Easily Distracted

Iraq’s future is in the hands of long-time now.

There’s no need now to rush to the blog or the column, the talk show or the speech, to mark and masticate the meaning of each and every event. Listening to Swarthmore’s War News Radio (the last four programs have been really excellent), I heard one student summarize a suicide bombing from this week by saying that it was the worst attack since…the previous week.

Listening to the reporting of American casualties, I don’t hear more significance in a week of 20 dead than a week of 5 dead: it is an oscillation within an established register. Reading of American participation in the beating, torture and murder of a Ba’athist military officer and insurgent I don’t think, “Now there’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, which proves Abu Ghraib was not an isolated case”. That has already been proven: the new story is merely more demonstration of a pattern. Reading of Steven Vincent’s death, I wonder why some of his readers do not see the careful attention he was giving to the underlying pressures shaping Iraq’s evolution and the American involvement, the slow movement of events in one direction and away from the direction he believed in and cherished, a perception which led to his murder.

The determining structures are hardening in place, made as they always are by the accumulation of the choices of many people and institutions. Some choices made clearly, with foresight of their consequences. Many choices made hastily, without contemplation, in response to directives and impulses coming from far outside the heat and dust of the war itself. What Iraq is becoming is not just what America is making of it. It is not just what Iraqis are making of it. It is not just what the insurgents are making of it. No one has a god’s eye view, but anyone who thinks there is a good and desirable goal here beyond bolstering some bullshit partisan advantage has to at least try to look at the track that the train is travelling upon. If they’re not happy with the destination, they need to try desperately to pull the switch and move it onto a new one. A train track that’s just a single degree of angle away from another can lead, far later, to a radically different place.

No one knows what the insurgency wants, probably not even the insurgents. Partly because there is more than one insurgency: there are those who just want a better cut of the action in a corrupt postwar US client state, and those who think they can only get a better cut of the action by cutting out the “US client state” part and being just an ordinary corrupt Third World state. There are young jihadists who are the 21st Century’s Lincoln Brigades, restless young men who fuse romance and nihilism and treasure a chance to matter now rather than simply settle into the ordinariness of middle-aged anomie. What could satisfy them but death and killing, unless they somehow live long enough to see through the haze and their own narcissism to the lives they destroy and the futures they strangle? There are the flinty old manipulators and grand dreamers of Islamist movements trying to make moves on a global chessboard, with as little ability to tangibly grasp and hold onto the whole of the game as wonks in Washingtonian think tanks and Pentagon situation rooms. Different insurgencies, adding up to a complex sum far greater than any of its parts, pushing Iraq one way. Perhaps some insurgents do not want it to go that way, but given the incoherence of the overall situation and their own efforts, any direction except improvement of the American situation will do well enough.

There’s the Americans, trying hard to master a messy political situation with largely military means. Some dreamers who truly want a democratic and free society, with little thought to grand geopolitical plotting about Israel or oil. But the dreamers are mostly sleepwalking past what is happening: past the torture (“merely a few bad people, and we caught them”), past the shootings of innocents at checkpoints (“understandable error”), past the dirty deals with death squads (“counter-insurgency is all about breaking eggs to make omelets”), past the easy slide towards accomodating kleptocrats and ‘our-bastards’ in order to establish order. These are not single decisions, single events, with one turning point. That’s the real dreamers: there are also fake ones, who don’t actually care much about Iraq, just about gaining advantage within the United States or even just within the factions of the federal bureaucracy.

These are structures of decision, driven by the confluence of political expediency, the cycle of the American presidency, and more crucially, the deeply rooted and muddled instrumentalism of the war’s planners. The planners have unfocused eyes on the prize because they’ve never been honest with themselves or with the American public about what the prize was, save the unseating of Saddam Hussein. Yes, they did that, and we’re all quite happy about it. But if they want more, they’re going to have to move the train one angle away, shift the structures of decision, move the long-time. More American men and women in Iraq, soldiers and civilians, are going to die in the long-time between now and the day they are no longer there. If their deaths are ever to mean more than, “We got that bastard Hussein”, the logics of the long-time are going to need to push away from torture, away from expediency, away from backroom deals with people who have no more interest in democracy than the insurgents do.

And then there’s the Iraqis. Surely none of them, save the insurgents and the people seeking short-term advantage from American intervention, can be hugely satisfied with the situation as it stands, least of all those who believe in and hope for freer, better, safer society. Their hands are far from the train switch. It’s one thing to say that achieving democracy is a bloody and difficult business. Surely that’s so. But if you say it with any sincerity, think at least of the Iraqis as well as you think of Londoners. Mourn as much their dead as the dead in London’s undergrounds. Grant at least the indignity of being chosen to sacrifice your people in the struggle for democracy instead of choosing yourself to do so, the pain of being the proxy battlefield selected by bearded men huddled in caves at the high roof of the world and men gathered in situation rooms in Washington DC. Feel at least a little discomfort at the thought of people without representation or say being volunteered to heroic sacrifice in the global war on terror.

Iraqis most of all live in the long-time now, and most painfully of all of us, know least and fear most about where it is all heading.

I’m starting to feel weary and gun-shy about political discussions in the public sphere (among bloggers or otherwise).

It feels to me that so few people are stopping to take a deep breath, look at issues from several angles, think about first principles, likely outcomes, the constraints on the possible. Even commentators that I’m generally in sympathy with are precluding any discussion besides strict agreement with their own take on matters.

I’m really feeling this with the Roberts nomination and the related discussion of Roe vs. Wade. Yes, I found the head-fake to Clement deplorable: a petty bit of political mockery from the inner cirlces of the Administration, a “hah-hah, you thought maybe for once we’d actually try to play to the center! Hah-hah!” Yes, this is about trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn much of what it has accomplished in the last twenty years, which makes me sad for a variety of reasons. Yes, I’m concerned about the threat to Roe vs. Wade.

But at the same time, here’s some other things on my mind.

1) Do we really want to be in the position of saying that we will oppose a candidate who has great qualifications for the Supreme Court strictly because of his apparent legal and political ideology? There’s only one person on the current Court who I think is straightforwardly a blemish on the institution, and that’s Thomas, who is clearly not qualified and who doesn’t even have a vague hint of a judicial temperment. Even Scalia was an intellectual asset of sorts before he started going off the religious deep end and cutting his originalism to fit instrumentally partisan ends. I think the ideal Supreme Court should have ideological and philosophical pluralism, as long as all of its members are intelligent, knowledgeable and persuadable, capable of adjusting their views in any particular case based on the soundness of the arguments presented to them. I understand that the arguments against using a “litmus test” are offered cynically by many on the right (and the culturally conservative right isn’t even pretending any longer that they don’t have their own litmus test). At the same time, I’m always thinking about where we want to be as well as where we are, and where we want to be, I think, is that the Supreme Court should have a different ethos of selection than other branches of government. I want to vote for Congressional representatives who will speak for my views on the issues, and a President who will lead in a way consistent with my political values, but I don’t want the same direct correspondence between my own political views on particular issues and each and every Supreme Court justice. Indeed, if we value the Warren Court’s legacy, that’s exactly what we’re saying.

2) That’s all pretty abstract. Let’s get down to the real deal. Do you think that there is any way in hell to stop the confirmation, barring the revelation of some dark secret about Roberts? Somebody tell me how the opposition pulls that off. No, don’t tell me to get angry, demonstrate, write letters to my (avowedly and inflexibly Republican) Representative or my (batshit insane and wimpily moderate) Senators. Not unless you can tell me about the unknown terrain between getting! really! angry! and “blocking the nomination with the result that a more moderate person is nominated next time”. So if the nomination isn’t going to be stopped, what should it be about? How about a longer-term strategy where the implications of the shift in the Court are made clear to the American public, where the Democrats in the confirmation process set themselves up as the reasonable guardians of American consensus as opposed to the irresponsibly partisan fringe-elements dominating the Republican Party? And so on: all things which seem to me necessarily preclude an apocalyptic, fight-to-the-finish, junkyard-dog strategy for opposing the Roberts nomination. There’s some consensus on the left that the longer-term strategy is the way to go, but it’s often followed by advice to hit Roberts himself hard, or to be fierce in the hearings, and these are incommensurable.

3) On Roe vs. Wade. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon is unsparing: she says drop the “horseshit argument” that securing the right to choose abortion is going to have to be conceded back to state legislatures. There’s a lot of opinion behind her on this point. It’s an argument that was newly galvanized by Benjamin Wittes’ article “Letting Go of Roe” back in the February 2005 Atlantic Monthly.

I think that Marcotte and others are right about the consequences of accepting Wittes’ argument: there will be some states in which a choice that many of us regard as an expression of a larger right to privacy and self-ownership will be denied to women. In practical terms, it will be denied in particular to poor women who lack the resources to travel across state lines. I agree that if you see choice as part of a fundamental right, accepting that it is not a universally guaranteed right is extraordinarily painful.

But Wittes’ argument is not “horseshit”, and it’s not “looking for a way out of the fight”, both cheap responses to an important debate that we’d better have now in a much fuller and more mutally tolerant fashion. Wittes observes that centering the debate on Roe vs. Wade has prevented those of us who believe in choice and in the right to privacy and self-ownership from securing that right either constitutionally (with an amendment) or through state and federal statutes. We’ve put all our eggs in the Supremes’ basket. More importantly, Wittes is right, in my opinion, to note that our reliance on Roe has kept the cultural conservatives from having to actually shoulder the political cost of passing specific statutes that take away a right that the majority voting population of most states supports, from having to actually do something that will have concrete consequences in terms of the everyday lives of most Americans.

You could legitimately object that Wittes’ argument implies that we should never rely on the Court to do anything, in fact, that all rights should be secured by statute. Should we overturn Brown vs. the Board of Education, too? But this goes to the deeper heart of the abortion issue. The fact is that the Court’s civil rights decisions were, first off, supported by a wave of legal and political reforms. But second, they were supported by a broad and abiding moral and cultural consensus across the United States. The glorious triumph of the civil rights movement was that it simultaneously forced the political order to abide at long last by the guiding principles embedded at its foundations and it made white Americans who had not wanted to see or know or truly care about racial inequality to at last care, to recognize how far the country was from a minimal realization of its highest ideals.

Abortion has simply never achieved the same status. The right to privacy and self-ownership is supported by a relatively wide social consensus, but that consensus peels away significantly around abortion. Yes, at least some of the opposition to abortion is a reactionary, unacceptable opposition to the wider right of privacy, and some of it is unmistakeably motivated by a desire to control women, or to discriminatorily deny them a general right. Some of it is driven by the same kind of proxy exportation of fundamental social and cultural conflicts that appears in debates over gun control, free speech rights, and so on, where abortion is just a synecdotal device expressing a deeper cleavage. But some of the separation of abortion from the wider right to privacy is driven by an authentic if also ambivalent sense that abortion is a place where the right to privacy and self-ownership gets authentically complicated. Complicated because a child is a rights-bearing entity in its own right and because children, even in utero genuinely involve more than one person’s hopes, fears, wishes, desires and rights. Any argument on behalf of choice has to take that messiness and the unease it generates seriously, and that’s something which those of us who support Roe didn’t do for a long time.

We even have to take the more obdurate or extreme opposition seriously in that it exists and it persists. There was for a long time an assumption among supporters of Roe that the Court’s protection for the right to choose would eventually, by osmosis, create a consensus, that the opposition to Roe had the same archaic and self-evidently backward character that the opposition to civil rights did. That history would dispense with the opposition to choice, and that all we had to do was keep strong and organized amongst ourselves. The folly of that approach has been demonstrated, and I think with more than just abortion. The force of social reform coming out of the 1970s became far too dependent upon guarantees of legal, political or institutional power, far too dependent on a model of enforcement. At a distant remove, that’s what drove speech codes in universities: the mutating, growing belief that changing what people think, producing new consensus views, could be done through an enforcement model rather than through seeking persuasive dialogue with people unlike ourselves. Because persuasive dialogue exposes, requires concessions, is dangerously contingent in its outcomes.

That’s all high-toned talk. So let’s switch gears a little on Roe to practical matters. It’s pretty clear it’s going to be overturned sooner or later, either in total or as good as such.

So then what, if it’s just “horseshit” to talk about other political pathways to securing the right to choose for as many Americans as it can be secured for? Does the campaign for the right to choose in Ireland curl up and die because they don’t have Roe vs. Wade to begin with? You work with what you got. Go to the barricades for Roe if you like, but if you don’t have a Plan B, then don’t spit on the people who do. If you can’t tell me how you actually intend to keep Roe from being overturned beyond getting angry and demonstrating and all that, and you don’t want to talk about the political alternatives, how committed are you really to the right to choose or the wider right to privacy from which it derives?