Wars end

Cartoon from Get Your War On by David Rees

Even if Barack Obama has failed to enacted cap and trade legislation to fight global warming, close down Guantanamo Bay, or make much progress on the war in Afghanistan, the days he could credibly be accused of running a do-nothing administration have long since passed. But while his stimulus package and high profile reforms of health care and financial regulation have captured headlines, just as important have been some of his lower-key, less well publicised attempts to curb some of America’s worst ideas.

We saw an example of this today when Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, a bill designed to wind back one of the less rational aspects of the U.S.’s ill-fated War on Drugs.

Currently, under American law, anyone caught with five grams of crack cocaine receives a mandatory five year prison sentence, while it takes 500 grams of the drug in powder form to attract the same penalty. The disparity is absurd; it is the same drug in both cases, and is equally harmful to the user. The biggest difference between crack cocaine and the regular sort is that black folks tend to use the former while whites tend to use the latter. The result is that African Americans get imprisoned far more often than white people for using exactly the same drug.

Once Obama signs the bill into law, this disparity will be reduced a little: users will need to be caught with 28 grams of crack before receiving the mandatory sentence. There’s still a pointless, unfair, and discriminatory difference in the penalties the two forms of the drug attract, but it’s nonetheless a step in the right direction. By making the law a bit less discriminatory in its treatment of African Americans, it  will hopefully reduce the gulf of opportunity between the races in the United States.

Why doesn’t Australia have a Sarah Palin?

Hidden in a smart post about Australian politics, Jonathan Holmes makes a smart point about American politics:

In a much smaller way, Canberra shares some of the characteristics of Washington. Both are cities that owe their existence to politics, artificial capitals created to house the government of a federation of states. But whereas Washington has many hubs of power – the Congress on Capitol Hill, the White House and its annexes, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon across the river, K Street with its army of lobbyists – at the heart of Canberra is one world-within-a-world: New Parliament House, encircled by its own little Beltway, State Circle, is the purely political citadel within a city inhabited largely by public servants.

This is a feature of American politics that makes its operation entirely different from what we are used to seeing in Australian government. In Canberra, as Holmes points out, anyone with influence is largely confined to the government itself. For the most part, the important people in Australian politics are the elected Members of Parliament. From time to time a former PM, a well-known media figure, or a member of the public with a heart-tugging special interest story will be able to actively shape the nation’s political direction, but most of the time, the federal politicians are firmly in charge.

In D.C., however, nothing is so clear cut. Holmes describes well the lack of a political focal point within D.C.: one week the Supreme Court may find states cannot ban Americans from owning guns, the next Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid may push a piece of legislation designed to reform the financial markets, and after that a member of the Administration might ill-advisedly fire an employee. But the haze extends beyond the separation of powers, and beyond, even, the Beltway bubble.

The best example at the moment is Sarah Palin, a politician who manages to exert sizable political influence in America despite holding no office, and having never held any office higher than governor of a lightly populated, geographically distant state. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wields a similar power, though his is less characterized by celebrity. It is near unimaginable that an Australian figure could hold a role like that of either Gingrich or Palin.

Chairpeople of party national committees like Howard Dean and Michael Steele aren’t strangers to political influence, either, despite being more involved with fundraising than legislating. Single-issue activists like Al Gore put new issues on the agenda, and media figures like Glenn Beck have constituencies unimaginable in the Australian system. Political power in America is far more dissolute than in Australia, particularly for opposition parties, who do not have the advantage of the shadow cabinet structure to attract attention to themselves.

This has both advantages and disadvantages. In America, ideas and influence are not restricted to the halls of Congress or the meeting rooms of the White House. If anyone who can attract a constituency can become a national player, the political culture will be more inclusive and open to unexpected innovations. In Australia, meanwhile, those in charge are there because they’ve worked their way steadily up through a party system, made connections and insinuated themselves into the workings of existing political apparatus.

The down side? Well, the Australian system might turn out more than a few party hacks, but then again, it hasn’t turned out any Sarah Palins, either.

Riding out the recession

Last week I went to Safeco Field to watch the Seattle Mariners lose to the New York Yankees, and while wandering around in between innings, I spotted this advertisement for the local rail system.

In a country like Australia, which dodged the worst of the global financial crisis, it’s easy not to see how deeply the recession has affected the United States. As advertisements like this show, the economic downturn has so throughly soaked itself into the nation’s zeitgeist that it can be used as advertising fodder: everyone’s poor — ride the train!

A similar impetus can be seen in this advertisement for BECU, a Washington-based credit union. Distance from the financial industry is here a point of distinction, one that informs potential customers that the service in question is clean of the taint of bailouts and subprime mortgages.

On needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

In the words of Springfield Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby: “If that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don’t also blow.”

Jonathan Chait says he has “a soft spot for bluntly transactional politicians,” like Mitt Romney or Charlie Crist, who shamelessly reconfigure their political viewpoints to suit their ambitions. Crist, the Republican Governor of Florida, is running as an independent for the state’s Senate seat this November, and since severing ties with his party, he has veered left on issues like abortion, health care reform, and education, and has admitted the shift is partly for reasons of political expedience. Chait explains his new-found affection for Crist’s pragmatism:

I think it actually takes real guts to admit something like this. There’s no such thing is a non-opportunistic politician. Even a genuine ideological fanatic like Rand Paul is feverishly trimming his sails. For a pol to just come out and admit the obvious is refreshing.

I have some sympathy for this view. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking, writing, or reading about politics develop a good understanding of how much theatre is involved in lawmaking, and when a politician comes along, winks at us, and acknowledges the game-playing involved in the business of politics, we find it refreshing. “Finally!” we think. “Someone in government prepared to treat us like adults!” But voters tend not to have such a positive view of these wry cynics, and understandably so.

While campaigning, politicians make a lot of promises, and while these are often useful insights into the visions these candidates hold for the nation, promises and policies alone are not particularly helpful when it comes to working out how a politician will govern. First, whether president or mayor, senator or city council member, no one in government acts alone. A promise made on the hustings will always be modified as it makes its way into law. And secondly, as politicians govern they will be asked to confront problems that may not even have existed during their campaign for office. If Crist is elected to the Senate, he will be voting on legislation until January 3, 2017. Who knows what bills he’ll be asked to give his yea or nay to six years from now?

Weekend update

Playing in the sun and having fun, fun, fun.

• According to Peter Hartcher, Barack Obama phoned Kevin Rudd before Julia Gillard after the leadership spill.
• Mark Twain, in a newly discovered essay, hates interviews.
• Conor Friedersdorf explains how the American two party system works.
• Margaret Wheeler Johnson discusses the new, gay-friendly South at Slate
• The New York Times tries to answer just who is Alvin Greene.

I’m listening to Billy Bragg’s “Help Save the Youth of America”; here he is singing it in the USSR in the late ’80s. And in slightly more contemporary forms of entertainment, I’m revisiting the Chicago-set, music geek movie classic High Fidelity. If you’re in America, you can do likewise for the next day or so, at Hulu.com.

Undocumented vs illegal

I want to be wary about commenting on this post at Feministing. The author, who writes under the single byline “Miriam” says of the pictured AP Stylebook Tweet:

The AP Style Book is a resource for journalists on language, spelling, pronunciation and proper word usage. I’m not clear how the AP Style Book makes decisions, but it is widely regarded and highly used by journalists.

This explains why most of the mainstream media still uses the term “illegal immigrant.” I find the term offensive and disrespectful, as do most immigration activists. People are not illegal, actions are. The advocate community uses the term “undocumented immigrant” which the Stylebook clearly disagrees with.”

I had heard the term “undocumented immigrant” here in the States, and had not thought a whole lot about it until I saw this post. Sometimes when looking at a foreign country’s politics, it can be difficult to perceive the precise contours of a debate, even when one understands the issues at hand quite well. But while I have sympathy for “undocumented” immigrants, and think that even those whose presence in a country is not authorized do not deserve to be dehumanised, I don’t quite understand Miriam’s protestation over the term “illegal immigrant.”

Who comes after Hispanics?

Mike Barthel has an article over at Salon arguing that, perversely, Arizona’s immigration law represents a growing acceptance of Hispanics in America:

It’s an incredibly slow and painful process, and it sure would be nice if we could be less awful about accepting newcomers to our culture. But the Arizona law seems so desperate, and the opposition to it so strong, that we’re closer than ever to changing American culture enough that it becomes indistinguishable from Latino culture. It’s too much to hope that we’ll never not hate Mexican-Americans; after all, we pretty much hate everyone. But if we loudly object to every incursion of nativism, we may be able to experience anti-Latino slurs not as a bulwark against foreign incursion, but as just another entry in the panoply of prejudices and bigotry we harbor toward our fellow Americans.

Barthel’s “we hate pretty much everyone” construction is a bit cute; America isn’t that awful, and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, for instance, suffer from no real prejudice any more, though they were once as demonized as much as Latinos are today. But his point is a good one: Arizona’s law might be gathering a lot of support, particularly from copycat Republican gubernatorial candidates in the South, but the furious reaction to it from so many Americans suggests that Latinos are seen by more people than ever to be a naturally and incontrovertible part of American society. Latinos, like other immigrants before them, have become neighbours and colleagues, singers on the radio, and stars on TV — and not just on the Spanish language channels. What once seemed a threatening other is closer than ever to being just enough boring old feature of American life, as unexceptional as the Catholic Church down the road, your boss’s Polish surname, or hearing a Frank Sinatra song piped through the sound system after a baseball game.

Less happily, however, is Barthel prediction for the next point of American immigration angst:

The whole history of American culture can be seen as a long negotiation about the nature of our national character that becomes more and more expansive as time goes on. Having nativism directed at a particular group is unpleasant for members of that group, but it also signifies that we’re in the process of debating whether the group qualifies as “American.” And the nice thing about America is that, so far, we’ve pretty much always decided that if you’re living in America, you’re American — which is not a foregone conclusion in most other countries. But unless that debate happens, a group isn’t grandfathered in. It’s just invisible, as Muslim-Americans currently are.

America does have its Muslim-American immigrants; particularly a sizable Arab community in Detroit, and an Iranian population in Los Angeles. And despite some post-9/11 violence and, as the Daily Show pointed out this week, a growing wariness over mosque-construction, Muslim-Americans have for the most part avoided the kind of nativist wrath suffered by other immigrant groups. If Barthel is right, that’s not because they’ve been lucky, but because they’re standing in the queue.

If Muslims should indeed be America’s Next Top Targeted Immigrant Group* the results will be as ugly as American nativism always is. But, as I’ve said before, even when they’re being hostile toward a particular group of them, Americans tend to like immigrants. It may be that the U.S. has not experienced the intense Islamophobia seen in Europe merely because Muslims are a lower proportion of its population, but if that should change, I would expect America would be just as adept — and just as anxious — at integrating them as they had been with each prior immigrant group.

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*Tyra Banks is not involved

King James edition

The news gripping America these past few sweltering days has been primarily concerned with the future career prospects of now ex-Cleveland NBA player LeBron James. I would tell you more about the situation, but, other than informing you that he has signed with the Miami Heat and is now more likely to win a championship, I can offer little that would be enlightening. Of the four major American sports, basketball is the realm in which I am at my weakest.

Being a politics guy, I turn to FiveThirtyEight for my sports analysis, and they do not disappoint. But being an urban geography nerd, my favorite portion of Nate Silver’s post over there was this one:

According to commoncensus.org; the New York Knicks are the favorite team in 10 markets totaling 23.1 million people, the Chicago Bulls in 19 markets totaling 18.0 million people (the Bulls are popular in Missouri and Iowa, which have no NBA teams), and the Cavaliers in 14 markets totaling 11.8 million people. By contrast, the Heat’s market is relatively small at 8.3 million people, and has a smaller percentage of African-Americans than do Chicago and New York. (Black Americans are two-and-half times more likely to be NBA fans than the population average, according to polling conducted by YouGov.)

One tends to think of Cleveland as a small and shrinking Midwest city, but such conceptions obscure how populous states like Ohio are, despite internal immigration flows heading south and southwest. It’s a similar circumstance to that of the city of Detroit and the metropolitan area of Detroit, I suppose; while the former dwindles to 900 000 citizens, the latter remains a Sydney-sized metropolis of, depending how you measure it, 4-5 million people. Meanwhile, the city of Cleveland is home to just 450 000 people, but it has a metropolitan area of 2.25 million, many of whom will be disappointed by James’s announcement. Meanwhile, Miami has a similar city size, but a metro population of more than twice that of Cleveland, and it was this awareness that caused me to misconstrue the size of these teams’ markets. I had, of course, disregarded the many, many residents of smaller cities scattered around Cleveland’s vicinity. The rust belt may be shrinking, but it is doing so from a formidable size.

Long weekend update

Hope all celebrating the Fourth of July, whether in America or abroad, had a good one. Here’s what you missed while you were grilling dogs and drinking suds:

• The New York Times goes to the cricket: Staten Island Cricket Club plays Merion, Pennsylvania.
• Erick Erickson of Red State says Michael Steele must resign.
• Can you fix the U.S. budget deficit? Try the liberal and conservative calculators.
• Health.com shows how to eat your way to a bigger waistband, one state at a time. (I’m very disappointed that Washington is represented by a salad, even if it is a fattening one.)
• Spencer Ackerman on Spiderman’s working class struggle.

In celebration of the holiday, here’s Shooter Jennings’s “4th of July.”

What, to Frederick Douglass, is the Fourth of July?

I’ve been seeing this image around the Internet (originally from here, I believe) today, and I can’t help but think that these are hardly comments to be held in ironic opposition. The Douglass quote the first anonymous Facebooker highlights is from his address to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, on July 5th, 1852. (Douglass would not speak on the Fourth.) His speech is an astounding feat of oratory, and though it is long, if you’ve never read it in full, you should now. It would be very disappointing to have such a considered argument reduced to cherry-picked excerpts.

That said, I will ignore my own caution and post a portion from toward the end of the speech:

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference.

Douglass’s speech, known commonly as What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, is an excoriating rebuke of American claims for their nation being a haven of liberty. His audience was a group of abolitionists, but he did not spare them from his condemnation; the address referred throughout to “your” Fourth of July, accentuating Douglass’s lack of citizenship and his race’s lack of personhood. He describes vividly, and at length, the horrors of slavery, and denounces a nation that would allow such a practice to endure within its borders. But he also praises the Founding Fathers and the ideals upon which they founded the country, and exhorts America to stay true to those ideals.

I like this part, near the beginning of his address:

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

Douglass was pointedly reminding his audience of the need for moral bravery in the fight upon which the nation was then on the brink — though at that time it was only a fight of ideas, not yet of armies. And it is a worthy reminder of what is right about America, and about Americans. America believes itself to be worthy of the inheritance of its forefathers; it believes it must side with right against wrong, weak against strong, oppressed against oppressor. It doesn’t always do so, but it has no doubt that it is in its national capacity to make the choice for right. That belief won’t achieve much on its own, but that belief is still nonetheless a very important thing!

Douglass, I think, is an example of so much of what is right about America. He was a man born into slavery, who freed himself, educated himself, built himself into one of the most impressive thinkers in his country’s history, and, as an abolitionist, helped to free others like him who had been born slaves. He knew where America was wrong but he understood how America could be right, and worked to make it so.

I’ll disregard the “greatest country on earth” rhetoric in the second picture in the sequence; I have my own country, and I have some pretty strong feelings for it, as well. But America? America is a laudable nation, and the words of men like Frederick Douglass are evidence of that, not an argument against it.