A Cogent Criticism Of New Athiesm

Via BoingBoing:

In politics, I think there are two competing motivations for voters to support a cause publicly. One is to influence the majority to agree, to make changes that you believe in, and the other is to distinguish your opinions as superior to most other peoples'. These two motivations generally cause people to act in similar ways, but I've found some "tells" that reveal the underlying elitist motivation:

* Leaving up losing campaign stickers and signs long after the election is over. (I passed a Ron Paul window sign today...)
* Dressing and behaving at political demonstrations in a non-respectful way (partying, trying to "shock people out of their complacency," etc.).
* Saying that it requires superior knowledge or compassion to arrive at the views you hold.
* Saying that it makes you "uncomfortable" or "scared" that a group you don't identify with actually agrees with your view.

Under a democracy, the elitist motivation is self-defeating: If your true aim is to distinguish yourself from the masses, you really don't want your side to win-- your aim is better served when more people vote the other way, and then you can be disgusted with most peoples' stupidity and wash your hands of responsibility.

Very, very, very true. This goes for Atheism (which is the focus of this article), but also for artistic aesthetics, and for politics. This article is spot on. But later on he says:

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

Really? Excuse me? That seems like the most backwards... I can't even put words to it. But imagine if that's what he was saying about closeted gays. Oh, you don't have to make a big deal about being Gay, just don't mouth the words that you disagree with.

As many of the commenters pointed out, the real answer is simply to steer clear of religion and of noisy atheism as well. You don't need to pretend that you're religious, but you don't need to get on a bucket and scream. The difference is that Atheism is not a political party in a Democracy--it's not a political movement. It's only the elitist Atheist who sees their goal as the conversion of all the heathens.

I love to talk to my friends about religion--especially, oddly enough, my Catholic friends, who seem to have the most complex relationship with their religion. (The people whose religion is simply "I've let Jesus into my heart" doesn't give me a lot of complex ideas to grapple with in my atheism, but the complexities of the saints, angel/demonology, witchcraft, church history etc. does).

The false opposition that this article puts forward is that there are only two choices:

1) Elitist, evangelical atheism.
2) "Big tent," populist atheism.

Now, the problem with the "big tent" is that in creating a big tent, you dilute the ideals involved. If you're having a political movement, that's a good thing, because moderation is best for governance of crowds. But if you're talking about personal beliefs, that's a bad thing. Your own beliefs need to have integrity in your personal life, and it's in public life that you need to navigate your way into the crowds.

Open Letter To Dr. Ron Paul

Later this month, the Republican Party in Congress will be meeting to elect new leadership in the House. Any leadership challenge for the party is an opportunity to define a new direction, as I'm sure you understand from your run for the Presidency. Much noise is being made that the most recent election is the end of conservatism, or that the Republican Party has nothing left to offer the American People except the same rejected platform that President Bush offered America for the last eight years.

I'm writing to urge you: please challenge Rep. Boehner for House Minority Leadership.

When you first appeared to me on the national stage, challenging the more likely Republican presidential nominees in the beginning of the primaries, I was instantly struck by what you stood for. Every step of the way, you fought for a return to conservative principles, calling for the Republican Party to openly repudiate President Bush, to return to its small-government principles. This is the message that the Republican Party should have communicated in 2008. Perhaps it would have won on this message, or at least come closer to winning. But in choosing John McCain, it chose to continue standing by the Neoconservative movement.

You saw John McCain try to pretend to be you. He tried to pretend to oppose his party, when nobody has made such a clean break with President Bush while still remaining a true conservative as you. You saw John McCain pretend to be against redistribution of wealth, even though he never truly opposed it in a flat-tax scheme such as the one you have proposed. As a result, it never really rang true in the electorate.

You were one of the few people who was questioning Alan Greenspan's policies back when he was still at the Fed. Many else were buying into the Cult of Greenspan, assuming that his knowledge of the situation far dwarfed their own, and allowing him to do his work. You also voiced your opposition to the Iraq War, which most Americans now agree with. If the Republican Party is going to move forward, they're going to need to prove that they have more than ideology: that they have foresight, the ability to see problems as they approach, not just react to them once they're here.

People are also discussing how the Republican Party has lost the young, the educated. How Barack Obama captured an excitement around his ticket that the Republican Party could never capture. But you, in your primary run, proved to be exciting and inspiring to a large block of conservative independents who could not continue to support Bush, but didn't want to turn to a liberal agenda. When John McCain became the candidate, most of those who supported you wound up supporting Barack Obama.

Your fundraising and organizational skills proved to be incredible. You set a record for a single day of fundraising; you outshone all of your opponents in fundraising during the primaries; while John McCain was going bankrupt, you were showing the same internet savvy that Barack Obama was using to his own great success.

In short, if the Republicans in the House choose to reelect John Boehner, then the conservative movement will be out of touch with the people. They will still be trying to appeal to the voters as if it were still 2002. They need a new direction, and they need to be in touch with reality. They need someone who is willing to say, "This is where we went wrong," because until the Republican Party can do that it can never truly win the trust of the American people again.

It will be an uphill battle for you. Even if you don't win the Minority Leadership, however, it will benefit the House Republicans to have an open debate about their future. The idea that they may simply retain Boehner without even wondering if there is an alternative is possibly the worst outcome at all,

Fear of Unity: Why I'm Disheartened About The Republican Party

Before I begin: I consider myself an independent, but because of my personal beliefs and my more pragmatic approach to politics, I wind up aligned (most of the time) with the Democratic Party.

That being said, I find myself a lot more invested in the Republican party than most Democrats (or fellow-travelers). There's two reasons for this, and they are interlinked.

I am what most people would call a Democrat, but I don't fall lock-step into the party platform. And therefore, although I want there to be Democrats in Congress, I do still want there to be Republicans (or oppositional Democrats, or Independents) which represent issues on which I disagree with the Democrats. For instance: the Democrats have made a lot of issues of change part of their platform, but fiscal responsibility is still not their strongest suit (they're doing better, in my mind, than the Republican Party in general, but it's not the top of their agenda). Between the sum of two or more parties, all of my desires will be represented in the dicussions of Congress.

The second reason, which is tied into the first, is that I don't ever want one party to rule. Even if it's the party I support. Even if it was a party led by Barack Obama, taking completely his words to be law. And believe me, I'm excited about Barack Obama. But I want Obama to feel the opposing force of dedicated, intelligent conservatives. Opponents who will correct the flaws in Obama's policy, and make it better for the criticism.

Which is why right now, I'm disheartened by the Republicans. When I went into Primary Season, I hoped against hope that John McCain would win. Instead, he lost. He may be the nominee, but the ideas and platform that I remember supporting John McCain for got lost. Very early in the primary, my support for him was destroyed.

I want two parties who agree on one single principle: the truth is important. I was fiscal conservatives who agree on the hard truth that we don't have an infinite credit card; I want socialist-leaning candidates who agree on the truth that taking care of the poor is necessary. I want people who can agree that nothing is absolute, and that both sides of the issue merit examination.

I was thrilled that Obama came out on this side, because I believe he believes in the truth, in consistency, in good governance, and in dialogue. And the old John McCain believed in that. The new John McCain hides his VP from the press, lies and lies and lies, hews to whatever opinion is popular, and in general acts with a total disregard of the truth (Harry Frankfurt's definition of Bullshit).

By the end of the primary season, I was rooting for two ponies in the Primary Season. One was Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, to a certain degree, is not my favorite man in the world: I think that his social conservatism is a holdover from an age we should leave behind. I refuse to accept anything less than equal rights for all genders and sexualities. But on the other hand, Huckabee came across as a thinking social conservative. He has always been respectful of Obama (the only one at the Republican Convention with anything nice to say) and of his Republican enemies (at a time when Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani were content to question patriotism and adherence to Reagan). I can imagine that if Mike Huckabee were to take the Presidency and the Democrats retain their hold on Congress, social issues might continue to be a mess but things like health-care reform and poverty issues would be able to be discussed in a bipartisan manner. I can't prove, of course, that Mike Huckabee might not get McCained, and I am extremely unhappy at the fact that he (unlike my other pony in the race) was willing to be at the Republican Convention and tout McCain at all.

But I don't believe in vilifying enemies unless they actually are villains, and certainly I think we'd have a healthier national discussion right now if Mike Huckabee was the VP candidate rather than this Sarah Palin character.

The other horse I had in the race is Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, like Mike Huckabee, attracted a significant base (in many areas, up to 15%, like Huckabee) of people who strongly agreed with him and believed in him personally. Paul, like Huckabee, is not prone to baseless character assassination. Paul, like Huckabee has a sense of humor (which you should never underrate in a politician--a lack of a sense of humor indicates a lack of a sense of perspective).

It is disgraceful of the Republican Party, by the way, that this group simply get ignored and dismissed. No representation in the Republican Convention, unless they want to be sycophantic and fall in step behind John McCain. I suppose it is his party, but what has the party done to appeal to Paul's movement? Considering all of the pandering which goes on toward the evangelicals (such as the Palin nomination).

And who is Dr. Paul's movement fueled by? Dr. Paul speaks to a group that I want more represented in politics: Libertarians. My brother is a Ron Paul libertarian, and we have discussed this at length. One of our debates centered around the Internal Revenue Service, which Dr. Paul wants to get rid of in lieu of a flat sales tax. Now, I disagree with the flat sales tax. On the other hand, Paul wants a simpler, more straightforward, less loophole-prone tax code. Even us big-government socialist Democrats can see the virtue in that, for many reasons (one of which being the fact that a complicated, time-consuming tax code winds up costing the poor and benefiting the rich). There's common ground. We can work together.

Another discussion: healthcare. Now, libertarians, in general, don't believe that everyone should be forced to have healthcare. I suppose I agree with that... if someone is determined that they don't want health insurance, that (I suppose) is their right. Now, if someone wants not to insure their child I'm more against that. One of the points my libertarian brother raised, however, is that the problem isn't that people don't have health-care, it's that healthcare is too expensive for people to have. Therefore, finding out how to lower the price of healthcare and increase its efficiency is the first step. If you lower the price of health insurance, then less people would need help paying for health insurance. And then we can discuss who the government should help in terms of health insurance.

Democrats may be too blinded by their drive for an English-style National Health Service to realize that it is just as important to lower the prices of medical care than to help pay for it. And that's something that I hadn't thought of. Libertarians had. Probably because they have a lot of economists on their side.

Now, I'm unhappy about this upcoming election because the Republican Party still seems rather lock-step behind the Neoconservative movement that I thought had proven itself bankrupt. The problem with neoconservatism isn't necessarily their platform (although certain parts of the platform are extremely unpleasant to me and to people of my political background), it's the ideology of the background. Neoconservatives are not out to govern better. They are out to pass their agenda. Compromise has not been in their history. We need compromise. We need thoughtful conservatives, not ideological conservatives.

I actually feel the same, in reverse, on a state level. My home state of California has a very bankrupt politics as well. If you don't know, a few years ago we had a Governor named Gray Davis. He promised a lot of money for a lot of things during the years when we had a huge surplus, and then the state got defrauded by the energy market he deregulated (read: Enron), the tech bubble boomed, and he rolled back parts of his platform. The state now has ballooning debt, and is governed by Governor Schwarzenegger, who replaced Davis.

The problem with California is two-fold. The major problem is the initiative system. The initiative system is a great system for passing laws, but because of a lack of distinction between laws and government programs, the voters get to directly propose and vote on government programs--in essence, the budget is decided by popular vote. And as you might expect, the California voters continue to vote to spend more money and take in less taxes.

This is a ridiculous situation. Nobody will tell the voters otherwise, because if they do, they'll lose their office immediately. But it is necessary to balance the budget. You cannot run a government with a broken fiscal system, any more than you can run it with a broken political system.

The second problem is the Democratic Party of the State of California. When Gray Davis was being recalled, there was an strange method: on the same ballot was two separate votes:

vote 1: Recall Gray Davis?
vote 2: Who would you like to replace Gray Davis?

The latter vote being dependent on the first being passed. Now, from the perspective of the Democratic Party, they need to run a candidate in the latter. It obviously can't be Gray Davis. Now, common sense would dictate that you should support Gray Davis, and find someone else (plausibly distinct from Davis) to run for vote 2.

Instead, the Democrats ran Bustamante, the Lieutenant Governor, who ran on a platform of "I promise to continue Gray Davis' platform."

Well, that was stupid. Obviously, once the recall passed, a majority of Californians were against continuing Gray Davis' platform. And since the Democrats didn't give them any other option, they got to choose between Schwarzenegger and Ariana Huffington (Independent), or a Republican who was even more conservative than Schwarzenegger). Clearly, Schwarzenegger would win. But this gave poor Schwarzenegger the mistaken idea that he had a mandate to try and balance the budget. And ever since then, he's been at war with the bureaucracy of the state of California, and with the people who supported him.

And it has been several years since then. The only opponent who has come against Schwarzenegger was Phil Angelides (Davis' treasurer), who was just as equally unpopular. He turned out to be a crooked character too. So the question is: why can't we do better, Democrats? Schwarzenegger wants to balance the budget. This is something that needs to be done. Democrats will not win any battles by saying we should continue ridiculous debt spending. Instead, they need to confront Schwarzenegger and say, "Yeah, he wants these things, but we can deliver it. We can negotiate; Schwarzenegger can only threaten."

So until then, I support Governor Schwarzenegger's ridiculous guerilla tactics against the Teacher's Union and the state legislature. Schwarzenegger may not be the best politican we could have asked for, but he's the only one in the state taking things seriously. Where is the Democratic Party? Who else are going to tackle those problems?

We live in a two-party system in this country. That means we need both parties. And the better each party is, the better our country will be.

Identity Politics

Today, in my Culture of Dissent class (taught by the inimitable Jan Urban, a Czech dissident from the Velvet Revolution and an excellent journalist in Bosnia, and Kosovo), we discussed the rather difficult question of why Communism proved to be popular.

The answer, from my point of view, is one having to do with the nature of identity in the 20th Century. There are many people who don't believe themselves to be very philosophical in their everyday life (philosophy being a very 'elite' passtime), but in point of fact, everyone has philosophical ideas and worldviews. And one of the big philosophical questions is, "Who am I? What is my identity?"

People base a surprising amount of their political convictions and idealisms based on who they think they are. For instance, one of the reasons that Americans have consistently voted for tax cuts for the wealthy is an array of polls which show that Americans consistently think that they are wealthier than they actually are (which corresponds to the way that they think they're thinner than they actually are).

We talked about the appeal of communism in the Industrial Revolution era. In order to understand it, you need to take a village-eye view of the change. The poor serfs, living in small rural communities, lived in an era with very little mobility. They were engaged in occupations passed down to them from generations, among a small community of people they knew. As the industrial revolution came to pass, serfdom was abolished: they were not necessary anymore. A vacuum formed, which sucked these serfs into the city. Suddenly they were in a huge community, much larger than themselves. Whatever they had previously been known for, through their family, was no longer a mark of identity. They passed by nameless and faceless masses everyday; they worked alongside nameless and faceless masses that did exactly what they did. There was no honor in their new work: they were (proverbially) just another cog in the machine; just another brick in the wall. They had been robbed of their identity, their purpose, and their security.

It was rather like going to a large college after being in a small high school.

At any rate, they needed a new identity. Communism provided that. It gave them a name for themselves: proletariat. It gave them a cause for their misery: bourgoisie. It told them that not only were the proletariat powerful, they were the single most powerful force of history: and that it was historically determined that they must succeed.

So, to turn to contemporary politics: during the Cold War, these identity politics broke apart into large dualisms: Communists and Capitalists on the world stage, and Democrats and Republicans on the American stage (note that third parties were still a noticeable force until World War Two). Ideology became, for one of the few times in American history, a primary source of identification: Democrats, Reds, Anti-Communists, Republicans, Socialists, Peaceniks, Hippies. All of these tags were ideological in nature. They gave people a sense of identity.

Today, these two grand coalitions seem more fractured. At least, the Republican camp seems to have split decisively into moderates, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives. A messy primary season filled with candidates who did not fully appeal to any of these groups (with the exception of Mike Huckabee for social conservatives and the Ron Paul movement for Libertarians) left people on the right with a lack of a sense of direction. Many of these people identified themselves as Republican strongly, without being on board with many of the actions or beliefs of other Republicans.

A big tip-off to me that this identity politics is coming apart? Obama has a large following of so-called Obamicans (Republicans for Obama). Notice, of course, that they are still calling themselves Republicans despite voting for Obama. I'm not necessarily saying that they aren't actually Republicans, but I'm noticing that their insistence is on defining themselves by a party affiliation which, in this election, may not be entirely accurate.

One of my favorite sayings to hear is "I've been a life-long Republican, but I'm considering voting Democrat." Notice the phrase "life-long." This is put forward as a positive, even though being a life-long Republican might imply that you've supported characters like George W. Bush, Nixon, or Reagan (in the same way that a life-long Democrat must have supported Carter, Dukakis, McGovern).

But this is the way people have previously identified themselves.

But with a hyper-specification of polls, there is a new level of identification going on. We hear it today on the news all the time. Demographics. Very small clusters of identity. How are middle-aged women going to vote? What about older men? Young black men in rural towns? These statistics can all be coallated. And apparently, they matter. And although women's groups have been condemning Palin since she was first put on the ticket, the latest poll shows that McCain has indeed spiked among women.

The question, I suppose, is whether we can move past identity politics. Barack Obama (in my opinion) has a way of addressing that. He appeals to people to vote not as Democrats, or Republicans, or as black and whites, but as Americans. This isn't just a trite slogan of identification: he's asking us to identify ourselves as America, and vote in such a way that doesn't just benefit my group or your group or any group, but benefits all of America.

And the question is: will it work.