Over at The Bit Bucket, there's a nice post arguing against the newfound enthusiasm of the center-left for the draft. One of his arguments is:
"The draft would spread the burden more fairly": This is wrong on several levels. For starters, even if we assume all the loopholes are closed so everyone has to serve, it's a safe bet that the well-educated and the children of privilege will get put in front of computers, not on the front lines. I probably count of one of those "children of privilege," in the sense that I have clerical and computer skills that would be far more useful to the war effort in a Pentagon office than anything I could do with a rifle in Faluja. So if the goal is to have equal proportions of rich and poor kids die on the front lines, a draft isn't going to equalize things very much.
In the comments to the post, there is a response from Kilroy Was Here that I think highlights something important about the center-left case for the draft. Kilroy says:
In your refutation on spreading the burden, first, you are describing only one version of a draft. One could imagine a draft that did not have this problem (i.e. random assignments).
My initail reaction was that the idea of random assignments is absurd. The reason, though, is that the only sort of argument that could convince me to favor the draft is an argument from military necessity -- i.e., "we need more soldiers or else the bad guys will conquer us." From a standpoint of military necessity, you want people in the positions where they'll do the most good. It may not be fair that the Bit Bucketeer and I are, because of our privileged upbringings, better suited to the low-risk desk jobs. But it's much more efficient in terms of building a winning army. And if we're in dire enough straits that we have to draft people, efficiency of fighting is going to be of overriding importance.
The thing is that the center-left argument for the draft is not about military necessity. It's about using the military (or an equivalent peacetime national service regime like Americorps and the Peace Corps) as a means for social engineering. The ends being served by the draft are ends of social solidarity -- making people love their country because they were forced to serve it shoulder-to-shoulder with a cross-section of the population, making elected officials care about what happens to Joe Schmoe because their own son or daughter could be in Joe's place.
Stentor Danielson, 12:49,
A national group of Christian leaders is sending a scathing letter to President Bush to coincide with Earth Day, accusing his administration of chipping away at the Clean Air Act.
... "In a spirit of shared faith and respect, we feel called to express grave moral concern about your 'Clear Skies' initiative -- which we believe is The Administration's continuous effort to weaken critical environmental standards to protect God's creation," the council wrote in an advance copy of the letter provided to The Associated Press.
The nice thing about Christian environmentalism, I think, is that it doesn't require theological liberalism. Theological and political liberalism tend to go together, and for some issues the bond is tighter than for others. For example, while you needn't be a Unitarian to believe God approves of gay rights, you're not going to get the politically liberal answer if you start out assuming the literal inerrancy of the King James translation. Environmentalism, on the other hand, strikes me as entirely consistent with a conservative exegetical approach. A Biblically-based Christian environmentalism could be an important partner to that conservative environmentalism I'm still holding out hope for, even (especially?) if it focuses more on general principles of stewardship of Creation and environmental justice rather than advocacy of particular policy prescriptions.
*Remember this post for sometime down the road when I put "What Would Jesus X?" jokes in the kiosk.
Stentor Danielson, 23:36,
Liberalism Gone Haywire
Today a forward came over the WoGAN listserv about an action being planned to support the pro-choice "March for Women's Lives" in DC this weekend. Naturally, pro-life groups have organized a counter-demonstration. The email urges people to participate in a "phone jam," calling the hotel where the pro-lifers are staying to let the hotel management know that "we do not appreciate their support of fascism, and that no one in the pro-choice movement will patronize their businesses when they obviously support a right-wing agenda."
My initial reaction was simply disappointment, that members of groups like WoGAN, who are so active in defending their own right to protest and so attentive to the intentional and unintentional ways their own message is silenced, would approve of browbeating not just their opponents but also people who would "support" their opponents by declining to impose an ideological test on customers. It's somewhat analagous to the case of proponents of hate speech laws, who call for tolerance and neutrality when it helps them but are willing to turn to power politics when they can.
Thinking about these led me to think about what liberalism (broadly defined) means. The essence of the liberal tradition, I think, is procedural fairness. The classical liberals had great faith that fair procedures -- the marketplace of ideas, individual choice, democracy, the scientific method -- would lead to outcomes that were both right and legitimate. This is in opposition both to a conservatism that says we people aren't worthy to question the eternal word of God or tradition, and to a leftism that says that reason is an illusion and only raw power exists.
Habermas's distinction between strategic and communicative action is relevant here. Liberalism as I've defined it is a defense of the possibility of communicative action. The fair procedures advocated by liberals are the framework under which something approximating communicative action is possible. For all their rhetorical -- and perhaps honest personal -- commitment to liberal communication, phone bank jammers are not quite willing to take strategic action out of their toolbox, to relax their insistence on winning.
Of course, as Habermas recognized in his more recent work, liberalism is only ever an approximation. Leftist critiques -- Chantal Mouffe's does a good job of not throwing out the baby with the bath water -- are useful as a caution against the hubris of thinking we've come up with the final word in implementations of liberalism, reminding us of the inescapable partiality of our viewpoints. But such humility, coupled with the willingness to take a responsible chance, is entirely consistent with liberal ideals.
This brings us to the question of "beyond the pale" rhetoric. "Beyond the pale" can be framed as a form of conservatism or leftism, denying the freedom to take wrong positions. But I find it more interesting to see it as liberalism gone haywire. Liberalism demands that fair procedural framework under which communicative action can occur. "Beyond the pale" is an attempt to shift the grounds of the argument to the framework rather than the content. It's a charge that the view in question is inherently inimical to communicative discussion. We're left debating the legitimacy, rather than the content, of the view.
It's true that discussions of the framework are necessary. Habermas argued that there are three types of communicative action, and hence three grounds on which one can challenge another's statement -- one of which is legitimacy. Mouffe argues that modern society is necessarily caught in a constant contestation over how to draw the framework, how to resolve its contradictions and get the best approximation of pure communicative action. However, defining the framework is only the first step. There's no point in having the framework if there's no communicative action underneath it that grapples with substance. So the problem with the politics of "beyond the pale" is not just that it makes incorrect charges of illegitimacy, but that it sees nothing beyond the question of legitimacy.
Stentor Danielson, 22:40,
Little Worcester
Maybe it's my rural bias showing, but I had to laugh when I saw some of the responses to the "People on the Street" question in this week's WoMag. Asked "What are your favorite and least favorite things about the Worcester area?" people said things like:
My favorite thing about Worcester is the fact that everyone knows everyone else. It's a very close-knit community.
This recent poll from Gallup (link via WitchVox) has to be disappointing to environmentalists, especially after hearing what sounded like the first rumbles of an emerging conservative environmentalism. Americans are now about equally likely to say that the economy should take precedence over the environment as vice-versa, though the environment used to win by a healthy margin. The percent who worry about the environment is down from 77% three years ago to 62% today.
The bright side, though, is that Americans' views of the quality of the environment are nearly stable (with a slight trend toward pessimism). This suggests that people aren't losing interest in the environment so much as having their environmental concern eclipsed by other concerns, especially terrorism and the economy. The overall picture, then, is of a public dissatisfied with the status quo. While the Sierra Club may not like its agenda losing out in the struggle for attention, the forces pushing aside environmental concern may be good for John Kerry's chances.
Stentor Danielson, 23:29,
Sustainability Through Exhortation
For this week's cultural and political ecology class, I have to read a bunch of articles about sustainability science. Some of it -- like adaptive management and Hollings's work on complex systems -- is interesting. But I think that sustainability-wise, we're in deep trouble, since sustainability scientists seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time writing articles that amount to "we're in deep trouble, so we need an interdisciplinary scientific program to figure out what to do," as opposed to actually carrying out the aforementioned scientific program.
Stentor Danielson, 21:14,
The Secular Left
There's been a flurry of discussion around the blogosphere (centered around this post by Allen Brill citing examples of Air America mocking religion) about the disrespect that the secular left shows for the religious left. Though I've by no means read all the commentary on it (my aversion to entering long comments threads is kicking in), I felt like offering my (disjointed) opinion.
First, I think that "secular left" is a broader term than most people realize. It's not just the lefties among the 10 or so percent of Americans who are atheist or agnostic. It includes a large number of people who are nominally Christians or Jews. They may even go to church/synagogue with some regularity. They may believe that God exists, and their ethical system may be largely rooted in Judeo-Christian teaching. However, as an identity issue and a political issue, they leave their religion at home. Except as a tactical move to reach out to (usually black) religious voters, they speak in terms of Rawlsian "public reasons" or a religion-neutral comprehensive doctrine. (I should note that there's also a substantial secular right that's larger than just the Randian contingent. I'd say that most of the top members of the Bush administration, with the exception of Ashcroft and Bush himself, are secular rightists).
To some degree, the secular left has accepted the need not to alienate the religious left. It's standard for diatribes against the religious right to end with a note that they're only talking about the fundamentalists, who give good Christians a bad name, and some of my best friends are religious people. It's hard to tell how often these statements are sincere, and how often they're tactical (if you can't convert them to secularism, convince them that good Christians are liberal). I've heard about how Jesus was a hippie and the "profound" observation that conservatives don't love their neighbor too many times to think that the secular left doesn't recognize the possibilities of a nod to religious values.
There's a segment of the secular left, though, that seems to see the idea of a religious left as illegitimate. After Kevin Drum echoed Brill's call for secularists to show respect for the religious left, many of his commenters seemed to interpret that as a call to show respect for the religious right, and responded that those people were either beyond hope, or in the grips of an ideology so vile and dangerous that it deserves no respect (and even if it did, the religious people disrespected atheists first with their evangelism). They agree with the religious right that real Christians (you rarely hear about the Pagan left or the Buddhist left) ought to be conservative, and are leery of the presumed hypocrisy involved in being a religious liberal. (It echoes, in a way, one of the conservative arguments against Islam -- "though many Muslims are in fact peaceful, my interpretation of the Qur'an says that Muslims are obligated to slaughter the infidel, therefore those supposed peaceful Muslims are just fooling themselves.")
UPDATE: I accidentally published this before it was done, so if you read it when it was fresh, you may have missed this part (as well as a few minor changes to the above portion):
But that's just the extreme version. Most members of the secular left, I think, aren't anti-religious as such. They're more than happy to have the Martin Luther King Jr.'s on their side. They may find religion silly or try to argue you out of it, but they won't begrudge you your Sunday mornings. What they're unhappy with is religion as a defining political identity, religion outside the house and on Monday, Tuesday, etc. Arguments against the religious right focus not so much on the wrongness of their principles as on the inappropriateness of bringing religion into the public sphere. Again, this is not an aversion to public displays of religion (aside from the few people who are oversensitive about the possibility of being proselytized -- a problem perhaps stemming from the same psychological mechanism that makes some people think that gay PDA is "forcing homosexuality down my throat"). It's an aversion to the idea that your religion has anything to do with me. The secular left doesn't want to hear that they ought to incorporate your religion into their private life (and most are good about not reciprocating). And they definitely don't want your religion being imposed on them even indirectly by inspiring any public policy.
This kind of tension is bound to happen whenever a movement has competing philosophies. For centrist political coalitions, the peace is largely kept by the lack of a fully articulated doctrine on the part of most participants -- when was the last time you heard the utilitarian and Kantian factions of the Democratic Party going at it? (The converse of this is the fractiousness of extreme political movements, where their divergence from the mainstream means that they have fewer positions taken unsystematically and out of habit, thus setting the stage for the vicious battles between the premillennialists and the postmillennialists, or the Trotskyists and the Kropotkinites.) Religion, however, represents itself as a comprehensive doctrine -- and what's more, a comprehensive doctrine adopted wholesale on the basis of faith. There seems to be less room for reconsideration and engagement. This, I think, may be an important reason why the religious-secular split can become such a hot point even when the people involved agree on policy.
UPDATE II: Reading the comments thread on Brill's post, I think JRClarkIII has a point about part of the problem being the religious left not being assertive enough. Given that the secular left is often privately religious, it's easy for members of the religious left to slide into that position, adopting the secular norms of the left's political discourse. Without any system for supporting the use of religion for progressive causes and bringing together members of the religious left, they can be left isolated and become politically secular. This is especially easy on the left because liberal theology (at least within Christianity) places more emphasis on acting in accordance with God's will than on professing one's faith. When getting progressive results becomes the highest priority, it's easy to let maintaining a politically religious identity fall by the wayside, and eventually atrophy from lack of use.
Stentor Danielson, 17:38,
20.4.04
OSP
Moving into the gray area between "post" and "article," I've made my first contribution to the new Open Source Politics front page blog. It's on the Saudi oil deal.
Stentor Danielson, 15:18,
Teresa Heinz Kerry won't be backing Sen. Arlen Specter in his re-election bid this year. And that's news ? at least, apparently ? to Specter.
... "If somebody said to her, 'What do you think about Arlen Specter?' I think she'd say, 'He's been a very good senator. I like him. He's important for Pennsylvania,'" Specter said. "She might say, 'I'm going to vote for him.'"
I'm a bit surprised that Specter could not immediately see how much Heinz Kerry has to distance herself from him this year. I wonder whether Specter might have been playing up the possibility deliberately in order to spark a story like this that would get him some credibility with moderates. Then again, considering how successful Pat Toomey has been in making Specter sound too liberal, in part by linking his voting record to Kerry's, it seems that Specter ought to want to distance himself from Heinz Kerry as well.
It's kind of sad, though, that that's the way it works. Why should Teresa's political affiliations reflect one way or the other on John?
Stentor Danielson, 01:21,
Sew-what?
Good reporters like to get quotes from the public capturing how they feel about an issue. But this example, from a story about a process to destroy sewage sludge, makes it sound like the reporter was really fishing for reaction:
"Huh, how does it work again?" said Jason Hunter of Millbrook. "I have no idea what you just said, but as long as the toilets in my house keep flushing, I’m OK with it."
Then again, it looks like even the mayor has no idea what's going on:
"I still don’t know how it works, and Truel has been explaining it to me for six months," the mayor said. "But I do know if we don’t have sludge, we don’t have to get rid of sludge. That means we don’t have to operate a truck, and face the liability of transporting the stuff on the highway to the field. And the biggest benefit of course is for the environment, since we no longer have sludge to get rid of."
debitage 
Drafted For Your Own Good