It Can’t Hurt – Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Things that are aggravating me today
1. People who equate ‘pain’ with ‘correct’ when it comes to political decisions. Slate is full of such people, but it’s a pretty common meme: that you’re not really serious unless you’re willing to inflict some pain. You hear it, in particular, when it comes to the economy. The only serious economic policy is one that asks people to make sacrifices, and so on.
Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with creating a political culture that is a little more aware of the necessity for making tough choices that will involve some sacrifice. Energy policy is a clear example: we have a spate of non-serious solutions that are grounded in the idea that it will be possible to radically reconfigure our energy consumptive patterns without it forces any difficult changes.
So that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a pundit class that seems incapable of grasping that there can be situations where policies that don’t inflict obvious pain are nevertheless the right ones. Discussion about stimulus, for example, is often afflicted with a sense that just spending money can’t possibly be right because it doesn’t ask anything of anyone.
Matt Yglesias has a good post about this. Key quote: “I think this highlights the extent to which political commentators like to substitute cheap moralism for real thinking about economic issues.”
2. The whole Park51 ‘controversy.’ I hesitate to even bother bringing it up, because the whole thing is so ridiculous, but I think it’s still important to think about it. A number of people have pointed out that there is vanishingly little chance that this particular issue will have any lasting effects. I think that’s right. As much as I hate the current discussion, I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim (as some have) that the attacks on the center constitute a major boon to bin Laden. I’m sure the radical folks out there are pleased to see the US behaving like a bunch of idiots, but I can’t really see this being part of their large strategic plans.
That said, I think it’s worth reflecting on this particular controversy insofar as it reveals something broader about our political discourse. Remember that we face a new version of this every couple weeks these days. Some relatively innocuous thing that gets treated as a national crisis–never for any genuinely good reasons–and then forgotten about. And each individual issue never ends up mattering that much, but the coarseness of our capacity to collectively consider important issues surely has to be a concern.
Basically: it’s a sad comment how quickly and how explosively a total non-issue can get turned into a firestorm–particularly when the undertone of the entire thing is a message that being Muslim is (in and of itself) a kind of affront to ‘American’ identity. It’s just sad how willing people are to go along with the whole thing.
3. Speaking of which, the new news is that over 1/6 of the country believes Obama to be a Muslim.
One response to this news from a lot of people has been to issue a caution. It’s not that 18% of people REALLY think he’s a Muslim. They’re just using it as a stand-in for ‘different’ or ‘not like us.’
It confuses me why people think this ameliorates our concerns. That a massive chunk of America feels completely confident in associating ‘Muslim’ with ‘bad’ is a MASSIVE problem–far bigger than some conspiracy zidiots being incorrect about a religion. The fact that they think he’s a Muslim isn’t bad because it reveals they are ignorant–it’s bad because it reveals just how deep and wide the subtle bigotries of anti-Muslim thought run in the country.
Or, to put it another way, John Dickerson at Slate poses a good rhetorical question: “Why won’t any Republicans condemn the “Obama is a Muslim” myth?” For example, you get Mitch McConnell saying he “takes the president at his word” that he’s a Christian. Which is about the weakest defense imaginable. For instance, I take Senator McConnell at his word that he’s not committed to the violent overthrow of the US Constitution. Why have there been a vanishingly small number of Republicans willing to actually condemn this narrative? As Dickerson writse:
What you didn’t hear McConnell say was that the whole notion that Obama is a Muslim is ridiculous because by any standard we use to evaluate the religious beliefs of our leaders, President Obama is a Christian. Nor did he go on to say that any politician who tries to benefit from this urban legend—by courting either Islamophobes or conspiracy nuts who think Obama is engaged in some kind of systematic deception—should be ashamed of himself.
It’s offensive for what it says about Obama, to some extent. But it’s really offensive for what it says about being Muslim–that it’s a slur to imply that someone secretly is one. And it’s a stain on our political discourse that it’s so easy to mobilize these kinds of attitudes.