The Austerity Trap

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

The Eurozone is in a deep recession. Some members even face conditions not seen since the Great Depression. Spanish unemployment tops 27 percent, with half of its youth unemployed. Not to worry, say the elites of the European Central Bank. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, aptly abbreviated as the PIIGS, are getting what they deserve. They have spent beyond their means. Once they reduce their deficits—preferably by cutting benefits and services—confidence in the markets will increase and investments will flow in. Swallow your medicine, eat your vegetables, and all will be okay. Here in the US, despite persistent unemployment, budget deficits remain an obsession, at least with the elites. This conventional wisdom now has a new name, expansionary austerity. Austerity in its various forms and guises is the subject of a comprehensive and provocative new study, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Brown University political economist Mark Blyth.

Blyth cites the many failings in this diagnosis and prognosis. Some of these will not be unfamiliar to regular readers of Paul Krugman's New York Times column and blog, but Blyth more fully acknowledges the importance of uncertainty in economic life, attributes more significance to the role of investment banking, and develops an interdisciplinary approach to the crisis.

With the exception of Greece, none of the PIIGS had levels of debt that disturbed markets in earlier eras. Ireland and Spain were models of fiscal rectitude. The sovereign debt crisis emerged only after their private sector banks had inflated a massive real estate bubble. This process was driven by a major transformation in the private banking world. In the eighties, as banks lost customers to the corporate short-term capital markets, they needed another business model. That model evolved to include consolidating and offloading mortgage securities. These securities bundled many homes at different levels of borrower economic strength. Risk calculations for each level were based on sophisticated mathematical models. These assumed a normal, bell curve shaped, distribution with Texas housing losses during the 1980s S & L meltdown of 40%, the worst in their sample, as the outer bound, lowest probability event. This market was further pumped up by a new form of security, the Credit Default Swap (CDS). These allowed purchasers of these multilayered securities to obtain insurance against their default.

Assuming a normal distribution, bank economists argued that a 40% decline in value of all mortgages in one of these synthetic securities was a once in a third of the life of the universe event. But as Blyth points out, "if you haven't been around for a third of the life of the universe, then how can you know what is possible over that time period? It is the assumed distribution that tells you what is possible, not your experience." (Emphasis mine) In addition, the providers of the CDS securities were unregulated, allowing them to become enormously overextended. This concoction had an unforeseeable dynamism not reducible to the sum of the parts. Its creators could not imagine that "the meshing of elements that were each intended to make the world safe, such as mortgage bonds, CDSs, and banks' risk models, could make the world astonishingly less safe. "

In Europe, this model had even worse consequences. Its banks were more concentrated and leveraged than even US banks. They soon became insolvent, threatening the complete collapse of national economies. In order to avoid such disaster, the governments of Ireland and Spain absorbed the debt, thus staining their own once pristine balance sheets.

If government deficits did not cause the problem, public sector retrenchment will not end the financial crisis. Households, having lost much of their net worth in the collapse of the real estate bubble, are reluctant to spend. If governments also slash expenditures, from where does the spending upon which the economy depends come? Your spending is my income. Advocates of expansionary austerity argue that confidence will be restored when governments shrink, thus assuring businesses that future profits will not be taxed away. But business is likely to respond only to tangible demand in the market place rather than to uncertain promises.

But the evolution of mainstream economics from the fifties on had left policy makers with few tools to address the uncertainty and unpredictability of markets. These economists, Paul Samuelson most prominent among them, had reduced Keynes to the contention that economies can be fine tuned by interest rate adjustments or at worst by discrete, specifiable in advance, injections of fiscal stimulus. Market economies were thought to display steady and predictable tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment and policy makers could choose the most desirable point. When the stagflation of the seventies came along, with high unemployment accompanied by high rates of inflation, Chicago school economists had an entry to argue that Keynes was wrong and that markets should thus be left to do their own thing.

Chicago had, however, slayed a paper tiger. Keynes was far more than an advocate of "fine tuning" via fiscal stimulus. He emphasized the uncertainty and unpredictable dynamism of markets. Capital, commodity, and even labor markets can be governed by self-reinforcing swings both internally and with each other in a climate where the future is uncertain. No single fiscal injection or interest rate adjustment can be sure to work. Thus post Keynesian economists like Nicholas Kaldor advocated international commodity reserves, especially for oil and wheat, to limit the damage of commodity speculation. In labor markets, governments could make full employment guarantees, using as much spending as it takes and even direct government hires to restore full employment. Such policies would not abolish capitalism but would rather mitigate its self-destructive potential.

The world, however, has moved in the opposite direction. The Eurozone has no central government with the power to tax and spend. When a bubble in Spain collapses, the Spanish government cannot devalue its currency. Nor can it spend more to reflate its economy and recapitalize its banks without seeing interest rates soar to unsustainable levels. And once markets see this process unfolding in one nation, speculators look around for the next most vulnerable. Their actions often provoke the next crisis. This is a true doomsday machine, as Blyth argues.

The Future of Austerity

Austerity advocates, who like to deem themselves as orthodox scientists swayed by the data, are unmoved by a totality of evidence that would surely prove persuasive in other contexts. How can a doctrine that has consistently failed in practice survive so many reverses? Perhaps the greatest strength of Blyth's work is his explanation of austerity as a leading example of what John Quiggin calls zombie economics. Despite having been killed repeatedly, it lives among us. There is an intellectual and a moral or even identity component to the survival of this bankrupt idea. Lockean notions of government's limited role as defender of individual property and the right to individual appropriation and accumulation of nature's bounty, made possible by money, is a key and deeply embedded theme in American culture. Adam Smith admits the need for government, if only to protect the rich against the envy and ambitions of the poor. But he worries about how to pay for it and is concerned that debt will lead to default and inflation that will erode the wealth of lenders.

Most telling and enduring in Smith is the morality play that so resonates today: "Saving is a virtue, spending is a vice." According to Blyth, Northern European savers "are juxtaposed with profligate Southern Europeans, despite the fact that it is manifestly impossible to have overborrowing without overlending... The conditions of austerity's appearance, parsimony, frugality, morality, and a pathological fear of the consequences of government debt—lie deep within economic liberalism's fossil record from its very inception."

Austerity will not continue forever. The reason for its demise is not its unfairness, though it is. It simply does not work. Continuing rounds of fiscal cuts depress net wealth faster than debt. Eventually populations revolt, not always in sensible and humane ways, as the experience of the Thirties suggests. Blyth makes a powerful case that austerity was a principal cause of the rise of fascism in Japan and Germany and thus of World War II.

Members of Greece's neo-Fascist party, Golden Dawn 

There are alternatives. Blyth guardedly speculates that the current investment bank business model is on its last legs. There may not be any remaining asset classes for investment bankers to "pump and dump." If that is the case, how sad that we have pursued a long, painful austerity to preserve this parasitical creature. Iceland may have been a better role model. Faced with its own banking crisis, it allowed its banks, with assets equal to ten times the nation's GDP, to fail. It recapitalized its banking system at far less cost than keeping its troubled ones alive. It devalued its currency and imposed capital controls so that speculators could not take their funds out of the country. In addition, it stimulated its economy at least until the worst downturn had been prevented. And once the economy started to right itself, government turned toward taxation of the wealthy. Iceland has far outperformed Ireland, which has followed the orthodox austerity course.

Neither Keynes nor Blyth ever said that debt does not matter. But today's heavy debt load is not a result of an irresponsible democratic government. Nor is a deep recession the time for cuts in an already inadequate welfare state. And once growth resumes, taxes would be appropriate—especially on those who have profited most from the bailout of the banks, tax avoidance, or tax rates lower than those paid by typical working citizens. But taxation alone as a path toward economic justice may be a difficult sell in America, where the prevalent mindset is "I earned it and I should get to keep it." Policy should thus also aim for reforms that foster more justice in labor markets. Over the last forty years workers have seen gains in their productivity unmatched by any increase in their real income. In a full employment economy labor can demand its just rewards. And as Dean Baker has pointed out, intellectual property holders and high income professionals use the law to extract monopoly pricing power even as blue collar workers face the perils of the free market.

Banks also merit special attention. Even if their business model is dying, steps might be taken to hasten this process. Blyth suggests financial repression, forcing them to hold low interest government bonds, thus gradually eroding their assets until total national debt is reduced to tolerable levels. In Debunking Economics, Australian economist Steve Keen presents a related idea. He acknowledges that debt forgiveness can hurt creditors, a class that might include workers' pension funds as well as affluent investors. He advocates instead a simple one-time grant of say $50,000, which can be spent only after it has been used to pay down any personal debt. This proposal has several merits. Because it is universal, it would help the thrifty homeowners sufficiently who have paid off most of their mortgage while also aiding those under water from home or student loans.

Other post Keynesian economists have advocated changes in banking law that would make bank executives doubly liable for losses in investment schemes, a measure that would surely change the whole incentive structure of banking. Banks must be returned to their role as handmaidens of industry rather than as parasitical speculators. With such changes the corrosive inequalities of the last decade can be mitigated.

One final thought I draw from Blyth is that combating the dangers of austerity may require more than economic arguments. It will also need an ethical critique, one that awards consumption its place. Such a message may seem dangerous in an era of environmental limits. Consumption, however, need not be limited to the corporate driven consumerism of our era. We might revisit John Kenneth Galbraith's moral critique of two generations ago, with his contrast of private affluence and public squalor. Especially necessary is public sector spending on a new green infrastructure, on preventive health care, university education. Equally important would be public and private art. The gains from technological progress can also be "spent" on more leisure, with all its possibilities, rather than more goods. Austerity is a passionate opponent and demands a multifaceted response.

I'm reading: The Austerity Trap

The Dilemma of Electoral Politics

William E. Connolly
Connolly's forthcoming book is entitled The Fragility of Things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, democratic activism.

The dangers posed by climate change and potential shifts in the ocean conveyor system; the extensive suffering generated by the heightening of economic inequality; the need to restructure the state supported infrastructure of consumption so that all residents can participate in the housing, travel, health care, retirement and educational institutions it makes available; the need to support the pluralization of gender practices, religious membership, and ethnic identifications; the desperate needs of our cities and the ugly politics of apartheid designed to isolate them---these interlocking issues constitute commanding problems of our time. The fact is, however, that they are not addressed within the established terms of the electoral system.  Does that mean that we should withdraw from electoral politics? Or wait for a revolution that eschews “reformist” politics until capitalism is liquidated, as some critics of the Occupy movement have asserted? I know too many people suffering in the working class to sanction either response. I read about too many others under duress as well.

There is, nonetheless, a dilemma of electoral politics confronting the Left: 1) It is tempting to forgo electoral politics because it is so dysfunctional. But to do so cedes even more power both to independent corporate action and to the radical right within the state. The right loves to make electoral politics dysfunctional so that people lose confidence in it and transfer confidence to the private sector. (2) Nonetheless, the logic of the media-electoral-corporate system does spawn a restrictive grid of power and electoral intelligibility that makes it difficult to think, experiment, and organize outside its parameters. Think of how corporations and financial institutions initiate actions in the private sector and then use intensive lobbying to veto efforts to reverse those initiatives in Congress or the courts, just as financial elites invented derivatives and then lobbied intensively to stop their regulation; think of how media talking heads concentrate on candidates rather than fundamental issues; recall the central role of scandal in the media and electoral politics; consider the decisive electoral position of inattentive “undecided voters”; note how states under Republican rule work relentlessly to reduce the minority and poor vote; recall those billionaire super pacs; and so on. The electoral grid cannot be ignored or ceded to the right, but it also sucks experimental pursuits and bold ventures out of politics. Can we renegotiate the dilemma of electoral politics? That is the problematic within which I am working. I do not have a perfect response to it. Perfect answers are suspect.

Perhaps it is wise to forge multimodal strategies that start outside the electoral grid and then return to it as one venue among others. Strategic role experimentations at multiple sites joined to the activation of new social movements provide possibilities. Indeed, these two modes are related. Consider merely a few examples of role experimentation tied to climate change and consumption available to many people in the shrinking middle class. We may support the farm-to-table movement in the restaurants we visit; we may participate in the slow food movement; we may frequent stores that offer food based on sustainable processes; we may buy hybrid cars, or, if feasible, join an urban zip-car collective, explaining to friends, family, and neighbors the effects such choices could have on late modern ecology if a majority of the populace did so; we may press our workplace to install solar panels and consider them ourselves if we can afford to do so; we may use writing and media skills to write graffiti, or produce provocative artistic installations, or write for a blog; we may shift a large portion of our retirement accounts into investments that support sustainable energy, withdrawing from aggressive investments that presuppose unsustainable growth or threaten economic collapse; we may bring new issues and visitors to our churches, temples, or mosques to support rethinking interdenominational issues and the contemporary fragility of things; we may found, join, or frequent repair clubs, at which volunteers collect and repair old appliances, furniture, and bikes to cut back on urban waste, to make them available to low income people and to increase the longevity of the items; we may probe and publicize the multimodal tactics by which twenty-four-hour news stations work on the visceral register of viewers, as we explain on blogs how to counter those techniques; we may travel to places where unconscious American assumptions about world entitlement are challenged on a regular basis; we may augment the pattern of films and artistic exhibits we visit to stretch our habitual powers of perception and to challenge some affect-imbued prejudgments embedded in them. A series of intercalated role experiments, often pursued by clusters of participants together.

But don’t such activities merely make the participants “feel better”?  Well, many who pursue such experiments do feel good about them, particularly those who accept a tragic image of possibility in which there is no inevitability that either large scale politics, God, or nature will come to our rescue. Also, could such role experiments ever make a sufficient difference on their own? No. These, however, may be the wrong questions to pose. What such experiments can do as they expand is to crack the ice in and around us. First, we may now find ourselves a bit less implicated in the practices and policies that are sources of the problems. Second, the shaky perceptions, feelings, and beliefs that authorized them may thus now become more entrenched as we act upon them. Third, we now find ourselves in more favorable positions to forge connections with larger constituencies pursuing similar experiments. Fourth, we may thus become more inspired to seed and join macropolitical movements that speak to these issues. Fifth, as we now participate in protests, slowdowns, work “according to rule” and more confrontational meetings with corporate managers, church leaders, union officials, university officers, and neighborhood leaders, we may become even more alert to the creeds, institutional pressures and options that propel these constituencies too. They, too, are both enmeshed in a web of roles and more than mere role bearers. Many will maintain an intransigence of viewpoint and insistence of interpretation that we may now be in a better position to counter by words and deeds with those outside or at the edge of the intransigent community.

One advantage of forging links between role experimentations and social movements is that both speak to a time in which the drive to significant change must be pursued by a large, pluralist assemblage rather than by any single class or other core constituency. Such an assemblage must today be primed and loaded by several constituencies in diverse ways at numerous sites. 

It is necessary here to condense linkages that may unfold. But perhaps movement back and forth between role experiments, social movements, occasional shifts in the priorities of some strategic institutions, and a discernible shift in the contours of electoral politics will promote the emergence of a new, more activist pluralist assemblage. Now, say, a new, surprising event occurs. Some such event or crisis is surely bound to erupt: an urban uprising, a destructive storm, a wild executive overreach, a wide spread interruption in electrical service, a bank melt down, a crisis in oil supply, etc. Perhaps the conjunction of this new event with the preparatory actions that preceded it will prime a large constellation to resist the protofascist responses the intransigent Right will pursue at that very moment.  Perhaps the event will now become an occasion to mobilize large scale, intensive support for progressive change on some of the fronts noted at the start of this piece. It is important to remember that the advent of a crisis does not alone determine the response to it. So waiting for the next one to occur is not enough. The Great Depression was followed by the intensification of fascist movements in several countries. Those with strong labor movements and progressive elected leaders proved best at resisting them. The most recent economic melt-down was met in many places by the self-defeating response of austerity, and worse. That is why the quality and depth of the political ethos preceding such events is important.

The use of the “perhaps” in the above formulations suggests that there are no guarantees at any of these junctures. Uncertainties abound. These points, however, also apply to any radical perspective that counsels waiting for the revolution, as it surrounds its critiques of militant reform with an aura of certainty. Today the need is to curtail the aura of certainty of all perspectives on the Left. The examples posed here, of course, are focused on primarily one constituency. But others could be invoked. The larger idea is to draw energy from multiple sources and constituencies.  The formula is to move back and forth between the proliferation of role experiments, forging social movements on several fronts, helping to shift the constituency weight of the heavy electoral machinery now in place, and participating in cross-country citizen movements that put pressure on states, corporations, churches, universities and unions from inside and outside simultaneously. Indeed, perhaps the severity of the issues facing us means that we should prepare for the day when we are strong enough in several countries to launch a cross-country general strike.   

The proliferating approach adopted here, again, is replete with uncertain connections. That’s politics. The point is to resist falling into the familiar game of optimism vs. pessimism and to minimize that tempting blame-game within the Left, folding more attraction and inspiration into our activities. The point is to appraise the severity of the needs of the day and to attract people to join in different ways and degrees a multifaceted movement to respond to them. 

I'm reading: The Dilemma of Electoral Politics

On the Use and Misuse of Zero Dark Thirty

Steven Johnston
Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of Zero Dark Thirty. Not, perhaps, since Oliver Stone’s JFK has an American film generated such widespread censure. Hollywood insiders, seeking adherents, waged a public relations campaign to deny the film a possible Oscar for best picture. From The New York Review of Books to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic to The New Yorker, the Huffington Post and beyond, Zero Dark Thirty has been maligned, denounced, and dismissed. Jane Mayer concludes a moralizing assessment by declaring: “Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ should care a little bit more.” Matt Taibbi finds the storytelling problematic and asks “all the people defending the movie, what do you think Dick Cheney’s review is going to be?” As if that rhetorical question weren’t enough, Taibbi adds, redundantly: “Isn’t it just a crazy coincidence that he’s probably going to love it?” Alex Gibney, literally unable to control his indignation, adopts a similar moralizing posture: “I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible…” As for their film, “it is fundamentally reckless.” Politicians have also gotten into the act. Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain have ripped the film for its factual inaccuracies and demanded the studio make changes to it. Why these extreme reactions? Zero Dark Thirty, in short, supports or endorses torture. It’s as simple as that. Or is it?

Many of Zero Dark Thirty’s critics condemn the film for blurring the putative line between fact and fiction, history and creative storytelling, for invoking the verisimilitude and authenticity the one provides and the artistic license the other affords. Gibney, representing many, is succinct: “You can’t have it both ways.” This is a peculiar position to take not just because some combination of fact and fiction composes all of our lives, but because in this film the indecipherable combination mimics beautifully the post-September 11 understanding of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and those doing their dirty work. Nevertheless, with this unexamined interpretive first principle securely in place, Mayer proceeds to criticize the film for being consistently wrong, comparing its account of events to “reality,” with reality always winning. Not only is the depiction of torture and the results it produces false, Mayer also rebukes the film for failing to convey the actual character of the torture debate within the Bush Administration, where the FBI, among other institutional players, rejected the CIA’s brutality and refused to participate in its interrogation program. This is just one example Mayer cites of dissent within the Administration. The lack of dissenting voices to American torture further incenses critics. It, too, is tantamount to endorsement. What’s worse, according to Mayer, the film offers a scene in which President Obama, in the background, denounces torture on “60 Minutes.” Given the success that torture has (allegedly) already enjoyed in the film, Mayer insists this opposition comes across as “wrongheaded and prissy.”

These criticisms suffer from a number of shortcomings, as do their critics, who, apparently, don’t want the assassination of Osama bin Laden needlessly spoiled by torture’s taint (might that make it more difficult to dance and cheer in front of the White House?). Principal among them, I would like to suggest, is genre confusion. Mayer calls Zero Dark Thirty a “police procedural.”  Taibbi thinks it’s a “detective story” with an “action-movie plot.” Gibney and Steve Coll think of it, with prodding from the filmmakers, in journalistic and historical terms. It’s not that these categories might not offer productive interpretive lenses, but they not only seem designed to set up the angry criticisms that follow, they also miss important opportunities for a more dialectical engagement with the film.

What if we read Zero Dark Thirty as a revenge tragedy? What if we read the film as revealing a country informed by a sense of rightness and victimization hell-bent on retaliating for wrongs done to it and thus blind to any possible consequences for itself, let alone the world? These imperial presumptions animate Zero Dark Thirty’s two main characters, Dan and Maya. They practice torture as a matter of course, living in a culture of torture: publicly speaking, results alone matter. Following the September 11 attacks, they presume its necessity as well as its efficacy. The film also displays torture as a reassertion of American power and mastery. We are entitled to the world; we will take it (back) on our terms and enjoy doing so. Dan, for one, revels in the power torture expresses. It feels right, even good following 9/11. Still does the film itself endorse any of this? Characters in a film may believe something to be true and act accordingly with conviction—that, however, doesn’t make it true. Nor does it mean that this is the film’s perspective. Gibney insists that “Maya is a glamorous heroine [and] we identify with her.” Do we? This is not clear to me, but it isn’t necessarily problematic, especially given the film’s conclusion, as long as the identification is weak and temporary, since she is a criminal awaiting her day in court, whether it ever comes or not.

Torture, then, plays a prominent (visual) role in the film, but what does it mean to say that Zero Dark Thirty supports or justifies torture? This (alleged) aspect of the film is particularly galling, so the argument goes, because torture played no role in locating or eliminating bin Laden. It is thus historically inaccurate, morally repellent, and politically dangerous. Whether the film effectively advocates the use of torture is not only a question difficult to answer, it may actually miss the point.

The case for torture tends to rely, ultimately, on the coercive power of a ticking time bomb scenario. “Who would not agree to torture as long as it would save (an untold number of) innocent lives,” advocates demand to know? Once such agreement is exacted, it (supposedly) opens the floodgates to an otherwise forbidden practice. Torture, then, justifies itself along narrow instrumental lines. We need to know something now to stop an unspeakable atrocity from happening and torture alone can produce the necessary knowledge. Proponents of torture, that is, do not justify it by claiming that if enough people are captured and subjected to criminal treatment, sooner or later a piece of information might be generated that, in turn, might prove useful at a later date, even ten years later, for another purpose altogether. Yet is that not roughly the brutal, ugly scenario depicted in Zero Dark Thirty? Doesn’t the torture depicted feature a man, Ammar, who may or may not be a Saudi, being questioned on a matter having nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden or his location? What’s more, torture does not actually get Ammar to talk. Two C.I.A. agents trick Ammar into believing he has talked (but has no memory of it), thus leading him actually to talk. True, they are clever enough to take advantage of torture’s manifest failure, but it did fail. They seem surprised by this realization, but they do—because they must—adjust to it. The film thus depicts the corruption of two C.I.A. case officers, standing in for America, who cannot see how far they have fallen as they can just as easily waterboard or feed another human being (Ammar) under their control. What’s more, throughout the film terrorists implement one successful terrorist attack after another (in London, Saudi Arabia, Islamabad, an American military facility) despite the widespread torture being practiced to prevent it. Still, the torture continues.

At the close of the film, following bin Laden’s execution, Maya is seen sitting alone in a C-130, weeping. This follows a scene in which she confirms it is bin Laden who has been killed, a moment that brings her no apparent satisfaction, let alone joy, which is remarkable since a great enemy has been defeated. What might the tears mean? Does she finally appreciate the cost of the ten-year mission-cum-obsession she pursued? The very moral and political values she swore to uphold were repeatedly violated, even destroyed. She has become, at best, not at all dissimilar from the enemy she hates. Does she sense that this convergence was too high a price to pay, that she cannot justify what she condoned and committed? In the wake of bin Laden’s death, she might be remembering the ugly confrontation she initiated with Joseph Bradley, C.I.A. station chief in Istanbul, who told her that bin Laden was an irrelevancy, old news, no longer a prominent player in the new al-Qaeda. Bradley was focused on defending the country against real, active threats, not old ghosts. Maya was only able to see her grand obsession to its conclusion by effectively threatening Bradley with public career suicide. Bradley, recognizing a deranged fanatic when confronted and assaulted by one, relents. This did not make what he said wrong—anything but, since Maya barely makes a case for her obsession. Bradley recognizes that she cannot hear what he is saying and merely chooses a pragmatic course of action when giving her the resources she demands to (possibly) consummate her hunt. Maya does succeed; bin Laden is assassinated. 

Yet as an act of revenge it is unsatisfying, impotent even: it can’t undo bin Laden’s 9/11 triumph. Nor can it be said convincingly to enhance America’s security. He can and will be replaced. Moreover, as Taibbi notes, bin Laden succeeded along another, more insidious dimension than the attacks themselves. He wanted to provoke the United States into a barbaric response, committing deeds that revealed its true character. Taibbi concludes (and this accounts for his outrage) that Zero Dark Thirty celebrates this response; I would argue it exposes it.

As the film concludes, the futility, perhaps absurdity of Maya’s actions may suddenly be dawning on her, at least at a visceral level. The somber mood of the film peaks and exudes a feeling of cold emptiness. Taibbi rejects this reading (of regret) of the film and does so, oddly enough, because it is a “reading in,” as if he is not also interpreting the film as he condemns it. Critics like Mayer and Taibbi want to be able to moralize; they want a film like Zero Dark Thirty to rebuke and castigate torture in no uncertain terms; they don’t want (or trust) the audience to do any difficult, critical interpretive work, to discern the tragedy (the self-destruction) unfolding before them and their own implication in it. But isn’t that the only way to prevent future self-inflicted disasters, to come to a realization on our own rather than through another’s hectoring?

I'm reading: On the Use and Misuse of Zero Dark Thirty

The N.R.A. and the New State of Nature

Alex Livingston
Cornell University

When President Obama justified his executive order to regulate firearms in terms of weighing the right to keep and bear arms with the state’s responsibility to protect the vulnerable, he may not have known that he was repeating an argument made by the seventeenth-century royalist philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is perhaps the most profound thinker of human frailty in the modern canon of political philosophy (in the ancient world, the title goes to Hobbes’s personal hero, Thucydides). Life at the hands of one another, he famously wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is for this reason that we need mutual protection as the first virtue of civil society. It is tempting to conclude from such claims, like the National Rifle Association has in recent weeks, that individuals have a responsibility to arm themselves for this protection. But in drawing this conclusion, Hobbes would warn, the NRA fundamentally misunderstands both human nature and the nature of government. 

In Leviathan, written while he was in hiding from the horrors of the British civil war, Hobbes asks us to imagine ourselves in a “state of nature” before the establishment of civil government. Without the constraint of public laws individuals live lives of perfect and total freedom. No government exists to tax them or to regulate the use of their property.  In this state of nature each person has one natural right, the right “for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life, and consequently of doing anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” The right to self-protection may seem like an uncontroversial starting point for thinking about politics but, Hobbes shows, taken by itself it leads to disaster. Notice that Hobbes says that a right to self-protection includes the right to individually interpret, “in his own judgment and reason,” what self-protection demands. This is where the trouble starts and precisely where, a Hobbesian would wager, the NRA’s proposals for an armed society threaten to take us. 

The problem is that people are, on average, bad judges in their own case. It might be rational to say that the best way to protect myself is to stick to my little corner of the wilderness and let you have yours, but you might think otherwise. A policy of preemptive intervention is also rational in the state of nature and there is nothing to stop you from beating me over the head with a rock before I get the idea about doing the same to you. Maybe you think I’m a threat to your collection of apples, or maybe you don’t trust me, or maybe you even just don’t like the way I looked at you. In any case, these are all good reasons for you might find to exercise your right of self-protection by snuffing me out. 

Once we head down this road freedom turns into suspicion and the state of nature turns into a state of “war of all against all.” Hobbes’s vision of a world of mistrust and murder was informed by his experience of the civil warfare that culminated in the beheading of Charles I. Once this cycle of suspicion, violence, and retribution gets moving it is has no natural end because of a certain fact about human nature. This is the fact that we are all equal in two important senses. First, we are equally vulnerable to die at each other’s hands. “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.” Even a thirty-bullet clip won’t save you while you’re sleeping. And second, we are equal in our short-sightedness. It is in our best interests to preserve ourselves by agreeing to abide by shared laws but mistrust and pride too often get the best of us.  

We saw a contemporary example of Hobbes’s worries in the debates concerning Stand Your Ground laws. When George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin he claimed that he was exercising his own judgment about his right to self-protection. Was Martin, an unarmed teenager walking home from the convenience store, really an immediate threat to Zimmerman? Or did Zimmerman misjudge the scenario and use lethal force out of the sense of personal mistrust that Hobbes calls “diffidence”? Either way, Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws puts the onus on Zimmerman’s own interpretation of the threat and in doing so blurs the lines between protection, assault, and revenge. 

The NRA’s claim that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with more good guys with guns, including good guys with guns in schools, is an extension of the same logic. Threats are everywhere and it is your right to protect yourself. But where the onus of interpreting what constitutes a reasonable threat is placed on individuals, even good guys, the result is too likely going to be an excess of force that responds more to perceived slights rather than real threats. It is the emptiness of the NRA’s distinction between good guys and bad guys that Hobbes underlines. He would not object to the claim that people suffering from clinically defined mental health problems should not be allowed equal access to firearms. But Hobbes would want to remind us that the difference between Adam Lanza and George Zimmerman is not one of good vs. bad or healthy vs. ill, but rather degrees in the distinctively human willingness to act impulsively or passionately when they are made the final arbiters of law enforcement. 

So what’s the solution? For Hobbes, the only way out of the nightmare of the state of nature is to enter a social contract with each other whereby we agree that decisions about enforcing protection are best left to the state. The first step to this covenant comes when we acknowledge that our neighbors are bad interpreters of their right to self-defense, and that the best way to stop them from exercising their right to protection is by agreeing not to exercise ours in turn. This doesn’t demand any act of great moral altruim but rather an act of enlightened self-interest where we realize that we are individually better off with an accountable police force preserving social order than we would be at the whims of an armed militia of George Zimmermans. 

But of course the real claim of the NRA and gun extremists is not that we need protection from each other, but rather we need to protect ourselves from the state itself. To Hobbes any state is preferable to the horrors of the indiscriminate violence of the state of nature. We ought to be more critical than Hobbes was of the legitimate boundaries of state power, but there is one last insight Hobbes has to offer to the discussion about guns in America. Human beings are frail, passionate, and irrational creatures, but more than anything else we are fearful. Hobbes’s advice to any student of politics is that “the passion to be reckoned upon is fear.” It is this fear that explains the violence and suspicion of the state of war. And it is the permanence of fear that makes people subject to manipulation by elites with vested interests. Hobbes took aim at British ecclesiastical institutions as merchants of fear but his conclusion can speak to us today: a politically mature populace does not demand changing human nature but neither is it to feed our appetite for fear with fantasies of millennial apocalypse. Rather, it requires learning to see that the greatest thing we have to fear is what we ourselves are capable of when left to our own devices. 

I'm reading: The N.R.A. and the New State of Nature

The Photographs of Lui Xia

Kathleen Roberts Skerrett
Dean, School of Arts and Sciences
University of Richmond

At the end of February, a small exhibition of photographs by the Chinese poet and visual artist Liu Xia opens at the University of Richmond in Virgina.  The artist is unable to publish or exhibit her work in China.  The photographs are on exhibit at Richmond because the French scholar Guy Sorman arranged for their removal from Beijing, enabling them to be shown abroad with the artist’s consent.
   Liu Xia has lived under house arrest in her apartment in Beijing since October 2010.  She has never been charged or convicted of any crime.  But her association and marriage to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has had a vast impact on her life and work.
   Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace prize in 2010 for his decades of work as a pacifist and human rights activist in China.  At the time he became a Nobel Laureate, he had already begun his eleven-year sentence in prison following conviction for his contributions to the creation of Charter 08.
   This petition, signed by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals and activists, calls for a new constitutional regime in China that would advance democratic rights and freedoms in that great country.   After Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Prize, his wife Liu Xia was placed under house arrest.  

Liu Xia married her activist husband during his prior three-year sentence to a reeducation labour camp in 1996.  The introverted artist describes herself as apolitical; she married Liu Xiaobo so that she could legally visit him during his incarceration.  While under house arrest, Liu Xia is prohibited all contact with anyone but her parents, and a security detail is constantly on guard.  Her freedom is severely constricted hour by hour, day after day, month after month--without any foreseeable end.
   In a pamphlet published in 1940 (under a pseudonym), the French political philosopher Simone Weil described the effects of repressive political force on a human soul.   The furthest end of force is, in any historical or cultural vector, to turn its object into a thing.  But a human soul resists this process with horrible tenacity and anguish.  Long after she might want to accept her fate, the soul goes on longing to recreate the world in which she could move and make and love.  Such incurable longing is neither liberal nor romantic:  It is the torment of slaves and prisoners anywhere.
   In late December 2012, several friends surprised and overtook the security detail that guards Liu Xia’s apartment and gained entry.  Her friends filmed the brief minutes of their visit, and the footage shows Liu Xia at once elated and distressed by their presence.  She immediately begged them to leave of their own accord for fear of retaliation against her family. Yet the vivid emotions that crossed her face remain indelible on the film--like the expressions of the dolls that are the theme of Liu Xia’s photographs.  

In the Lora Robins Gallery of the University of Richmond, the public can view Liu Xia’s photographs.  The prints are black and white, about 18 x 18, depicting inexpensive and unbeautiful dolls in simple scenes—standing between stacks of books, or wedged between two flat stones, or perched on rough wooden boards.  Typically, there is high contrast between light and darkness in the images so that the dolls’ faces become the foci of the scenes.
   The dolls are placed in postures of constraint—propped in a birdcage or behind the slats of a chair’s back or wrapped beneath cellophane or crushed by a human hand.  Amidst the silent shadows, the dolls’ luminous faces express the anguish of freedom lost:  A small furrow in the brow, the open mouth wrenched to the side, the downcast head, the restless, staring eyes—these small arrangements of the face become acutely expressive.  The dolls appear simultaneously defenseless and indefatigable.  

Liu Xia’s photographs reverse engineer the process of repression.  If the furthest end of repressive force is to turn the person into a thing, the furthest aim of the photographs is to turn things into images of benighted souls at the limit of freedom.  An act of creative imagination projects that condition onto the inanimate dolls.
   At his conviction in December 2009, Liu Xiaobo observed that his only permissible public statements since 1989 have been before the courts that have sentenced him three times for speech crimes.  In his last statement before beginning his eleven-year sentence, he thanked the officials, including those who interrogated, prosecuted, and convicted him, for their professionalism and good faith.  Indeed, he praises a particular warden for the humane management of detainees, observing that such practical respect for dignity is the basis for human rights:  Liu Xiaobo avows no enmity to anyone, while he continues to aver that he has committed no crime and that he does not accept restrictions on his right to free speech.  Liu Xiaobo’s statement concludes with a message for and about his wife Liu Xia: 

"Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window… filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning.  My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times make me stagger under its weight.  I am an insensate stone in the wilderness…Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you."

In her 1940 pamphlet Simone Weil observed that, even in its desolation, the soul sometimes grasps moments of self-possession in which there only remains room for courage or love.  Liu Xia’s photographs bear the impress of such fugitive moments.  No one can say what this costs her.  Perhaps such moments are felt as the monotonous loneliness of missing another soul without any near purpose but to endure the psychic clamor of going on missing him.   Thus, it has been suggested that Liu Xia’s “ugly babies” represent her husband Liu Xiaobo.  In one of her most accessible images, a doll perches like some defiant child-like familiar on the shoulder of a gentle man.   

At the limit of freedom, what stands between the person and her reduction to a thing may be the inconsolable animation of the other within.   The soul averts its loss of self-possession to force through another prior dispossession to the beloved, whose interior occupation proves the incontestable reality of love.  This is also neither liberal nor romantic:  It is the inner tumult of democrats everywhere.
   The moral objects of freedom are not universal; they are the individuals and ideals one uniquely loves.  But the moral subject of freedom—the soul who suffers affliction under the effects of repressive force—is universal.  Thus, Liu Xia’s “ugly babies” make their appeal to the world.

I'm reading: The Photographs of Lui Xia

Obama, Drones, and the Inauguration

Steven Johnston
Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Thanks to the nomination of John Brennan as C.I.A. director, the United States is finally conducting a national conversation about President Obama’s dangerous expansion of presidential power. Going Bush and Cheney one better, the Obama Administration insists that the president can order the targeted killing, that is, the legalized murder, of American citizens abroad if they pose a threat to American interests. The so-called white paper obtained by NBC News in early February ostensibly narrows the range of executive action by limiting it to high level al Qaeda officials posing “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” but the definition of imminent is so broad that it allows targeting anyone deemed a terrorist (read: enemy of the United States). 

The official conversation, not surprisingly, is rather dismal. One idea, floated by Senators and supported by Obama, has developed some traction: establish a secret judicial review process to sanction the killings. The problem here is not just that proponents of this idea model it after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, a clandestine body that “monitors” government eavesdropping in the United States and rarely if ever denies the state the warrants it seeks; the problem is that Obama and others want to normalize the practice of presidential killing, give it both a Congressional and official judicial seal of approval. The proposal, in other words, seeks to disseminate responsibility—and thus, ironically, preempt accountability—for a “process” that has no place in a democratic society.

Remarkably, while a handful of politicians express some concern or unease about executive overreach (how can the president play the role of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner?), there is little or no indignation, at least not in the mainstream. What’s more, even proponents of the idea of a supervisory court worry that it might impinge on the president’s prerogatives as commander-in-chief. Thus the very reason for a court also turns out to be an objection to it. What’s worse, the president, perhaps too busy skeet shooting to exercise the authority he claims to possess, has distanced himself from active involvement in the targeting process, preferring to unleash a rejuvenated C.I.A. that effectively answers to no one. Obama may ridicule Republicans for wanting to live in the 1950s, but he has already returned government to that lawless era of coups and assassinations. 

The lack of outcry should come as no surprise to any close observer of American politics. The United States loves executive power and wants to see it deployed, including in spectacular fashion, on behalf of American interests. Obama has been waging a vicious drone campaign for years in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, producing hundreds of civilian casualties, without official dissent. Republicans who profess to believe in small government, who foam at the mouth at the prospect of the state playing a supporting role in providing health insurance to tens of millions of fellow citizens, fall silent in the face of Obama Administration’s happy trigger finger.
The country’s love affair with executive power was on full display during last month’s inauguration. Nationally televised, commentators universally celebrated the event as American democracy’s finest moment: the pageantry of the peaceful transfer (or reaffirmation) of political power. No prospect of coups, no violence in the streets, nothing untoward mars America’s political system. What a sight to behold, we were told over and over again.

What were we actually looking at while being tutored in American political ritual by the likes of Diane Sawyer? Our attention is riveted on a large black SUV with tinted windows, containing the president and first lady, making its way slowly on the streets of Washington, D.C. from the Capitol to the White House. When will the SUV stop, Sawyer asks breathlessly? When will the brave president leave the secure confines of his armored vehicle, alas necessary in the age of terrorism, an age which makes him a target wherever he goes? At long last Obama deigns to appear before the American people. This is the moment we have been waiting for. Ooh, look at the thickness of the door frame, Sawyer gushes. No one knows just how thick it is, she claims (it looks to be about six inches). There he is! President Obama waves to the people, to his most ardent supporters, to federal employees who have the day off. He’s a veritable rock star. Jonathan Karl offers some firsthand reporting about the electric atmosphere, but it’s so loud he can’t hear a thing! I hope you can hear me, Diane! As Obama walks a few blocks on Pennsylvania Avenue, he carries on a tradition started by Jimmy Carter in 1977 to make the presidency seem a little less imperial. By displaying himself in this way, the school lesson continues, Obama shows us that he is the American people’s president. He represents us. It’s a moment for people and president to bond in celebration of the exceptional American political system (as if other democracies don’t routinely transfer power without incident). That this same smiling, beaming man might also have to wield terrible destructive power is the farthest thing from anyone’s mind. Besides, that’s not the face of a killer, is it? Look, he’s waving to me! He’s saluting us! Two thumbs up!

Still, Obama’s inaugural address emphasized the indispensable role of citizens in the American democracy. It’s “we, the people” who ultimately matter and decide the country’s future. If we act together, our best days lie ahead of us. Thank you for this reminder, Mr. President. Perhaps we should start by raising the question of impeachment for the blood on Obama’s hands. Not because I have concluded that Obama can or should necessarily be impeached, but to give the drone question the proper political, juridical, and rhetorical context. True, Obama accelerated withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, but the price has been high and paid largely by others (Pakistani and Yemeni civilians). After all, might not the arbitrary assassination of American citizens (not so-called citizens, Diane Feinstein’s rhetorical sleight-of-hand notwithstanding) constitute a “high crime” as delineated in the Constitution? Cornel West thinks Obama’s drone program, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of casualties, amounts to a sequence of war crimes. Let’s act on Obama’s advice and take back (some of) the power that presidents, perhaps especially the last two, have arrogated to themselves. We can start with Barack and then move on to W., who can’t be impeached, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t belong in the dock for his personal war in Iraq. In the name of national security, our democratic security, let’s put presidents in their place. That they walk among us and wave every four years does not make them any less dangerous; if anything it enhances the awesome powers already at their disposal. 

I'm reading: Obama, Drones, and the Inauguration