"Advent: A Self-surrender at the Heart of the World"

A beautiful article at this blog "dedicated to the writings of the Jesuit priest and martyr–Alfred Delp,"  Delp was "a German Jesuit priest, and philosopher of the German Resistance. Part of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group, he is considered a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism."

This comes from Tegel Prison, Berlin, and December 1944:

The deepest meaning of Advent cannot be understood by anyone who has not yet first experienced being terrified unto death about himself and his human prospects and likewise what is revealed within himself about the situation and constitution of mankind in general.

The entire message about God’s coming, about the Day of Salvation, about the redemption drawing near, will be merely divine game-playing or sentimental lyricism unless it is grounded upon two clear findings of fact.

The first finding: insights into, and alarm over powerlessness and futility of human life in relation to its ultimate meaning and fulfillment. The powerlessness and futility are boundaries of our human existence and are also consequences of sin. At the same time, we are keenly aware that life does have an ultimate meaning and fulfillment. The second finding: the promise of God to be on our side, to come to meet us. God resolved to raise the boundaries of our existence and to overcome the consequences of sin.

However, as a result, the basic condition of life always has an Advent dimension: boundaries, and hunger, and thirst, and the lack of fulfillment, and promise, and movement toward another. That means, however, that we basically remain without shelter, under way, and open until the final encounter, with all the humble blessedness and painful pleasure of this openness.

Therefore there is no interim finality, and the attempt to create final conclusions is an old temptation of mankind. Hunger and thirst, and desert journeying, and the survival teamwork of mountaineers on a rope—these are the truth of our human condition. The promises given relate to this truth, not to arrogance and caprice. There really are promises given to this truth though, and we can and should rely upon them. The truth will make you free (Jn 8:32)

That truth is the essential theme of life. Everything else is only expression, result, application, consequence, testing, and practice. May God help us to wake up to ourselves and in doing so, to move from ourselves toward Him. Every temptation to live according to another condition is a deception. Our participation in this is existential lie is really the sin for which we today—as individuals, as a generation, and as a continent—are so horribly doing penance. The way to salvation will be found only in an existential conversion and return to truth. 

More at the link.  HT Sublunary Sublime.

Politics and religion

Awhile back, I posted some thoughts on an article titled There Really Are Two Americas: Republistan and Democravia at The Atlantic. 

Actually the bigger problem is this: now that religion has fallen out of favor - or is seen in great part as a marker of tribal and cultural loyalties - politics has taken its place in a totalizing way. The headline and content of this article demonstrate this very clearly.

Religion - and in the same way, philosophy - once helped people recognize their own shortcomings, and offered a program of working towards virtue by means of self-discipline; politics is always about somebody else's shortcomings, and offers only argument and discord. Granted, those things are sometimes needed - but can never be the entirety of what life is about, or accurately describe human experience.

The inner, spiritual life - and the common humanity people always found at the heart of spiritual practices - has been completely sacrificed to external, tribal, political loyalties. (Modern religion isn't interested in spiritual practices, either, BTW.)

Under the political description of living, people become rigid, narrow, sclerotic - entirely and myopically dedicated to their own small vision of the world, always focused on the present moment and personal "rights" - which are usually somehow being violated by their enemies on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And all this is happening in one of the richest countries in the world; it reminds me of what they say about politics in the university: the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.

We then went on to discuss this a little.  One person thought this "rings true in modern America" - but that "religion has historically had the nasty 'my side is the right and the enemy needs to be destroyed'  mentality and still does in parts of the world (including in parts of the U.S.)."
Also, interestingly, that "In some sense, modernity changed religion both by making it more reflective and by making it less relevant to a large portion of the population. Nevertheless, the basic human tendency to form tribal loyalties and hate those who are different from us has not really left us, and perhaps we have been transferring the receptacle of that tribal mentality from the religious sphere to the political sphere."

(At some point I'd like to talk about that "modernity made religion more reflective and less relevant" thing.  That's in an interesting idea!)

I replied (to the "religion has historically had the nasty 'my side is the right and the enemy needs to be destroyed' mentality" thought) that:

You're right, of course, that this does happen and has in history. But the fact that it's happening now, in a secular society, is a pretty important clue as to where it actually originates: in human beings. I'd say it's an atavistic impulse, common to all of us, just as you describe.

Ironically, religion is the only thing I know of that also offers the antidote: self-criticism and "repentance," and on a regular basis. Some historical philosophies have also done this, but I'm not aware of any current ones that do.

Also, religion (and philosophy) offer a bigger-picture conversation about meaning; this is spiritually important - and also helps people get some distance from and perspective on their immediate perceptions and issues.

Without something like this, I don't see anything changing soon, I have to say....

My interlocatur (love that word!; been watching Hercule Poirot on Netflix recently, so it seemed to be a perfectly natural usage here) then replied:

I generally agree with you, but I am skeptical whether it is in our human nature to elevate ourselves to the lofty goals of self-criticism and repentance that religions often suggest. We often deceive ourselves that those requirements are for everyone else, but we are absolved from them. Or at least, I admit to being guilty of that some of the time.

And that response, I think, is really important!   This person is self-aware already, and at least somewhat attuned to some of these ideas about the inner life - yet still thinks of self-criticism as a "lofty goal," rather than a discipline necessary for living life.

It's interesting, too, that this person is apparently unaware of something like the Sacrament of Confession - which was absolutely central to Western life for the past 2,000 years.  It all seems terrifically unlikely - if not impossible - to him.

And that is where we really are, I believe.   Human beings, apart from religion (which is not actually functioning this way for the most part today), have no particular guideposts for living life as human beings.  We have no overarching philosophies for living; we have very little handed-down wisdom about living and growth and maturity in living.

In other words:  we're winging it, all the time.

I went on my usual "self-criticsm" spiel:

You are absolutely right: self-criticism is foreign to our nature; that's why it always has to be a formal discipline.

And that's exactly the point, in my view: religion offered a "formal discipline" of this kind, as did various philosophical systems in history. Other groups use such formal systems, too: soldiers, for instance - but of course not everybody is or can be a soldier. (The Samurai system in Japan is a clear example of something like this: the combining of philosophy with the warrior arts. But as far as I can telll all military groups do it, implicitly if not explicitly.)

Hospitals and medical schools do this, too; there are periodic meetings called "Morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences" during which failures and mistakes are looked at and analyzed. So this applies to institutions as well - but it needs to be formalized or it won't happen.

Religion and the various philosophies were formal systems that anybody could adopt; they all pointed towards the idea of "developing the virtues," and used old and tested methods for doing just that. The Sacrament of Confession is a good example in Christianity - and monks and nuns throughout history have developed various systems for deeper and more formal self-examination (called "examen"). Jews have Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. Muslims also do this, I believe, during Ramadan. Not sure about Buddhism, but it, too, clearly, is a formal system aimed at changing people from the inside out.

But these systems - outside the religious ones, which still exist but are far less widely used - are no longer in use, generally. In fact, I wonder how many people could name, say, the Classical Virtues today - or are even aware there WAS such a designation. I couldn't, until a few years ago.

People in the past knew, though, that human beings needed such disciplines, and believed it was worth working through them; I'm not sure we do anymore.

One person, interestingly, said, "I could not agree with you more about our shortcomings spiritually."    Which I was interested by and glad to see.    He added:  "I also think all this rooting for red versus blue and treating politics like pro-football (at best) or pro-wrestling (at worst) is actively supported by the media, has distorted our perception of each other as citizens who share a country and values, and has undermined our ability to have meaningful conversations leading to fair solutions to major problems."

I've noticed many times in A.A. meetings that talking about "the life of the spirit" - a difficult-to-define-precisely topic, but like pornography: you know it when you see it - is a way of getting people and meetings centered; when it happens, people leave saying things like "Wow, we are sure lucky to have these meetings."  I think that's what this person was saying.

All this is to say:  as Anglicans, we may be in a good position to help people spiritually.   We have a great deal of experience with avoiding the "my side is the right and the enemy needs to be destroyed" syndrome.  We don't generally do religious warfare over "beliefs."

Our shortcoming, though, is that we're generally not very aware of - or at least willing and able to discuss - the "inner life," and of what our faith is actually doing for us in that regard - or what it is for, generally speaking.    We need more fluency in this. 

I'm wondering, more generally, though:  where have all the "philosophies of living" gone?    Did religion destroy them, back thousands of years ago, so that we're left with nothing at all in this respect now that religion has fallen out of favor?

I think we need them back, myself;  I think somebody is going to have to start some new pragmatic philosophical systems.   (Hint:  A.A. would be a good place from which to start.....)

"How to read in 2013"

Here's Ross Douthat's column in the Times today.  I want to point to it for a couple of reasons.

First, I think he's right - that the big problem we have is that we've all separated from one another, like oil and water, and essentially live completely apart from one another, both physically and virtually.  It's very easy, at that point, for each side to caricature the other - and we really almost never admit that the other side may have something important to say (although I do think this is changing a bit).  This is just not healthy - mainly because everybody's kind of out of reality on this account. 

The second thing I want to point out is that second-to-last paragraph, where Douthat talks about his hope that getting a wider view will "unsettle minds a little."    The "unsettling" he's talking about addresses, I think, two similar but slightly different conditions.  The first has to do with "mindset" - a hardening of position; he thinks listening to arguments from "the other side" will pry people a bit loose from their "set" ideas.  

The second is a commentary on the human condition itself, I think - and is coming out of  Douthat's Catholicism.  Because the Christian story - the whole Judeo-Christian story, actually - is one that "unsettles" the world - including the interior world - continually.   This is its most important feature, in my opinion; it's what allows for - commands, in fact! - the metanoia that permits us to live in an interally revolutionary way.   There is much, much more to say about this, but for now here's the whole article.

COME what may in the next 12 months, 2013 has this much going for it: It’s a year without a midterm election, and a year that’s as far removed as possible from the next presidential race. This means that for a blessed 365 days you can be a well-informed and responsible American citizen without reading every single article on Politico, without hitting refresh every 30 seconds on your polling-average site of choice, without channel-hopping between Chris Matthews’s hyperventilating and Dick Morris’s promises of an inevitable Republican landslide.

So use the year wisely, faithful reader. For a little while, at least, let gridlock take care of itself, shake yourself free of the toils of partisanship, and let your mind rove more widely and freely than the onslaught of 2014 and 2016 coverage will allow.

Here are three steps that might make such roving particularly fruitful. First, consider taking out a subscription to a magazine whose politics you don’t share. I’m using the word “subscription” advisedly: it may sound fusty in the age of blogs and tweets and online hopscotching, but reading the entirety of a magazine, whether in print or on your tablet, is a better way to reckon with the ideas that its contributors espouse than just reading the most-read or most-e-mailed articles on its Web site, or the occasional inflammatory column that all your ideological compatriots happen to be attacking.

So if you love National Review’s political coverage, add The New Republic or The Nation to your regular rotation as well. If you think that The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is the last word on current affairs, take out a Weekly Standard subscription and supplement Jeffrey Toobin with Andy Ferguson, Adam Gopnik with Christopher Caldwell. If you’re a policy obsessive who looks forward every quarter to the liberal-tilting journal Democracy, consider a subscription to the similarly excellent, right-of-center National Affairs. And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.

Second, expand your reading geographically as well as ideologically. Even in our supposedly globalized world, place still shapes perspective, and the fact that most American political writers live in just two metropolitan areas tends to cramp our ability to see the world entire.

So the would-be cosmopolitan who currently gets a dose of British-accented sophistication from The Economist — a magazine whose editorial line varies only a little from the Manhattan-and-D.C. conventional wisdom — might do well to read the London Review of Books and The Spectator instead. (The multilingual, of course, can roam even more widely.) The conservative who turns to Manhattan-based publications for defenses of the “Real America” should cast a bigger net — embracing the Californian academics who preside over the Claremont Review of Books, the heartland sans-culottes at RedState, the far-flung traditionalists who write for Front Porch Republic. And the discerning reader should always have an eye out for talented writers — like the Montanan Walter Kirn, the deserving winner of one of my colleague David Brooks’s Sidney Awards — who cover American politics from outside D.C. and N.Y.C.

Finally, make a special effort to read outside existing partisan categories entirely. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean reading reasonable-seeming types who split the left-right difference. It means seeking out more marginal and idiosyncratic voices, whose views are often worth pondering precisely because they have no real purchase on our political debates.

Start on the non-Republican right, maybe, with the libertarians at Reason magazine, the social conservatives at First Things and Public Discourse, the eclectic dissidents who staff The American Conservative. Then head for the neo-Marxist reaches of the Internet, where publications like Jacobin and The New Inquiry offer a constant reminder of how much room there is to the left of the current Democratic Party.

And don’t be afraid to lend an ear to voices that seem monomaniacal or self-marginalizing, offensive or extreme. There are plenty of writers on the Internet who are too naïve or radical or bigoted to entrust with any kind of power, but who nonetheless might offer an insight that you wouldn’t find in the more respectable quarters of the press.

If these exercises work, they’ll make 2013 a year that unsettles your mind a little — subjecting the views you take for granted to real scrutiny, changing the filters through which you view the battles between Team R and Team D, reminding you that more things are possible in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by John Boehner and Harry Reid.

Then, and only then, will you be ready to start counting the days till the 2016 Iowa caucuses arrive.

"Obama the moderate Republican: What the 2012 election should teach the GOP"

This from William Saletan at Slate Magazine; seems about right to me.   The hysteria over Obama's election has really shocked me in its virulence; I'm not getting what's going on at all.

I don't watch TV anymore, and have not really been following what must have been an absolutely crazy trajectory in politics.  I did vote for Obama myself; I never considered Romney, for a variety of reasons.  I've never voted for a Republican for President, matter of fact. 

I really had no idea it was this bad out there.  It's something of a major shock to read the things being said and written when you haven't been a frog in the pot, sitting there getting used to the warming water.

I'm beginning to wonder if today's echo-chamber politics is maybe truly dangerous....

Cheer Up, Republicans
You’re going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.

Dear Republicans,

Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I’ve been there many times. You’re crestfallen. You can’t believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.

Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.

I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when you’re trying to beat the guy, it’s hard to let go of that image of him, just as it’s hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and you’re staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.

Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibility—insisting that people carry private insurance so we don’t have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitals—was a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.

Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaida’s leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iran’s economy to its knees. That’s why Romney had nothing to say in last month’s foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

"The Party of Work"

Brooks again, at NYTimes.com.   He makes some interesting (and I think very accurate) points here, and I agree with him - except I think that Democrats are the ones poised to be able to accomplish what he recommends here.   I've read so many strange "America is over" post-election essays from the Republican side, and I honestly cannot understand where this is coming from.  It seems completely wacko, to me.  I guess it's what  Brooks is saying here:  that many Republicans have had this romantic ideal (and self-image) of "the rugged individual and the frontier"  - and that that is what's gone now.  To be honest: I'm glad; good riddance to that whole idea, I say.  I think finding ways to live in community is a lot healthier - and it's what we need to do anyway.

I do suppose that there are some Democrats who want to "be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state" - but I don't know any personally.  The Democrats I know work very, very hard themselves - and I don't know anybody who thinks "the welfare state" per se is the goal.  The idea has always been, in my experience, for government to assist people in achieving a better life for themselves - to help create conditions for that to happen, if necessary - and, of course, to help  people who really can't help themselves.

I honestly don't know anybody who doesn't work or aspire to - so I'm not sure why the Republicans are the "party of work."   Bill Clinton reformed Welfare, after all - that's sort of ancient history by now, isn't it?     (I read an interesting article awhile back about the problems with "meritocracy," and will post that at some point if I can find it; it made some interesting points about the unexamined assumptions built into the notion.)

To me, the problem with the Republican Party is that their media mouthpieces and their hangers-on seem really crazy these days.  From what I'm reading on the web, some really do believe that 47% of the people of the country are basically worthless - and they don't hesitate to express their disdain openly.  How did they ever think they were going to get people to vote for them with that approach?   It's nuts.

I woke up in the middle of the night after the election - didn't know who had won when I went to sleep; I've been going to bed with the chickens lately, especially after the hurricane - and was vastly relieved that Obama won.   The Republican Party scares me these days; it seems, as a whole, totally filled with rage and anger, and just plain out of touch with reality.

Anyway, here's the article; my bold, as usual.

The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.

This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be given maximum freedom to do so.

This is not an Ayn Randian, radically individualistic belief system. Republicans in this mold place tremendous importance on churches, charities and families — on the sort of pastoral work Mitt Romney does and the sort of community groups Representative Paul Ryan celebrated in a speech at Cleveland State University last month.

But this worldview is innately suspicious of government. Its adherents generally believe in the equation that more government equals less individual and civic vitality. Growing beyond proper limits, government saps initiative, sucks resources, breeds a sense of entitlement and imposes a stifling uniformity on the diverse webs of local activity.

During the 2012 campaign, Republicans kept circling back to the spot where government expansion threatens personal initiative: you didn’t build that; makers versus takers; the supposed dependency of the 47 percent. Again and again, Republicans argued that the vital essence of the country is threatened by overweening government.

These economic values played well in places with a lot of Protestant dissenters and their cultural heirs. They struck chords with people whose imaginations are inspired by the frontier experience.

But, each year, there are more Americans whose cultural roots lie elsewhere. Each year, there are more people from different cultures, with different attitudes toward authority, different attitudes about individualism, different ideas about what makes people enterprising.

More important, people in these groups are facing problems not captured by the fundamental Republican equation: more government = less vitality.

The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.

For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.

Let’s just look at one segment, Asian-Americans. Many of these people are leading the lives Republicans celebrate. They are, disproportionately, entrepreneurial, industrious and family-oriented. Yet, on Tuesday, Asian-Americans rejected the Republican Party by 3 to 1. They don’t relate to the Republican equation that more government = less work.

Over all, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the six post-cold-war elections because large parts of the country have moved on. The basic Republican framing no longer resonates.

Some Republicans argue that they can win over these rising groups with a better immigration policy. That’s necessary but insufficient. The real problem is economic values.

If I were given a few minutes with the Republican billionaires, I’d say: spend less money on marketing and more on product development. Spend less on “super PACs” and more on research. Find people who can shift the debate away from the abstract frameworks — like Big Government vs. Small Government. Find people who can go out with notebooks and study specific, grounded everyday problems: what exactly does it take these days to rise? What exactly happens to the ambitious kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity?

Don’t get hung up on whether the federal government is 20 percent or 22 percent of G.D.P. Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.

At Poets.org today:

Election Day, November, 1884
by Walt Whitman
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, 'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing     and disappearing, Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi's stream: —This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name—the still small voice vibrating—America's     choosing day, (The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,) The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont,     Virginia, California, The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict, The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict, Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all, Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross: —Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

"What Moderation Means"

Brooks, in NYTimes.com today.

Over the past month, Mitt Romney has aggressively appealed to moderate voters. President Obama, for some reason, hasn’t. But, in what he thought was an off-the-record interview with The Des Moines Register, Obama laid out a pretty moderate agenda for his second term.

It occurred to me that this might be a good time to describe what being a moderate means.

First, let me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.

Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn’t ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream — committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.

This animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike. It means that we have a tradition of conflict. Over the centuries, we have engaged in a series of long arguments around how to promote the American dream — arguments that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides balanced. She understands that most public issues involve trade-offs. In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension. The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.

Americans have prospered over the centuries because we’ve kept a rough balance between things like individual opportunity and social cohesion, local rights and federal power. At any moment, new historical circumstances, like industrialization or globalization, might upset the balance. But the political system gradually finds a new equilibrium.

The moderate creates her policy agenda by looking to her specific circumstances and seeing which things are being driven out of proportion at the current moment. This idea — that you base your agenda on your specific situation — may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.

For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right. Situations matter most. Tax cuts might be right one decade but wrong the next. Tighter regulations might be right one decade, but if sclerosis sets in then deregulation might be in order.

Today, we face our own set of imbalances. Inequality is clearly out of whack. The information age, family breakdown and globalization have widened income gaps. Government spending and government debt are also out of whack. The aging population and runaway health care costs have pushed budgets to the breaking point. There’s also been a hardening of the economic arteries, slowing growth.

The moderate sees three big needs that are in tension with one another: inequality, debt and low growth. She’s probably going to have a pretty eclectic mix of policies: some policies from the Democratic column to reduce inequality, some policies from the Republican column to reduce debt.

Just as the founding fathers tried a mixed form of government, moderates like pluralistic agendas, mixing and matching from columns A, B and C. They try to create harmonious blends of policies that don’t, at first glance, go together.

Being moderate does not mean being tepid. It will likely take some pretty energetic policies to reduce inequality or control debt. The best moderates can smash partisan categories and be hard-charging in two directions simultaneously.

Moderation is also a distinct ethical disposition. Just as the moderate suspects imbalance in the country, so she suspects it in herself. She distrusts passionate intensity and bold simplicity and admires self-restraint, intellectual openness and equipoise.

There are many moderates in this country, but they have done a terrible job of organizing themselves, building institutions or even organizing around common causes. There are some good history books that describe political moderation, like “A Virtue for Courageous Minds” by Aurelian Craiutu, a political scientist at Indiana University. But there are few good manifestoes.

Therefore, there’s a lot of ignorance about what it means to be moderate. If politicians are going to try to pander to the moderate mind-set, they should do it right. I hope this column has helped.

Conor Friedersdorf: "Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama"

In The Atlantic; here's the whole thing:

Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney's flaws, which I've chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.

Don't they see that Obama's transgressions are worse than any I've mentioned?

I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. 

Nope.

There are folks on the left who feel that way, of course. Some of them were protesting with the Occupy movement at the DNC. But the vast majority don't just continue supporting Obama. They can't even comprehend how anyone would decide differently. In a recent post, I excoriated the GOP and its conservative base for operating in a fantasy land with insufficient respect for empiricism or honest argument.

I ended the post with a one-line dig at the Democratic Party. "To hell with them both," I fumed.

Said a commenter, echoing an argument I hear all the time:

I mean, how can someone who just finished writing an article on how the Republican Party is too deluded, in the literal sense, to make good decisions about anything not prefer the other party?

Let me explain how.

I am not a purist. There is no such thing as a perfect political party, or a president who governs in accordance with one's every ethical judgment. But some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying. Most of you will go that far with me. If two candidates favored a return to slavery, or wanted to stone adulterers, you wouldn't cast your ballot for the one with the better position on health care. I am not equating President Obama with a slavery apologist or an Islamic fundamentalist. On one issue, torture, he issued an executive order against an immoral policy undertaken by his predecessor, and while torture opponents hoped for more, that is no small thing.    

What I am saying is that Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. Everyone must define their own deal-breakers. Doing so is no easy task in this broken world. But this year isn't a close call for me.

I find Obama likable when I see him on TV. He is a caring husband and father, a thoughtful speaker, and possessed of an inspirational biography. On stage, as he smiles into the camera, using words to evoke some of the best sentiments within us, it's hard to believe certain facts about him:    

1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn't "precise" or "surgical" as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue. 
2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.  
3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security. 

In different ways, each of these transgressions run contrary to candidate Obama's 2008 campaign. (To cite just one more example among many, Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers. In fact, under Obama, Bush-era lawbreakers, including literal torturers, have been subject to fewer and less draconian attempts at punishment them than some of the people who conscientiously came forward to report on their misdeeds.) Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won't win. I am supporting him because he ought to. Liberals and progressives care so little about having critiques of the aforementioned policies aired that vanishingly few will even urge that he be included in the upcoming presidential debates. If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn't as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don't know. I can imagine he'd kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn't kill any. I can imagine that he'd kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

To hell with them both.

Sometimes a policy is so reckless or immoral that supporting its backer as "the lesser of two evils" is unacceptable. If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

If not?

So long as voters let the bipartisan consensus on these questions stand, we keep going farther down this road, America having been successfully provoked by Osama bin Laden into abandoning our values.

We tortured.

We started spying without warrants on our own citizens.

We detain indefinitely without trial or public presentation of evidence.

We continue drone strikes knowing they'll kill innocents, and without knowing that they'll make us safer.

Is anyone looking beyond 2012?

The future I hope for, where these actions are deal-breakers in at least one party (I don't care which), requires some beginning, some small number of voters to say, "These things I cannot support." 

Are these issues important enough to justify a stand like that?

I think so.

I can respect the position that the tactical calculus I've laid out is somehow mistaken, though I tire of it being dismissed as if so obviously wrong that no argument need be marshaled against it. I am hardly the first to think that humans should sometimes "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." I am hardly the first to recommend being the change you want to see. I can respect counterarguments, especially when advanced by utilitarians who have no deal-breakers of their own. But if you're a Democrat who has affirmed that you'd never vote for an opponent of gay equality, or a torturer, or someone caught using racial slurs, how can you vote for the guy who orders drone strikes that kill hundreds of innocents and terrorizes thousands more -- and who constantly hides the ugliest realities of his policy (while bragging about the terrorists it kills) so that Americans won't even have all the information sufficient to debate the matter for themselves?

How can you vilify Romney as a heartless plutocrat unfit for the presidency, and then enthusiastically recommend a guy who held Bradley Manning in solitary and killed a 16-year-old American kid? If you're a utilitarian who plans to vote for Obama, better to mournfully acknowledge that you regard him as the lesser of two evils, with all that phrase denotes.

But I don't see many Obama supporters feeling as reluctant as the circumstances warrant.

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans -- along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers -- just aren't valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama's tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man's transgressions, have done over and over again.  

Keen on Obama's civil-libertarian message and reassertion of basic American values, I supported him in 2008. Today I would feel ashamed to associate myself with his first term or the likely course of his second. I refuse to vote for Barack Obama. Have you any deal-breakers?

How is this not among them?

"Angry At Washington Gridlock? You May Want To Look In The Mirror"

Via NPR:

Like plenty of other voters, Tony Hocamp is disgusted by Washington. Too often, he says, politicians put their partisan interests ahead of doing what's right for the country.

"The politicians we have in office right now are concerned about nothing but themselves and getting re-elected," says Hocamp, who runs a motel in Marengo, Iowa.

It's easy to get upset during a political era in which the leaders of the two major parties seem incapable of putting aside their differences and working together to solve the nation's problems.

But if there's plenty of blame to go around, some of it belongs to the voters themselves. They are the ones who have chosen the politicians. Quite often, they reward those who sit at either end of the ideological spectrum while punishing compromisers.

In part, that's because voters are becoming more like rigid partisans — unwilling to see the other side as having any good ideas or political virtue.


"The folks who've worked across party lines are generally being replaced," says Joe Hackney, the Democratic leader in the North Carolina House. "The public does ultimately hold the key to that."

Recent polls underscore how much more polarized Americans have become.

Public perception about whether the economy is getting better is increasingly divided along partisan lines. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of people who said they'd be upset if their children married someone from the other party has jumped to 40 percent from 5 percent.

We live in an era when the choice of chicken sandwiches can become a political marker. In one widely noted poll last week, even people's beer preferences were shown to be predictable based on their partisan inclinations.

Increasingly, Americans are going so far as to change their opinions about key issues in order to better match their partisan group, says Bill Bishop, co-editor of The Daily Yonder, which follows rural issues.

"With issues as close to their heart as abortion and gay marriage, people are changing what they believe to stay with their [political] tribe," he says.

Bishop commissioned a poll, which was released last week, that found people split along partisan lines when it came to their responses to immigration. Fair enough. But they split even more when informed that they were hearing the Republican or Democratic platform planks on the issue.
In other words, just knowing the partisan label behind a position made people more likely to embrace or reject it.

"If you ask people how they feel about the deficit or the DREAM Act, you'll find people are hovering around the middle," says Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford University. "But over time, they have internalized the rhetoric they hear, that everyone on the other side is a total fill-in-the-blank."

Iyengar co-authored a new study concluding that people's hostility to the "other" party has spiked in recent decades. There's an echo chamber effect to this.

People are more likely to get their news from partisan news outlets and social media than they were a generation ago. And Americans are increasingly likely to live among people who share similar partisan leanings, says Bishop, who wrote a book called The Big Sort about this phenomenon.

Back in 1976, only about one-fourth of Americans (26.8 percent) lived in landslide counties, which Bishop defines as giving the Democratic or Republican presidential candidates margins of 20 percentage points or higher. By 2008, nearly half of Americans lived in landslide counties (47.6 percent).

Because Americans are able to shop around, in essence, for support for their own opinions through geography and media, they are now more polarized than Europeans — exactly the opposite of what was the case 30 years ago, says Torben Lütjen, a political scientist at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany.

Lütjen is studying heavily Democratic Dane County and heavily Republican Waukesha County in Wisconsin, finding that people in these strongholds have completely separate and distinct worldviews and can't fathom their counterparts in the other place.

"We all love compromise," Lütjen says. "Then again, we only love compromise that serves our own interests."

There are political scientists who believe that it's still mainly the political "elites" — officeholders and interest groups — who are heavily polarized. Average voters, they maintain, are not so ideologically divided.
"The electorate has become more polarized, but not hugely so," says Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Voters are simply responding to the choices they're given by a political and primary system that is "essentially rigged to favor extremists," he says. "You cannot have moderate voters without moderate candidates."

The number of voters who describe themselves as independent has been growing in recent years. Still, even they tend to hold strong partisan inclinations, says Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska.

Many people, regardless of affiliation, subscribe to the mistaken belief that a big majority of Americans think the way they do, she says, and that it's only the intransigence of politicians that keeps them from doing the right thing.

"As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has," as the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton once put it.

The world looks different to voters in, say, Iowa City than it does to those in more rural Marengo, Iowa — or those in liberal Rhode Island, versus more conservative Texas. Rather than simply being a partisan universe of its own, Congress thus mirrors differences that exist among voters in the country.

And those differences aren't likely to fade anytime soon, says Alan Abramowitz, author of the recent book The Polarized Public.

Voters are increasingly divided by race, along cultural lines, on ideological grounds and by geography, says Abramowitz, who teaches political science at Emory University.

"There's a very strong division among white voters that didn't used to exist or used to be very small, based on religious beliefs and practices," Abramowitz says. "For the people who care about them, on those issues, it's very hard to compromise."