Greenwald invites us to consider a series of bills that enlist government in punishing corporations for views they express, money they donate to causes, etc. Some examples:
I agree with him that the above laws are unconstitutional. Government is prohibited from discriminating or giving unequal protection to the free speech rights of corporations as currently settled law stands (that was indeed one of the caveats he made). Indeed, Greenwald took pains to point out that even in the Citizens United case, not one Supreme Court justice questioned the legitimacy of corporate personhood at all (I addressed Greenwald’s commentary on this matter in more detail here). I also agree with him that The Nation’s Lee Fang takes an unprincipled, politically expedient position against corporate personhood – one cannot confine one’s critiques of the doctrine to only those cases where it acts against one’s sense of justice. Nobody wants to be allied with a hack like Fang less than I.
However, I do take issue with Greenwald’s notion that protecting corporate rights are constitutive to unbiased government. The imaginary laws he suggests are careful to target particularly contentious political issues that divide our nation. I assume his goal here is to show how Fang’s argument could be pressed into the service of a variety of illiberal ends. But why should we only consider narrowly moral issues in light of interventions by government? The examples ably illustrate the heaviness of the hand government uses to skew society to its political vision in general; no need to contain our outrage to only those narrow attempts at referreeing decorum and moral convention.
Indeed, the sole problem I have with Greenwald’s thesis is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough, constituting a blind spot for certain institutional arrangements he (and not simply the Supreme Court) considers beyond dispute. I would argue that the corporate form owes its very existence as a legitimate legal fiction to government intervention in the first place. Not only that, the intervention was designed to favor a certain view – in fact a political, even moral, opinion – of how business should be organized. This view is at least as arbitrary, moralistic and prejudicial as the imaginary laws he righly argues represent state overreach.
As far as I can tell (and I’d be happy to be corrected) Greenwald takes a thoroughly liberal view here that makes a distinction between rational, secular business matters and irrational, polemical moral and religious matters. I hold that this distinction is thoroughly false: government intervention to create and sustain corporate privilege is itself a moral intervention. For example, it has rigged our business environment to prefer capital over labor and business interests over civil interests. That is not just a technical legal matter for our society to work out rationally; rather, I’d argue it circumscribes a great deal of the inequality at the heart of our society’s decay.
I’d like to follow Greenwald’s lead by imagining the following laws:
In each of the above cases, I have not entirely made up the law as Greenwald did – these statements more or less describe the current legal environment. Corporations are created by government when people file paperwork and pay a fee. In return, the government grants them ownership over an entity they may govern. This entity confers on them limited liability for their actions, entity status that people are compelled to respect, and the privilege to abide by different standards than those applied to us flesh-and-blood humans. This is just the beginning of the story of how government intervenes through the corporate form to skew society towards an arrangement with moral and ethical consequences. Among other results, this artificially instituted and imbalanced playing field directly contributes to:
The idea that somehow the above situation is a technical, amoral, secular outcome that government is perfectly at liberty to pursue underlies Greenwald’s entire argument. It’s only when the issue at hand is abortion, or minority rights, or religion, or some other contentious topic on which the elite have not already reached consensus that government must look the other way.
The proper remedy to all of this (besides abolishing the state and privilege at large) is hold all people equal before the law – whether or not they are principals, managers, or shareholders in some contractually created, legally fictitious business entity. This must entail the end of all government favoritism, including that powerful subsidy embodied in corporate privilege. Nobody should be allowed to manipulate society through government force, neither for moral ends nor business advantage.
But more subtly and importantly, the line liberals draw between secular business matters and religious or moral matters is itself an arbitrary, self-serving reordering of society to their liking that underlies their statist politics. Every group with an agenda thinks theirs is different, but the liberal desire for technocratic, rational secularism is just as much a pre-rational value imposed on society as Christian fundamentalist theocracy would be. We could strike a blow for true equality – and accomplish a lot of “progressive” ends along the way – not by encouraging more government picking of winners and losers but by stopping the intervention that has already been going on for a century and a half.
]]>I think after three years of Obama at the helm, we can safely put to rest any notion that he’s any substantively different. Need I list the reasons? Composing “kill lists” for drone strikes that target any “military-age males” and kill scores of innocents. Duplicity on withdrawing from Iraq. Doubling down on Afghanistan. Waging a war on whistleblowers while indeminfying torturers and other criminals. Corporatized health care for all. Continuing and extending bailouts for corporate America. Crackdowns on medical marijuana despite his campaign rhetoric. The NDAA and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists.
Just as it is unwise to be reflexively partisan when voting, it’s unwise to be a reflexive voter at all. I am not the kind of anarchist who believes voting is inherently evil or violent. You have to weigh each opportunity on its own, unique merits, surveying where you can make the most difference. Even when you choose to participate, most of the time the real opportunity has nothing to do with the office being contested or the people contesting it. Because the state is tied up so intricately in the civil society we want to liberate, and engaging those people is the real task anyway, we have to meet them where they’re at.
However, there comes a time when the kind of engagement best fitting the situation involves telling those very people why you’re not meeting them at the polls this year. In 2008 the left had high hopes for an administration that would change our course at home and abroad. Not only hasn’t this happened, we’ve seen a Democratic machine that has become the mirror image of the neoconservatives in terms of imperial hubris. By all accounts this campaign will not be about hope and change so much as fearmongering against a Romney presidency’s social agenda. What a disappointing difference four years make.
Many earnest liberals, progressives and lefties worry about the recent assaults on reproductive freedom and marriage equality. They feel that, since Romney will be no better on foreign policy, they might as well make this about the issues where there is a difference. I don’t think that’s bad reasoning at all. I cannot ask marginalized groups to adopt my priorities and jettison those unique to their situation (I would suggest a lot of this battle is happening at the state level, though).
I can, however, appeal to their long term, positive interests over their short term, defensive instincts. If you look for the difference between any two politicians, you’ll always be able to find something. It might even be on an issue you care about. But you’re not just electing a president on one issue; that man or woman will be empowered to act all issues, disagree or agree. Maybe you’re protecting yourself on one issue, but just because you’re in a group that has a special vulnerability on that issue doesn’t mean you don’t share other, more common vulnerabilities that are just as threatening.
I will stand in solidarity with oppressed groups. But solidarity doesn’t just mean elevating the interests of marginalized groups over your own legitimate interests, let alone over the legitimate interests of other marginalized groups (such as innocent drone victims). Ultimately, an oppressed group that believes it can gain some advantage by selling out the interests of others is not suited to solidarity at all. There are issues that threaten all of us, and issues that threaten some of us. If solidarity means anything, it is uniting the struggles on those two fronts – not selling one or the other out for a politician’s convenience.
Over the long run, it doesn’t do any good for us to simply look harder and harder for the ever-shrinking differences between candidates. All that encourages is the continued convergence of the parties on an increasing amount of issues. The longer that convergence goes on, the more normalized the consensus becomes, so that these stances become the accepted default rather than matters to contest. At some point that has to be understood as simply unacceptable – regardless of what small gain might be possible through backing a candidate.
The trick here is that candidates want you to identify political victory with their short term electoral triumph, because they know they can’t deliver much of what you actually want. Winning the election is what’s important to them, and they want you to think of your interests in terms that reinforce the urgency of that victory. But we should be focused on the people winning, as we construct that through our chosen political perspective, because that should be what’s important to us. Sometimes moving in the right direction long term means folding in the short term. Especially when you’re holding a shitty hand, because it accomplishes nothing but exposing desperation to insist on playing it.
If partisan electoral politics is even worth engaging, it must effect accountability for politicians. There’s only one way you accomplish that: by kicking them out of office. It can’t just be about the other side losing; it has to be about your side being on your side. Voting is a means to an end, and campaigns spend millions to convince you to adopt their ends. Whether or not you vote, it’s vital you remember what your ends are.
]]>Still, I was a bit taken aback when I first heard of Keith’s plans for a four-part series of articles on German jurist Carl Schmitt (Part 1, Part 2). Here was a thinker who provided the legal basis for a continuity between Nazi-era totalitarianism and emergency, extra-constitutional measures in the present “War on Terror”. But as it turns out, Schmitt’s actual scholarship on these subjects has been rather narrowly read over the past eighty or so years. One need not adopt his advocacy for the establishment to see the problems with liberal democracies he pointed out. This passage from Keith’s latest is particularly compelling:
At a fundamental level, there is an innate tension between liberalism and democracy. Liberalism is individualistic, whereas democracy sanctions the “general will” as the principle of political legitimacy. However, a consistent or coherent “general will” necessitates a level of homogeneity that by its very nature goes against the individualistic ethos of liberalism. This is the source of the “crisis of parliamentarianism” that Schmitt suggested. According to the democratic theory, rooted as it is in the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a legitimate state must reflect the “general will,” but no general will can be discerned in a regime that simultaneously espouses liberalism. Lacking the homogeneity necessary for a democratic “general will,” the state becomes fragmented into competing interests. Indeed, a liberal parliamentary state can actually act against the “peoples’ will” and become undemocratic. By this same principle, anti-liberal states such as those organized according to the principles of fascism or Bolshevism can be democratic in so far as they reflect the “general will.”
I think this perspective also has very relevant things to say about current populist phenomena such as the Tea Parties. It’s clear that these people talk the language of individual rights, but behind the language is an earnest desire for a return to a social consensus of the 1950s: a feeling of common purpose, belief and aspiration for white middle class people (even if chaos and betrayal lay seething under the rug). It’s why they can, in one breath, call their movement apolitical, and in the other breath denounce Obama as a Muslim, communist “other”. The homogeneity they seek is nothing if not typical of historical democracies, Schmitt says, which often had stratified societies in which equality was reserved for a particular class.
You won’t agree with all of Schmitt’s thought on the role of the state, parliamentarianism, “states of exception”, etc. But don’t you read enough stuff that you agree with already? Those with different politics see the same world we do; it can’t hurt to hear them out, for they might expose important facets of the human condition that, though we don’t see them, are nevertheless crucial to address. Kudos to Keith for advancing thoughtful anarchist scholarship once more.
]]>The sad truth is everything we are seeing we have already seen. Despite presidents who come and go, permanent war is a hallowed American institution. Start if you will with the War of 1812, the invasion of Mexico, and the carnage of a Civil War. Move to the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their property, the killing, torture, and prison camps in the Philippines, then the blood-drenched 20th century. The 21st likewise dawns red. It never changes. Doves protest, hawks rule, ordinary people pay the penalty. All wars are “just.”
Hint: it’s also the same magazine Time called “the most anti-Bush magazine of the [past] decade.”
Here’s the answer. The biggest element missing from the anti-war movement is the anti-war part. Instead, you get a coalition of exotic interest groups around culture war and identity politics. Wake up - that’s a language neocons speak easily (as long as the criticism can be focused beyond our borders; see the women’s rights arguments for the Iraq invasion).
But as the article goes on to explain, there’s a rich history of antiwar conservatism (see Bill Kauffman on this topic) rooted in American traditions and sensibilities. And it took a monumental upset in the conservative movement to override the prejudices and side projects of the modern, liberal, supposedly anti-war characters in this country. Shameful.
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