John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.
David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.
And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.
If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.
And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.
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David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.
Do you think Jesus would have been a Republican or a Democrat?
Panelist 1: My take on Jesus is he would be both.
Panelist 2: No, he wouldn’t. He’d be an independent. He would be a cafeteria politician.
Panelist 1: Well, first of all he wouldn’t be a politician.
Eric Metaxas: No, he would be an itinerant rabbi. By the way, he actually was an itinerant rabbi. I think we can move on.
Panelist 2: Whoa, whoa, well tell us how you really feel about our answers.
Eric Metaxas: No I couldn’t possibly, because this is being recorded.
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Eric Metaxas, commenting on the issue of Jesus’s political affiliations (or lack thereof) during a recent panel discussion.
Well, I guess that’s settled. My attitude towards the question is precisely that of Metaxas. In fact, his answer is probably a sentence too long. Jesus was an itinerant rabbi.
A red flag reading “INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT” should shoot up in your mind anytime an interlocutor cites a first century carpenter to defend his twenty-first century political ideology. It’s a sham trump card for them, first; and second – if the assertion is being made by a Christian – it’s a painfully unflattering and parochial association for the divine. During the most grim period of the Civil War, a beleaguered Abraham Lincoln was asked whether he believed God was on the Union’s side. Lincoln responded with typical prudence, putting the question to rest in one sentence, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is whether we are on God’s side, for God is always right.”
And while we’re at it, can we also stop equating the other guys with Hitler. That’s almost as idiotic.
Interviewer: Often, government-funded scientific research gets on the front pages of newspapers, where people see it as not being a good thing: ‘We’re spending x millions of dollars studying such-and-such behavior of chimpanzees!’ When you see something like that, what’s your response?
Steven Pinker: Oh, well, am I allowed to bring up Sarah Palin?
The most hair-raising, egregious, nauseating example of this occurred just last week, when Sarah Palin ridiculed the idea that the federal government would sponsor research on fruit flies. She followed by saying, “I kid you not,” as if this was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard — ignoring the fact that almost everything we know about genetics originally came from research on fruit flies, such as the existence and behavior of chromosomes, which is one of the things that allows us to determine the cause of Down syndrome, something that she claims to be interested in devoting more resources toward.
So genetics is something you study with fruit flies. Fruit flies are also a major economic pest: our huge citrus industry in California and Florida can be threatened by quirks of the behavior of the fruit fly. So in picking what she thought sounded like an example of government waste, she was identifying one of the most important bodies of research in the entire scientific enterprise.
And John McCain did the same thing. In two debates, he ridiculed research on the DNA of grizzly bears, not realizing that nowadays if you’re a biologist, you study DNA. Even if you’re a field biologist looking at conservation of endangered species (and grizzly bears are a threatened species, so there’s a federal mandate to keep track of their numbers). How do you know whether you’ve seen two grizzly bears or one grizzly bear twice? Well you snag bits of their hair, and you do DNA analysis, and that’s how we know how many grizzly bears are out there.
In making the cheap shot of joking, “Well I don’t know if it’s for a paternity test or a crime scene,” both he and Palin I think showed a certain contempt for science that I and many other scientists find deeply disturbing.
If you describe any scientific research out of context, you can make it sound silly. I think it’s utterly irresponsible for a politician to do that, given how much of the fate of our country — and of our species — is going to depend on basic and applied scientific research.
Last evening, the Senate voted 72-26 to approve our federal budget for the upcoming year. The bill now heads to the White House to receive President Obama’s signature before the deadline at midnight on Saturday.
The above photo: a keen lesson in gun un-safety, from a recent Facebook photo-op of Palin posing with a dead (black) bear.
“This may well be the last time I speak on the House Floor. At the end of the year I’ll leave Congress after 23 years in office over a 36-year period. My goals in 1976 were the same as they are today: promote peace and prosperity by a strict adherence to the principles of individual liberty.
It was my opinion, that the course the U.S. embarked on in the latter part of the 20th Century would bring us a major financial crisis and engulf us in a foreign policy that would overextend us and undermine our national security.
The problems seemed to be overwhelming and impossible to solve, yet from my view point, just following the constraints placed on the federal government by the Constitution would have been a good place to start. To achieve the goals I sought, government would have had to shrink in size and scope, reduce spending, change the monetary system, and reject the unsustainable costs of policing the world and expanding the American Empire.
How much did I accomplish?
In many ways, according to conventional wisdom, my off-and-on career in Congress, from 1976 to 2012, accomplished very little. No named legislation, no named federal buildings or highways – thank goodness. In spite of my efforts, the government has grown exponentially, taxes remain excessive, and the prolific increase of incomprehensible regulations continues. Wars are constant and pursued without Congressional declaration, deficits rise to the sky, poverty is rampant and dependency on the federal government is now worse than any time in our history.
All this with minimal concerns for the deficits and unfunded liabilities that common sense tells us cannot go on much longer. A grand, but never mentioned, bipartisan agreement allows for the well-kept secret that keeps the spending going. One side doesn’t give up one penny on military spending, the other side doesn’t give up one penny on welfare spending, while both sides support the bailouts and subsidies for the banking and corporate elite. And the spending continues as the economy weakens and the downward spiral continues. As the government continues fiddling around, our liberties and our wealth burn in the flames of a foreign policy that makes us less safe.
The major stumbling block to real change in Washington is the total resistance to admitting that the country is broke. This has made compromising, just to agree to increase spending, inevitable since neither side has any intention of cutting spending.
The country and the Congress will remain divisive since there’s no loot left to divvy up.
I have thought a lot about why those of us who believe in liberty, as a solution, have done so poorly in convincing others of its benefits. If liberty is what we claim it is — the principle that protects all personal, social and economic decisions necessary for maximum prosperity and the best chance for peace — it should be an easy sell. Yet, history has shown that the masses have been quite receptive to the promises of authoritarians which are rarely if ever fulfilled…
Liberty can only be achieved when government is denied the aggressive use of force. If one seeks liberty, a precise type of government is needed. To achieve it, more than lip service is required.
Two choices are available.
A government designed to protect liberty – a natural right – as its sole objective. The people are expected to care for themselves and reject the use of any force for interfering with another person’s liberty. Government is given a strictly limited authority to enforce contracts, property ownership, settle disputes, and defend against foreign aggression.
Or: A government that pretends to protect liberty but is granted power to arbitrarily use force over the people and foreign nations. Though the grant of power many times is meant to be small and limited, it inevitably metastasizes into an omnipotent political cancer. This is the problem for which the world has suffered throughout the ages. Though meant to be limited it nevertheless is a 100% sacrifice of a principle that would-be-tyrants find irresistible. It is used vigorously – though incrementally and insidiously. Granting power to government officials always proves the adage that: ‘power corrupts.’
Today’s mess is a result of Americans accepting option #2, even though the Founders attempted to give us Option #1.
The results are not good. As our liberties have been eroded our wealth has been consumed. The wealth we see today is based on debt and a foolish willingness on the part of foreigners to take our dollars for goods and services. They then loan them back to us to perpetuate our debt system. It’s amazing that it has worked for this long but the impasse in Washington, in solving our problems indicate that many are starting to understand the seriousness of the world-wide debt crisis and the dangers we face. The longer this process continues the harsher the outcome will be…
Because it’s the government that initiates force, most people accept it as being legitimate. Those who exert the force have no sense of guilt. It is believed by too many that governments are morally justified in initiating force supposedly to ‘do good.’ They incorrectly believe that this authority has come from the ‘consent of the people.’ The minority, or victims of government violence never consented to suffer the abuse of government mandates, even when dictated by the majority.
This attitude has given us a policy of initiating war to ‘do good,’ as well. It is claimed that war, to prevent war for noble purposes, is justified. This is similar to what we were once told that: ‘destroying a village to save a village’ was justified. It was said by a US Secretary of State that the loss of 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, in the 1990s, as a result of American bombs and sanctions, was ‘worth it’ to achieve the “good” we brought to the Iraqi people. And look at the mess that Iraq is in today…
What a wonderful world it would be if everyone accepted the simple moral premise of rejecting all acts of aggression. The retort to such a suggestion is always: it’s too simplistic, too idealistic, impractical, naïve, utopian, dangerous, and unrealistic to strive for such an ideal.
The answer to that is that for thousands of years the acceptance of government force, to rule over the people, at the sacrifice of liberty, was considered moral and the only available option for achieving peace and prosperity.
What could be more utopian than that myth – considering the results especially looking at the state sponsored killing, by nearly every government during the 20th Century, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. It’s time to reconsider this grant of authority to the state.
No good has ever come from granting monopoly power to the state to use aggression against the people to arbitrarily mold human behavior. Such power, when left unchecked, becomes the seed of an ugly tyranny. This method of governance has been adequately tested, and the results are in: reality dictates we try liberty.
The idealism of non-aggression and rejecting all offensive use of force should be tried. The idealism of government sanctioned violence has been abused throughout history and is the primary source of poverty and war. The theory of a society being based on individual freedom has been around for a long time. It’s time to take a bold step and actually permit it by advancing this cause, rather than taking a step backwards as some would like us to do.
Today the principle of habeas corpus, established when King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, is under attack. There’s every reason to believe that a renewed effort with the use of the internet that we can instead advance the cause of liberty by spreading an uncensored message that will serve to rein in government authority and challenge the obsession with war and welfare…”
