The War Powers Resolution is Dead! Long Live the War Powers Resolution!

The first casualty of our military actions in Libya may have been the War Powers Resolution.  President Obama dealt the coup de grace to a resolution that was already mortally wounded by four decades of Congressional passivity in the face of the rise an ever more imperial executive.

Before I perform an autopsy to establish the cause of death of the War Power Resolution, we should honor its life.  The War Powers Resolution rested on sound Constitutional, prudential, and strategic grounds.

The Founders and the Role of Congress in the Defense of Our Republic

Our founding Fathers’ political theory was, above all, consistently opposed to monarchical absolutism.  In the 17^th century, England was the scene of furious violent struggles, including the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, against Stuart monarchism.  Englishmen like John Locke argued that when all political power was concentrated in a single person or branch of government, that the result was not political society at all, but a state of nature, a state of war.

But our Founding Fathers’ distrust of excessive executive power had ancient sources.  Although Hamilton advocated a stronger executive and central government than nearly any other Founder, he used the pen name Publius – the name of the Roman who overthrew the Tarquins and established the Roman Republic – in the Federalist Papers.  Hamilton was not alone in drawing inspiration and guidance from Roman history.  Content analysis of the writings of our Founders has found that they refer to Roman sources more often than English Republicans like Locke.

Our Founders not only drew inspiration from the founding of the Roman Republic, but learned important lessons from its demise.  Our Founders understood, as did Machiavelli, that the Republic fell in part because it became embroiled in ongoing warfare requiring standing armies.  From the Punic Wars onward, nearly continuous warfare forced Rome to replace its intermittedly created citizen armies with permanent standing armies, which were later replaced, more and more by standing armies which largely consisted of mercenaries and non-Romans . 

These changes in the nature of the Roman military were accompanied by changes in the Roman “executive power.”  In the Republic, “dictators” wielded short-lived, temporary emergency military powers to execute the Republic’s wars.  But as the Republic died, and with the ascendance of Julius Caesar, temporary dictatorship under Republican control was replaced by a deified, Republican Emperor Caesar.  A month before his death, Caesar was named “dictator perpetuus.”  With this, the Republic was dead.

Our Founders knew well from ancient Rome and 17^th century England that unbridled executive power, standing armies, and permanent executive “dictatorship” in military affairs were anathema to Republican principles.  For our Founders, standing armies were the bain of liberty.  Thomas Jefferson said, “Standing armies are inconsistent with [a people's] freedom and subversive of their quiet.”  Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said, “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.”  James Madison contended, “As the greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies, it is best to prevent them by an effectual provision for a good militia.”[i]  

Although our Founding Fathers’ republicanism and belief in legislative supremacy was deeply influenced by their fear that we not repeat Roman and English mistakes, some of their confidence in legislatures was fortuitous.  Under English colonialism, the Crown retained the executive power.  When colonies and their subdivisions were established, the normal form of colonial charters was collective and legislative.  Consequently, when the colonies removed themselves from the colonial power and declared independence, they left the colonial governors control.  Removed from control of the English executive, the colonies’ default governmental form was legislative.  Legislatures are the common institutional thread from the colonial period through the Revolutionary War to the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.

Our Founders’ view of the proper role of the legislative branch in military matters was not only informed by their fears regarding the threats posed by perpetual dictatorship, absolutism, and standing armies to Republics but also their positive experience in the Revolutionary War.  The Revolutionary War proved to our founders that the legislative branch could successfully raise, organize, and reorganize armies.  The relationship between the Continental Congress Washington’s military leadership foreshadows the Constitutional allocation of war powers. 

In the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress raised, supported, and organized armies, and Washington served as the Commander in Chief of the armies they raised.  In the period between 1775 and 1779, the Congress sent several committees to Washington, solicited his advice, and after consultations, took steps to reorganize the army.  The role of the Continental Congress in this establishment and reorganization was quite detailed.  See for example – http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/bdsdcc:@field(DOCID+@lit(bdsdcc04901))

Our Founders were Republican in both theory and practice.  Their political theory developed in opposition to monarchical absolutism, informed by the mistakes of Roman history and English history.  But our Founders had real practical experience in legislative government, in the colonial period, in the Revolutionary War, under the Articles of Confederation. 

A simple prudential insight informed our Founders’ construction of the Constitution.  Large standing armies are anathema to liberty because they are readily used by absolutist-minded tyrants to repress the people.  Legislative supremacy, avoidance of foreign entanglements requiring long standing armies, and the prevention of permanent dictatorships arising from usurpations of power by the executive were essential ingredients of a healthy Republic.  The Revolutionary War had proven to our Founders that the legislative could effectively establish, raise and organize armies, and win wars.  No temporary or perpetual dictator was needed.

The Founders understood that exclusive executive control over the war power, even in the form of a temporary dictatorship, would embroil the nation in military adventures that would undermine the Republic.  Their solution was to limit the military power of the President and vest most war powers in the legislative.  Thus, Madison wrote, “. . .  the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.  [The Constitution has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature.”  James Wilson wrote, “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it.  It will not be in the power of a single man . . . to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large. . .”

The constitution that our Founders were creating was a Republic.  In a Republic, the Legislative branch must be supreme.  As Federalist 51 states, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”  The Founders’ respect for legislative supremacy finds formal architectural expression in the fact that the first Article of the Constitution is the Legislature.  The sequence of the Constitution’s discussion of the powers of each of our separate branches is not random.  The fact that the Legislature comes first in the Constitution is consistent with our Founders Republicanism, their respect for the Roman Republic, their familiarity with the struggles of British republicans against Stuart absolutism in the 17^th century, and their experience in the Revolutionary War.

Importantly, the war powers of Congress are outlined in the Constitution before the war powers of the Executive.  Under Article 1, section 8, Congress has the power to:

To declare War . . .

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

What are the war powers of the Executive?  Article II, Section 2 states:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States . . .

One doesn’t have to be a Constitutional law scholar to discern our Founders’priorities.  The legislative branch is mentioned first in the Constitution, is the supreme branch of government, and has a long litany of war powers under the Constitution.  The executive branch is mentioned second and has but one power; albeit an important power.  One need not be a sophisticate to apprehend that the Constitution’s architecture and plain wording indicate that our Founders intended that Congress have a substantial role in our Republic’s military matters. 

 Nor do the two branches act in isolation.  The Founders, as is well know, believed that governmental power must be divided between branches which would act as check and balanced on one another.  The Federalist Papers 51 makes it clear that government must check government.  “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” 

Federalist 51 stated: "TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places."

Thus, the defense power of the legislative provides a check on the defense powers of the executive.  Congress has the power of the purse, the power to declare war, the power to organized armies and navies, and the President wields the sword that Congress has placed in his hand.  Even Hamilton, the most executive oriented Founder, wrote in Federalist 24, “that the whole power of raising armies was lodged in the LEGISLATURE, not in the EXECUTIVE.”

The central role of Congress in military matters is evident, not only from the construction of the Constitution itself and the longer litany of Congressional war powers, but from the comments of our Founders.  Jefferson wrote, “We have already given in example one effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body. . . .”  James Madison stated, “The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature . . . the executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”  William Paterson wrote, “It is the exclusive province of congress to change a state of peace into a state of war.” George Washington said, “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”[ii]

The arrangement our Founders created in military affairs is simple.  The supreme legislative branch decides whether we should go to war and the executive branch executes those wars.  This arrangement worked in the revolutionary period and was later written into the Constitution.

The War Powers Resolution

Fast forward to the time of the War Powers Resolution.  Although Congress played a role in the ramping up of the Vietnam conflict with its unanimous support of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, by the 1970s, Congress began to doubt the wisdom of its actions.  President Johnson has, at various points, greatly escalated the number of ground forces in the climate and President Nixon expanded the war’s air campaign and approved the broadening of the conflict into Cambodia.  Both Johnson and Nixon based their actions on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

By 1973, Congress was ready to reel in the President.  Citing the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause, it passed the War Powers Act, over President Nixon’s veto.  The state purpose of the Resolution is:

It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgement (sic) of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicate by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.

To me, the heart of the War Powers resolution is its consulting and reporting provisions.  Those sections provide:

CONSULTATION.  SEC. 3.  The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations.

REPORTING  Sec. 4. (a)  In the absence of a declaration of war, in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced– (1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces; or (3) (A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; (B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and (C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement

Since the passage of the Act, both Republican and Democratic President, have consulted and reported consistent with the Act.  Richard Grimmet’s work on the issue lists 111 incidents of reporting consistent with the Resolution.[iii] 

The seeming compliance of Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Carter and Bush with the Resolution’s consulting and reporting requirements would suggest that all is well, that Congressional efforts to redress the imbalance between Congressional and Presidential war powers has succeeded.  The danger of runaway Presidential military action no longer exists.

But I would argue that the War Powers Resolution has really not been tested since its passage. First, the rapid nature of American military actions prior to the second Bush Iraq and Afghanistan wars meant that the time limits of the Resolution were seldom triggered.  The real “teeth” of the War Powers Resolution, Section 5(b) have not been bared.  Section 5(b) provides:

 Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1), whichever is earlier, the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to which such report was submitted (or required to be submitted), unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States.

Basically, this section requires the President to request a declaration of war or terminate military actions under the Act.  But the rapid nature of many of the 111 reported military actions avoided showdowns between Presidential war making and the Resolution’s termination procedure.  Indeed, Grimmet lists just two examples where some members of Congress felt that the time limitation of 5(b) had been triggered (President Clinton’s involvement in Somalia and Bosnia).[iv]

Conflict was also avoided in nearly all cases Congress has been willing to cooperate and accommodate Presidential military actions and war making.  In contrast with the tough questions that Congress eventually asked about President Johnson and Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam War, Congress has tended to be accommodating, even docile in their relationship to Presidential war making.  For example, President George W. Bush’s wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan began with reports consistent with the war powers act and have continued for eight and nine years.  The time limitations of the Resolution have not been raised regarding these wars by complacent Congresses.  Ongoing Congressional docility raises the question of whether it has tacitly waived its powers to terminate military actions under the Resolution.

Finally, to the extent Congress has challenged Presidential military decisions since the passage of the Resolution, the challenges have been highly partisan and of questionable legitimacy.   Republicans questioned the actions of Presidents Carter, Clinton, or Obama.  Democrats questioned the actions of Presidents Ford, Reagan, and the Bushes.  When this partisan sniping is viewed alongside general Congressional cooperation with the executive’s military decisions, it suggests that there is little in the way of real bipartisan Congressional disagreement regarding the role of Congress and the President in military matters.  

But more simply, the Executive and Legislative branches haven’t yet had the occasion to go toe to toe, as institutions, over the War Powers Resolution.  The closest we have come to interbranch conflict over the Act is Congressman Bruce Campbell’s suit against President Clinton’s Yugoslavia action in Campbell v. Clinton, 203 F.3rd 19 (D.C. Cir. 2000).  But that suit was only supported by 31 Congressman.  Thus, we have not had the occasion to ascertain what would happen if a bipartisan Congress and the President clashed over military actions and the Act.

Taken together, I would argue that the War Powers resolution has really not been tested since its passage.  Partisan sniping aside, Congress has generally been docile in the face of executive military decision making.   The lack of bona fide institutional conflict between the executive and legislative branches since the passage of the act, mean that we have sidestepped several six million dollar questions in the period since the passage of the Act.  

• What happens if the President fails and refuses to consult and report consistent with the Resolution.
• What would happen if the Resolution’s Section 5(b) time limitations were triggered but the President refused to comply, refusing to request a declaration of war and to terminate military action.

On March 21, 2011, it appeared that we might, finally, have encountered an example of a President failure to report and consult as required by the Act.  On that date, President Obama sent a letter to the House Speaker and President Pro Tempe of the Senate, pursuant to the War Powers Resolution, informing them that:

At approximately 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, on March 19, 2011, at my direction, U.S. military forces commenced operations to assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council and undertaken with the support of European allies and Arab partners, to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and address the threat posed to international peace and security by the crisis in Libya.

This letter is inconsistent with the Resolution.  President Obama introduced forces into action on March 19 but didn’t “consult” until March 21.  But the Resolution provides, “The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.”  Besides not consulting before introducing forces, Obama’s consultation turns the act into a mere formality. 

Merely formal consultation is inconsistent with Congressional intent in the drafting of the Resolution.  Grimmet says of consultation:

A considerable amount of attention was given to the definition of consultation. Rejected was the notion that consultation should be synonymous with merely being informed.  Rather, consultation in this provision means that a decision is pending on a problem and that Members of Congress are being asked by the President for their advice and opinions and, in appropriate circumstances, their approval of action contemplated.  Furthermore, for consultation to be meaningful, the President himself must participate and all information relevant to the situation must be made available.

Given the substantive requirements for consulting envisioned by Congress, President Obama’s letter of March 21, 2011 merely informed Congress of his introduction of forces. 

This act of noncompliance or superficial compliance with the Act is troubling because candidate and Senator Obama vowed to act consistent with the resolution.  In response to questions by Charlie Savage, then of The Boston Globe, the candidate Obama said:

Q. In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? (Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites — a situation that does not involve stopping an IMMINENT threat?)

OBAMA:  The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. 

As Glenn Greenwald points out, our Libya actions cannot and has not been justified on the grounds of imminent danger or self defense.  As he has done on so many campaign stances, President Obama has backtracked.  This reversal is not his first in the area of foreign policy, he has reversed his campaign stances on ended the wars, Gitmo, torture, and detainee trials. 

It now appears that a full blown showdown over Libya and the war powers act has been averted.  Subsequent to March 21, and perhaps in response to bipartisan criticisms of his alleged unilateralism, President Obama and administration officials engaged in more substantive consultations with Congress.  In addition, the short lived US leadership of the coalition’s efforts, and the engagement of our forces appears to have ended. 

Thus it appears that the first of our two questions above has been answered.  What happens if the President fails to consult consistent with the Resolution?  Congress complains and the President brings his consultative efforts into substantive compliance. 

But the other question remains.  What if President Obama reintroduced American forces into Libya for more than 60 days, triggered Section 5(b), but refused to terminate actions after a Congressional refusal to declare war or approve extensions under the Act.  My sense is that Congress would stop funding.  At that point, President Obama could either terminate his military actions or follow the example of the Stuart monarchs and President Reagan and seek funding for his was from foreign powers, circumventing Congress.

But the recent controversy over President Clinton’s Libya action is more anomalous than representative.  This controversy and partisan second-guessing of President Clinton’s Somalia and Bosnia actions are hardly the norm.  In most instances, including high questionable engagements like the Bush invasion of Iraq, Congress simply rolls over.  It fails to ask hard questions and to get the answers that should accompany a commitment of our forces to combat.  It is Congressional docility in the face of the Imperial Presidency that really killed the Act.  Of the Act is dead, Congress is to blame.  President Obama simply applied the coup de grace.

America’s Punic Wars

Our republican military period, is dead, the imperial approach is upon us.  The War Powers Act was passed in an effort to bolster Congressional war powers, but has simply created a procedure for Congressional rubber stamping of the military decisions of our Imperial Presidency.  The progressive evisceration of the War Powers resolution is a predictable consequence of our most recent “Punic Wars.”  Those wars have undone the Constitutional balance of powers in the area of military affairs and war making.  The War Powers Act did little to redress this imbalance. 

Heeding the warnings of our Founding Fathers, America largely stayed out of foreign military entanglements in the first century of our Republic’s existence.  In the 100 years after the revolution, America was involved in just two wars outside its borders (the Barbary Wars and Mexican American War).  But as we emerged as a major world power, our military role expanded.  In the next 120 years, we would be involved in a dozen wars.  For all the protests and conflict around the Vietnam War, it did nothing to slow our military expansion.  In the last 30 years, we have been involved in 6 wars.  The combined time of twenty years spent in Afghanistan and Iraq exceeds the time our troops spent in World War 1, World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam combined.

Our Punic Wars have had the same impact on our Republic that they had one Rome’s.  They have created a hypertrophied executive, particularly in the areas of espionage, defense, and military matters.  Not surprisingly, our liberties have been compromised.  The Patriot Act expanded government surveillance of American citizens, 9-11 was used to justify the trial of American civilians in military courts, and military and civilian prisoners have been deprived of speedy trials, access to counsel, and subjected to pre-conviction abuse and punishment.  But perhaps worst of all our Punic Wars have altered the power balance between our branches of government.  In the Bush years, Congress abdicated its oversight of our military, choosing instead to rubber stamp the President decisions to go to war and subsequent occupation. 

The minor ruckus that some Congressmen raised about President Obama’s actions in Libya hardly means that Congress has taken back the war powers it rightly has under the Constitution from the Imperial Presidency.  The same Congress that has questioned his limited involvement in Libya, docilely accepts his continuation of our costly, pointless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is that docility that poses the greatest threat to our Constitution in this area.

 

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[i]  http://ragingtantrum.com/?p=2504

[ii]  These quotes and the quotes just above of Jefferson and Wilson are found at http://warandlaw.homestead.com/files/foundin2.html

[iii]  http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RL32267.html

[iv]  Id.

Teaching, Rebellion and Transference

The comments of Derek Seidman, particularly his very honest admission that he “was never able to overcome the intense insecurity [he] felt around [Victor]” kept him from getting to know Victor as an adult and friend,  moved me to the role of transference in teaching.  Transference plays an important role in teaching and can play an important role in resistance and rebellion.

As a practicing psychoanalyst, Victor would have told Derek that his insecurity was transference at work. Transference makes teaching possible, but it also can create some problems for students and teacher-professors alike.

Transference is centrally important to psychoanalysis.  In the therapeutic setting, analysis is only made possible by the transference of feelings that the patient has toward their parents to the analyst.  Although certain types of emotions consistent with the project of analysis may be transferred – respect, influence, authority, submission, love - other emotions which may be obstacles to analysis may also be transferred – anger, resentment, erotic or sexual attraction, paricidal feelings.  Successful analysis not only exploits these positive emotional transferences but also grapples with the obstacles presented by the negative emotional transferences.  Over time, in successful therapy, transference has a kind of dialetical twist, the process of parental emotions to the therapist helps the patient to free themselves from issues they have with their parents.

It almost goes without saying that teaching, runs or doesn’t run, on transference.  We see glaring examples of this in elementary and high school teaching, where chaos in the class room results from the transference of the parental disrespect to teachers.  Two generations ago, our superego bound grandparents transferred the stifling authoritarianism of their often dictatorial parents to their elementary and high school teachers.  The teacher was always right. Now, id-driven school children, transfer the marginal, shaky respect they feel for their parents, onto those teachers.  The teacher is always wrong.

(An aside. If the above sounds culturally conservative, a lament about the decline of discipline, it isn’t.  Like Victor, and other critical theorists, I believe changes in psychodynamics, character structure, and family relations are driven by the demands of capitalism.  As the great conservative social theorist Daniel Bell argued in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,  the new, consumerist capitalism needs a different personality-type than the old, work oriented capitalism.  The former needs hedonistic, sexually liberated, impulsive, rebellious, undisciplined id-driven consumers, the latter requires ascetic, disciplined, hard-working, emotionally controlled, workers.  The archetypal personality of our grandparents was the factory worker.  The archetypal personality of the current era is the internet surfer, splitting time between porn and shopping.  One should not confuse this loosening of restrain with true liberation or real human emancipation,  it is what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation, a loosening of restraints which actually increases the dominance of the system of domination over individuals. Or as Foucault would have argued, there is power aplenty in that sexual liberation. )

I digress.  College teaching also runs on transference. In some ways, more so than primary or high school teaching. Why? Because when students leave for college, they leave their parents behind.  This temporary psychological orphanning leave them very ripe for teaching.  Professors are not just sources of interesting information, college professors become stand-ins for parents.  The richness and depth of transference in college educational settings gives college professors unique opportunities to teach and change their students. 

Take politics. Until college, statistically, most students have more or less the same political positions as their parents. As with religion, they get socialized into believing what their parents believe. Obviously, there are exceptions to these general statistical tendencies, some children rebel against their parent’s politics and religious positions before college.  But generally, students begin college with the politics of their parents.

College changes this in many cases. At least temporarily. Students are likely to change their politics in college for several reasons. First, they gain substantive knowledge, theories, analytical tools, and facts that raise questions or cast doubts about their parents politics. Second, they are surrounded by peers, and peer trends impact student politics.  Bandwaggoning is pretty common.  In the late 60s and 70s, during the cultural revolution, colleges were liberal and radical, and many students followed the herd. In the 80s, with the Reagan counter-cultural revolution, more and more white students shifted their politics conservative (or retained the conservatism of their parents once in college).  In the Clinton years, that began to shift back.  And finally transference plays a role, students transfer emotional states like authority, respect, and nurturing to their professors, opening the door for the professor to push the parental political instruction aside.

But professors, helped and hurt by transference, are also the source of student politics.  This cuts both ways.  Because one’s college years are a period of self-discovery, development, individuation, and growth, it is not uncommon that some students rebel against their parents, both psychologically and politically.  These processes can be mutually reinforcing in some cases. Alongside its philosophical, normative, or practical side, a political position may be attractive precisely because it is contrary to the politics of one’s parents.  But not all students rebel in college. Some students adapt to college life by following much the same path as their parents.  If their parents worked hard and became doctors, they do the same. If dad joined a fraternity, partied alot, and didn’t get serious until business school, they may do that,

In either case, rebellion or imitation, transference may have a role. The rebellious student may be drawn to professors with some traits, an interpersonal style, or ideas dissimilar to their parents, and repulsed by those like their parents.  Less rebellious students may be drawn to professors with some traits, style, or ideas like their parents, and repulsed by those unlike their parents. 

This process may go well beyond the adoption of intellectual or political positions or world views. Transference can play an important role in the very person the student becomes, their very identity.  Some students adopt identities unlike mom and dad, others adopt identities like mom and dad.  You can see the empirically at graduation, where, even spruced up, and factoring for generational differences in clothing and hair styles, some students look quite different from their parents, and others look like carbon copies. 

Pedagogically and politically, I always viewed transference in Platonic terms.  The historical Socrates tried to change Athenian minds by arguing with people.  This highly rationalistic approach to political and philosophical discourse, assumes that the other discussant is rational, and will be won over with arguments alone.  Doing this got Socrates executed.  His student Plato was so dismayed by this that it eventually changed his entire theory of socialization, education, and the training of citizens.  As Plato’s work develops, it becomes ever more clear that he didn’t think the Socratic approach worked, at least in most cases.  Outside of those students with unusually well-balanced souls and considerable intellectual ability, argumentation with already formed near adults didn’t work.  Where students had been corrupted by society, they were more likely to use the intellectual skills they learned in argument and education for some corrupt personal or political end.  Thus the problem with sophists, demagogues, and tyrants.

For Plato, as outlined in his Republic, proper education, education which could produce a ruling class that would actually rule in the collective good (and not for their own self advancement), required selecting an educating students from birth virtually.  Indeed, Plato’s Republic contains a suggestion, treated as many as ironical, that those creating his ideal state – the Callipolis – must kill off a whole generation, including parents to start from scratch.  In that ideal state, the educators get orphaned children for proper education from birth virtually.  The children who compose the class from which the ruling class and philosopher kings would be draw is transferred out of their parent’s care to education by the state.

In simple pedagogical terms, Plato is saying two things to me.  The Socratic method of educating and influencing others through argument and discourse seldom succeeds, except in cases where those arguing are unusually rational and open-minded. In contrast, in most case, changing the hearts and minds of others, isn’t just a rational process of argument, counterarguments, etc.  It has irrational components.  Those being educated must be in the right psychological and state to absorb the materials.  And part of that educational process is having them away from the influence of their parents, and, metaphorically, stepping into their place. In those conditions, students who might otherwise not be receptive to certain ideas might be.

At UCLA, I witnesses this Socratic/Platonic dichotomy in action.  For example, when I was a teaching assistant or professor, and exploiting transference, I could get otherwise resistant students to ponder and understand controversial political theorists (Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche)  who they might otherwise reject out of hand. For students to understand and appreciate the work of political theorists like these demands not only that they discard the cultural and historic lenses of their time and place, but that they jettison any preconceptions they might have about the thinker.  To understand a work of political theory, one must get inside the head of the theorist,  get internal to the text. To understand “them,” means leaving “me” behind.

In classes, as a TA or prof, with a little help from transference, I was able to make this happen. Students would suspend their disbelief and drop their prejudices. But if I found myself in private conversations on campus, just me, stripped of  transference and position, the students to whom I was talking would be incredulous.  In the private setting, I would hear the same old tired prejudices and misconceptions that one encounters with these thinkers. Plato is a totalitarian, Machiavelli counsels evil, Rousseau would force us to be free, Hegel is an apologist for Prussian statism, Marx is responsible for the horrors of communism, and Nietzsche’s superman is a precursor of the Nazis. 

Private Socratic argumentation/no transference/closed-minded and resistant.  Institutional education/ transference/more open-minded and less resistant. 

Transference enters education in another more personal way. The way one interacts with a professor has much to do with one’s psychological state.  My own relationship to male authority figures has been deeply shaped by my upbringing.  If the authoritarian personality type is created by excessively strict parenting by a traditional father and mother, my antiauthoritarian personality was shaped by less strict parenting largely by my mother.  My father abandoned my mother and I when I was one.  My mother remarried when I was four, but she shielded me from the authority of my stepfather. Thus, not much super-ego going there. To the extent I had a father figure, it was my uncle, but his guidance was more ego, reality principle based, not much in the way of superego style “Thou Shalts.” 

This upbringing shaped my reaction to authority figures, including professors.  I tended to be rebellious in general, arguing when I disagreed with professors, whether I liked them or not.   I had particularly conflictual relations with professors and teachers that I believed heavy handed, unfair, capricious, authoritarian, or incompetent.  If teachers or professors were competent, good teachers, I would treat them respectfully, even if they weren’t my ideal type. But it was the professors that had the traits of my ideal-typical father, iconoclastic, rebellious, unauthoritarian, humorous, that I really tended to love.

Victor was the best of those bests, followed by Bruce Bechdel.  I never really felt fear or distance from them. I didn’t feel secure around them. In contrast with my dead-beat dad and other incompetent or authoritarian teachers and profs, I felt secure, comfortable, and empowered around them.  In contrast, as an undergrad and grad, I often felt nervous and insecure around professors, particularly if I didn’t know them well. 

Admittedly, feeling relaxed and comfortable around someone like Victor is easier for a graduate student in their late 20s and early 30s than for an undergraduate like Derek. But some of my ease around Victor also came from the fact that I felt in some ways we were kindred spirits and he was fatherly and nurturing in a reality principle and not superego-ish kind of way.

Derek need feel no embarrassment in his insecurity around Victor. It was common that students are nervous around college professors, particularly if the professor is renowned and an award winning professor.  But even more ordinary professors can make their students insecure.  One of the more interesting and humorous examples of this happened with me and a student who happened to be a football player at UCLA, Nkosi Littleton. 

Nkosi was very bright and polite, but a massive brute of a man.  Nkosi was one of my tutees when I tutored athletes with Tamrat Bayenne’s Arts and Science program.  He was later in several of my political science classes.  Good student.

One day I was walking across campus and I stopped him. I said hi, and stopped to talk. While he was talking to me, I couldn’t help but notice that he was visibly nervous, almost sputtering. At the time, I thought, “This guy is nervous talking to me because I am his professor, and its me who should be nervous. He could kick my ass in about two seconds.”  To me, much of that nervousness was transference.  We are nervous around many of our professors because we worry they will be like harsh  judging  parents and think we are stupid.  But the more nervous were are, the more tongue tied we get, the more idiotic we sound. Vicious circle.

This can happen even in adulthood. Because, as any psychoanalyst like Victor, will tell you, we never leave the parents-in-our-head completely behind. When I began my legal education at Berkeley’s Boalt, at age 37, I had little transference with my professors. I was roughly the same age, I had a Ph.D. in hand, and had taught at Pomona College and UCLA.  I was very confident during law school.

But once I went to work in law, in the private sector and later in government, the transference slowly crept in.  My first law firm has an institutional culture that is a case study in psychopathology, run by an insecure tyrannical principal who is threatened by other males (unless they are sycophants who were psychologically castrated by overparenting) or females.  I fared poorly there, partly because I hated that culture, partly because I had no knack for the work.  My inherent tendency to dislike and disrespect unfair, capricious male authority came to the fore. But it was later, in the equally unhealthy work culture of the NLRB, that my rebellion to illegitmate, unfair authority was sublimated into my finest moment – my leadership of a successful multidimensional campaign against an unfair, discriminatory evaluation system.

Ironically, when I taught at UCLA in the summer of 2006, as part of a detail I took as a respite while my grievance of my unfair evaluation was being processed (they settled on my terms), I was so proud to tell Victor about my union battle.  I wanted him to know that I had gone beyond interpreting the world, and had actually done something political, as a union officer, to change that world. (Marx – The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.”) In short, I wanted this surrogate father of mine to know about and appreciate my proudest act of anti-authoritarian rebellions.

My union struggles at the Board could be entitled, “Profiles in Intersectionality.”   The Board has consistently favored those at the top of the intersectionality ladder (white, male, and young) above those at the bottom of that ladder (non-white, female, and older).  The Board Member for whom I worked, loved wimpy, compliant overparented males, in many cases, nice Jewish boys.  But unlike that principal, she hated other women.  She was sexist and racist. Plain and simple.

As a result, when the Board implemented a new evaluation system, the Board member tried to chase out older women particularly women of color and the two union member males (myself and the Union Vice-President) who has resisted her efforts.  In a two year period, 8 of the 11 lawyers on her staff grieved. Five of the 8 were females. All of the females were over 30, 4 over 40.   Boardwide, none of the white males under 40 were downgraded in their evaluations under the new system, but 64% of the females over 40 were downgraded.  Five of the six black females working at the Board were chased out of positions on Board Member staffs by unfair evaluations or threats of unfair evaluations to come.

Beside being discriminatory, the evaluation system was implemented in an unfair way.  Management would cook the books, in violation of our contract and federal regulations to get the result they wanted. Perhaps the best example of this was the way in which the various Board staff managers worked in concert to more evenly distribute the number of evaluations in each of three categories. Although federal agencies may downgrade the evaluations of individuals, they cannot impose a predetermined distribution or curve.  The Board was doing just that. In previous years, employee evaluations had average about 60%, 30%, and 10% in the three applicable evaluation categories.  But after the new system, almost exactly 33% of employees were rated in each category. The numbers were good proof of a curve.

How was this done? But cooking the books.  To get the right distribution, supervisors and managers would selectively tinker with the element (subcategory) ratings of ratings borderline attorneys to kick them into a lower category. For example, if a rating of Exceptional in the legal writing element would otherwise have given the attorney an overall rating of Exceptional, but their quota of Exceptionals was filled, they would lower the legal writing score to produce the desired result. They would then invent criticisms, previously never voiced to the employee, to justify the desired element score.

This pos hoc tinkering with element and overall ratings to get the right distribution manifested itself in two ways. Either the element evaluation was facially unfair. The criticisms of performance voiced were either inconsistent with the facts or unrepresentative. Or the criticisms were invented, and written post hoc, after the end of the evaluation period, in some cases over the objection of the employees’ immediate supervisor.  The managers injecting these kind of post hoc justifications were so lacking in guile that the post hoc criticisms were either written in a different font or had a markedly different style than the supervisor’s comments and criticisms.

During my time as grievance chair, nearly 1/3 of our union’s Board side bargaining union grieved their evaluations or filed some other kind of action.  Of the 20 or so actions, nearly all were settled on terms acceptable to the employees.  I was particularly proud to get some of my friends, who were long serving, extremely component, employees, out of the line of fire.  In that capacity, and with the support of the Union President, Leslie Rossen, I developed and implemented a multidimensional campaign, with grievances, mediation, fliers, press releases, FOIA requests, information requests, ULP charges with the FLRA, a complaint to the MSPB, protests, and other strategies. In this campaign, the mixture of labor history and game theory that I studied in graduate school was particularly useful.

Successful political or legal or even religious rebellion cannot run on psychological rebelliousness, moral indignation, or personal resentment or anger alone.  Although union activity or other forms of resistance by subordinates taps into and uses negative transference and resistant to illegitimate authority, it must also be reality based.  It must be driven by the ego, not just resistance to the superego.

My struggles at the Board would not have been possible without the strong streak of rebelliousness and resistance to capricious authority that my upbringing and childhood imbued in me.  Beyond that, my childhood has made me particularly quick to jump to defense of oppressed women, since I grew up hearing about my maternal grandfather’s drunken neglect of my grandmother, my paternal grandparents’ legal defense and  justification of my father’s failure to pay child support, and my father’s neglect of my mother and I.   Not surprisingly, I am proudest of the fact that I defended the relatively older female employees at the Board from unfair and discriminatory evaluations.  I wasn’t going to allow the Board to abuse these women.

But resistance must be based in more than the Great Refusal.  Just as the authoritarian personality type is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Nazism and fascism, the anti-authoritarian personality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful union activity.  The Great Refusal can spark action, propel it, but not guide it.

Successful rebels must also have a keen sense of reality. In this case, I studied, analyzed, and thought about how the Board’s evaluation should and didn’t work more than their managers. I knew the numbers better than they did. I knew the applicable rules and regulations better than they did.  I had the reality principle on my side.

And I understood their psyches better than they understood mine. For me, threat of job related punishments were of no avail.  I had right and justice on my side, and, quite frankly, I loved the joy of the battle. I was having fun. But I made sure they weren’t.  I used a constant bombardment of emails, fliers, grievances, information and FOIA requests, protests, and other forms of resistance, to make them as miserable in their work as possible.  As a current Board member was to say when we finally brought in the FMCS to mediate our differences, our management “hated coming to work, it sucks.”

This strategy was heavily informed by my dissertation, in which I developed a three person version of the famous Prisoners’ Dilemma for situations of worker collective action.  I developed that model as a kind of Rational Choice Marxist critique of the work of Mancur Olson. In Olson’s work, he predicts workers will underprovide collective good (and simply endure their oppression) because the costs of unilateral action, and its low likely efficacy, makes such action prohibitively costly.  Olson argues that large numbers deepened these collective action problems.  In related literature, Rat Choice Marxists like John Roemer, argued that Olson was right, Marx wrong.  And they tried to prove this using the two person Prisoners Dilemma Game (PDG).

My dissertation questioned this literature in two ways. First, I argued that worker collective action cannot realistically leave the employer out of the game. For me, the two person, worker worker Prisoners Dilemma, committed the Gulliver Fallacy, leaving Gulliver out of the game and treating it as a game between Lilliputians. Thus, for me, injecting the DA was a kind of operationalization of ideological critique. The Prisoners Dilemma Collective Action Game approaches to worker collective action, whether used by conservatives, liberals or Marxists, were ideologically distorted. Realistic modelling required the insertion of the employer into the game.

But when one injects the DA into the PDG, or the employer into the worker game, these equals are not equals. As Marx notes, capital is already organized, it isn’t an individual it is an institution, a firm. As such, it starts the unionization game, hierchally situated, it has the ability to control many of the rules and parameters of the game.  To escape from the dilemma, the workers like the allegorical prisoners, must struggle to overcome the rules of the game they play.  For example, if communication about workplace conditions are disallowed, then they must struggle to communicate.  My dissertation applied this triadic model to cases of worker collective action.

One of those case studies was the prevention of unionization at Ford in the Depression.  The Ford’s River Rouge is the quintessence of a triadic prisoners dilemma type social trap.  Ford adeptly manipulated the rules of interaction and communication, along with wages, threats and violence, to atomize workers, highlight the high price of union activity, and to reward compliance.  To unionize the Rouge, the UAW-CIO had to change this  game. But unionization at Ford and elsewhere was helped by the eventual passage and implementation of the National Labor Relations Act.

One of the things the act protects legally is communication between workers about work conditions.  At the Board, communication about evaluations wasn’t strictly disallowed but it was uncommon.  Some of this was a matter of courtesy. But when the playing field changed, communication about evaluations was imperative.

To help employees overcome their communicative distance, to escape from the cells of their dilemma, the union worked to improve internal communications. We had to break down those walls. I used emails, passed out surveys, crunched numbers, made charts, and distributed statistics.  This  was aimed not only at creating more solidarity and mutuality of purpose, but also aimed at leveling the informational playing field.

The new performance system’s standard for Productivity illustrates this. When it created the new system, Board management chose the arbitrary number of 10 cases for a rating of Proficient in that element.  Proficient is the 3rd to lowest rating of 5.  But this number was arbitrary and unrealistic. Because Board case intake had dropped,  the Board didn’t have enough cases for each attorney to have 10 each. Even if they had asked for and processed 10.  But employees didn’t know this standard was unrealistic, until our FOIA request showed that the number of available cases would have allowed attorneys to move 5-7 cases at most. 

Another piece of information we shared with attorneys was the average number of cases that were actually handled by the employees in each of the rating categories in Productivity. As it turned out, those processing about 7 new cases received the highest rating, about 6 the next, and about 5-6 the next. This information allowed individual employees to better evaluate whether their Productivity rating was fair.  Rather than evaluating their numbers by the arbitrary, unfair, standard of 10 cases, they could compare their actual productivity to the actual rating average.  “I moved 7 cases, I got  Proficient, they did 6 cases and got the higher Commendable, that is unfair.”

The other piece of information we shared was the divergent ways in which Board staff managers were counting cases.  Suffice it to say, the way cases were counted was different from staff to staff. Which mean that production numbers deemed Proficient (3) on one staff might be deemed Commendable (2) on another staff.  Since the attorneys do the same work and work together on teams of three, these inequities were particularly galling. The one employee of twenty some who grieved the whole way to arbitration was particularly pissed off that she received a Commendable (2) for a large project that her co-counsel on another staff earned an Exceptional for.  

These unfair results were made even more objectionable by the fact that they were overlaid with gender, race, and age discrimination.  White males were often given the advantages of helpful case counting methods, older women  and women of color either had their cases counted differently or not counted at all.  In some cases, management simply misrepresented the number, lying about the number, despite the fact that all employees submitted detailed weekly case work summaries.  Amazingly, the Board’s management had justified these reports on the grounds they would lead to more accurate, fairer evaluations.  But when the Board wanted to downgrade a particular employee, most often a women, they would ignore the very reports they had us submit.

In fighting all this, I took a page from management. In the past, when management wanted to get rid of an employee, they would simply harass them until they quit or made a mistake (for example with the use of leave) that would allow them to threaten them into leaving (to avoid discipline).  Why? Because the process of removing underperforming or misbehaving federal employees costs time and money, taking at least a year, often more, and costing as much as $100k to $200k if the employee appeals. But that process only works if the employee is actually doing something wrong. It won’t work if they are simply someone management doesn’t favor..

My strategy in the evaluation fight was a mirror image. Above all, make them miserable. Lay the kind of shit on them that they laid on employees.  Beat them up using numbers and statistics. Attack and ridicule their performance as managers. Highlight and publicize their every mistake.  Use threats (grievances, public relations embarrassment, public protests) as disincentives for their unjust actions. Above all make them miserable. Make coming to work horrible for them.

It worked. When we went to mediation at the FMCS, their litany of complaints was a virtual list of my strategies and tactics. I could barely contain my smile. It worked.

But making them more miserable did more. In concert with the union, working in FMCS mediated labor-management committees, the Board agreed to a best practices memo that ended most of the worst, most unfair practices. We settled our most of our evaluation grievances on terms acceptable to the grievants. And magically, over time, the Board began promoting more women to supervisory and management positions.  And not all of the new hires and promotions were white women, some of them were women of color (at least one Asian and one African American). The Board even hired a Latino male for a prominent position.

In fighting these fights, my rebellious personality, my tendency to challenge unjust authority, particularly in the defense of women, played a role.  But this is not all super-ego stuff. The rational part of the mind, the ego, must play a role, discerning what is real and possible.  The battle cannot only be about “what should be” and conscience.

One example illustrates this. I have heard from sources that after I left the Board, but raising hell on labor law blogs, that the Board members and their managers instructed someone in the Board’s information office to counter my statistics.  I guess they thought I was simply a petulant child, raising hell, for no good reason.  But after the employee went out and crunched the numbers, they found and reported, that I was right. That the Board has advanced very few women, particularly women of color and older women.  I am told, that this report, led them to drop their proposed project of countering my statistics on discrimination and discriminatory evaluations.

The Great Refusal can spark and push rebellion, transference plays a role.  But as in teaching, at some point you have to master the material, know your stuff.

As Engels said, “From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom. The task of economic science is rather to show that the social abuses which have recently been developing are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production.”   In my case, the task was showing that the Board’s abuses developed as necessary consequences of the illegal, inconsistent, capricious way they implemented a flawed system.

Tranference matters, but in the end, the Ego and the reality principle must provide the cure. Freud wrote, “The business of analysis is to secure the best possible conditions for the functioning of the ego; when this has been done analysis has accomplished its task.”

The Private & Public Selves: Some Thoughts on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Introduction

Recent exchanges on Facebook and elsewhere regarding Bruce Bechdel’s portrayal in his daughter’s gothic novel Fun Home have prompted some thoughts on the private and public selves.  I want to make it abundantly clear that I know the two selves can be quite different.

Ironically, many of my thoughts on this subject apply things I learned from one of my favorite professors – the late great E.V. Wolfenstein – to the life of my favorite high school teacher, Bruce Bechdel.  Bruce inspired me to love ideas, books, and thinking; Victor supplied me with ideas, helped me work through great books (particularly Hegel’s Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right), and taught me how to think using a sophisticated mix of historical materialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, post-modernism, and critical race theory. 

On Narratives

 Victor and I were both strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory.  Critical Theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm combined (among other things) Freudian and Marxist categories.  One of the shared moments of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory is the proposition that critical analysis and thinking can cut through the untruth of rationalizations and ideology and uncover the underlying truth of psychological or socio-economic-political reality respectively.  Framed in this way, these theoretical methods are modernist – they posit a singular reality, an essence, underlying appearances.  There is a “there” there, as Marge Shultz likes to say.  Indeed, Victor and I both studied and utilized Hegelian phenomenology which uses the power of critique to carve through Dasein (appearance).

Without committing to a position in the ongoing debate between post-modernists like Derrida and Foucault and the Critical Theorist Jurgen Habermas, Victor and I learned important lessons from Foucault and post-modernism.  In this context, the most important lesson was suspicion of meta-narratives.  Rather than viewing psychoanalysis, social theory, or political action was carving through ideology and rationalization to lay bare the singular, essential truth, post-modernism sensitized us to the need for multiple narratives.  In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard wrote, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”  In Lyotard’s construction of progressive politics, meta-narratives are replaced with a whole range of diverse and always locally legitimated discourses, reflecting the diversity of human experience.

 Although post-modernist’s rejection of meta-narratives sits uneasily with the metaphysical modernism of Critical Theory and its Marxist and Freudian, it fit well with epistemological aspects of our theoretical apparatus – the grounding of the psyche in the body (phenomenology, Nietzsche, feminism, critical race theory) and knowledge in class, history, and power relations (Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, Marx’s epistemology, and Foucauldian power-knowledge).  Put simply, and contrary to Mannheim, there is no quasi-transcendental Archimedean point at which knowledge escapes embodiment and grounding.  

Persons of different social classes, family backgrounds, historical periods, races, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds will experience the same reality differently.  For purposes of this work, Itake this to mean and  understand that gays and straights, children and students, males and females might not see things in the same way. 

 With this, there is no single narrative, no one true story.  There are multiple narratives.  Telling the story of a family life and its psychodynamics is like Kurosawa’s Rashomon.  Each character tells a different story, and none of those stories enjoys a privileged epistemological position.  

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel developed a narrative about her father, the private Bruce.  My narrative, of Bruce the English teacher, public Bruce is quite different.  But that difference is irreconcilable.  I will do nothing to deprive her of her right to that narrative.  That is her story.

 Private and Public Selves

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.  -  Sigmund Freud

 Although Freud argued that health people successfully juggle live and work, their public and private lives, the two projects hardly fit together seamlessly. 

 In Civilization and its Discontents Freud argued that the entire structure of civilization was built upon diverted (sublimated) psychological energies.  Freud saw the process of socialization as the development of superego and ego control of our impulses and drives (Treiben).  In Freud’s analysis, work and love, career and family life, are a kind of zero sum game – the energies sublimated and allocated to one are taken from the other.  To work successfully, diverts energies away from the concrete bonds of love of our family members.  As Herbert Marcuse civilization later says of Freud, “‘Happiness,’ said Freud, ‘is no cultural value.’  Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as fulltime occupation . . . .”

 The theory of sublimation has dire consequences for the project of balancing work and love.

The diversion or sublimation of psychological and emotional energy away from the family, creates distance between the public and private self, and generates unhappiness in two ways –   neglect and displacement.  It is not uncommon that a working parent, often a father, will allocate their energies away from their families, toward work.  This sort of neglect is often rationalized as the opposite – the individual justifies their careerism and pursuit of material gain on the grounds that they are doing so because they are caring for and acting on their love their family.  The best test of whether such assertions are rationalizations are valid is the sentiments of their family members.  Surveys show that many of the spouses and children of workaholic parents would prefer that their breadwinner spend less time and energy on work and more on them.

 Thus, the fact that a family’s breadwinner is successful or accomplished hardly means they are likely a good father or mother.  Indeed, it may increase the likelihood that they are not.  It makes it more likely that their sense of self worth and their identity is more bound up with their career success and material accumulation than the love and care they give to their family.

 The more the demands of the work world impact family life and the private self in more ominous ways.  The demands and stresses of work take their toll on breadwinners.  The workplace is the scene of fulfillment, self-expression, and satisfaction, but is also the scene of stress, conflict, and workplace politics.  The stresses of employment (and unemployment) result in frustration, substance abuse, unhappiness, mental illness, abusive behavior, aggression and violence. 

 Although those who are unhappy or stressed in the workplace see their spouses and families as a refuge from the stresses of their workplace, others handle the stresses differently, displacing their aggressions onto family members.  In some cases, particularly high job stress is closely related to abuse in the family – police and military personnel are particularly likely to abuse their spouses.

 For those who come home from work unhappy or angry, spouses and children are easy targets for their aggression.  A particularly explosive combination in this regard is situations in which the male breadwinner is marginalized or unemployed and the female spouse and her children are trapped and have little possibility of being self-subsistent.  Such circumstances the victims of abuse and domestic violence may be forced to choose between abuse and homeless and poverty.

 Although some breadwinners view their families as a refuge from unhappiness in the workplace, the opposite can be true.  Where an individual is unhappy in their family life, they may reconcile themselves to finding fulfillment and happiness away from home in their work.  In many instances, these two dynamics are mutually reinforcing.  The more the breadwinner pours his or her energies into work, the more unhappy their family life.  As that unhappiness deepens, they pour themselves ever more into work. 

 The tensions between work and love, career and family life are also higher where the breadwinner’s career selects for traits which are problematic or dysfunctional in family life.  The personality traits which make success as in some careers often make for unhappy marriages and poor parenting.  For example, careers in law place a premium on argumentation, precision in language, and prevailing for one’s client, but in many family arguments these traits are dysfunctional.  In family discussion and argument, the point is not winning, but coming to understand and appreciate the feelings and positions of the other family members.  The very traits cultivated and honed at work and career, may make for misery when unfurled in the family. 

 But success in work can be inversely related to family happiness in another way.  Abusers and molesters may often use their public or career success to bolster and strengthen their abuse.  The victims of domestic abuse are more likely to flee and contest their abuse if they believe their claims will be believed, that they will enjoy the support of family and friends, and that the police and legal system will find their claims credible.  But where the abuser enjoys a good public reputation, among their peers at work, family members, and the community, the abuser may use that good reputation as a weapon against their victims.  In some cases, abusers and molesters disempower and trap their victims by leading them to believe that no one will believe them in light of their good standing in their extended family, community and workplace.

 Where abusers and molesters enjoy good reputations in work, community, and family, their victims face the real possibility of revictimization.  If they liberate themselves from household domination, bring their abuse to light, and seek the help of friends, family, the community or the legal system, they may find friends, family, community members, and the police to be incredulous.  Having been abused inside the family, they are abused outside the family.  This may go well beyond disbelief.  The victims may actually be attacked for challenging the character or repute of such an outstanding public person or professional. 

 The contribution of psychoanalysis to our understanding of the tensions and potential contribution between work and love, between success in career and neglect, failure or abuse in the family, goes beyond the theories of sublimation, identification, displacement of aggression, or the use of public image as a tool for the perpetuation of private abuse and entrapment.  In psychoanalysis, (spousal-parental) family life is inherently problematic because it brings to fore the unresolved psychological issues of our family dynamics from childhood. 

 Many adults carry issues and problems from their childhood, unresolved neuroses and psychoses, into their role as spouses or parents.  Although the workplace implicates some emotional issues, the family runs on emotions like love, nurturing, care, etc.  Given the relatively greater depth and important of emotional issues in family life, individuals who are emotionally competent in work may be inadequate and incompetent handling the deeper emotional demands of their family life.  And if their coping and problem solving skills have been deformed by their own upbringing, they may not handle their family life failures in a healthy way.  Having learned poor coping and adjustment skills from their parents, they may simply perpetuate the cycle, turning to escapism in work or avocations (like sports), substance abuse, anger, or other forms of healthy behaviors.

 Alcoholism and sexual molestation are among the most tragic forms of private sphere dysfunction being passed one generation being passed to another generation.  Alcoholism not only has a genetic component, but it also has family patterns.  Although alcoholics allow their sickness to interfere with their work, many function at work, and drink at home.  Where this happens, the alcoholism may be unknown in the public sphere, to workplace peers and the community, but all too well known to the members of the family.  In these instances, the family members bear the full burden of the addiction, an addiction others may not see.

 Although sexual harassment is common in the workplace, the workplace only presents opportunities for child molesters in certain lines of work (priest, teachers, day care workers).  As a result, child molestation outside those lines of work is inherently a private horror.  Coworkers and community members, family and friends, may have a good opinion of the molester based on their work, while the family members see another darker side.

 Sexual molestation is another private tragedy that may be completely unknown publically and passed from generation to generation.  Those who are molested as children are statistically prone and vulnerable to molest as adults (particularly if they don’t seek professional help).  Why?  Many molesters are victims of a kind of distorted form of misidentification.  For Freud, early childhood is often the scene of conflict between parents and children, particularly the parental superegos and egos and the ids of children.  In successful, normal socialization, the child progressively comes to identify with the parent, internalizing the superego and ego controls of their impulses that have been transmitted to them by the parents. 

 For Freud, identification gives the child a kind of pyrrhic victory over the parents.  For Freud, the child experiences parental demands and restrictions on its impulses as an imposition.  Those demands and restrictions are irresistible.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to beat them, the child decides to join them, or more accurately to “be them.”  By identifying with the parent unconsciously, the child reduces the tension and friction between me and them.  In identification the child incorporates aspects of parental personality as part of their own personality.  In doing so, the child wins a kind of victory over the parents, the parental identity is gobbled up and becomes part of the child’s self. 

 This same mechanism is at work for those who suffer abuse at the hands of their oppressors.  When adults are confronted with the overwhelming power of an oppressor, one of their mechanisms of adjustment is identification with the oppressor.  Unable to beat them, they  become them.  Identification with one’s oppressor was reported in concentration camps during the Holocaust and is sometimes observed in kidnapping victims (the Stockholm syndrome).

 Like kidnapping victims or concentration camp prisoners, who may cope with the enormous stresses of subjugation by their oppressors by identification with oppressors, molested children sometimes internalize the behaviors of their molesters.  Unable to escape from the horror of their molestation, they unconsciously internalize molestation into their character structure.  In many instance, the victims of molestation will repress all memories of their molestation, but will later be haunted by unconscious urges to mimic the violations of their childhood oppressor.  Despite suffering at the hands of a molester, they will do unto others as was done onto them as children.  This form of misidentification with the molester provides the answer to the often asked question, why would you do that if you suffered from it being done to you.

 Molestation tends to dirempt the public and private selves.  Most professions do not present adults with the kind of opportunities that the family presents to molesters.  The family not only provides molesters with access to children, parental molesters have various forms of power over their children.  While molesting priests, day care workers, teachers or coaches may have psychological power over their victims, they do not support them.  Ironically, the work and income of a molesting parent, can be a source of power in the family sphere, power over the material subsistence and needs of the molested.  As with abusers, the rewards of work may actually be manipulated to bolster the malignant power structure in the family.

 Like abusers, the good public image of the molester may act as barrier for pursuit of liberation from their oppression.  The better the public image and workplace and community contributions of the molester, the more likely allegations of molestation will be met with incredulity or attacks.  Indeed, even in criminal and other formal proceedings, those accused of abuse, sexual harassment, or molestation is often defend themselves against such charges by trotting out witnesses, in some case family members, who testify that they were not abused, harassed or molested.  For example, in the Clarence Thomas hearings, Republicans trotted out women who worked with Thomas who testified that he had not harassed them.

 But such testimony is irrelevant.  Spousal abusers may not beat all of their partners or spouses.  Priests, teachers, and day care workers may not molest most or all of the children under their care.  When I taught in Southern California, I had students who claimed their siblings were molested at the McMartin School, and others who swore nothing like this ever happened.  The fact is, that predators tend to select particular types of victims, they don’t attack indiscriminately.  For this reason, the fact that some weren’t molested, abused, or harassed does not mean others were not molested, abused, or harassed.  The narratives of victims cannot be silenced by the fact that those who were not victims would tell a different story. 

 The Public and Private Bruce Bechdel and Fun Home

 Alison Bechdel has the right to tell her story, to tell her side of the story of the inner world of the Bechdel family household in Fun Home.  Without challenging the accuracy of her depiction of the private Bruce Bechdel, I think her account is one-sided and a bit unfair.

 First, her account gives her father little credit for his extraordinary teaching and the positive impact he had on the lives of mostly working class rural students.  Bruce wasn’t just a teacher, he was a life transforming teacher for many of his students.  Bruce Bechdel is one of the three or four best teachers I have had in almost three decades of education, much of it at some of this nation’s best schools.  In my six years at Lamar Township Elementary School, six years of junior and senior high school at Bald Eagle Nittany, four years of college at Millersville, a few courses at Florida Atlantic University, graduate school at Duke and UCLA, and law school at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, only a few teachers or professors come close or surpassed Bruce as a teacher.  Off hand, only Victor Wolfenstein at UCLA, Marjorie Shultz at Boalt Hall, Tom Spragens at Duke, Leroy Straley at Lamar Township, and Gerry Weinberger at Millersville are even in the ballpark.  If I was forced to pick my top three, they would be Victor, Marge, and Bruce, Leroy close fourth. 

Bruce was one of those teachers that your hear talking in your head decades later.  Just as I remember Leroy Straley’s fifth grade talk on how we needed to “ask why?” –  I can hear Bruce talking and teaching.  I remember him throwing out for discussion the theory that the first human verbal communication was a lie, since communication of the truth would have been unnecessary.  I remember him having us read Marshall McLuhan, and think of him every time Woody Allen pulls McLuhan out of the movie line in Annie Hall.  I remember well how he would read from books and so embellish the passages that he was hard to follow.  He would add and change words, leading us to wonder, “where the hell is he on this page?”  I remember his stories about serving in the military with some childhood friend of Hemingway.

 And Bruce wasn’t a case of someone who was a good teacher but an asshole to his students.  The late Richard Ashcraft, one of the world’s leading experts on John Locke, was one of my professors in graduate school at UCLA.  He was the smartest person I have encountered, with an Einstein type mind.  I learned so much from him.  But he was an asshole to students.  One of my friends, a graduate student who studied with Ashcraft, once found herself trapped alone in an elevator with him.  Trying to be nice, she said hello.  He looked at her incredulously, as if to say, you have some nerve, and laughed, rather than saying hello.  Bruce wasn’t like this, he wasn’t an asshole to his students, who was nevertheless a good teacher because he passed only good information.

 Bruce’s inspired us in part because he seemed to believe in us, giving us confidence in our intellects.  For many of us, this was more important than the English or literature or theory he taught us.  Many of the students at BEN, weren’t from families with erudite parents like Bruce.  My mother dropped out of high school to have me.  My stepfather, graduated from high school but worked in a quarry.  For students like me, learning substance wasn’t the issue, we lacked the confidence to believe we could succeed in college, let alone go to graduate school.  Having someone who believed in us, like Bruce, was extremely important. 

 And Bruce reinforced our confidence in other ways.  He treated us with respect.  He wasn’t authoritarian, in a school where many professors were old school, in a school which still had corporal punishment.  He allowed students to call him Bruce, the only teacher who allowed this.  He didn’t talk down to us or abuse us verbally.  In contrast, verbal abuse of students was fairly common for some other teachers.  For instance, once during a debate on the Vietnam war, teacher Roland Weaver lashed out at student Tom DeGarmo, shouting red-faced “DeGarmo, you are gutless, gutless, gutless!” 

 I think Bruce also made many of us more tolerant and accepting of gays.  I knew, and I believed most people knew that he was gay.  It was pretty obvious to me.  To me, he was a bright, kind, successful, boundary respecting gay person.  Not all of the areas gays had these traits.  During my employment at the Other Exit sub shop, I was sometimes harassed by a group of gay males which included the former husband of a coworker.  These individuals seemed to get pleasure from making inappropriate remarks to me and watching me squirm.  Once, when I was out on a run in warm weather, they followed me for miles in a convertible, making harassing statements. At least in my case, Bruce always respected that I was straight. And I never heard any rumors that Bruce was inappropriate with students.  To my knowledge he kept his private identity out of school.

 I see little acknowledgement of Bruce’s extraordinary teaching and the positive ways he handled his sexual identity in Fun Home.  One reads the book and comes away with the impression that he was a run of the mill teacher who was an asshole at home and a coward or sissy in his handling of his sexual identity.  I think only one of those criticisms – that he was sometimes an asshole at home – is arguably fair.  Only his family members know if that is true.  But he certainly wasn’t a run of the mill teacher. 

 The thing I find most unfair in Fun Home is Alison’s criticism of her father’s handling of his sexual identity.  If Bruce had lived in New York City or Los Angeles at the time, or even more so today he would have been well advised to seek counseling to help him better cope with his sexual identity. Or to get divorced, come out, and live a gay lifestyle (whatever that means, since the Right tends to use the term in a derogative, derisive way.)  But Lock Haven at the time was hardly a place where one could find a competent psychiatrist or psychologist for the handling of sexual identity issues.  In fact, at the time, most psychiatrists continued to view homosexuality as a sickness.  Even if Bruce had found a counselor, I doubt the psychiatrist or psychologist would have been capable of helping him much. 

Nor could Bruce come out.  Almost 40 years later, for all of our progress, gay do not enjoy legal protection from discrimination in the workplace, either in Pennsylvania or the federal level.  My hunch is that as long as Bruce kept his homosexuality private, the knowing school district was willing to turn a blind eye.  But coming out could have endangered his job, a job he clearly loved.  I find it amazing that someone like Alison who fought so hard for the cause of gay rights, and contributed so much to the LGBT community, would show so little empathy and sensitivity to the plight of a gay man in Central Pennsylvania in the 70s. 

 I also find the criticism hypocritical.  Despite the fact that Alison has a gay father, who would have been and was accepting of her lesbianism, Alison was closeted as long as she remained in the repressive social confines of Central Pennsylvania.  During high school, she dated or seemed to date, Tim (now Tym) Desanto of Design Star and Fashion File fame.  Tim was her skirt and, given my knowledge of Time, an accepting, tolerant and understanding friend.  It wasn’t until later, when Alison went away to school, that she came out.  It had to be much easier to be an openly gay female at a liberal arts school like Oberlin College than it would have been in Central Pa.

 However, given Alison’s portrayal, I believe some criticism of Bruce is appropriate.  In  Fun Home, we find a private Bruce different from the public Bruce many of us knew.  If Bruce was as depicted at home, that private Bruce must have been, at least in part, a product of the fact that he was living a lie.  I won’t justify or defend  the way he handled the pressures of living that lie.  Bruce’s wife and his kids were not the source of his oppression and he shouldn’t have vented his anger and frustration on them.  He could and should have handled the situation differently, coping with his anger and frustration in some other way rather than venting his anger at his wife and children.  Himself a victim, Bruce victimized his family in his private life.  

 That said, I find it astonishing that Alison missed such a great opportunity to teach one of the central lessons of the struggle against the oppression and discrimination against gays in Fun Home – the lesson that repression and living a lie doesn’t work and makes people miserable. 

I accept as accurate Alison’s portrayal of the Fun Home, as anything but fun.  But Alison could have used the example of her unhappy not-so-fun home to underscore the real human costs of homophobic pressures that force gays to live lies.  How living a lie causes anger and frustration that is then passed along and displaced on innocent family members.  She chose not to do so. 

That she chose not to do so is her artistic license.  Fun Home tells a story, and she may not have wanted to add a didactic conclusion or moral.  But she could have made the point that the events depicted in Fun Home are a case study in the unhappiness and dysfunction that results when people have little choice but to live lies in subsequent interviews. The fact that her family home wasn’t always or often fun testifies to the important of the ongoing LGBT struggle.

 Alison has the right to tell her story.  Fun Home is her story, her narrative of private Bruce.  This piece is my narrative of the public Brucem Bruce the great teacher.  That is my story.

To close, I will say that Alison and I agree on something.  In an interview with the Colouring Outside the Lines blog, she was asked whether her publication of Fun Home was “brave.” She said:

 I feel like the book is just as selfish as it is brave, so perhaps those things cancel one another out.[i] 

Perhaps. Perhaps.

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[i]  http://cotlzine.blogspot.com/2011/04/colouring-outside-lines-cover-art.html

The Pandemic is Upon Us! The Stupidity Pandemic!

 

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed” – Heraclitus of Ephesus

The pandemic is here.  No, not the bird flu, the swine flu, mad cow, or any other of the diseases that the fear mongerers have us worrying about.  We have been hit by a pandemic of stupidity.

By stupidity I don’t mean a lack of education or erudition.  Not everyone has the opportunity to pursue higher education, so there is no shame in not going to college, grad or professional school.  But the fact one isn’t educated doesn’t mean one has to be stupid.  Having grown up in a rural area where many don’t go to college, where many don’t graduate from high school, I know that people who aren’t well educated can have common sense, wisdom, insight, and prudence. 

Our stupidity pandemic has nothing to do with education . . .

Our stupidity pandemic consists of Americans constantly making public statements or posting comments inconsistent with common sense, logic, the facts, and prudence.  The pandemic of stupidity moves on two fronts.  One on hand, idiotic public statements by talking heads, politicians, and other public figures.  One the other hand, idiotic tweets, blogs, and social media posts by ordinary people.  Saying or posting stupid shit has become the rage, everyone is doin it!

But what is stupidity?  How would I define it?  What Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography applies equally to stupidity.  To paraphrase Justice Stewart, “I shall not today attempt further to define [stupidity] . . . But I know it when I see it . . .” 

I know stupidity when I see it.  And recent remarks on drunk driving by Montana Representative Alan Hale were stupid.  Just plain stupid. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl_QNa-bCKc

One would think that pride or shame or respect for one’s position as a legislator would make someone like Hale hesitant to utter such stupidity.  But far too many Americans like Hale, don’t stop to think before they lip off.  The pandemic spreads in part because self-indulgent, incapable of self-censorship and self criticism.  If a thought pops into their minds, they blurt it out.

This isn’t a rural American issue, it is a stupidity issue.  Even an uneducated or undereducated rural American, regardless of their politics, knows drunk driving is a serious problem.  Drunk drivers claim a life every 50 seconds.  Those deaths devastate families and friends of the innocent victims.  This is a matter of ordinary human decency and compassion.

Think about the stupdity of Hale’s basic argument.  DUI laws are driving Montana’s taverns into the ground. Why? Because drunk drivers only have two transportation options – drive or hitch hike. And they aren’t going to hitch hike, so they must drive. So the drinkers are left with two choices – drive into town, drink, drive home, and risk a DUI or stay home.  With more and more people staying home, the bars and taverns are hurting for business.

This is stupidity squared.

Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that Montana’s taverns and bars are hurting, that likely has alot to do with the bad economy, underemployment, and unemployment.  The booze industry isn’t entirely recession proof, contrary to the lure.  When money is tight, people are more likely to drink at home, and less likely to go out to drink.  

For example, in 2010, the Distilled Spirits Council reported a “2.2 percent volume growth in the off-premise sector—75 percent of the industry—as more people entertained at home.  That was offset by the on-premise sector—restaurants, bars, hotels and nightclubs—which continued to suffer with a three percent volume decline.”  The result? Hard times for restaurants, bars, and taverns. As Distilled Spirits Council CEO Peter Cressy put it, ““Restaurants and bars have closed in every city and town in the nation during this recession.”[i]

Hale is a tavern owner.  How hard would it have been for Hale to investigate whether hard times were the source of declining sales in his and other Montana bars and taverns?  Would be have needed to send out hoards of researchers, had to use complex statistical tools like regression analysis?  No.  All Hale needed to do was one of the things good tavern owners do best – talk to your regular customers!  Find out why they are coming in less often, whether they are drinking at home more and going out less, or maybe whether they are drinking less because money is tight.  This is a great example of ordinary people skills and common sense being more than adequate tools for the task of ascertaining the facts. 

But in this case, as is so often the case in the stupidity pandemic, laziness and a lack of concern for the fact led to idiocy.  For Hale, like so many Americans, doing a little bit of background research and looking into the facts, is too much to ask.  That requires work.  Instead, they self indulgently open their mouths and pipe off, without any sort of concern for truth or accuracy.

Hale’s other idiotic contention is that “on premise” drinkers have no choice but to drink and drive.  Again, you don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to see the various other alternatives.  I will outline some of the obvious alternatives that even a rural unsophisticated like Hale can see –

• Have a friend or family member drive you to the bar or tavern.
• If you go out in a group, designate a safe driver.
• If you can’t get a ride or designate a driver, sober up before you drive.
• If you can’t get a ride or designate a driver, go out but don’t drink alcohol.
• Organize a local safe driver program.

Wow, aren’t those options complicated!  You really don’t have to be Steven Hawkins to think of these fairly common sense alternatives to drinking and driving. 

Hale is a public servant.  Under Montana Code Article III, Section 3, he took this Oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, protect and defend the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Montana, and that I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity (so help me God).”[ii]

Discharge with fidelity?  Fidelity would dictate using some common sense before opening your mouth.  Fidelity would dictate talking to your constituents, particularly the customers in your taverns and the other bars in your district.  Fidelity would dictate thinking about the common sense alternatives to drunk driving.  Fidelity might even mean using your position as a legislator to create and promote safe driving or designated driving programs to reduce drunk driving rather than justifying drunk driving and disparaging DUI laws.  Hale’s idiotic comments are inconsistent with his oath.

His stupid comments are also inconsistent with the Montana legislature’s description of “Legislative Leadership: A Guide to Roles & Responsibilities” states:

Every legislator has a responsibility to represent constituents and promote good public policy. But the role of the leader goes even farther: it reaches across the entire lawmaking institution – its procedures, membership, staff, facilities, and image.[iii]

Hale’s actions didn’t represent the interests of many of his constituents (who have a right to drive the roads safe from the dangers of drunk drivers).  Hale didn’t promote good public policy, he didn’t propose any legislative solution to the drunk driving problem or the plight of taverns.  Instead, the defended drunk drivers in the course of defending the narrow economic interests of taverns and bars.  But perhaps worse of all, Hale failed in his role of promoting the image of his lawmaking institution.  He has made a mockery of the Montana legislature.

But perhaps we should forgive Hale.  After all, he was sick.  He was the latest victim of the stupidity pandemic.

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[i]       http://www.nightclub.com/bar-management/operations/news/distilled-spirits-review-industry-proves-recession-resilient-2009-168

[ii]       http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/mca/Constition/III/3.htm

[iii]      http://leg.mt.gov/css/For-Legislators/Publications/legislative%20leadership.asp

Our Sophistry Problem – Paid to Make the Unjust Sound Just

 

In Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, he portrays sophists as rhetoricians who are paid to make the unjust argument sound just.  Although Aristophanes’ mistaken portrayal of Socrates as a sophist probably contributed to Socrates eventual execution, the historical Socrates and Plato opposed this portrayal.  Socrates and Plato contended that Athens was being destroyed by the sophists.  

Aristophanes’ play provides one humorous example of how sophistry harmed Athens.  In the play, a corrupt father (Strepsiades) sends his son (Pheidippides) to Socrates at the Thinkery, in the hope that the son will learn rhetoric and rescue him from his debts in court.  

PHEIDIPPIDES: What is it you want me to learn?

STREPSIADES: They say that those men have two kinds of arguments—the Better, whatever that may mean, and the Worse. Now, of these two arguments, the Worse can make an unjust case and win.  So if, for me, you’ll learn to speak like this, to make an unjust argument, well then, all those debts I now owe because of you I wouldn’t have to pay—no need to give an obol’s worth to anyone

 But for Socrates and Plato, sophistry went beyond the courts and unjust resolution of legal disputes like debts.  For Socrates and Plato, sophistry had more far reaching effects, saturating the upper echelons of Athenian politics and society, even the psyche.  In Plato’s Republic, Plato argues that sophistry prospers in a society where base physical desires, raw emotions, and material advancement rule over truth and pursuit of the good.  

Similarly, we have a sophist problem, not just in our courts, but in our media and political system.  Let’s be clear, this NOT is a partisan issue.  No American political party or ideology has a monopoly on sophistry.  Plenty of Democrats and Republicans are willing to sell their souls to defend the indefensible.  There are good livings to be made making the untrue sound true.

And although the Republican Party’s sophists (Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly) may get more attention and press than their Democratic counterparts, plenty of Democrats get in on the sophistical action.  Many Democrats, whether liberal or conservative, make handsome livings on K Street or in the media promoting injustice – for example, lobbying and providing public relations for dictators and tyrants like Hosni Mubarak.  Not surprisingly, given the money involved, the project of making the “unjust sound just” is sometimes bipartisan, as this article shows.  See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/48650.html.  In a country where many worship Mammon, sophistry knows no political bounds and crosses political lines.

Our sophistry problem is not limited to commentators, lobbyists and lawyers.  Our sophistry problem is not just a problem of talking heads, but a problem of our body politic.  As Plato argued, sophistry prospers in a polity no longer ruled by reason and will, one ruled by the base desires – greed, avarice, anger, sloth, fear.  Sophists have an audience not just because Americans are ever more ignorant and undisciplined in their thinking, but because the sophists appeal to their baser natures.  When sophists turn their rhetorical skill at making the unjust sound just to the political arena, the result is demagoguery.  Rather than leading, demagogues follow, they tailor their message to the base desires of the herd.  The result, as Plato warned, is decay.

In Defense of Single Mothers: Against the Calumny of Medved and Huckabee

I rise to defend Natalie Portman and single mothers against factually inaccurate, disparaging remarks by Michael Medved and Mike Huckabee.  But first, please allow me to digress . . .

At some point during the Oscars, I turned to my girlfriend, and said, “The right wing isn’t going to like this.”  Given the historically bad relationship between the right and Hollywood, from the anti-Semitism and McCarthyism of the 1950s to the culture wars of the Reagan era and post-Reagan era, I just knew these Oscars wouldn’t sit well with the right.  Not only did a few winners, including best cinematography winner Wally Pfister (“Inception”), thank their union crews, there were several positive references or jokes about lesbians.  I knew the right wouldn’t like it. Little did I imagine that the object of the right’s ire would be Natalie Portman! 

 Say what?  Queen Padme Amidala!?  The mother of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia?

 At first glance, Natalie Portman should be a favorite of the right.  She was raised by traditional male-female married parents, attended a religious elementary school, has worked since she was 13, fought nasty drug dealers in The Professional, a freedom fighter in three Star Wars movies and V for Vendetta, all the while doing well enough in school to get into and graduate from Harvard.  She seems to be the poster girl for family values, hard work, and education.

 Indeed, in her Oscar acceptance speech, Portman thanked her parents for precisely those values. “I want to thank my parents, who are right there, first and foremost for giving me my life and for giving me the opportunity to work from such an early age and showing me everyday how to be a good human being by example.”[i]

 So “what’s not to like?” Portman, it seems, made the mistake, from the right wing perspective of showing up to the Oscars, pregnant but unwed.  During Portman’s acceptance speech, she thanked, “my beautiful love Benjamin Millepied who . . .  and has now given me my most important role of my life [motherhood].”[ii]  You’d think the fact that she referred to motherhood as her most important role would win her points with the pro-life Right.  It didn’t.

 First to attack was conservative media critic Michael Medved who proclaimed, “It’s a problem because she’s about seven months pregnant, it’s her first pregnancy, and she and the baby’s father aren’t married, and before two billion people, Natalie Portman says, ‘Oh I want to thank my love and he’s given me the most wonderful gift.’  He didn’t give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring!”

 Medved was wrong on at least four counts.  First, Portman was, in fact, engaged at the Oscars and announced that fact in December.  Second, Millepied appears to have given her “the gift” of a wedding ring, since Portman seemed to be wearing one at the Oscars (see picture below).[iii]  Third, Portman didn’t say anything about her fiancé giving her a “wonderful gift,” she referred to motherhood as her “most important role.”  Fourth, even if she had called motherhood or her baby a gift, since when is a mere object like a wedding ring a more wonderful than motherhood or an obviously cherished pregnancy.  If that is Medved’s value hierarchy, if he values bling bling above babies, he is guilty of the same “shallow, materialistic mindset” that he criticizes in the entertainment industry.  At the very least, Medved was playing fast and loose with the truth.

 Not only were Meved’s criticisms inaccurate and unfair, they were highly selective.  As a movie critic, Medved should have been more circumspect and given Portman some credit as a positive role model for the roles she has played. In her first role, at 13, she played a brave, tough girl fighting corrupt policemen and drug dealers who orphaned her by killing her entire family.  More importantly, as Meved knows, Portman played one of the most famous and bravest mothers in movie history – Queen Padme Amidala, the mother of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Star Wars movies.  The Queen is not only an elected leader and freedom fighter who liberates her planet Naboo from the clone armies, she dies in childbirth giving birth to her twins.  Those twins, Luke and Leia, later take up the cause of fighting for the Republic against the evil empire.  Given the way Portman has lived her life and the roles she has played, Portman should be getting credit as a role model.  But rather than being circumspect, paying attention to all the facts, and being fair, ignored the reality of Portman’s life and roles, misrepresented the facts, and nitpicked.

 But he wasn’t alone.  Seems, Portman’s pregnancy also offended Fox commentator and possible Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.  In response to Medved’s comments, Huckabee.  He responded to Medved, “You know Michael, one of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ . . . it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of having children out of wedlock.”

 Huckabee’s comments show the same lack of concern for the truth and fairness as Medved’s.

Portman didn’t boast about any but the importance of motherhood to her.   Portman didn’ say anything about “ having . . . children” or “they’re [the children] are doing fine.”  Portman didn’t say anything glorifying or glamorizing having children out of wedlock.  She simply thanked her finance for giving her the most important role of her life – motherhood. 

 Huckabee’s comments were inaccurate and unfair.  But that wasn’t the end of Huckabee misrepresentations.  In addition to disparaging Portman, Huckabee stated: “Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care.  And that’s the story that we’re not seeing . . .” 

We aren’t “seeing this story” because none of this is true.  According to a 2009 Census Bureau document entitled Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2007, there were approximately 13.7 million single parents in the US, raising 21.8 million children (approximately 26% of children under 21).  Of those single parents, 84% are women.[iv]  The average single mother bears no semblance to Huckabee’s distorted caricature.  In fact:

• 79.5% of single mothers are gainfully employed
• Only 27% of single mothers and their children live in poverty
• Only 23.5% of single mothers receive food stamps
• Only 12% of single mothers receive some form of public housing or rent subsidy
• Only 5% of single moms receive recieve Temporary Assistance for Needy Families)

 More recent statistics also support the conclusion that Huckabee was wrong on the facts of single motherhood.  In the 2010 Census, just 29.9 % of female householders with no male present were below the poverty line in 2009.  Significantly, even the single mothers among the minorities which Huckabee singled out, aren’t mostly living in poverty.  Of black female householders with or without children below the age of 18, 35.2% live below the poverty line.  Of Latina female householders with or without children below the age of 18, only 38.8%.   In fact, about 90% of welfare receipients are white, but that fact doesn’t play well in Huckabee’s base.

 Huckabee was wrong.  It isn’t true that “most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job.”  That isn’t even true for most black and Latina single moms.  In fairness, the Huckabee might counter that the statistics support his implied contention that children fair better in two parent families, since poverty rates are lower in all demographic groups for married couple families than female householder families with no male present. 

 But if Huckabee’s point is that two parent families are better for childen, it isn’t clear why he singled Portman out for criticism, since she appears to be creating a two parent family with the means to support her child.  She comes from a traditional family, seems to enjoy parental support, is engaged to a successful man, and has the financial means to support herself and her child. 

 Oddly, Huckabee, who has derided others for engaging in class warfare,[v] engages in some class warfare of his own in this regard.  Rather than praising Portman’s hard work and her accumulation of the means, he criticizes her for creating unusually good circumstances for her child.  The fact is, unlike the welfare dependent single moms that Huckabee criticizes, Natalie Portman is unusually well situated materially and otherwise to be a parent, whether single or not.

 Huckabee, however, is so intent on criticizing, that he hypocritically engages in class warfare, attacking Portman’s income.  “But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie . . . not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses.”  But again isn’t that the point?  Isn’t his point that some single moms don’t have the education, job, and means to provide for their children?  If so what criticize someone who does have the education, work, and means like Portman?  Makes no sense.

 And Huckabee’s swipe about “nannies, caretakers, and nurses” is doubly unfair.   First, it is unfair to Portman. Although Hollywood has plenty of parents who farm their parenting out to nannies and au paires, nothing indicates that Portman will do this.  It is just plain unfair for Huckabee to imply that she will be a absentee parent whose kids will be raised by others.  Second, it is hypocritical for someone like Huckabee who receives campaign contributions from rich people to criticize people who use their millions to hire nannies, caretakers, and nurses.  I don’t hear Huckabee criticizing such conduct by the rich who contribute to his campaign.  So, the rich hiring nannies, caretakers, and nurses is wrong in Hollywood but not in Little Rock?

 By Friday of this week, Huckabee started trying to backtrack.  In doing so, he once again played fast and loose with the truth.  On his blog on his PAC website, he posted, “However, contrary to what the Hollywood media reported, I did not ‘slam’ or ‘attack’ Natalie Portman.”[vi]  But he did.   Huckabee specifically mentioned Portman by name when he said, “people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, . . . it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of having children out of wedlock.”  There is no other reasonable construction of that statement other than as a criticism of Natalie Portman as wrongly boasting about, glorifying, or glamorizing having children out of wedlock.  Huckabee lies in saying he didn’t slam or attack her.  He did.

 In the process of backtracking, Huckee advanced another falsehood – he made it sound like all this was invented by the media.  Playing the victim, he falsely claimed that the Hollywood media wrongly reported that he criticized Portman.  But this wasn’t a creation of the Hollywood media, it is what Huckabee said.  If you don’t believe me listen to the video.[vii]  The fact is, Huckabee criticized Portman, and now is not only lying about the fact that he didn’t, but also lying when he claimed that the Hollywood media incorrectly reported that he criticized her. 

 Huckabee’s stretching of the truth didn’t end there.  On his blog, he claimed, “nor did I criticize the hardworking single mothers in our country.”  While it is technically true that he didn’t criticize hardworking single mothers, he did misstate the facts about how many single mothers work.  Huckabee claimed “most single moms . . . can’t get a job” when in fact, nearly 80% have jobs.  He may not have criticized the single moms who are hard working but he grossly underestimate how many single moms are working, and overestimated how many “can’t get a job.”  Bottom line – he misrepresented the employment status of “most” single mothers.

But there’s more.  Having claimed that he wasn’t criticizing Portman or single moms, Huckabee inaccurately claimed he was only making statistical statements.  On his blog he claimed:  “My comments were about the statistical reality that most single moms are very poor, under-educated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death.”

 Like the other parts of his backtracking, this statement is untrue.  First, his comments weren’t only statistical in nature, he singled out Portman by name.  Second, there is no reality to his statistical reality.  He was wrong about the numbers when he spoke to Medved, and his March 4 blog post simply repeats the same erroneous facts.  And once again, for the second time, he is misrepresenting the employment status of single moms, disparaging “most” single moms as uneducated, jobless deadbeats living off government assistance, unable to feed their children. 

Thus, in his efforts to backtrack, Huckabee has dug himself in deeper.  Rather than apologizing to Portman and taking the time and effort to get the facts straight, Huckabee has decided instead to lie about the nature of his earlier statements, to lie about the Hollywood media, to dissemble about not criticizing hardworking single mothers, and to lie about the statistics. 

 This isn’t the only time Huckabee has tried to sidestep taking responsibility for his inaccurate comments by dissembling and playing the victim of the big bad liberal media.  On March 2,  he wrongly claimed of President Obama, “And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya – his view of the Brits, for example, very different from the average American. . . . if you think about it – his perspective growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution is very different from ours, because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”[viii]  

As with Portman, Huckabee’s comments about Obama’s Kenyan Mau Mau upbringing, caused an uproar .  As a result, on March 6, his spokesman Hogan Gidlay claimed, “Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in ‘Kenya.’ The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia.“[ix]  But Huckabee’s denial rings untrue. This wasn’t a case of simply misspeaking and saying the wrong location, Kenya rather than Indonesia.  Huckabee not only said the President grew up in Kenya, he (wrongly) claimed that he was raised by his father, with a Mau Mau perspective on British imperialism.  He was talking about Kenya, not misspeaking when he meant Indonesia.  Indonesia was a Dutch colony with no Mau Mau.

As in the Portman-single mother issue, when his Kenyan comments caught flack Huckabee played victim of the media.  Although the story was all over the media, online and traditional, he claimed on his webpage. ”I’m not surprised the NY Times chose to sensationalize this story. In fact, the New York Times, the AP, and other news organizations ran with the “sensationalized story” despite being specifically told by Steve Malzberg himself that they were incorrect in their assessment of the sound bite.  You just can’t help but laugh when my simple slip of the tongue, becomes a huge story . . .”

 Same tactic as with Portman and single mom’s – dissemble about your remarks and blame the media.  This wasn’t a slip of the tongue.  A slip of the tongue is saying one word (like “Kenya”), when you mean another word (like “Indonesia”).   But this isn’t what Huckabee did.  His Kenya tirade consisted of three sentences and 98 words.  That isn’t a slip of the tongue. 

 And the sensation wasn’t created by the media.  Huckabee created the sensation by making irresponsible and inaccurate remarks.  Obama didn’t grow up in Kenya.  He wasn’t raised by his father.  There is no evidence to support Hackabee’s inflammatory claim what he hates the British, let alone because he was indoctrinated in anti-British Mau Mau ideology as a child.  Beyond that, there is no evidence that Mau Mau ideology caused the removal of Churchill’s bust.  If the story is sensational, it is sensational because a national level politician misstating the facts and engaging in wild speculation based on inaccurate facts is inherently sensational. 

 Not only are the premises of the speculation misleading, the logic of the speculation is, well, illogical.  The fact that Obama, like many African-Americans (and many white Americans) may view the Kenyan struggle against British imperialism as a good fight, doesn’t mean he hates the British (as Huckabee implied and Malzberg stated).  European imperialism wrought terrible horrors on Africa.  In time, like the American colonies, the African colonies rose against British imperialism. It is ironic, if not hypocritical, that someone like Huckabee, who enjoys strong support among the members of a political party named after American anti-colonialists would criticize Obama for his purportedly negative attitude toward  of British colonialism.

 Maybe that seeming contradiction is the real point.  Huckabee praises the revolution of American colonists against British imperialism, but expresses disdain for the revolution of Kenyan colonists against British imperialism.  What is the difference?  One was white revolutionaries, the other was black revolutionaries.  White Tea Party good.  Black Mau Mau bad.  I won’t ascribe motives to Huckabee, but on its face, this seeming value hierarchy looks racist.

 Perhaps most disturbing in all this is Huckabee’s thin knowledge of history.  For someone who might be the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world, he seems ignorant of the relevant history.  Specifically, Huckabee seems completely unaware of the interconnection between British struggles against monarchism, the American revolutionaries, and African anticolonialism in place like Kenyan.  The political theory of English political theorist and revolutionary John  Locke and the American Declaration of Independence inspired and cited routinely as support for the anticolonial struggles in Africa, particularly in the British colonies. 

The leaders of the African anti-colonial movements drew heavily on the Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others in the Anglo-American tradition.  For example, Africans have long paid homage to the Declaration of Independence.  The Liberian Declaration of Independence of 1847 tracks its language, stating “We recognize in all men certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, enjoy, and defend property.”[x]  Similarly the recent Kenyan Declaration of Independence takes liberally from the American Declaration, integrating the first six sentences of our Declaration verbatim.[xi] 

 What Huckabee doesn’t seem to understand is Africans and African-Americans like Americans, can have a mixed, nuanced relationship to our colonial mother country.  Like the American colonist fighting British imperialism, African colonists embraced and used aspects of the English political tradition, like the natural rights based, anti-tyrannical political theory of John Locke while criticizing and opposing British colonialism.  Indeed, like the American colonists, African independence movements often used the theories and moral ideas they inherited from the British, as weapons against the British empire in their struggles, in much the same way as the abolitionist movement in the United States drew inspirationfrom slave-owner Jefferson’s  Declaration of Independence.  Similarly, President Obama might simultaneously embrace Kenyan anticolonialism while respecting other aspects of the British political tradition, like its longstanding constitutionalism and rule of law.  As Huckabee himself proves, you can applaud the Boston Tea Party or the Declaration of Independence without hating the British. 

The bottom line – In recent weeks, Mike Huckabee has shown a penchant for making outlandish and inaccurate statements, only to backtrack when the predictable backlash comes.  But when the backtracks, he digs himself in deeper, by heaping additional misrepresentations atop of the original and blaming the media.  Instead, he should be contrite, honest, and disavow.

 As Baptist Minister turned politician, Huckabee likes to point out the importance of ethics and religion.  He has said, “Folks, the moral absolutes of this universe are critical if we’re going to have succeeding generations who can survive, thrive and pass on any semblance of human life.”[xii]   Admittedly, Portman likely violated one of Huckabee’s moral absolutes – abstinence premarital sex.  But in criticizing Portman, disparaging single mothers, and backtracking on Obama’s Kenyan upbringing, he violated one of his own moral and religious absolutes – he lied or misrepresented the truth. Repeatedly.

Although Reverend Huckabee is so quick to give out Biblically based moral advice, to talk about moral absolutes, the Reverend’s inaccurate disparagement of Portman’s conduct,  his repeated misrepresentation of the “statistical reality” of single motherhood, and his inaccurate contention that he merely had a “slip of the tongue” regarding Obama’s growing up in Kenya, are inconsistent with Biblical guidance on lying.  Psalms 31:18 says “Let the lying lips be put to silence.”  Proverbs 12:22 says, “Lying lips are abomination to the Lord.”  Certainly, the Reverend Huckabee has  read these passages.

Huckabee needs to bear in mind that “the Truth will set you free.”  John 8:32.

G

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[i]       http://eotm.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/natalie-portmans-acceptance-speech-83rd-annual-academy-awards/

[ii]       http://eotm.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/natalie-portmans-acceptance-speech-83rd-annual-academy-awards/

[iii]      http://showbizrenegade.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/natalie-portman-oscars-2011.jpg

[iv]      http://singleparents.about.com/od/legalissues/p/portrait.htm

[v]       http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0211/wisconsin_watch_5f9ceaaa-02ba-4022-9c0f-c9db0f1515cc.html

[vi]      http://www.huckpac.com/?Fuseaction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=3408

[vii]      http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video;_ylt=A0oG7h1dLXNNvHsA6rlXNyoA?ei=UTF-8&p=huckebee%20medved&fr2=tab-web

[viii]     http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/01/6163302-huckabee-claims-obama-grew-up-in-kenya

[ix]      http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0302/Mike-Huckabee-caught-claiming-Obama-grew-up-in-Kenya

[x]       http://onliberia.org/con_declaration.htm

[xi]      http://kumekucha.blogspot.com/2008/01/unanimous-declaration-of-six-united.html

[xii]      http://www.christianexaminer.com/Articles/Articles%20Jul09/Art_Jul09_15.html

The American Revolutionaries, the Founders & Armed Resistance to Tyranny: Reexamining the Individual Rights and Inferior Magistrates Theories of Resistance

The notion that individual citizens may rightly take up arms in resistance to perceived government or Presidential tyranny has been bandied about recently.  Some assert or imply that the American Revolutionaries and Founders took up arms in the face of tyranny.  This pieces examines that idea in more detail.  

Although I haven’t yet done specific, detailed research of the writings of particular revolutionaries or Founders to establish in a historical and empirical manner whether they supported resistance by individuals, I find it unlikely.  Although there is some tension in the colonial historical record in this regard, it is much more likely that the leading American revolutionaries and the Founders generally supported a more institutional approach to resistance or a Lockean theory that views individual, armed resistance as a default, to be resorted to only when establish institutional channels of resistance had long  failed. 

From the time of Martin Luther until the Age of Revolution, two theories of resistance were advanced in Europe. One theory, called the individual rights theory, argued that individuals had the right to engage in armed self-defense of their rights and property in the face of tyranny.  The other theory, called the inferior magistrates theory, also justified resistance, but not first and foremost by individuals. Instead, these theorist argued that resistance to tyranny (e.g., by a tyrannical monarch) should be done by magistrates inferior to that king, for example by a Parliament or legislative branch.

Each of these theories had adherents and advantages. The proponents of the inferior magistrates theory, not only argued it was more consistent with the longstanding Christian (Pauline and Augustinian) doctrine of submission to earthly political authority (Romans 13:1), but more importantly avoided anarchy.  They argued that this theory simultaneously left government in place but allowed government.  They argued that allowing individual to pick up arms whenever they individually believed themselves aggrieved would lead to lawlessness and anarchy, since it could be used by madmen to justify violence against their rulers. The assassination of Henry of  Navarre (Henry IV) by a fanatic was seen by some of them as an example of the excesses of the individual rights theory.

The individual rights theory was particularly powerful and appealing in circumstances where the inferior magistrates failed to counter tyranny.  In circumstances where the inferior magistrates balked, individual rights theorists argued that the right to defend one’s rights and property devolved to the individual. Such arguments were very common in the English setting, during the 17th century.   At various junctures, when they believed Parliament was failing to fight Stuart monarchism, papism, and religious intolerance, English Calvinists, Dissenters and Puritans, defended individual resistance to the Stuarts. George Buchnanon is perhaps the best known example of this position.

Both theories are at work in the actions and work of John Locke, the English political theorist who had such an influence on the American revolutionaries and some of the Founders.  On one hand, Locke’s 2nd Treatise of Government contains passages advancing an institutional approach (legislative, Parliamentary)  to resistance to a tyrannical monarch.  This tracks the historical reality of Parliament-based resistance to the Stuarts.

On the other hand, Locke’s work and life contains individual rights theory.  In the 2nd Treatise, he compares tyrant monarchs to wild animals and defends an individual, natural rights based defense of individual rights by individuals.  This tracks the historical reality of Locke’s involvement in the Rye House Plot.  For Locke and the plotters, Parliament was acting too slowly, and they believed they need not wait for the King’s henchmen to knock on their door to act in self-defense. Indeed, Locke advanced a powerful defense of anticipatory violent resistance, arguing that self defense was justified once it became clear that the tyrant had a settled design on depriving individuals of their rights.

Although I have not yet done the historical-empirical work, I believe it likely that the American revolutionaries and Founders generally eschewed the pure individual rights theory, and either adhered to a version of the inferior magistrates theory or a kind of Lockean combination of the two, with individual action being justified only where institutional political revolt has failed.

There are certainly historical instances of individual resistance to British tyranny. The Sons of Liberty’s Tea Party, from which the contemporary political movement draws its name, can be seen as acts of individual resistance to a (British) Parliament that not only was not resisting monarchical tyranny but actively advancing it with oppressive legislation like the Sugar, Stamp, Townsend, Quebec, Intolerance, and Tea Acts.  The Tea Party can be justified on the grounds that the inferior magistrates (Parliament) had failed, and that individual resistance was justified.

But, as with Locke, there is another historical pattern and theory running alongside.  Like Locke, Sam Adams both engaged in individual rights theory type individual action, but also played a role in the development of institutional loci of resistance to British monarchical and legislative theory.  Adams played a role in the Constitutional Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles.

The colonial pattern of resisting English tyranny through inferior magistrate type bodies is the strongest practical support for the notion that they eschewed individual rights theory as a practical matter.  The rebelling colonists consistently acted through institutional entities in resistance – the Stamp Act Congress, Committees of Correspondence, the Continental Congresses, Provincial Congresses.       The Second Continental Congress not only appointed the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, but also the committee what drafted the Articles. The Congress of the Articles of Confederation invited the changes to the Articles and the meetings that eventually led to the Constitutional Convention.  Thus, the revolutionaries and the Founders tended to act through institutional channels in resistance to tyranny.

While it is undeniable that some revolutionaries (like the Sons of Liberty’s Tea Party) engaged in action consistent  with an individual rights theory of resistance, the main agency or loci of colonial resistance and the political reconstitution of government  was institutional.  Frustrated with the duplicity of Parliament in monarchical tyranny, the revolutionaries and Founders, acted through reconstituted colonial bodies against British tyranny.   Since the King and Parliament has, through a long train of abuses, the King and Parliament has divested themselves of their authority and declared war against the colonies, the colonies had the right to separate themselves.  But that separation did not propel the colonies into an anarchic state of nature requiring individual self defense.

Instead in the Declaration, after declaring independence and separation in the first paragraph, Jefferson immediately calls for the “institute[ion] of new Government.”  So while the Declaration severed our ties with the British, it did not create a state of nature without Government. Instead, the Continental Congress stepped into the void, serving as the legitimate colonial government, resisting British tyranny.   Just as earlier theorists had argued that errant kings should be resisted by bodies of “inferior” magistrates, the colonial practice and the Declaration seem to support institutional resistance to tyranny.

As with Locke’s theory (Jefferson called Locke one of the three greatest men in history), there is some tension here.  Just as Locke engaged in the Rhy House plot because Parliament was sitting on its hands, the Sons of Liberty and Adams tea partied because Parliament was not defending their rights.  But just as Locke and English Puritan resisted through Parliament, the revolutionaries and Founders acted through reconstituted  colonial political bodies – the Stamp Act Congress, Committees of Correspondence, the Continental Congresses, Provincial Congresses.  Although both individual and institutional strands were present, the “inferior magistrates”  trend is more dominant.

Several questions remain. Some are more intellectual.  First, to really resolve this question detailed, painstaking analysis of the political writings of the revolutionaries and Founders is needed.  Second, such analysis is complicated by the strong influence which Roman historical and political experience had on our Founders.  It is arguable that our Founders were more influenced by Roman history than the polemics on resistance of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. (I recall reading an article which showed that there were more references to Rome in the Federalist Papers than to recent English historical events like the English Civil war or Glorious Revolution.)

Finally, the implications of these ruminations for contemporary political action are unclear.  Assuming, for the sake of argument, that President Obama is a tyrant, two questions arise. First, has President Obama committed the “long train of abuses” that seems to be required by Locke or Adams or Jefferson?  The English Puritans, the Sons of Liberty, and the revolutionaries like Jefferson, did not call for armed resistance (individual or institutional) simply because they disagreed with a few actions by the King or a few pieces of oppressive legislation.  Second, even assuming for the sake of argument that Obama is a tyrant, it is unclear that our institutional agents of resistance (Congress, the States, and the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court)  have failed to resist his tyranny.  Assuming health reform legislation is an act of tyranny,  Congress (the House) and the courts (to some extent as a result of the states bringing legislation), are still viable loci of resistance to this act of tyranny by the executive branch.  One might argue that it is premature to conclude that the other branches of government are so impotent or duplicitous in the face of the purported Obama tyranny that we must take up arms as individuals.

What is the downside of premature calls for individual resistance?  Declaring our government a failure, declaring ourselves back in the state of nature,  declaring that we may rightly take up arms to defend ourselves and avenge our political grievances, has very real costs, even when necessary.  Anarchy, civil war, political instability, violence, and a Hobbesian state of war, where life is short and brutish, can ensue, as our Founders knew.  As in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, premature or errant calls to arms risk madmen acting violently on their delusions and fantasies (like Fromme, Sarah Jane Moore, Hinkley,  Loughner).

 This is the rub.  We view some acts of individual violence against purported tyrants – like the assassination of Henry IV, Hinkley’s attempt on Reagan, or Loughner’s shooting of Giffords and others – as the disgusting acts of madmen.  But most of us support tyrannicide.  For example, nearly all of us  view the various assassination attempts on Hitler’s life as acts of heroism.  This is the dilemma – we can’t always wait around for our political institutions to defend our rights, sometimes we must act individually.  But individual acts of violence aren’t always motivated by legitimate rational political calculations.  Sometimes, as recent events show, they can be sheer madness.

 Are those calling for individual 2nd Amendment remedies more like Von Stauffenberg or Loughner? That is the question.