more responsive to a “light-skinned” black candidate who sounded like them… as opposed to someone who looked and spoke like, say, James Brown.
Obama has manfully dismissed the incident, and so has Harold Ford, the African-American chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. Ford simply called Reid’s remarks “an unusual set of words,” which was both charitable and on-the-mark.
Of course, “Negro” used to be the standard terminology for someone of sub-Saharan African origin. And it’s instructive to note that the current U.S. census form includes “Negro,” along with “African American” and “black,” as descriptors for individuals of that race. But nobody with any sense or sensitivity uses the term “Negro” these days without irony, any more than we use “Oriental” to describe people of East Asian origin. The terms aren’t intrinsically offensive; they’re simply archaic and borderline-comical, which Reid should have known.
Still, the Democrats’ forgiving response to Reid’s remarks caused Republicans to bristle with accusations of double standards. Well do they remember that former Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican, was forced to resign from his post in 2002 for toasting reformed segregationist Strom Thurmond during the latter’s 100th birthday celebration.
Republican party Chairman Michael Steele (an African American) seemed incensed that Reid has been let off the hook so easily by his fellow Democrats. He complained that “the Democrats feel that they can say these things and they can apologize when it comes from the mouths of their own… But if it comes from anyone else, it’s racism.”
Lott shouldn’t have been hounded out of office for his innocent remarks, and neither should Reid. In fact, Reid’s gaffe calls to mind the mild uproar caused by a prominent Democrat who described candidate Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
That Democrat’s name was Joe Biden, who, like Harry Reid, is a certified WPFIMS sufferer. As we all know, Obama subsequently hand-picked Biden as his vice president, an office he holds to this day (relatively gaffe-free, we should mention).
The New Moderate can only conclude that, where verbal gaffes are concerned, it’s the sentiment that counts. Harry Reid’s sentiments were above suspicion. That was good enough for Obama, and it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Religious Extremists: a Moderate Rant
Let me announce, before you and the Almighty, that I’ve officially lost my tolerance for religious fundamentalists of any stripe. I’ve had it with zealots who believe their holy textbooks to be the literal word of God. I’ve had it with the jihads, the smugness, the forced conversions, the notion that one’s own sect boasts an exclusive pipeline to the Divine. As far as I’m concerned, they can all go to hell… or at least heck.
What brought me to this unholy pass? The Christmas underwear bomber — a radicalized Muslim from Nigeria — definitely helped. So did the fanatic who barged into the home of the notorious Danish cartoonist who satirized the Prophet Mohammed. So did the Fort Hood psychiatrist who decided he’d rather kill fellow Americans than fellow Muslims.
Granted, fanatical Muslims are generating the greatest worldwide misery at the moment. But as I took a little time to reflect, I concluded that all fundamentalist religious interpretations are equally archaic, equally obnoxious and equally wrong.
Fundamentalist Christianity depicts us as debased sinners who can be saved only by the sacrificial blood of Jesus. (Those who don’t get with the program or believe in blood sacrifices are condemned to eternal torment.) Fundamentalist Judaism exalts the Jews above all other people — not the surest prescription for amicable relations with the other 99.8% of the world’s population. And of course we all know about the excesses of fundamentalist Islam: the unquenchable libido for world conquest, the systematic oppression of women, the grotesque beheadings, the insane belief in an orgasmic eternity for those who die in the name of the Prophet.
If only it were enough to say “Enough!” But how do you convince millions of diehard believers that their beliefs are simply that: beliefs… and not inerrant God-given truths? (Sorry, but nobody has ever taken dictation from the creator of the galaxies.) How do you roll back 1500, 2000, 3000 years of dogmatic indoctrination lovingly handed down through the generations? Most important, how do you persuade these extreme believers to shift to a more moderate form of belief?
Because I’m not convinced that God is a myth or that all religion is bunk. Religious certainty is bunk, because no living mortal knows the nature or will of God. Our holy scriptures — Jewish, Christian and Islamic alike — are ancient conglomerations of history, mythology, prophecy, dogma and sheer fudge. It’s impossible to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins.
So we’re left with pure faith, which can be a beautiful and noble thing. The world would be a happier and healthier place if religious fundamentalists had the courage to abandon certainty in favor of faith.
The tragedy is that the masses of fundamentalists need certainty to anchor their uncertain place in the cosmos. Mere faith is too nuanced, too reasonable, too moderate. Fanatical religious souls, like fanatical political souls, want to see the world clearly outlined in black and white. No shades of gray. No uncertainty. No wandering in the wilderness. No need to think.
In short, we’ll be sharing the world with religious fanatics for a long time to come.
Farewell to the Great Dismal Decade
10:47 p.m. EST, December 31, 2009. At this moment the Eastern Hemisphere is a decade ahead of the West, though Newfoundland has already made the leap. Soon the other Maritime Provinces will follow, and the midnight meridian will continue to sweep across our planet like the Scythe of Death. The 2000s… the Zeroes… the Aughts… the Noughts… the Naughty Aughties — whatever you might call it, this name-defying decade is being dumped into the dustbin of history. High time, too.
I generally hesitate to dub anything “the worst” — movies, restaurants, books, people or decades. Personal judgments are so subjective, after all. But it’s probably not much of a stretch to commemorate the 2000s as the worst decade of our lifetimes — and by “lifetimes” I mean any living mammal under the age of 150.
If you doubt me, let me refresh your memory with partial catalogue of the past decade’s lowlights:
- The dotcom crash of 2000-2002
- The election of George W. Bush
- Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz
- 9/11
- Reality shows dominating prime-time TV
- The invasion of Iraq on false pretenses
- The disastrous aftermath of the invasion of Iraq
- The Southeast Asian tsunami that eliminated a quarter-million souls in a matter of hours
- The re-election of George W. Bush
- Bush Derangement Syndrome: an allergic reaction by “progressives” to anything sp0ken or done by George W. Bush
- Hurricane Katrina
- The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
- The aimlessness of the U.S. manned space program — let’s go somewhere!
- Somali pirates
- The Taliban
- al-Qaeda
- The widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else
- The outsourcing of white-collar jobs to India and points beyond
- Out-of-control illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexican border
- Out-of-control political correctness stifling free speech and ideas
- The prospect of perpetual war against Islamist fanatics
- The prospect of a slow-motion Islamic takeover of Western Europe
- Endless despotism in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and Iran
- Dubai, the world’s greatest monument to wretched excess
- The baseball steroid scandal
- Texting and its wretched effect on written English
- Texting while driving
- “Sexting”
- The public self-destruction of Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jackson, John Edwards, Jim McGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods and numerous other willing and unwilling tabloid celebrities
- The perpetual conflict between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, with no solution in sight
- Our increasingly futile war in Afghanistan, with no solution in sight
- LOLcats
- Extreme reliance on the Internet at the expense of “real life” (What’s that?)
- The lingering death of newspapers, magazines, bookstores and the American auto industry
- The real estate bubble
- The reckless repackaging of subprime mortgages into fanciful “credit default swaps,” “derivatives” and other incomprehensible “financial products”
- The fact that those incomprehensible “financial products” triggered the worst worldwide financial collapse since 1929
- The fact that we used taxpayer money to bail out the companies that caused the collapse
- The fact that the beneficiaries of the bailout still expect $10 million personal bonuses
- Bernie Madoff
- The Great Recession
- The woeful state of our 401(k)s
- Saying goodbye to retirement
- Moderate Republicans and Democrats being forced to leave their parties to keep their seats
- The Henry Louis Gates arrest, which caused nearly everyone in the country to take sides according to racial affiliation
- Octomom, the “balloon boy” incident and other idiotic pseudo-news concocted by desperate celebrity wannabes
- The rise of “Birthers,” “Tea-Baggers” and other manifestations of right-wing Obama Derangement Syndrome
- Prominent polarizers Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Keith Olbermann, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi
- Double-digit unemployment
- 14-digit national debt
- After endless debate, still no affordable health insurance for the self-employed and unemployed
- The sickening suspicion that lobbyists and rich financiers really do run our government
- The icecaps and glaciers that continue to melt
Had enough desperately depressing recaps of the past ten years? Before you jump off the nearest bridge, remember that the decade wasn’t all bad. The Red Sox, White Sox and Phillies all took turns as World Champions. Harry Potter spawned a new generation of readers — at least until they reach high school. Facebook has been fun. And Obama actually turned out to be a moderate.
Still, based on all the evidence listed above, I think we can safely affix a descriptive label to the nameless 2000s: The Great Dismal Decade. In fact, I can’t think of another decade so dismal on such a grand scale, with the possible exception of the 1860s. (Even during that bloody decade, we still had colossi like Lincoln, Dickens, Melville, Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Victor Hugo, Brahms, Wagner, Disraeli, Tennyson and Queen Victoria strolling the earth.)
Will the new decade bring us a renewal of hope, success, vitality and high spirits? Or will it just be more of the same? Will we look back on The Great Dismal Decade as the last golden age before the final collapse of society as we know it? All we can do is tighten our seatbelts and hope for a smooth ride.
I just looked at my watch, and the new decade is here. Happy New Year, and God help us!
U.S. Healthcare Reform Devoured by Sharks
They smelled blood, in the form of a plump healthcare package nibbling at the fisherman’s line. Meanwhile, the fisherman had a bundle of crises to manage. Preoccupied by Afghanistan, Wall Street, the Great Recession, sinking ratings and a premature Nobel Peace Prize, Obama briefly looked away.
It was enough. The sharks moved in, circled around and began to feast. First the rapacious jaws ripped out the single payer model. Nothing fatal… healthcare reform could live without it. But the next strike was more devastating: the sharks seized the public option and the early Medicare buy-in plan, chewing them both to a ghastly pulp.
Nearly reduced to a skeleton, the doomed creature now looked grotesque enough to repel even those who had admired it. The gasping hulk drifted slowly downward, trailing a cloud of blood and dashed hopes. The sharks, bellies full, rejoiced as much as sharks can rejoice over anything.
Joe Lieberman and his friends in the insurance industry must be rejoicing, too. I still don’t pretend to understand how the wizened Connecticut senator and man-without-a-party suddenly gained so much power over the healthcare proceedings. It might have had something to do with his standing among the insurance giants who fund the campaigns of so many of our elected representatives. But I could be wrong.
I’ve also wondered why the president has submitted to the dismembering of Obamacare with scarcely a whimper of resistance or regret. Somebody even more powerful must be holding a knife to his throat. But again, I could be wrong.
Our venerable republic is the only industrialized nation on earth without a universal healthcare plan. Our citizens are still free to go bankrupt when they have the temerity to contract a serious disease. And naturally, they’re free to die.
Why are we Americans unique among the more enlightened nations in our freedom from universal health coverage? It might be that our fabled spirit of rugged individualism predisposes us to shun safety nets. But I also suspect that our corporatist climate is especially congenial to sharks and their allies. Even when those allies are moderates who should know better, like Lieberman and Obama. Of course, I could be wrong.
Note to a Young Moderate Activist
As a minor star in the largely unnoticed constellation of moderate bloggers, I’ve found myself wondering how we can make ourselves more visible. How do we turn up the heat, emit more light, dazzle the stargazers?
Nils Bergeson is an upbeat twenty-something graduate student with his own centrist blog, aptly called Moderate Thinking. But he’s done something else, something eminently suited to our ultraconnected Web 2.0 era: He’s started a Moderate Thinking group on Facebook. Already more than 1100 members strong, the group can serve as a vital sounding board (and venting arena) for chronically exasperated, alienated moderates like me (and probably like you).
I’ve known Nils as a congenial fellow moderate blogger, but the Facebook forum was a revelation. I had to let him know how valuable a service he was providing for all of us homeless men and women in the vast, voiceless mid-regions of the American political landscape.
Nils: My dream is to create the nucleus of a moderate/centrist movement with our sites, work cooperatively, swap ideas, attract a following and eventually reach critical mass: we moderates would finally become an active, vocal presence to temper the wildly polarized ideas of the right and left.
It won’t be easy. Moderate ideas are sensible and just — but not intrinsically exciting. That’s our biggest problem, because we already have a plurality of Americans (roughly 40%) on our side. (Most of them just don’t know it yet.)
We need to generate excitement for our ideas, and that’s what I try to do at The New Moderate. I use irreverence, humor, anger and passion to promote our cause. Like you and Stephen Erickson, I insist that moderate solutions don’t have to be tepid, middle-of-the-road compromises.
I saw your post on “300,000,000 heads” and I heartily agree: most of the time, the collected wisdom of the people trumps the narrow pronouncements of the ideologues. I’d like to see a few more of those 300,000,000 people get involved here. Your membership list is growing fast, but more of those members need to speak up.
Meanwhile, I’m really glad we’ve connected here. Some of the most prominent moderate bloggers don’t seem interested in anything but their blogs; they write about the “trees” but I suspect they’re not looking at the forest. We’re different, and I think we can MAKE a difference.
There. That felt good. I’m already a little more hopeful about the future. Take Nils and his 1100-plus moderates on Facebook, mix with Stephen Erickson’s ambitious grassroots centrist organization at CenterMovement.org, add my own musings and diatribes here at The New Moderate — and we might have the makings of a potent chemical reaction that flashes its light across the night sky of American politics. I hope the stargazers are watching.
The Minarets of Switzerland
In one of the stranger stories of our strange times, the people of Switzerland voted recently to ban any further construction of minarets in their venerable republic. I have to applaud any country that considers architecture a matter of pressing national importance. (If only we could have voted down some of those glass-and-concrete monstrosities that sprouted in American cities during the ’60s and ’70s!)
But of course the Swiss vote was more than a matter of bricks and mortar. It was a provocative statement on nationalism, religion, immigration, cultural competition and, ultimately, the future of the West.
Here’s what happened. Responding to a vigorous campaign by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (and defying the official position taken by the goverment), 57 percent of voters — and 22 of the country’s 26 cantons — agreed that the pointy-topped Islamic architectural embellishments deserved no sanctuary in Switzerland. The anti-minaret faction saw the offending towers as a political symbol of Islamist fervor; the pro-minaret party stressed the need for religious tolerance.
As a congenital moderate, I can see both sides of the argument. My inner nationalist laments the defiling of pristine European cultures by non-assimilated, non-native elements. The U.S. is a melting pot by nature; Switzerland, though historically tri-lingual, has always displayed a unique quality of Swissness that stamps its character. Think of Heidi, William Tell, meticulous mustachioed watchmakers, Alpine pastures and fondue pots. As much as I love halvah and shish-kebab, those robust Eastern delicacies are simply out of place in the shadow of the Matterhorn.
Of course, my inner Classical Liberal believes that no religion should be suppressed by vote or decree. But what exactly were the Swiss voters deciding when they put the brakes on the burgeoning minaret industry? Were they sending a xenophobic message to their Muslim neighbors… or were they looking to the future, delivering a pre-emptive strike on militant Islam and Sharia law before they could gain a foothold in Switzerland?
Switzerland is six percent Muslim, a number that started at zero only a few decades ago. Given the disparity between native European and Muslim birth rates, you can safely bet that the number is pointed upward. Switzerland already harbors around 150 mosques — should we be alarmed? How could any reasonable person expect the Swiss to tolerate the sound of Muslim muezzins calling the faithful to prayer — six times a day, starting at dawn?
Well, the story isn’t that simple. Only four Swiss mosques include minarets. In fact, the call to prayer is already illegal in Switzerland — as it should be. (Can you imagine the uproar at HuffingtonPost if American churches started broadcasting the Lord’s Prayer from their steeples six times a day?)
President Obama has referred to the muezzin’s call as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth.” (Naturally, that statement ignited more than a little hysteria on the right.) Having heard the call myself while standing atop a medieval tower in Istanbul, I can’t entirely disagree with the president. But aesthetics aren’t the issue here — neither the architectural aesthetics of the minarets nor the vocal aesthetics of the call to prayer. Religious freedom isn’t the issue, either; the Swiss haven’t prohibited or even restricted anyone’s right to practice Islam.
The crux of the matter is symbolism: whether the West should welcome highly visible emblems of a religion that, in its fundamentalist form, calls for the forced conversion (and, failing that, the divinely-sanctioned destruction) of us infidels.
Muslim fundamentalists are at war with the West. We didn’t ask them to make war on us, but here we are anyway. If the fundamentalists had their way, every nation in the West would bow to Mecca and submit to Sharia law. Obviously we can’t permit that kind of cultural transformation in our own societies. But how do we hold back the tide without sending a message of intolerance toward inoffensive moderate Muslims? Can European societies declare that their vaunted guest-worker programs were a disaster, and send their Muslims packing? No, too late for that.
So we’re left with banning public symbols. That’s about all we can do at this point without either compromising our stance on religious tolerance or abandoning Western civilization to the fanatics. It’s a reasonably moderate position, if we can keep it. I suppose we can also pray that Jehovah will help keep Allah’s legions in check. Wait… they’re the same god? Never mind.
Obama’s Afghan Strategy Was Worth the Wait
Sometimes (despite the bestselling advice of guru Malcom Gladwell) it actually pays to think before you act.
President Obama thought long and hard about our role in Afghanistan. He thought and thought and thought, until he started feeling the heat from both the right and the left. It looked as if Obama’s chronic deliberation was going to be his undoing. (For George Bush the Elder it was “the vision thing.” For Obama, it was “the dithering thing.”) Perfectly sane commentators were starting to feel nostalgic for George Bush the Younger. At least Dubya was a “decider.”
On Tuesday, December 1, in his much-anticipated, analyzed, debated and deconstructed address at West Point, our rookie president finally revealed his war plan. It was worth the wait. In fact, he offered a textbook moderate solution (if moderates had textbooks) to an increasingly dangerous and unwieldy conflict.
Here are the realities of the Great Afghan War, both pro and con…
Pro:
- The Taliban aided and abetted al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that attacked the U.S. on 9/11
- Although officially out of power, the Taliban is a resurgent force throughout much of Afghanistan
- Afghanistan’s Islamist terrorists have now spread their operations into neighboring (and nuclear-armed) Pakistan, going as far as to establish Sharia law in some areas — not a good thing
- We need to break the back of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, or the region will become a permanent breeding ground for worldwide terrorist activity
Con:
- With its staggering debts still piling up, the U.S. simply can’t afford the continued costs of an extended war in Afghanistan
- Lesson from Vietnam: we can’t win a war against guerrillas who have no capital, government or infrastructure to surrender; the only way to win is to kill every last enemy combatant
- No world power has been able to subdue Afghanistan: not the British in the 19th century or the Soviets in the 20th
- We can’t justify throwing away thousands of American lives in an unwinnable war
In short, you can make powerful and persuasive arguments both for and against this war. What’s a president to do?
Here’s Obama’s plan, in a nutshell: We’ll escalate our involvement in Afghanistan, but only for 18 months. We’re looking at a classic moderate “yes, but” solution: Yes, we need to ramp up the offense and knock the stuffing out of the Taliban (and al-Qaeda, while we’re at it). BUT we can’t shed our blood and money there forever; we have to do our damage quickly and memorably, then start getting the hell out.
Of course, a moderate can’t please everybody and often pleases nobody at all. Some commentators scratched their heads and wondered why Obama would escalate a war, then set a rigid date for withdrawal — as if we were playing a football game and had to watch the clock.
They missed the point. We DO have to watch the clock in Afghanistan, or we will surely bankrupt our already overextended empire and cause excessive loss of Americn life. We can’t win an open-ended war, because we’d have to kill every Islamist guerrilla in the region. Even then, more guerrillas would sprout up to take their place.
At the same time, we DO need to escalate our involvement in the war, and we need to do it before the tentacles of militant Islam extend their grip throughout South Asia. Moderate solutions are rarely perfect, but they make the best of a messy world.
Afghanistan is more than a brushfire. We can’t expect to extinguish the flames of jihadism there in a mere 18 months. Fanatics don’t surrender easily, if ever. But if we can break their will to fight… if we can banish them to isolated pockets in the dry and dusty mountains, we will have done our job. The Afghan government can take it from there.
Bravo, Mr. President. And good luck!
Are Moderates Just Misfits?
As we enter the final month of the most demoralizing decade in recent memory, I think we moderates need to ask ourselves some critical questions about our place in the world. Don’t worry about the answers. Right now it’s more important to ask the questions than to answer them (though you’re invited to supply us with any solutions that pop into your head).
If you’ve noticed the title at the top of this page, you already know my first question. Are moderates just misfits? Have we crash-landed in our lonely, uncharted, unregarded territory only because we couldn’t land anywhere else? Are we pariahs on the political scene? Do we really know what we believe, other than the fact that we can’t buy what the right-wingers and left-wingers are peddling?
This past weekend I had dinner at the home of a couple I like and respect. Both the husband and wife fit comfortably in the “NPR liberal” mold: they’re ardent vegetarians and members of the local food co-op… they send their two kids to a progressive private school that refuses to grade its students… they donate books to the poor. They’re good and generous people.
When I told them I had launched a blog for moderates, the wife was incredulous. “Do moderates believe in anything?,” she asked in earnest.
I reached deep into my hat and produced the obligatory white rabbit. We moderates believe in restoring a sense of balance, I told her. When we see the boat tipping to one side, we feel an instinctive need to tip it the other way. I said we support “the greatest good for the greatest number,” employing that hoary utilitarian catchphrase in all its sweeping vagueness. I added that our views are flexible and prone to shift over time; a moderate on race relations half a century ago would sound quaintly conservative (if not downright bigoted) today.
So yes, I supplied my friends with answers… but were they satisfactory answers? Did my impromptu apology for moderation give us a recognizable shape, a brand, a credo on which we could build a movement? I’m not sure. I’m afraid my answers gave the impression that we moderates have no fixed values of our own… that we exist primarily to foil those wicked extremists.
I did a little soul-searching after that dinner. I found it interesting that I’m both a longtime moderate and a longtime cynic (although less of a sneering, hard-boiled cynic than a disgruntled idealist who secretly clings to his ideals). I wondered if the two states of mind could be related. A cynic, after all, is inclined to be skeptical of all human certainties. So is a moderate.
I’ve tried to pry myself into the ideological hiking boots of the left, and I’ve attempted to squeeze into the glossy wingtips preferred by the right. Neither pair fits, so essentially I’ve had to cobble my own footwear. Maybe you’ve had to cobble yours, too.
Until now, we moderates have had no lodestars to light our way… no moderate magazines, or moderate activists, or larger-than-life moderate heroes immortalized in statues, verse or TV miniseries. Nobody knows what we stand for, including most of our own tribe, and until now we’ve been content to be left out of the public debate. We’re misfits, all right.
Then I had a minor revelation: in a society gone berserk, being a misfit is a gleaming, 24-karat badge of honor. We moderates swear allegiance to no rigid ideologies, bow at the feet of no preening potentates, drink no Kool-Aid before its time. In short, we own our souls.
We’ve been marginalized, yes… but we’re also free. Free to oppose special interests, with all their willfully self-serving hidden agendas. Free to speak out against coercion, censorship and chicanery. Free to shout “Humbug!” when we observe humbug in our midst.
Odd, isn’t it, that thoughtful moderates have so much in common with thoughtful cynics. We’re misfits, renegades, knights-errant battling windmills. And we get no respect from the safely entrenched insiders. Milquetoasts, are we? Timid and noncommittal? I don’t think so. We’re in good, robust company.
Give us a little time, and we’ll build a movement. We won’t be marching in lockstep; that’s not our way. But we’ll be moving… moving to the center of American political life where we’ve always belonged. Care to join us?
THE NEW MODERATE 