Tag Archives: ideology

Oh Ain’t It The Truth?

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Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

The central tenets of the Beltway religion — particularly when a Democrat is in the White House — have long been “centrism” and “bipartisanship.”  The only good Democrats are the ones who scorn their “left-wing” base while embracing Republicans.  In Beltway lingo, that’s what “pragmatism” and good “post-partisanship” mean:  a Democrat whose primary goal is to prove he’s not one of those leftists.  The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius today lavishes praise on Barack Obama for his allegiance to these Beltway pieties — and actually seems to believe that there is something new and innovative about this approach …

[…]

Whatever else one might want to say about this “centrist” approach, the absolute last thing one can say about it is that there’s anything “new” or “remarkable” about it.  The notion that Democrats must spurn their left-wing base and move to the “non-ideological” center is the most conventional of conventional Beltway wisdom (which is why Ignatius, the most conventional of Beltway pundits, is preaching it).  That’s how Democrats earn their Seriousness credentials, and it’s been that way for decades. 

The “non-idealogical center”!!  Guffaw.

Why is it that Republicans manage to govern significantly to the right, in line with their base, and stay in office for eight years while Democrats have to move significantly to the right to stay in office?  If it’s actually true, maybe it’s because right-wing voters can  count on Democrats to to betray their base and govern significantly to the right.  If this isn’t an argument for the need for a truly revolutionary politics in order to inject the word “change” with basic meaning, I don’t know what is.

Read the whole thing here

Law & Ideology, But What’s “Ideology”?

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From the abstract to a paper entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk about Ideology” by Bryan D. Lammon:

… much of political science scholarship quite clearly suggests that judging is ideological. What “ideological” means, however, is much less clear. A bit of reading between the lines reveals that much of judicial politics scholarship conceives of ideology predominantly as partisan politics. Along these lines, much of the scholarship presents an image of judges as consciously and actively promoting a political agenda.

This conception of ideology and ideological judicial decisionmaking, however, is quite unsatisfying. It conceives of ideology predominantly in political or partisan terms, and, bearing the influence of traditional notions of individual rationality and autonomy, it portrays judges as rational actors that can consciously impose their policy preferences through their decisions. This portrayal reflects the same conception of rational, wholly autonomous individual behavior that law and psychology is challenging. However, even if one rejects judicial politics’ conception of ideology and its influence, one still must contend with the reams of empirical research that judicial politics scholars have amassed.

You can read the rest of the abstract and download the article here [pdf]

via The Situationist

“Pragmatic” Politicians

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From Glenn Greenwald:

… it is nonetheless noteworthy — in general — how much accountability-free praise, and how little critical scrutiny, is heaped on establishment figures as they ascend to power.

Consider this truly reverent — and deeply misleading — profile of Dick Cheney that appeared on the front page of The New York Times in July, 2000, once George Bush selected Cheney as his running mate.  This homage, written by Eric Schmitt, was cited yesterday by sysprog to illustrate how often we are told that past actions and ideology of new political leaders don’t matter, that what matters is that they are serious, pragmatic establishment experts who can be trusted to do the right thing.

It’s well worth a read, and it’s here

No Ideology

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From Norman Solomon at CommonDreams:

On Friday, columnist David Brooks informed readers that Barack Obama’s picks “are not ideological.” The incoming president’s key economic advisers “are moderate and thoughtful Democrats,” while Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy views “are hardheaded and pragmatic.”

On Saturday, the New York Times front page reported that the president-elect’s choices for secretaries of State and Treasury “suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.”

On Monday, hours before Obama’s formal announcement of his economic team, USA Today explained that he is forming a Cabinet with “records that display more pragmatism than ideology.”

The ideology of no ideology is nifty. No matter how tilted in favor of powerful interests, it can be a deft way to keep touting policy agendas as common-sense pragmatism — virtuous enough to draw opposition only from ideologues.

Meanwhile, the end of ideology among policymakers is about as imminent as the end of history.

Read the rest here

It is the only way David Brooks can justify admiring Barack Obama though …

Politics Now

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Ideology has an interest in effecting a change in our relationship to temporality because the subject who grasps its authentic temporality exists with an urgency to act that the ideological subject does not. The subject for whom time is just ‘a pure succession of nows’ never experiences the fleetingness of a situation. As Heidegger puts it, ‘Up to the end “it always has more time”’ (1996, 389). As a result, the ideological vulgar interpretation of time succeeds in producing docility. As subjects with an external relationship to time who see time as a series of nows, we can leave the field of the political to itself; its claims never truly touch us because nothing, not even the political, is exigent. But as subjects of authentic temporality, we recognize the need to intervene in our situation without delay; we become fully politicised beings…

… the film not only reverses the usual cinematic role that romance plays relative to politics, but it also reveals the pathological stain at the source of all politicisation. One first becomes a politicised subject not out of some neutral concern for larger political questions or some universal desire to eliminate injustice but because of singular desire that bears only on one’s own subjectivity.

 

Tod McGowan, “The Temporality of the Real: The Path to Politics in The Constant Gardener“

The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Mereille

The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré

LOL Romney-Speak

Posted on by elizabeth
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From that great American news source, The Sacramento Bee (actually, I may put it on my list of must-reads):

“We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington – throw out the big-government liberals.”

– Mitt Romney,

Sept. 3, 2008

And then the gorilla run knee socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn’t we sing hats?

Ahem.

Maybe you wonder what the preceding gobbledygook means. I would ask which gobbledygook you mean: mine or Mitt Romney’s? If he’s allowed to spew nonsense and people act as if he’s spoken intelligently, why can’t I? If he gets to behave as if words no longer have objective meaning, why can’t I?

I mean, baffle grab on the freak flake. Really.

If you’re a regular here, you’ve heard me rant from time to time about intellectual dishonesty – to argue that which you know to be untrue and to substitute ideology for intellect to the degree that you’ll do violence to language and logic rather than cross the party line.

And no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it … art.

In fact, this originated at the Miami Herald, but I read it at The Bee.  You can read the rest of it here

Glenn Greenwald is a “Far Leftist Idealogue”

Posted on by elizabeth
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Me too:

Here’s what I learned today about democracy and ideology as a result of my debate with Ed Kilgore and having read the comments to the piece I wrote about targeting Blue Dogs:

  • If you believe in the Fourth Amendment, an end to the Iraq War, the rule of law for government and corporate criminals, a ban on torture, Congressional approval before the President can attack Iran, and the preservation of habeas corpus rights, then you’re a fringe, dogmatic Far Leftist ideologue, the kind who ruined the Democratic Party in 1968 and wants to do so again.   
  • Even though the country is overwhelmingly against the Iraq War and intensely dislikes George Bush, it’s necessary for Congressional Democrats to support the Iraq War and accommodate George Bush’s demands so that they can remain popular and be re-elected.   
  • If you oppose politicians who support laws that you think are destructive and wrong, then you’re an intolerant purist who hates dissent and doesn’t believe in democracy.   
  • If you try to defeat in elections those politicians who support the things you don’t believe in, then you’re similar to — basically the same as — Nazis and Stalinists, because targeting politicians for electoral defeat who espouse views that you think are wrong is comparable to murdering political dissidents and requiring purity of thought.   
  • Recruiting primary challengers to run against Democratic incumbents — and running ads to inform voters of what their Representatives are doing in Congress — is anti-democratic in the extreme.   
  • Being a Good Democrat means embracing, welcoming and supporting members of Congress who support unnecessary wars, the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment, the abolition of habeas corpus, the use of torture, and protections for lawbreakers — as long as they place a “D” after their name when voting for those things.

Read the rest here