This week's No Duh Moment from the GOP, and why they haven't got a prayer

Politico is not exactly the most high-brow publication out there. But today's article, "GOP reality check: Obama looking tougher to beat in 2012", if it's accurate, shows that the Republicans still really don't get it. The premise of the article is that the Republican optimism of the last two years that Obama would go the way of Jimmy Carter in 2012 was perhaps misplaced. Why? Well let's let the Republican frontbench explain it:

Mike Huckabee: “You just don’t go against a billion-dollar mountain of money, a guy who’s already won the presidency once – but he gets to fly in on Air Force One and make all his campaign stops with the trappings of the office.”

Haley Barbour: “Incumbent presidents don’t lose very often, particularly if it’s a president who has taken over from the other party.”

Chris Christie: “He proved he could win once, so that’s one more time than anybody else who has run.”

That last is a staggeringly stupid thing for a pretty smart guy to say. So never mind Obama's policy successes, never mind his statesmanship, never mind any of the man's actual talents. And also never mind the GOP's lack of coherent policies, lack of desire to govern rather than score points, lack of party coherence and above all lack of a candidate. Obama will win because he's already president. I mean, like, duh.

There are more sensible people who offer their opinions in the article. But, significantly, none of them are running for president. It seems like the smart folks in the Republican Party are sitting this one out. So who does that leave us with? Seems to me like a whole slate of not-yet-candidates who each have at least one big reason that they're unelectable. Here's my breakdown, for what it's worth:

England, England über alles...

Most days I spend my time wondering why America can't be more like Europe. Today is not one of those days. From The Guardian:

Huge numbers of Britons would support an anti-immigration English nationalist party [...], according to the largest survey into identity and extremism conducted in the UK.
A Populus poll found that 48% of the population would consider supporting a new anti-immigration party committed to challenging Islamist extremism, and would support policies to make it statutory for all public buildings to fly the flag of St George or the union flag.

Statutory?? It gets worse:

According to the survey, 39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that "immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country". Just over half of respondents – 52% – agreed with the proposition that "Muslims create problems in the UK".

The one thing that I have always found beyond disgusting in Europe is the casual xenophobia of a kind that, in my view, does not really exist in the United States (how do you have xenophobia in a country of immigrants?). But this is shockingly vehement. I mean, "all immigration into the UK to be stopped permenantly"? Really? Really??

Gens du voyage

Those of you in the UK will have heard about the Channel 4 TV show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, one of the more offensively racist offerings on UK public television recently. The Guardian has a moving piece on the lives of Gypsy and Traveler women in its lifestyle section today, and the effect that show has had on people's perception of them.

I often find myself thinking that there is not much development work to be done in Europe these days, outside of the truly poor countries in Southeastern Europe. But it strikes me that many of the issues facing Roma and Travelers are traditional development issues: things like poverty, illiteracy, education, violence, domestic abuse. I think there is also a large gap in understanding between gens du voyage (the French term for Roma and Travelers, which I like) and what the article calls "Settled people". Who of us could possibly identify with this kind of experience:

When Traveller girls are growing up, they are only allowed to go out with other family members, and once married, her husband rules the roost. "The men would never allow a woman out with her friends," says Kathleen. "That's why we want to live on a site, for company." Kathleen, after spending time in a refuge after finally managing to escape her husband, was initially allocated a house, as opposed to a plot on a site. Almost immediately her children became depressed. "It's like putting a horse in a box. He would buck to get out," says Kathleen. "We can't live in houses; we need freedom and fresh air. I was on anti-depressives. The children couldn't go out because the neighbours would complain about the noise."  

Please don't mistake  me - I do not pull that quote out for the sake of romanticizing Gypsy life or to talk about how they are naturally free spirits who should not be tied down or some other nonsense. I just think that someone who hasn't lived that way would have a hard time understanding what someone in such a situation would need, and what would be the best way to help them. This is really about being shut out of a world that doesn't see you as a part of it - what Žižek calls the part of no-part, the essential element of his definition of the Proletariat.There is hard, hard work to be done here - not to integrate gens du voyage into our world, but to expand our vision of the world such that it includes them.

Libya after Qaddafi

Slate does a pretty good job of laying out the challenges in a post-Qaddafi Libya (if we ever get there - which is no sure thing).

Unlike in Egypt, "the army" is not a coherent institution. Qaddafi took care to politicize the military and divide its commanders in order to prevent a coup or other challenges to his rule. Moreover, the army was involved in interventions, such as a disastrous war in Chad, that tarnished its credibility—its battlefield record is not a source of pride. So the military is less able to lead the country out of the mess.
Nor is there a bureaucratic structure that can simply resume basic government functions under new leaders. Qaddafi created one of the world's most bizarre governments, with "people's committees" playing important roles at the local level. Indeed, Qaddafi himself did not hold a government position in any formal sense, even though he was clearly recognized as "the leader." This personalized and politicized system is part of what Libyans hate; it should not survive its creator. But removing Qaddafi's regime demands more than just change at the top.

My suspicion right now is we're looking at a Romania-type scenario in Libya - Qaddafi is gone (in my view he'll probably get the Ceauşescu treatment), but all the old stalwarts of the regime are still in power. That's the game I see them playing with all of these resignations - people like the ex-Interior Minister can claim to have been opposed to Qaddafi all along and introduce a kind of pseudo-democratic one-party rule. But who knows at this stage - almost anything could happen.

The philsophical failure of the Left

Peter Hallward's pseudo-obituary of Neoliberalism in light of what he calls the Arab Spring of 2011 is a classic example of the Left completely failing to take the argument anywhere past banalities about people power and capitalist corruption. The points he makes are good:

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen.

But this is nothing new. He hits all the usual Leftist buttons about the decline of American power and the war of imperialism against democracy, also proffering the kind of sickening praise of Hugo Chávez that seems mandatory on much of the Left. But here his critique seems simply to stop. He celebrates the uprisings in the Arab world without saying a word about what should come afterward - he decries the bank bailout without so much as hinting at an alternative.

Hallward is a political philosopher and one of Alain Badiou's protégés. He is part of the contemporary Leftist intellectual establishment. And he, like Badiou, like Žižek, has nothing positive to offer.

In my view this is the greatest challenge that the Left faces today. The collapse of the Soviet Union obliterated the philosophical argument for Socialism as a practical political-economic system, and the Third Way politics of the Blair and Clinton school only offered palliative care for those ground up in the gears of global Capitalism, rather than offering a challenge and an alternative to the existing economic and political order. We on the left have still not gotten past that. I believe task no. 1 for intellectuals like Hallward, Badiou and Žižek is to construct a program, a manifesto of concrete proposals that can be implemented to create a more just political-economic system. If the political theorists of the Left cannot do that, then what exactly are they there for?

Banksy on the Oscars

Banksy will not be allowed to attend the Oscars ceremony in disguise, sadly. But he is keen to win:

"I don't agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I'm prepared to make an exception for the ones I'm nominated for," he said, adding: "The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me."

In defense of teachers' unions

Slate has a great piece on former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose anti-union teacher witch-hunt was one of the reasons that Andrew Fenty lost reelection as DC's mayor. I've always been deeply skeptical of the anti-teachers' union argument - it strikes me that urban public schools have been so badly underfunded for so long that it's impossible to assess whether teachers are bad or not based on student performance, and if you just fire teachers without addressing the funding issue, you're not going to make any progress. This evidence backs this up:

If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven't charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire? Why did the nation's most comprehensive study of charter schools, conducted by Stanford University researchers and sponsored by pro-charter foundations, conclude that charters outperformed regular public schools only 17 percent of the time, and actually did significantly worse 37 percent of the time? Why don't Southern states, which have weak teachers' unions, or none at all, outperform other parts of the country?

The secret is that like every public spending issue in the United States, education funding is wrapped up in issues of race and segregation. So until someone can convince affluent whites to spend money on poor blacks, you're left fiddling around the edges of the problem. Which in my view is exactly what Michelle Rhee was doing - just in a particularly obnoxious way.