eye of the storm

fcc regulation of radio, television, and cell phone frequencies has been wielded to allow an extremely narrow range of media corporations to corner public discourse. well, that kind of thing is what regulation is for. indeed the fcc "owns" the...atmosphere: they auction off spectrum and so on, which is only comprehensible within a claim of ownership. at any rate the last thing we should want is the fcc owning the internet and selling chunks of it to...you know, newscorp or whatever.

regulation of communications was certainly not a function of the state as the founders of the american republic conceived it - explicitly the reverse - and the fcc is a completely aconstitutional accretion in the first place. (of course, there is no power that federal govenment might claim that can't be justified under the history of interpretations of the interstate commerce clause.)  that's not an academic quibble: the actual effect has been to shape and deaden public discourse

the regime in iran is a very good example of squishy totalitarianism. here's a good model of essentially the way china or the u.s. or the eu etc are running their economies: by the merger of state and business:

The Revolutionary Guard has already worked its way into virtually all aspects of Iran's economy, from banks to manufacturing to the oil sector, and it is believed to have a hand in the country's black market. Isolation under sanctions could push even more of the economy into the corps' hands.

"A lot of companies that have invested in the economy are linked to the Revolutionary Guard," said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert with the RAND Corp. "You can make the argument that if you scare away foreign investors, you are strengthening the Guard."

since i frequently slap at frank rich, i want to say that this is good. but i also want to say that it's caught up in the anachronistic state vs corporation, pre-squishy-t conceptuality. so, ok, let's say that we create a new bureaucracy, a financial consumer protection agency. who do you think would staff such an agency? well, who understands the arcane workings of investment banks, etc? it sounds good, but in effect it will be a gov/industry cooperative that will wield the gov's resources in such a way as to benefit both. "consumers" can't be represented, because they've got no idea what's going on. 

i might put this a different way; i've formulated the same idea, perhaps somewhat wider, as ratigan's and called it "squishy totalitarianism."  but i say that this is a fundamental insight. last week there was a story about how tim geithner talks to the ceos of goldman sachs and morgan-chase every day: one of many ways to see that (with ever-greater perection) the treasury department = our mega-banks. now if you had benanke's records, they'd show the sam thing, i suspect. when we cal upon the govt to regulate the banking system, we are calling on the bankers to regulate themselves: there just is no distinction. this is why, when people (jon stewart, for example) confront libertarian-types (ron paul for instance) with the question of who is going to limit the power of the corporations if the state is, per impossibile, shrunk down, they're caught in a false and completely anachronistic dichotomy. you can't attack one without the other.

yes that's interesting what you say about capitalism, andrew. and this is also a problematical strand that runs through the american libertarian-type tradition, why it's infested with randians, e.g. sometimes. what that kind of libertarian needs to understand is the ways that corporate capitalism is in itself a form of oppressive power. we need to scout alternatives, e.g. josiah warren. but capitalism too runs all the way to the founding and is not only circumstantially connected to the basic theory and history of democracy.

that is, the connecton between capitalism and the american conception of liberty is intrinsic, while the connection between that conception and racism is completely contingent. so: an important dimension of freedom is to dispose of your resources as you see fit, to purchase what you want and can afford, and so on. this is why in a republican rhetoric, transforming china into a capitalist economy would entail transforming its polity into a democracy, which appears false.

at any rate, i really think the task for the libertarian right has to be to come up with something more inspiring - even in pure economic theory - than nonstop acquisition or accumulation. it has to take seriously that severe inequality of resources and severe poverty are severe limitations on freedom, that the leverage of employers etc is a real form of power, even in a case of voluntary-seeming contracts.

one angle on this might be provided by the basic idea of squishy totalitarianism. so the libertarian types stop celebrating the american economy as gloriously capitalistic, and start criticizing it on the ground that state and economy have merged here, as in china. this at least gets you out of defending the status quo, and is compatible with a celebration of small business and entrepreneurialism etc.

as you know, i take thomas friedman to be a pre-eminent advocate of what i have called squishy totalitarianism, which marries economy and state into an unstoppable military/money juggernaut, and which the u.s. and china are approaching in different directions. in case you think that's too rough, check this column, showing you what's wrong with democracy in friedman-world, where you've got to control populations through education, and every aspect of economic activity to deal with global warming, etc. but he seems to be losing all focus and just kind of wanders away as column goes on.

probably i've said this before. i think it's excellent that many americans, particularly in the south and in the west short of the pacific coast, are profoundly suspicious of government power and opposed to its expansion. indeed, it's important and refreshing that someone is actually capable even of detecting its increase. i like the fact that people are basically opposed to government health care, whatever may be the complex considerations that should be in play.

but as the birthers etc are showing, this extremely important, and extremely american, suspicion of government power and impulse toward freedom and independence is polluted by racism. this is traditional; one historical example would be "states' rights," a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the constitution and an attempt to decentralize in the face of the world-historical march toward total governmental power. but obviously, the basic idea was to preserve jim crow.

the american traditions of suspicion of government power and racism are only contingently related; indeed they are in tension. if your basic commitment is to freedom and independence, you ought to want the liberaton of everyone. you ought to be for gay marriage, etc. i was just reading in thoreau's correspondence: he was helping the survivors of the john brown group to escape to canada, etc. but of course he has all these same views about the pervasion of state authority.

another way to put this is that the american right is incoherent. if you're in favor of "small government" you can't also be for a series of measures to enforce traditional values or religious values or family values as you understand them. you've got to let people go.

at any rate, this all makes it difficult to criticize the constant onslaught of governmental powr, for which there is no moral justification. it discredits, indeed, the whole notion of freedom and those who advocate anything resembling it. that's a sad historical contingency, one that will end up helping bush/obamism (=squishy totalitarianism) to keep the government growing until there is nothing outside the scope of its power.

the dramatic increase in tobacco taxes raises myriad issues. alexander hamilton thought that the federal government could be largely financed by taxes on alcohol, and said in federalist 12 that americans could never be made to pay taxes directly (har har).  then:

The single article of ardent spirits, under Federal regulation, might be made to furnish a considerable sum....and if it should tend to diminish the consumption of it, such an effect would be equally favorable to agriculture, to the economy, to the morals, and to the health of the society. There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of national extravagance, as these spirits.

the thing was an obsession with hamilton. before long, revenue collectors and still licensers in the western frontier were being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. then there was a violent rebellion, put down personally by hamilton through military means. perhaps we are on the verge of a smokers' rebellion, though perhaps not. oddly, the argument is that the tax will reduce consumption, yet the children's healthcare initiative which it funds will be dependent on people's continuing consumption. really, the gov ought to get busy advertising smoking. the choice between smoking and children's health insurance is meant to put opponents in the extremely untenable position of favoring lung cancer for adults over the health of children. one thing i like about the whole deal: it makes children's health directly correlate with adult ill-health, or makes the health of children and adults vary inversely, which is excellent. meanwhile, the tax is a nice revenue-generator precisely because people are addicted; addictive substances are the perfect commodities, and also the perfect thing to tax, and gov gets into the lovely paradoxical position of discouraging and depending on addiction simultaneously, as in state governments in relation to gambling, for example. or state abc boards with booze.

it's obvious that barack obama is the de facto chairman of the board at gm and chrysler (etc) and that these companies have been in that sense nationalized: they are managed by the state. 

i guess i'm sceptical that an international or human identity could be forged that would allow us to organize into a single international polity. the idea of climate crisis is - more than it is science, i think - an attempt to motivate this development: it is an attempt to forge us into a single worldpeople. without a global threat requiring global cooperation, there would be all sorts of resistance to an international political regime. barring alien attack, climate crisis is about as good as we're going to do. if there were a crisis the only answer to which seemed to be radical decentralization, it would not be a very popular crisis, as demonstrated many. many times by every concentration and pervasion of political power. this is why climate change is more than "science": it is a means of pushing forward a particular political vision. that is not to say that it's all crap; like i always say, i'm not realy in a position to evaluate the data. but a healthy scepticism would make use of the way the motivations and constituencies flow together. al gore or tom friedman find the idea of climate crisis extremely useful in pushing forward an entire political agenda in every area, a world squishy totalitarianism.

let me do an incredibly cursory survey/evaluation of nationalism. one origin is the reformation, as religious leaders made use of political leaders/aristocracy to try to resist catholic power. or, for example, henry viii's assertion of sovereignty. the settlement of european borders at the peace of westphalia, 1648, establishing a principle of sovereignty was a turning point. the unification of germany into a political unit out of sort of feudal fiefs took another couple of hundred years, and the argument that resulted in it is the model of nationalism: the assertion of an "identity" based above all on language, but also folklore, arts, "values" and so on: mapping the political onto the "cultural": really a discovery or a manufacture of the nationalistic idea.

key to the making of such identities, or indiscernible from it, of course, is exclusion and a valuing of one's own culture above others. another site of this development is the forging of american colonies/states into a single nation: describing a liberty-loving national character across the seaboard etc.

the modern state arises together with nationalism: hence the expression "nation-state." state power makes use of and also forges, creates, re-emphasizes national identities: an essential ground of its legitimacy. the nation as cultural/linguistic/aesthetic identity and the state as a concentration of power in certain hands are mutually parasitic since westphalia at latest.

german nationalism is the paradigm, and in relation to state power it was a human disaster of unprecedented scale, a disgusting chauvinist totalitarian mess. in other cases the results have been more benign.

in making an assessment i will remind you that nationalism without militaristic state power is relatively impotent. national identities are of course "social constructions," not natural facts, but they are also not mere inventions of state power: language and other factors yield genuine human unifications. but they are expanded and emphasized and militarized by state power, and wielded/reinforced/forged explicitly as educational/propaganda strategies.

it's hard to evaluate whether this idea is actually dissolving; whether we are actually entering into a post-national or internationalist phase is, at least to me, a question, not some inevitable progression. yes and no. cosmopolitanism and species-brotherhood are groovy. but i'm always asking this: whose power is this consituting, whose power is using this, what forms of subordination are in store? this is what people should have been asking about nationalism in 1830. and one can't help feeling that one possibility is more complete subordination and hence more thorough human disaster even than was possible under nationalism: a world hierarchy and power-monopoly.

i'm no fan of nationalism overall, but nationalism, which once was about consolidation of power, is now a stage of localism. radical localism is of course my only actual prescription: constant reduction of the scope of anyone's coercion of others.

tom friedman today:

I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways.

well, ok, if you're saying that the current economic situation is caused by global warming, then i want to see the argument. i think it's truer to  say that you wish it was caused by global warming, thus enabling a redoubling of the volume of shriek - if such a thing is possible - and of the global regulatory regime proposed. everything constitutes evidence of the "crisis" and the crisis is of use in creating the desired political outcome: squishy totalitarianism gone all-world. meanwhile, freeman dyson.

i think you'll find that - let's see - the north korean missile tests are the result of global warming, which is our greatest "national security challenge." the darfur genocide. problems of tibetan monks. my headache.

i think the thing to really worry about is the whole kit and caboodle merging into an international monetary/trade/regulatory/political regime. it might get to the point where nationalism is actually a liberatory ideology. already, as you can see from hillary's trip, e.g., it gets obvious that the interests of the chinese state-economy are basically the same as that of the american state=economy. now this all might seem like it's a mellow alternative to feuding religions/nations/ethnicities etc. but you're constituting a completely irresistible machine of infinite power under which nobody is free, and when it turns sour - which it will because it will still consist of human beings - there'll be no possible resistance to the unbelievable disaster.

you might think the state is fundamentally distinct from the "private sector" of the economy in that any real resources the former has are based on confiscation, while the latter gets cash by lure: consumption and investment based on advertising etc. well they are different. but we should point out that, as it's demonstrating in spades, the state manufactures the money that is a fundamental commodity as well as the circulating medium of the "private" economy. if the corporation can annex the monetary and confiscatory functions of the "public sector" and the state can annex the pr machinery and the profit slice of the corporate sector, then everything makes amazing sense: it's all circulating and expanding in the same system/environment. the addition of contemporary marketing strategies/companies to politics and state functions is an important development in squishy totalitarianism. or notice the inextricability of federal reserve policy from the stock market etc.

i could say, for example, that the economy needs education, of a certain kind. the state's job is to supply it, to manufacture persons for the intergalactic economy of the 31st century, sophisticated users of information technology and docile citizens.  the economy requires health care, or else we'd never get to universal coverage. the economy requires international political relations. political and economic power are natural allies, and both operate within the flow of money/power.

here's a pretty interesting piece from the campaign for liberty site. anthony gregory argues, as you might expect from a, like, freee market libertarian, that the combination of "state socialism and corporate or free market capitalism" is inherently "unstable," as demonstrated in the current crisis. but i propose to you that it's perfectly coherent, and is in fact the form of government toward which the world, more or less, is moving, a model being china. as i say, the corporate and state sectors are merging or have merged into a single gargantuan cash machine: processing all the consumption and distribution. no doubt there are still crises and cycles etc. but there's no stopping the leviathan. we could call this state capitalism or squishy totalitarianism etc, and no doubt it appears incoherent by the standards of classical economics. but it is our future and our, um, doom. the political and economic powers are naturally allied and the distinction has never been as dramatic in practice as it is in theory. but it's in its process of perfection, and the crisis is only showing this and accelerating the complete merger. all of us will be little nodes in the state/corporate machine for generations.

where gregory is right, however, is that the answer is not regulation. that's not because all state interference in the free market is counter-productive, but because in a situation in which the regulators and the regulatees are in fact the same people, the same interests, the whole thing is a silly charade. as i say, there is, more or less demonstrably, no distinction between goldman sachs and the treasury department.

really the various political positions in the u.s. are only inflections of squishy totalitarianism, one reason why political participation is illusory. people like mccain and bush emphasize security state/safety from terrorists, obama economic safety. both are guaranteeing your life. on both, state and economy merge and grow and grow. and each also basically embraces the goals of the other with minor qualifications.

if squishy  totalitarianism needs its locke or marx, i might nominate al gore or tom friedman: their vision is "global": the merger not only of polity and economy, but of each distinct unit into a single world regulatory regime. the cult of information technology and fetishization of education (a zone of uplift, consciousness formation, and authority) are central ideologies of squishy totalitarianism. as are, as i say, the notion that direct authority is an anachronism and there is the zone of privacy that shouldn't usually be disturbed. the political theory is world welfare/education state in identity with a global economy, with the undertow of fear: what it takes to keep us all from drowning under polar melt or succumbing to bizarre attacks of the irrational, animal past=terrorism. it takes, in short, the merger of state and economy and the merger of state-economies into a single world-devouring blob: the infinite tub of goo.

however, i would not assume that this is some directedness of history: somehow, this idea too will collapse. the very gigantism is unsustainable: nothing, no matter or particularly how big, can fend off the chaos that evelopes us and is us. one little problem: human beings basically can't be educated.

define: squishy totalitarianism. alright. it's totalitarian in that the state permeates the lives of people to an ever-greater degree. so, for example, we need pre-k programs and assured retirement, cradle-to-grave healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing. sort of gently, it shapes consciousnesses: gently in comparison to a roomful of chinese children chanting maoist slogans or rallies of hitler youth (though of course our kids do inhabit rooms with patriotic symbols and chant slogans in unison). the state regulates media, and at the broad level helps keep it in the hands of large corporations. what is constantly emphasized is the dependence of people on the state. the bush administration jacked this up amazingly, and tried to make the only issue who could keep americans safe, as though the only human emotion was fear and we self-evidently live in a nation of cowards. the obama admin has taken this over seamlessly. so squishy totalitarianism has a militaristic edge and the domestic policing that goes with it.

the major feature, however, is the erasure of distinction between state and economy: the merger of the state and corporation in a way that makes corporations providers of basic public services and the state a for-profit enterprise. privitization and government purchases/bailouts of, say the financial system in a way amount to the same thing: blackwater merges with the pentagon; the fed with citigroup etc. this is theseemingly (at the moment) inevitable condition being approached in one direction or another by the u.s., china, venezuela, the eu, india, and russia: it's communism. or it's state capitalism. there is no distinction.

now why is it squishy? it doesn't usually involve straight-up crackdowns, where you have tanks in the streets of new york or beijing, or where we raid newspapers, round up dissidents into camps and so on, though of course such things still happen here and there. it has to deal, for example, with the constant proliferation of communication technologies, with the basic fact that the state/corporation cannot really control the flow of information, and actually depends on those same technologies in myriad ways. it respects some sort of zone of privacy around individuals and families and small affinity groups, because breaking into that zone is expensive and counter-productive. but it disables what goes on in that zone from constituting any serious subversion.

the political/economic/military systems are gargantuan: the largest human organizations ever known. revolution, like the straight crackdown, is obsolete, ridiculous. squishy totalitarianism absorbs dissent because it is a huge mound of goo: there's no real center: it's everywhere all the time: the only conceivable revolution would be to destroy...everything.

the era of revolution is over, just as is the era of the police state. in many ways, indeed, the concept of liberty is anachronistic, and means little except that we can still blog. concepts like "citizenship" are anachronistic: you still produce the signs of participation, but the systems are so gigantic and the consciousness so formed within them that your participation is meaningless.

let me do a little schtick on bush, obama, and totalitarianism. i think that after 9.11, bush (cheney) took an opportunity to move the country in an authoritarian direction, featuring universal surveillance, detention centers, and a national military mobilization (every soldier as an american hero) combined with a romanticized nationalism and militarism well captured in the use of the term "homeland." that is, it was a crypto-fascist expansion of state power. now i think we are actually to be congratulated in that we didn't allow this to happen; the media in particular pierced the veil. and that a variety of other factors led to plummeting public support for the administration was fortunate: you'd need great popular support to actually go fascist. but even if we had, it seems likely that bush would have peacefully relinquished power, that relatively fair elections would continue to be held, and so on: these are fundamental to american self-image, and you can't actually be a nationalist here without doing more than nodding in that direction. but there could have been a continuous administration through elections, and a serious erosion of basic liberties in their defense etc.

on obama: no, he's not going to suddenly be mao, suspend the constitution, move without congress, and so on. but if the public and media adulation continues, the democracy can easily erode in the other direction: government spending and gdp could approach merger. very aggressive federal education/welfare-type programs could produce a pretty credulous and dependent population. obama could continue to emerge into superhuman amazingness, and power continue to consolidate under a single executive, even as military power continues to be exercised globally. indeed the "homeland," "every grunt a hero" flavor will be retained and redeployed: a semi-permanent feature of our culture.

we're dealing with a long-term increase in federal and executive power: continuous really since the founding but certainly since the new deal (left) and cold war (right). and there is no party or significant faction of a party that really resists this: ron paul is, like, the last politician in a major party. what we're getting is a squishy totalitarianism with some democratic elements, such as occasional elections.

one sees china, for example, approaching squishy totalitarianism from the other end: they slowly expand economic and other freedoms, while continuing to control the population through education and welfare programs, and turning the state into a juggernaut by merging it with a sortof capitalist economy.

but obama's particular contribution to this flow is certainly a cult of personality, which reduces scrutiny and dissent and increases state power, though not by a straight crackdown. also, if we participate, we deserve what we get. if bush has one particularly useful quality, it's that a cult of personality around him would be absurd: he's always puncturing his own pretensions, is extremely approachable. he does funny dances. he has no mystique.

this is not to say that one shouldn't admire obama. i think he's the smartest dude to assume the presidency in my lifetime. i like his public persona. that he's black constitutes a great moment in our history. he ran an extremely effective campaign. it's just that we need to realize that the basic posture had always better be: scepticism about the exercise, over us, of power. that's the only thing keeping us free, to the extent we are free.