This debate has always divided the broad liberal left into anti-war left-liberals and pro-war anti-stalinist neocons since its very beginning right after FDR's death. At the bottom of it are two incompatible conceptions of liberal society -- Liberal Society as necessary based on a mobilization against its Enemies; and Liberal Society as fundamentally based on tolerance. For each side, the other represents the death of Liberal Society. Michael Pollak
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The problem I have with the neo-cons isn't really confined to their foreign policy, since those policies are egregiously stupid enough to suffer open derision, confinement, and resistance at the hands of most of the rest of the world and international community.
What bothers me most are the necon's destructive and attack oriented domestic policies which always propose the obverse of progressive and democratic reform as cures for the social and economic ills generated primarily by previous necon policies and of course capital.
The No Child Left Behind policy for distributing federal support to public education is a great example. Reward only those who don't need it, while starving all others to death. Sure makes sense to me. And, what makes this idea even more destructive, is the underlying cynicism which uses the obvious budget struggles of public education to dismantle funding it. Why reward failure, right?
It was sickening to watch the Moyer's NOW expose of the current Secretary of Education, who evidently managed to achieve miracles in the Houston public school system through a diligent application of waste, fraud and abuse. It seems, the Houston miracle and so-called solution to the high student drop out rate in Houston was to mark the drop outs as transfer students---transferred out, get it? We sure turned that one around didn't we?
I've had my own tangles with these jerks. Just this week, I was looking through UCB's Alumni magazine and found essays on the Iraq war. One opposed, and one in support. What I found of interest was the author of the supporting essay, a now retired professor of political science, Sandy Muir. A former Yale graduate, naturally.
Sandy Muir and I go back a long ways. In the late Seventies, I was working in a disabled student program running transportation and wheelchair repair services for disabled students going to UCB. The UCB administration was never a great believer in student services and these were very expensive services indeed. The program and its services only existed because they were mostly funded under a War on Poverty grand from the federal office of education (which disabled students wrote, btw).
Of course the program had its internal problems and suffered charges of waste, fraud, and favoritism. Many of these charges were crudely accurate, at least enough to justify some administrative wrist slapping and oversight, but that's about it. However, a particularly sniveling and disgruntled group of students and staff engineered a take over---principally to garner the fruits of the program for their own waste fraud and abuse of the system. They needed a faculty sponsor for their efforts and found none other than Professor Muir. Under Professor Muir's neo-conservative guiding hand, the group managed a classic Machiavellian coup, ousting the director and steering in their own hand picked candidate into `manage' the program and its problems.
First on the new director's list of priorities was to get the transportation and repair services in `order', meaning of course limited. Not by accident the source of all program problems was deemed to be the unionized shop staff---surprise, surprise. So a war of internal attrition began. Externally, all charges of fraud and abuse ceased, all controversy died out, everything was restored to a smooth well functioning facade of ever fewer services and ever greater benefits for the bureaucratic functionaries at the top. These functionaries devoted most of their time and effort to dismantling the shop piecemeal making the working conditions of their unionized subordinates as close to as intolerable as possible by imposing a long list of work rules, regulations, and forms, all theoretically tuned to monitor the production efficiency of service delivery.
Dot, dot, dot, of course the big freeze-out worked and the program subsequently died quietly some ten years later, slowly starving to death more or less on schedule. Its `top' management team retired on golden parachutes and all ended well. Yet another embarrassing example of progressive tolerance and social change was stamped out and forgotten.
About my only pride in this lengthy dead process was the solidity with which I had tried to construct the shop, unionized it top to bottom with locked in advancement and virtually guaranteed job security---provided you could stand the endless rain of management shit. After all it did take the sniveling establishment lackies ten years to get rid of it.
Meanwhile Professor Muir moved on to write speeches for VP George Bush during the Reagan administration, and a book on the Reagan administration called, The Bully Pulpit. Ah, yes, a democracy of right thinking values for one and all. And as I see this morning, Professor Muir is leading a happy life in his golden retirement, gratuitously justifying a completely unjust bloody atrocity in Iraq.
One of my shop buddies, Andy L. from that long gone era called me the other night and told me he was fighting a familiar sort of battle much like those we lived through back when. He is currently a middle school math teacher and he was elected the teacher's union representative to the local board of education. He is locked in a battle with the school board superintendent. The basic issue according to the superintendent is that all the problems of his school can be narrowed down to the teachers, of course. Meanwhile all the teachers have been taking pay cuts, buying their own supplies and working longer hours, while the administration staff increases along with their salaries. Ah, yes the teachers are the problem. We knew that going in, didn't we?
So, just as in the long-ago, we used to fight these battles with numbers, he has adopted the policy of killing his enemies with facts and figures. At his latest skirmish, he pulled out the over head transparencies with the charts and stats for the school board and showed them how the ever tightening budget crunches were continuously aggravated by the increases in administrative costs, not teacher salaries, as promulgated by the superintendent. The meeting ended in stalemate. The school board was apparently debating whether or not it was true, that facts are stupid things.
Not content with this display of eighth grade prowess, he then went on a web search on the background of this super-jerk superintendent to find as much dirt as possible. Lo and behold, his current superintendent was indeed a known jerk to his former school district somewhere else and his contract had been terminated, two years before it expired. So my buddy is saving this revelation for the next round.
Well, enough of that. I am going back to reading Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss. Speaking of which, judging from the numerous date stamps in the back of these tomes of wisdom, I have to wonder if Muir assigned them routinely for his courses...
Chuck Grimes