Politics

John "the ketchup kid" Kerry criticized the Massachusetts Democratic Party's expected approval to support same-sex marriage.“I think it’s a mistake,” Kerry said. “I think it’s the wrong thing, and I’m not sure it reflects the broad view of the Democratic Party in our state.”

Terrance from Republic of T summed up my reaction to this news best: "Screw you. You squareheaded, Herman-Munster-looking, bigot-pandering loser."

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

First, a general chat on states.

Politics is any kind of leadership in action (Class, Status, Party: remember, social clubs and grad school cohorts can have parties, just as states can). For this lecture, we will understand politics as the leadership or influencing the leadership of a political association, today (1918) a state.

The decisive means of politics is violence.

A state is defined by the specific means peculiar to it, the use of physical force. The state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics, then, means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. The state is a relation of men dominating men by means of legitimate violence (you already know the three ways it can get legitimated, so I'm not telling you). Leaders may arise on those three foundations as well.

How do the politically dominant powers maintain that dominance? Organized domination calls for continuous administration, requires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience to the power-bearers. It requires control over the material goods necessary for the use of physical violence. Thus, it requires control of the personal executive staff and the material implements of administration. All states may be classified by whether the staff of men themselves owns the administrative means, or whether they are separated from it (necesse. for bureaucracy).

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got onto it.... They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance caused a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me...glanced at me, at them, and back again at me and murmured “Socialists”.

-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

Earlier this week, I wrote an essay entitled "Plucking their Strings". My main argument was that progressives will need to abandon their boy-scout-goody-two-shoes ways if they ever expect to gain political power. My conclusion was that we'd do well to verse ourselves in "the dark arts of Rove". Anyhow, Mimus Pauly violently disagreed with me in a post at A Mockingbird's Melody. Therefore, I thought I'd respond to a few particulars (I'm letting the numerous Ad-Hominems slide). Mimus Pauly's questions are denoted by bold italics.

But what the bloody Christ is wrong with Nick Lewis?!

Quite a few people, including myself, have been asking that question since I was in Kindergarden. Even today, the answers remain elusive.One, who the fuck are you to decide what's "true, just, and beautiful" for everyone else?

Those words "true, just, and beautiful" were the result of laziness on my part; I was hoping the reader would just "fill in" those meaningless words. It wasn't my intention to suggest that it was my place to decide anything for anyone else.

By Sheldon Wolin The Nation (spring 2003)

The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former. The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. "Empire" and "superpower" both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms. "Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to "the Constitution of the American Empire" or "superpower democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution" signifies limitations on power, while "democracy" commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens. For their part, "empire" and "superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry.

Via Comments from Left Field

David Weinberger posted last night about the shockingly small amount of money the United States was pledging to the Tsunami victims. I posted about it briefly at the PBAHQ, and got tracked back by a British professor named David Smith who discussed the matter in more detail:

It is, then, a shock to read these sentiments: