Politics

I'm getting to this later than I had intended, and so many of you may only read this on Election Day itself. That's okay, though. If you vote the wrong way, not all is lost.

Our votes don't matter so much as our thinking about this issue.
In my , I argued that one could not argue for voting Republican on the basis of foreign policy. Putting Democrats in control of Congress will be no worse than keeping the Republicans.

Both of them will appease our enemies and fail to fight a proper war. So foreign policy is a wash, and the elections have to be decided by reference to domestic politics.
Is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans on domestic politics?

At this point, I will take it for granted that there is no important difference regarding fiscal and regulatory policy. The Republicans have clearly demonstrated their willingness to defend and expand the welfare state to historic proportions, not to mention their willingness to crush business with regulations, as in the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. I presume there is virtually no disagreement among Objectivists on this point.

The only other significant domestic issue between the two camps is the role of religion in politics.
Dr. Peikoff argues that voting for Republicans will help "push the U.

S. toward disaster, i.e.

, theocracy, not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner." He argues that the threat posed by ideologically-driven religious conservatives is more potent than that of the lukewarm socialism of the Democrats, comparing the first to "a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer" and the second to a "a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer."
Perhaps I am being too presumptuous here, but I also think it is fairly easy to argue that theocratic religion is more dangerous that nihilistic lukewarm socialism: I argued for this point back in 2004 during the Bush-Kerry election.

Today's liberals advocate socialist policies, but have abandoned Marxist ideology. What remains is either nihilism or pragmatism. In the face of that, a consistent ideology like religion will always win.

Historically speaking, it always has: nihilism and pragmatism offer no guidance, and therefore are not self-sustaining. Religious ideology is the historical default and the long-term threat.
In any case, most of the debate among Objectivists is not whether religious ideology is more dangerous than nihilism/pragmatism, but whether the Republicans pose any genuine threat of bringing about a theocracy.

I will confine myself to this question.
Of course this question does not even need to be posed in terms of a looming theocracy. Assuming that foreign policy is a wash, and given that Republicans and Democrats are comparable in terms of fiscal and regulatory policy, we need only recognize that Republican religious politics would be worse than Democratic politics that are less religious.

Some people argue that the religion question is also a wash, because Democrats are becoming increasingly religious themselves. As I in 2004, however, this is ridiculous: the Republicans are clearly more religious, and the Democrats are only following their lead.
But I think we should also think about the long-term consequences of Republican religous politics.

Otherwise the argument can always be made that there is an off chance that Republicans will fight the war slightly better than the Democrats, and given the disastrous consequences of another terrorist attack, it might be worth risking a little more religion in the short-term if it means avoiding this attack.
So where is the evidence that Republican religious politics could lead to theocracy? Seemingly the evidence is all around us.

Republicans, either in the White House, in Congress, or at the local level, have either attempted to implement or have succeeded in implementing a steady series of religiously-inspired policies in the past 6 years: the stem cell research funding ban, faith-based social services, the promotion of abstinence in the global AIDs initiative, various gay marriage bans, the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, partial birth abortion bans and an outright abortion ban in South Dakota, obscenity fines by the FCC, the Terri Schiavo fiasco, the appointment of religious conservatives to federal courts--and the appointment of religious conservatives Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court (with more to come). As more and more government policies are determined by religious morality, rather than the function of protecting individual rights, a precedent is set that subordinates rights to religion.
Objectivists defending the Republicans say that this trend is irrelevant.

Writing on the Forum, one author :

On the question of theocracy I would like to bring up an important issue. In order for there to be theocracy in America, there would have to be theocrats. It's not good enough to have a few people wanting to impose a few religiously motivated laws.

One must also have theocrats. Where are they?
David Koresh and Jim Jones had a following in the thousands, but they're dead.

There are others like them? Who? Where?

How many are their followers? How influential are their ideas? I've not read of even one of them.

I read six to ten newspapers several days a week. Am I misinformed?

This author is not misinformed.

He knows all of the facts I have listed above: he is simply unwilling to classify them as relevant to prospects for theocracy. But what would count in his mind as posing a theocratic threat, then? Presumably politicians would have to propose repealing the First Amendment and forcing us to convert to Evangelical Christianity?

In fact, real theocracy does not require this: conservative intellectuals today now argue seriously that the first amendment provides only Numerous sitting Congressmen endorse this specific formulation, congressmen like , , --and many others you've never even heard of who come up on a simple Google search for
We should, therefore, examine the definition of "theocracy." Some Objectivists argue that if we understand the concept correctly, we will see that religiously-inspired legislation--even religiously-inspired reinterpretation of the constitution--does not necessarily imply a danger of theocracy. In a post on the Forum, another author quotes the following definition of "theocracy" from the Oxford English Dictionary:

A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission.

On the basis of this definition, this author :

The religious right in America would like to define marriage as being solely between a man and woman, ban abortion, permit saying a prayer in public schools for those who want to, curtail pornography and drugs, etc. These and others represent a religious wish list, all of which have previously been enacted in our country in one form or another. As horrible as some of these are, as horrible as all of them would be, this would be a far cry from theocracy.

There is no priestly order set to redefine the structure of our government and replace our executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Do you get that? Because there are no priests waiting in the wings to take over the government, none of the religiously-inspired policies pose a threat of theocracy!

of Dr. Peikoff have noted that some of his critics offer only "concrete-bound" responses. Well this author's response takes the cake.

By his logic, not even the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with its Sharia law, would count as a theocracy, since its official head of state is a hereditary monarch, not a priest! Philosophically speaking, a form of government is not defined by the particular profession of its staff, but by the abstract principles that guide its decision-making: a theocracy is a form of government deriving its authority from religious law.
Now no Objectivist is claiming that we are currently under a theocracy, or that the Republicans will create one before their next term of office is up.

But as more and more laws inspired by religion are passed, and as fewer and fewer judges are willing to rule them unconstitutional (thanks to Republican appointments), the logical outcome will be a theocracy. Think about the meaning of the slogan "freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion." Taken literally, it suggests that as long as anyone is free to believe their own religion, there is nothing wrong with government forcing them to act in accordance with the dictates of another.

One woman's religion may not forbid abortion, but if the government's religion forbids it, she has no right to abort. The logical outcome of the conservative slogan is , where anyone is free to practice non-Muslim religions in private, but Sharia is the law of the land.
Perhaps the logical outcome of conservative principles is theocracy, but some Objectivists say there are practical barriers to the realization of this outcome.

They argue first, that contemporary America has moved further away from theocracy than ever before, and second, that existing institutions would prevent its return. The first of these views is exemplified in the of another regular poster to the Forum:

In the 1940-50's USA I grew up in, we had to start every public school day with ten verses from the Bible. It was the law.

Abortion was illegal in every single state and birth control of any kind was illegal in many states. Homosexuality was a crime. Adultery was the only grounds for getting a divorce and the process took years.

It was a crime to have a store open on the "Lord's Day." My state-approved biology textbook hardly mentioned evolution. This was god-awful, but it was not a theocracy.

She is correct, it was not theocracy. These laws were exceptions in the otherwise rational system we inherited from the Founding Fathers. Eventually all of these laws were eliminated, interestingly, as a result of the litigation of liberal activists.

The author recognizes this, and points out that the remaining liberal infrastructure constitutes a barrier against further theocratic inroads:

Since then the trend has been away from all these laws although some Conservatives have made feeble attempts to restore a few of them, in watered-down form, with almost no political success. There are serious obstacles to overcome: the Constitution, life- tenured sitting Federal judges, liberals and Democrats, the ACLU, and all the Christians and conservatives who don't want their views imposed by force. Because politics is an effect and not a cause, before theocrats can take over the government, they have to take over the culture.

That means, as Objectivists always point out, taking over the colleges. The liberal Leftists are firmly entrenched everywhere in Academia -- even in the Christian colleges -- with Objectivists beginning to make small, but significant, inroads.

I have already commented on the role of the Constitution as a barrier to theocracy.

As long as conservatives interpret it as consistent with the "freedom of religion, not freedom from religion" principle, theocracy is in principle possible. As for the other obstacles: Life-tenured judges are dying and are fast being replaced by the Republican executives this author voted for. This author also wants us to vote the "liberals and Democrats" out of office.

She has also for a "fairness doctrine" for education that would of liberal academics.
That leaves the "Christians and conservatives who don't want their views imposed by force" to save us from theocracy. What ensures that they will continue to exist in sufficient numbers to block the ambitions of their theocratic peers?

Not the overall direction of our culture. Evangelical religion is on the upswing, even while the level of overall religious belief remains the same. There is an important difference between the religion of today and the religion of the 1940s.

In the 1940s, religion was at minimum, as it has always been, an ordinary feature of American culture, an institution for weddings and funerals and social interaction. But the 1960s ushered in an age of relativism and nihilism, eradicating much of the lingering intellectual influence of the Founding Fathers. In this moral vacuum, Americans have increasingly flocked to religion not only as a social institution, but as a source of morality and meaning.

In the face of this, "Christians and conservatives who don't want their views imposed by force" have little intellectual ammunition with which to oppose their more seriously religious brethren--not as long as they remain religious themselves.
The point is not that voting for Republicans will make the culture even more religious. The culture is becoming that way on its own.

One need only look to prominent indicators: the surprising rise of the Christian right in Hollywood (e.g., "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia"), the rise of Evangelical mega-churches, the spread of Christian music and literature (e.

g., the "Left Behind" series).
The point is that voting for Republicans will work further to entrench the increasingly religious culture in politics.

And: whereas religious elements in the 1940s were unfortunate, they did not exist in the context of the massive statist infrastructure established in the 1960s by the liberals. Now that government has unprecedented control of education, health care, science, the media, and the economy in general, religiously-inspired legislators have far greater leverage to impose their beliefs on more and more of us.
If Objectivism is to succeed in saving the culture, there must be free speech.

It is also true that liberals have abandoned their role as the traditional defenders of free speech and have taken up advocacy of hate speech codes and the return of the "fairness doctrine" for the airwaves. But the conservatives have been equal if not greater offenders, pushing for new obscenity fines against broadcasters, helping to pass campaign finance reform, and working to pass the equally intrusive "fairness doctrine" for education. Even in cases like the Danish cartoon controversy, in which some conservatives have been nominal defenders of freedom of speech, others such as the Bush administration undercut this defense by that the freedom of speech implies "the responsibility to be thoughtful about others.

" In the end, conservatives defend instances of freedom of speech only when it otherwise serves their agenda. of freedom of speech is possible.
I don't think any of us can predict with certainty when and whether a full-fledged theocracy may arise in America.

If we are lucky today, Democrats will take over Congress and help to delay it. Objectivists who describe the obstacles to theocracy are correct, in a way: these obstacles will continue to exist, as long as enough people don't vote as pro-Republican Objectivists recommend. But if the Democrats don't win, what is to stop further theocratic or other dictatorial incursions?

I will close with a passage addressing this question from a book I quoted in one of my posts two years ago. It is still applicable today:

The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely. If the United States continues to go the way of all Europe, the people's rebellion against the present intellectual leadership will be perverted, and rechanneled into an opposite course.

Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught. All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative to today's intellectuals; mindless activism as the alternative to vacillating "moderation"; Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism; female inferiority as the alternative to Women's Lib; racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice in behalf of warring pressure groups; and government controls for the sake of the middle class, as the alternative to government controls for the sake of the rich or the poor.

The type of mentality produced by these choices—activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian—would have been familiar in the Weimar Republic.
No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed..

..
What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country's present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular.

The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.
The Constitution cannot stop the trend. A constitution, however noble, cannot withstand the death or eclipse of its animating principle.

Religion cannot stop the trend. It helped to cause it.

This, of course, is from The Ominous Parallels (pp.

299-300), by Leonard Peikoff.
For some time now I have been monitoring the debate among Objectivists about the upcoming elections. I have little time for blogging right now, but I can no longer hold my tongue on this issue.

Therefore I would like to address, in a series of posts, a number of issues I take to be essential in deciding the preferable outcome of the election. The reason to think about this is not because the Objectivist voting block has any influence on the outcome. It is because the way we judge this question will have implications for our subsequent thinking about where to focus our intellectual strategies in the future.

Older readers of this blog could probably guess that I agree in essence with Leonard Peikoff's recent supporting a vote for the Democrats to oppose the threat posed by Republicans' attempt to entrench religion in American politics.
Interestingly, Peikoff does not mention the issue of the war in his statement. This has perplexed those who believe that the war is the essential issue in the election.

For example, Robert Tracinski has voting for the Republicans, because a Democratic victory would allegedly hasten surrender in the current war.
If Peikoff is right and Tracinski is wrong, it follows that the war must not be the essential issue. It might seem strange to think this.

Militant Islam poses an immediate terrorist threat to the West, whereas conservative religionists pose a more long-term threat of theocracy. If the election could help defeat an immediately threatening enemy, it might seem we should vote to end that threat, and worry about long-term domestic threats later.
Could Peikoff think that the short-term threat is less immediate than many of us think?

That is doubtful. Peikoff is the one who warned us of the threat of militant Islam before it was on the radar screen of most anyone else. He warned us of the consequences of the Rushdie affair in the late 1980s.

He warned us of Al Qaeda in the 1990s and predicted major terrorist attacks as a result of continuing appeasement. Peikoff appreciates the threat of terrorism, so something else must explain why he does not mention it in his statement.
The war should be the essential issue in this election.

It should be, but it isn't, because the choice between Democrats and Republicans will make little difference for the outcome of the war. I will argue for this position presently.
First, why does Tracinski think Democrats will bring defeat?

He argues that if Democrats gain control of Congress, they will likely work to cut off funding for the Iraq war, and sooner or later force the withdrawal of our troops and negotiate a "surrender" with Iran and Syria. I have to admit this is probably true.
So let's assume that this much of the scenario is correct: the Democrats pull us out of Iraq.

So what? Prima facie this sounds good to me. We are indisputably losing the war in Iraq, where the lives almost 3,000 of our troops have been sacrificed.

Recognizing that the war in Iraq bears no direct relation to American interests, Tracinski argues that a pullout would have an indirect adverse effect on our security:

If you imagine that this disaster will be limited to Iraq, think again. Ask yourself: what would happen if the jihadis achieved a victory over the American infidel in Iraq? Flush with confidence and confirmed in the assumption that the Americans, for all of their technological superiority, don't have the moral fortitude to fight a war, where would they go next?

A lot of them would go to Pakistan and Afghanistan and launch an even bigger war against us there, which they would be confident of winning. And what would the Democrats do then? They would throw up their hands and declared that Afghanistan was a mistake, too.

Indeed, some on the left have already reached this point. Then the jihadis would set their sights on Pakistan, whose government is already in a stalemate with pro-al-Qaeda tribes in its mountainous provinces.
But don't worry.

Maybe Pakistan's new Islamist rulers wouldn't go after us first. Maybe they would start a nuclear war with India, instead.

I was willing to admit that a Democrat-engineered pullout of Iraq was a probability.

I am not willing to do the same for this scenario. To begin with, the "maybe" tacked on to the end about a nuclear war with India is incredibly far-fetched. I don't want to see Islamists with a bomb, but simply to assert "maybe they would start a nuclear war" sounds like the most far-fetched (and arbitrary) arguments I heard in high school policy debate.

Now the idea that Islamists would be emboldened by a withdrawal from Iraq is more plausible than the Indian nuclear war idea. But there are several factors worth considering here.
First, how much more emboldened could the jihadists be than they are at present?

We appeased them in Israel's war in Lebanon, we appeased the Iranians seeking nuclear weapons, and now we permit the Prime Minister of Iraq to order our own troops to remove checkpoints from Sadr City. Jihadists are already pouring resources into Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and just a few weeks ago a coup plot was uncovered (though crushed) against Pakistani president Musharraf.

Second, an American withdrawal from Iraq might generate propaganda for Islamists, but it does not follow that the terrorists would simply move from Iraq to other countries. This neglects the fact that the conflict in Iraq is less between terrorist insurgents and the U.S.

than it is between rival sects. If we leave now, the bloodshed in Iraq will continue for years and occupy many current jihadists, with the Iranians supporting Shi'ite militias and Al Qaeda supporting Sunnis. Perhaps some Al Qaeda operatives will move elsewhere, but would the number be significant?

Perhaps Al Qaeda would carve out some kind of base in Western Iraq, but a large-scale withdrawal would not be inconsistent with leaving a reaction force in the region (as we surely would in Kurdistan) capable of responding threats immediately affecting American interests.
Third, Democrats may well want to negotiate with Iran and Syria, but how does this differ from what the Bush administration is doing now? It has already negotiated with both, not only about stabilizing Iraq but also about Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Bill Frist even suggested the possibility of negotatiating with the Taliban. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans in this regard is that Democrats are honest about their desire for appeasement, whereas Republicans try to keep it under wraps.
Fourth, American withdrawal from Iraq may actually offer us the chance to refocus our priorities on more important targets.

If Bush's Iraq war is defunded, he may have to look for other targets to avoid being completely emasculated. I don't think this is very likely--but then again, neither is a nuclear war in India.
Perhaps as Tracinski suggests, a Republican victory would spur a temporary reassertion of American power in Iraq, as the 2004 election helped make possible the second battle of Fallujah.

But this war will not be won by fits and starts of temporary reassertions every two years. In fact I predict that if Republicans win on Tuesday, Bush might rescind the decision to take down checkpoints in Sadr City, and might even send in troops to battle Shi'ite militias. But the sum total of his policies to date will make such a stance impossible to maintain.

Bush has empowered the Shi'ites who support these militias--and the Iraqi prime minister who represents them--through his push for Iraqi democracy. He will not be able to use the Iraqi government to quell the sectarian violence, because the Iraqi government is party to it--and he has sanctioned their sovereignty. Any November surprise will quickly be followed by December, January, and February more of the same.

In short, there is little reason to think that Democrats would be substantially weaker on foreign policy than Republicans are already. This being the case, the essential issue for the election is not the war. All that remains is domestic politics.

More on this next time.