The New York Times reported on May 17 that several issues now confronting the Obama presidency have “energized” the recently factionalized and demoralized GOP base. These include the supposed partisan and autocratic Internal Revenue Service action to review closely a number of Tea Party chapter tax status applications, the alleged “cover-up” of an assumed illicit action in the Benghazi tragedy and the Justice Department’s obtaining of the phone records of a number of AP journalists in an attempt to uncover and stop what the department considered a significant national security breach. In response to these events, the nation has witnessed the following and more on the part of the Republican Party and its allies:

*Former Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared on national television to assert (while presenting no evidence for his claim) that the President is lying concerning Benghazi and there is in fact a “smoking gun” in this sad story and it is being hidden by the President personally

*Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, MN) has offered the following observation, again completely without evidence, “As I have been home in my district in the Sixth District of Minnesota, there isn’t a weekend that hasn’t gone by that someone says to me: ‘Michele, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren’t you impeaching the president? He’s been making unconstitutional actions since he came into office.’ ”

*Former Arkansas governor and conservative entertainment talk show host Mike Huckabee has likewise called for the President’s impeachment.

Republican officeholders and activists are arguing that the President is “obviously” misleading the American people and therefore unfit to hold his post, and the national government generally is just as illegitimate, because overreaching and tyrannical.

            Cynicism and ideological pretentiousness aside, the former Vice President offered no evidence of anything resembling a scandal occurring in Benghazi, nor did the recent House Foreign Affairs committee hearings concerning those events. Likewise there is no indication of anything approximating an impeachable offense in any of the three episodes noted. Indeed, to date the IRS scandal looks more like the product of technocratic confusion and perhaps ineptitude related to applications for tax-exempt status as 504(c)4 organizations than anything else. No substantiation to date has suggested Benghazi was anything other than the tragedy it surely was. And while the Justice Department’s actions in seizing AP phone records are troubling, untoward and deeply unfortunate, they were not undertaken without a genuine and debatable concern animating them. In short, to the extent the critical comments noted above can be explained, they appear to be linked to an effort to energize the Party’s base to mobilize its members electorally against such policy and program actions the President might propose. They are so wildly inflammatory and so utterly unrelated to reality that it is difficult to make sense of these assertions as anything but cynical posturing.

            Meanwhile, also this week, the Times reported that a large national survey of economists had found a solid consensus that the nation’s sequestration and allied efforts to cut its “unaffordable” deficit and debt, embraced by the lion’s share of GOP leaders and activists, were in fact misguided and were slowing the country’s recovery from its long-lived recession (and thereby actively harming millions of citizens, rich, middle income and impoverished alike). Nevertheless, as the sequestration and cuts progress, Republican Party leaders are demanding still deeper reductions in federal expenditures to rein in a purportedly unsustainable national government. But in complete empirical contradiction to GOP claims, the Congressional Budget Office reported this week a very significant reduction in its projected deficit for the nation, the product largely of the economic growth that has recently occurred. Nonetheless, Republican leaders and activists have ignored this fact in favor of a continued call for sharp cutbacks in national expenditures, using the deficit as rationale and cudgel.

            The Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI) offered another example this past week of the likely effects of continued GOP fiscal policies emphasizing public program and expenditure reductions. The CPI reported on May 14^th that poverty and inequality had increased in most communities in the recent recession, but this trend was not evenly distributed file://localhost/(https/::www.stanford.edu:group:recessiontrends:cgi-bin:web:sites:all:themes:barron:pdf: Communities_fact_sheet.pdf). Not surprisingly perhaps, minorities and recent immigrants lived in those neighborhoods with the largest increases in unemployment and inequality. The shift was so large that the Center predicted that, barring effective policy steps to ameliorate it, it will result in a continued and deepening divide between have and have not communities across the nation for  decades to come. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has targeted for sharp reductions or elimination in its federal budget plan many of the programs that assist such population groups. The conservatives call such efforts undue deprivations of the liberty of those populations, but Republican leaders never discuss the character of freedom enjoyed by individuals who live lives of profound poverty and food insecurity.

            One final example of GOP-style politics in our capital today is particularly telling. Republican leaders continue to refuse to confirm the appointment of proposed leaders to head federal programs they do not favor ideologically. They also have acted often to reduce appropriations for agencies they find odious including, ironically, the Internal Revenue Service whose budget has been reduced 17 per cent since 2002. The result is less than adequate performance by these entities in many cases, and for obvious reasons. The steps taken ensure the result, which is then used to pillory the public victim. The Times reports, for example, the Party plans to use any and all glitches in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act reforms, whose institutional leaders the GOP has refused to appoint, as a centerpiece of its campaign in 2014 to continue to tar that effort and ultimately obtain its repeal.

            What all of these examples illustrate is a party that has so lost its way in the name of power mongering or ideology, or both, as to encourage its leaders and mouthpieces to set aside facts in order to offer outrageous claims to inflame its base. In so doing, those same individuals are each day and with every misleading and demagogic assertion they offer, delegitimating the government they are elected to serve and of which they are a part (or as supposed journalists or media figures, to  cover thoughtfully), at least with those voters sufficiently credulous, pre-disposed or uninformed as to believe their claims. It would certainly be possible to debate a range of propositions concerning the warp and woof of political action in multiple domains without calling for the President’s impeachment without evidence, or assuming tyranny without facts to bolster that claim, but many elected GOP officials no longer appear willing to do so. Instead, a strong share of the Party’s leaders and media representatives are now, whether they realize it or not, attacking the very foundations of democratic governance by working assiduously to destroy its popular legitimacy. I cannot explain this turn, nor can I understand why these individuals believe that, should they succeed, they could govern in such a scenario, were they to gain the power they have taken such steps to attain. In short, the current state of the nation’s politics is not simply lamentable; it now constitutes a danger to self-governance itself. The present situation could be remedied, but only if those promoting it chose to discipline their claims and to harness them to facts, rather than ideological flights of fancy aimed at enraging a targeted population.

            I was touched this week to read that a committee of notable political and civil society leaders, working on behalf of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, had honored former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords with that institution’s Profiles in Courage award on May 5. The honor is annually given to an individual who embodies the sort of mettle chronicled in the Pulitzer Prize winning volume of essays by that title, which highlighted the difficult decisions taken by eight senators who risked their political careers by taking unpopular principled positions.

            Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the slain president, bestowed the prize at a small ceremony at the Library. Ms. Kennedy, who was not quite 6 years old when her father was assassinated, made clear that the awards committee chose Ms. Giffords for the courageous example she has set as she has sought doggedly to recover from the nearly fatal wounds she received from a would-be assassin in 2011, and for her continuing work meanwhile to curtail gun violence in the United States. As she presented the award, a sterling silver and crystal lantern meant to symbolize hope, Ms. Kennedy observed:

Our family is still suffering the heartbreak caused by gun violence. No one should have to lose a husband, a wife, a father, a child to senseless murder. But as our honoree has shown, out of that pain and tragedy, we must find the strength to carry on, to give meaning to our lives, and to build a more just and peaceful world. Gabrielle Giffords has turned a personal nightmare into a   movement for political change. Her work is saving lives and sparing countless families from the pain and loss caused by gun violence.

            I vividly recall how powerful I found Profiles in Courage as a youngster. I remember, too, watching in class a series of well-crafted films produced for television that both enthralled me and brought the book’s pages to light. They provided a portrait of both the paradoxes and possibility of representative governance that I found intense and hopeful, even as a child. The book revealed profoundly how difficult democratic self-governance can be to attain in light of the innate frailties of humankind, while also highlighting the possibility of the freedom it may assure.

            Ms. Giffords, still working to recover from her injuries and speaking in the shadow of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Senate’s failure to pass legislation requiring additional background checks for those purchasing guns, said little at the ceremony in her honor, but her brief remarks were nonetheless powerful:

I believe we all have courage inside, I wish there was more courage in Congress. These two years since I was shot have been hard. But I want to make the world a better place. More than ever.

            How refreshing to learn of a leader, touched forever and deeply by a senseless act of violence, who can still articulate an abiding hope for the future and for her nation, and who is willing to work peaceably and honorably to secure it. Ms. Giffords stands in stimulating contrast to the paranoiac bombast increasingly typical of a share of our nation’s would-be leaders, and to the self-consciously cynical attempts of many others to manipulate the electorate by any means necessary to gain personal or organizational advantage and power. Against the daily posturing of these who seek short-term partisan and political advantage at any social cost, we need to be reminded that there are many who stand with Giffords and refuse the powerful allure of an easy cynicism in favor of the more difficult path of resilient courage. Amidst the onslaught of the often Kafkaesque empty partisan positioning, we need to remember that there is always reason for hope that some leaders will emerge who can and will act with nobility, bravery and selfless grace on behalf of the possibility of freedom and self-governance.

On April 30 President Barack Obama rekindled public debate and conversation concerning this nation’s prison for detainees at its Guantánamo Bay, Cuba Naval Base by suggesting during a press conference that the facility must be closed. The President was succinct concerning why:                                                                                                                     

It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing.    It lessens co-operation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a     recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.       

            President Obama also remarked that such is “a hard case to make because it’s easy to demagogue the issue.” Indeed, as if in response to the President’s point, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (R), a leading opponent of closing the prison, quickly issued a statement observing, “there is wide, bipartisan opposition in Congress to the president’s goal of moving those terrorists to American cities and towns.” The President has never advocated such an action and did not do so at his press conference, but the response from McConnell’s office illustrated Obama’s point. The plan the President had offered, which the Senate rejected in a lopsided 90-6 vote in 2009, would have seen a share of the current institution’s 166 inmates (roughly 80 as the administration has cleared 86 formally for release) transferred to a “Super Max” federal penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois, a move very unlikely to endanger any Americans. That is, their incarceration in a maximum-security prison would not represent, “moving terrorists to America’s cities and towns.” This said, many media accounts dubbed the facility’s closure a “tough sell” politically in Congress.

            The important question this claim raises is, why? Why exactly do so many Republicans and Democrats wish to maintain this patently rights-violating and expensive facility to retain individuals indefinitely, many without charge or trial or who already have been declared “not a danger to our nation”?  Part of the answer may lie in public opinion polling, which has in the past found 70% of Americans favoring maintaining the facility. According to media commentators, this response was out of predictable fear of allowing “hard-core” terrorists on American soil.  That view is obviously misinformed, but Congress has done nothing to disabuse Americans of it and some political leaders have sought to use the sentiment manipulatively for their own partisan purposes.

            The prison is the result of a George W. Bush administration decision. The location was apparently selected deliberately to avoid United States legal jurisdiction so as to ensure space for torture and ill treatment of detainees in order to garner information for the “war on terror.” Now, however, formal revelation of those actions likely would be damning in trial, as when undertaken, the actions violated both United States and international law. Lawmakers also apparently fear as politically toxic the prospect of any released individual later engaging in a fresh terrorist act.

            At one point during the Bush years more than 800 individuals were held at Guantánamo and an untold number of them were cruelly treated or tortured. The Obama administration has not placed any new inmates at the facility and has sought to continue to negotiate agreements with other nations to transfer for detention or trial those no longer judged risks to the United States, and to move the rest to the mainland for trial and/or incarceration. Congress, however, has blocked all efforts to move detainees to the U.S., including specifically barring the use of funds for such purposes. The legislature has, however, left the President the option of asking his Secretary of Defense to certify that individuals transferred and later released would never pose any risk to the nation, a promise that appears beyond the administration’s control to ensure. Such certification poses a Trojan Horse-style political liability the White House has so far been unwilling to assume in any case.  Meanwhile, the President has chosen voluntarily not to return 50 detainees to their home nation of Yemen, due to the continuing instability in that country.

            This current state of political and administrative limbo has caused many of those enduring incarceration to lose hope, and approximately 100 of the inmates now at Guantánamo are currently participating in a hunger strike.  In still another cruel twist in the heartrending history of this facility, the administration is now force-feeding 21 of those men without their consent, a practice that violates international law and which has drawn withering criticism from the United Nations.

            So the upshot of this very sad situation is that the President’s opponents criticize him for potentially endangering Americans by foisting “hardened terrorists” on the nation whenever he suggests the facility should be closed. Progressives meanwhile condemn him equally vigorously for not having shuttered the facility already, thus failing to fulfill an important campaign promise. In the meantime, the administration is facing an untenable scenario with the detainees still present at the facility.

            Whether the President will be willing to bear the political and possibly legal risk of certifying prisoners for release by indicating they will never pose a threat to the United States, his only known recourse as this is written, remains to be seen. Whether other nations will be willing to take prisoners so certified, assuming such occurs, also remains to be seen, as does what will happen to those detainees for whom alternate locations cannot be found. For now, the President has asked for a review of his options, which appear to be very limited unless Congress shifts its stance, which now also seems unlikely.

            Little about this deeply tragic Catch-22 scenario makes sense.  The United States continues to incarcerate, in increasingly harsh conditions and without trial or hope of release, dozens of individuals it has already formally decided pose no threat. Meanwhile, legislators will neither allow the detainees’ transfer nor incarceration in the United States. This situation violates not only international law, but also fundamental tenets of United States law and human dignity. The Guantánamo facility was born of cynicism and fear and it remains open for exactly the same reasons. The President is right that it represents a continuing and toxic stain and should be closed. One may only hope a path to do so can be found. Any other course will continue to bring profound shame and dishonor to the nation.

           I always read nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts’ twice-weekly commentaries with interest, but this past Wednesday’s column made my blood run cold. Pitts reported receiving the following unsigned screed in response to his recent essay concluding that America should stand together with those killed and injured, united and defiant in the face of the Boston Marathon bombing. He shared it, unedited, in his column:

 Your wrong pal we do not STAND TOGETHER. OH MY GOD we need a CIVIL WAR. The American people against the LIBERAL DEMACRAT SCUM that we have let allow SCUMBAGS like those that would BLOW UP people in BROAD DAYLIGHT to be here ... WE NEED A CIVIL WAR. Those demacrats that happen to still be breathing after that CIVIL WAR will have a choice. BECOME NORMAL or you are LEAVING with the 11 million illegals that ARE GOING HOME ... THIS IS SO CLOSE TO HAPPENING THAT EVERY LIBERAL IN THIS COUNTRY SHOULD START LOSING SLEEP ... THERE IS A CLEAR REASON WHY WE ARE ARMED TO THE TEETH ...

         Pitts reported that he once might have laughed off this sort of drivel since writers receive hateful comments all the time, but this piece made him wonder whether the nation is already spiritually riven. If one cannot stand with innocents murdered and maimed, something very serious may be afoot. And indeed, Pitts’ noted the ultra-conservative entertainment and pundit industry (Limbaugh, Beck, Trump, Coulter and Santorum, among others) fans the flames of disunity and hatred each day and must therefore be held complicit in the sort of malicious inanity represented by this correspondent. The Miami Herald columnist highlighted the letter writer’s call for war against his own countrymen and observed that when the profoundly irrational becomes reasonable, even to a few, we may already be experiencing disunion. Instead of dismissing the email, as he might have done in the past, Pitts called attention to the comments of one misguided soul as evidence of the darker side of the broader polarization so evident today in our politics. That letter may not represent a larger trend or worse, as Pitts avers, but as I argue below, his concern nonetheless deserves continuing attention.

         Meanwhile, the Economist’s United States “Lexington” correspondent argued this week that the U.S. is experiencing a resurgence of libertarianism. The claims offered to support this contention were that the Senate had refused to pass a modest gun registration law and the nation did not rush to “blame itself” for the Boston Marathon tragedy and to create new laws accordingly. I am not so sure that the evidence supports such a broad assertion for three reasons. First, it seems to me the National Rifle Association and other groups were not so much arguing for a libertarian position as absolutizing one right over all others. And they did not prevail because of that strategy, but because a small number of lawmakers feared the mobilization of opposed gun owners might result in a later electoral challenge. The lion’s share of the American people neither supports the NRA’s claims nor the policy outcome in the cited case.

           Second, it is by no means self-evident that little immediate support for increased surveillance or new abrogations of civil liberties in the face of the Boston bombing is anything but prudent as the facts are sorted out. Perhaps a debate will obtain later concerning whether more cameras and surveillance in public areas might be necessary to ensure public safety. Indeed, such a discussion has begun and to date it has not been dominated by libertarian claims.

            Finally, I was struck most by the gun lobby’s mobilization tactics. The NRA and similar groups whipped their faithful into a frenzy on the basis of deeply misleading claims concerning what was at issue in the registration bill. I am not sure either that strategy or outcome constitutes a surge in libertarianism, but instead a successful manipulation of a sufficient swathe of citizens to concern a small group of election-chary Senators. Whether such should have occurred is a reasonable, but different concern.

          Yet, clearly, this explanation of the weapons registration fiasco does not reach Pitts’ concern, which represents a virulent variant of “Lexington’s” claim concerning the unleashing of libertarianism in the land. The columnist’s correspondent was literally brimming with hatred of his fellow countrymen who did not share his views. Indeed, he was so full of rancor that he could not bring himself even to empathize with the bombing’s victims. One hardly knows what to say in the face of such misguided animus. But whether one agrees that the writer’s anonymous rant is simply that, or finds it a symbol of bone-deep disunity afoot in the land, Pitts was right to raise the question. History teaches that social heterogeneity represents a continuing and critical challenge to democracy and any friend of freedom should monitor closely whether and how a diverse people is disciplining itself to accept difference. Too many wars and too much blood have been shed, and freedom lost too many times by those who damn differences of all sorts, not to pay close attention to those declaiming against their fellow citizens. That is, whatever one makes of Pitts’ decision to showcase this one writer’s maliciousness, unfounded hatred based on difference has undone freedom too many times simply to be ignored. Those who love freedom and cherish self-governance must be ever mindful of its relative fragility.

            This past week saw at least three significant events for the American regime, which were overshadowed, understandably, by the Boston Marathon bombing in news coverage. All three occurrences, while not obviously directly related, suggest lessons for self-governance and the profound importance of democratic political choices.

            First, the so-called Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of England and a leading proponent of neo-liberalism, was laid to rest. The doppelganger of our own nation’s former president, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher pressed for vigorous enlargement of the role of the market in virtually all dimensions of her country’s life. In so doing she went so far as to contend famously that there was no such thing as “society.” Only individuals counted in Thatcher’s calculus.

            Second, the nonpartisan Constitution Project’s task force on the brutal interrogation and detention programs carried out during the George W. Bush years (2001-2009) released its independent assessment of those efforts and forcefully declared them violations of international law and treaties and lacking any substantive rationale (http://detaineetaskforce.org). The report of the 11-member group, chaired by two former congresspersons, a Democrat and a Republican, was predicated on an exhaustive sifting of evidence and a wide ranging set of interviews with many of the principals involved.

            Finally, The United States Senate refused to pass any meaningful effort to secure a more thoroughgoing gun ownership registration system despite the American population’s overwhelming support for such measures, and as a direct consequence of the strongly mobilized opposition of the gun lobby, especially the National Rifle Association (NRA). Each of these occurrences deserves further consideration.

            The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg succinctly summarized the consequences of Thatcher’s successful institutionalization of neo-liberal policies for Great Britain in this week’s volume of that periodical:

‘Thatcherism’-small government, privatization, meager public services, regressive taxation, monetarism, hostility to trade unions, indifference to unemployment, austerity as a matter of principle, nationalism, military pride, and Victorian social values, all with a sheen of Murdochian populism--leaves a mixed legacy. The rumpled, cozy Britain of the postwar decades … gave way to a Britain of pitiless dynamism and poisonous inequality.

            One might describe the import of Reagan’s nearly identical program for our own country very similarly, particularly its consequences for inequality, for broad intolerance of government action among many and for Labor, which now offers little meaningful resistance to corporate power in the American political economy. In addition, Hertzberg’s description likely should be augmented for both the United States and the United Kingdom by acknowledging the fact that privatization has created massively complex structures of governance that are difficult for citizens even to fathom, let alone to understand and hold accountable. The implications of these regime realities are still unfolding decades later, but in both nations they have resulted in corrosive patterns of delegitimization of public institutions and, especially in the United States, too easy paranoia among some of public authority. There is surely vitality in each country, but it is increasingly an energy associated with the few while many citizens languish in the equivalent of economic and political quicksand. The implication of these trends for self-governance has been massive and growing inequality, increasing public attacks on the poor for being poor by many public officials, decreasing citizen understanding and engagement in governance and unprecedented willingness among public leaders to assume that markets can substitute for the hard business of democratic governance.

            Turning to the Constitution Project’s findings, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have each publicly and harshly criticized opponents of the torture regime both oversaw during the Bush presidency by arguing the necessity of their efforts and the naiveté of their critics. Cheney especially has demeaned any who disagree with his embrace of torture as an essential policy tool. The upshot of the claims of both men has been a continuation of the “debate” about America’s turn to brutishness as a means to address widespread public fears created by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. While the Obama administration has rightly ceased all such activity, it remains unclear, given the intransigence of these and other former Bush administration officials and Hollywood’s continued glorification of such horrific practices, that a future presidency might not revive such acts. The result would be both morally outrageous and ethically indefensible. So it is important, as the New York Times noted this week, that the Constitution Project’s thoughtful effort receives wide attention. As the task force itself noted, “as long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture.” Few policy steps have done more to diminish this nation’s standing in the world and to undermine its very foundational principles, than the Bush administration’s turn to torture. Such practices, undertaken with knowing malice, cannot be permitted to return under any circumstances. The Project’s patiently detailed critical analysis of the emptiness of their supposed justification deserves wide attention.

            Finally, the Senate vote not to embrace even minimal gun registration in the wake of the Newtown tragedy and too many other gun-related violent incidents to relate, reminds analysts, were any reminder needed, of the power of mobilized minorities in American electoral politics. While some of the critical phalanx of GOP senators and small number of Democrats who voted against reason in this case (notably, not on the merits, but on whether the bill could withstand a GOP filibuster) likely did so for ideological reasons, most were well aware that the claims of the NRA and other gun ownership groups denouncing the proposed legislation bore little relationship to reality. But these organizations mobilized a group likely to vote and posed the peril for many elected leaders of challenges from their right if they voted “wrong” on the gun registration proposal. So the nation continues as the most violent in the Western world and with powerful weapons readily available without sufficient accountability to virtually any persistent would-be purchaser. This outcome of America’s current curiously shrill form of interest group advocacy politics is especially sad and perverse. Proponents of an odd form of individual absolutism have once again mobilized sufficiently to defeat a reasoned claim for common action. This has become a frequent outcome in American politics in recent years. Only time will tell if this penchant can be reversed in the present case, but as I write, such a shift seems unlikely.

            One thread that joins these apparently disparate events of the week is that all are the product of democratic action. An oil-shocked and stagflation weary America turned to ideological claims in the late 1970s and thereby enlivened a democratic politics of profound marketization, governance complexity and crisis and public division in the span of a single generation. The policies resulting from that turn have created a new and increasingly corrosive politics of deep economic and social inequality that threatens not only the capacities of the American regime, but now also the very foundations of the nation’s moral standing and legitimacy with its citizenry and in the world. That said it is worthwhile remembering that these implications arose directly from democratic action. Ultimately, only the American population can address them, as it was that citizenry that embraced them.        

           One of the more theoretically interesting, and vexing, issues in the study of democratic politics, at least for those societies that employ capitalism as the engine of their economies, is how to characterize the relationship between markets and governance institutions. At least since the 19^th century, when Karl Marx wrote, many philosophers have argued that, once unleashed, capitalism will determine the course of modern societies. Ironically, while today’s neo-liberals loathe Marx, their prescription for maximizing the role of the market in societies goes far toward allowing capitalism the social space to triumph over the competing claims arising from democratic values (read: equality versus pervasive inequality) that the German philosopher saw as inescapable.

           Not all thinkers concur with Marxist-style economic determinism, of course. Many scholars have argued that both markets and democratic governance institutions are important organizing agents of societal resources and capacities. Many also contend that politics is, or ought to be, architectonic in democratic capitalist societies. In consequence, the most vital issues for mixed political economy nations, including our own, today rest in first establishing clearly within polities that politics is finally formative against ideological claims for the primacy of the market, and second in finding an appropriate dynamic balance between capitalist claims and democratic aspiration. Indeed, this might be said to be the cardinal responsibility of elected leaders at all scales in such societies.

           If the issue of the relationship of the political economy’s key elements is a central theoretical matter for understanding democratic governance, the question of how to regard the role of individuals in the polity is likewise a vital concern. That is, interested scholars must ask how much weight to assign specific persons’ characteristics and efforts as they seek to describe or explain events or actions. Leadership and foreign policy studies, for example, have long debated what influence to assign individual action, agency and discretion in explaining decisions or events. Some analysts have argued strongly that the personalities, traits and behaviors of leaders or statespersons matter profoundly to outcomes. Others have assigned primary importance to contextual conditions and forces, whether external to organizations or internal, or arising from them or their relationships with other institutions or individuals. For my part, I am convinced that individuals matter. Similarly, analytically, I do not believe actors take actions in voids. Contexts matter profoundly, too. The issue is how much latitude public officials and other social leaders have to act and why and how they elect to use it.

            I share this reflection as I recently finished reading a thoughtful memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe (2012). The volume chronicles the last two years of Schwalbe’s mother’s life as she suffered from pancreatic cancer. Mary Ann Schwalbe was an extraordinary woman by any measure. At various points in her long and distinguished career she was an executive with the International Rescue Committee, a prominent humanitarian relief and refugee assistance international nongovernmental organization, the director of admissions for Harvard/Radcliffe University and head of a highly regarded boarding school for girls.  And she did much else besides. She and her son, a publishing house editor, began their book club soon after Mary Ann learned of her diagnosis. Together, mother and son read dozens of books and discussed each during the last years of Mary Ann Schwalbe’s life.

           In the course of offering his recollections of that period, Schwalbe reports a discussion with his mother concerning Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book (2008), which Mary Ann liked very much. The poor behavior of a central character put her in mind of her own oncologist by way of contrast:

‘I don’t know what others think¾but I know what I think’-my mother replied. ‘I think everyone needs to be kind-especially doctors. You can be a very great doctor and still be kind. That’s partly why I like Dr. O’Reilly (her oncologist) so much more than the first oncologist I saw-not because she’s a woman but because she’s kind.’

‘But you always taught us that sometimes people aren’t nice because they aren’t happy.’

‘Yes, but maybe those people shouldn’t be looking after other people. And I’m also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it’ (pp. 109-110).

           I find this insight profound. Assuming one assigns some measure of agency to individuals in democratic political life, and irrespective of the level of analysis one is addressing, it matters what those people (citizens and elected leaders alike) do and why they do it. Mary Ann Schwalbe argued that individuals should be animated foremost by kindness and not merely by a sort of platitudinous, and therefore empty, niceness. Kindness is closely linked to empathy and to treating others with dignity and respect. Mary Ann Schwalbe knew its significance well from her long experience working with refugees and those afflicted by disaster and conflicts. This she knew well, too, from her many years of involvement in secondary and higher education.

           Kindness is necessary, too, for democracy to flourish. As with debates concerning the political economy or individual agency, however, one must settle first on the view that kindness matters, and thereafter begin to imagine ways and means by which citizens may come to understand its elemental significance for human interaction, development and self-governance.  These challenges strike me as ever more significant as many of our nation’s political leaders embrace a cynical politics of avarice, mean-spiritedness, self-regard and scapegoating. Civic capacities, of which kindness must be considered a central example, matter for successful democratic governance as well as for the possibility of attaining a polity that celebrates the dignity on which democratic agency is ultimately predicated. Mary Ann Schwalbe’s simply stated charge looms large for our nation today.

            Marc Thomas wrote provocatively in last week’s Re: Reflections and Explorations commentary (at https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/reflectionsandexplorations/) that empathetic imagination represents a crucial response to the challenge of racism, a particularly virulent endemic form of “othering” in the United States and elsewhere. Marc pointed out that neuroscientists are finding that humans innately possess capacity to empathize. Since human beings also evidence large capabilities for hatred, jealousy, avarice and the like, the challenge, as Marc suggested, is to find ways to educate and acculturate citizens to empathize rather than to hate. In a free society, this process must occur while maximizing the space for those individuals to make choices for themselves.

            More, since these proclivities are usually at least epistemic, if not ontologic in character, they are difficult to change. To the extent such norms and values are passed inter-generationally, they demand that citizens adopt a new frame if change is to occur. And surely, as Marc argued, enjoying opportunities to interact with the “other” will assist in breaking down barriers born of ignorance, rather than perpetuating ill will. But there are obvious challenges to securing this pragmatic result and unleashing empathy, including the nation’s sharply racially segregated neighborhoods, and political leaders’ and parties’ inclination to use difference as a “wedge” mobilizing device. As I have argued previously, history is littered with instances of popularly supported tyranny predicated on human capacity for hatred and desire for apparent “power over” others. There will always be would-be leaders in democracies desirous of gaining power by sowing distrust, acrimony and hatred.

           Beneath this concern lie at least two additional challenges. First human beings are sense-making creatures. Humans build their epistemic frames around powerful narratives that allow us to develop a shared understanding of our place in the world, and these often root us deeply in race, tribe, national group, ethnicity or shared attributes with others in our social spaces at all scales. Humans hold tightly to the norms that help them understand reality and this seems especially the case when those so ensconced do not have opportunities to learn anything different or to gain the critical capacities to test their framing assumptions and stories. These frames will not change if never examined.

           In particular, and put bluntly, provincialism, privatism and ignorance are the enemies of empathy and empathetic imagination. It is difficult to come to regard strangers with openness if one knows only a constricted world and views all else with fear or indifference or both. Likewise, it is difficult to empathize with others if one is convinced, consciously or not, that an inward-oriented selfishness connotes power and success (a frame often and increasingly adopted and pressed in American politics as a celebration of the energy of capitalism). And finally, ignorance, by definition, disallows individuals the capacity to rise above prejudice and discrimination based on fear.

           This analysis suggests that much afoot in American politics now runs directly counter to developing sharpened capacities for empathy in the nation’s population. First, the best known forums for allowing children to develop such imaginative capabilities—exposure to history, politics and literature and poetry of all sorts—are now in bad odor with political leaders in favor of so-called core subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I have no difficulty with any of these subjects or disciplines, but none teaches anything about the character and challenges of the human condition or of democratic self-governance. This trend in education rests on the faulty assumption that a democracy can educate for the market place while ignoring the living conditions and requisites for assuring its population’s freedom. Empathy is never developed in a vacuum, and one may not assume that simply ignoring the inherent and difficult challenges confronting its acculturation will result in beneficial social outcomes.

           Second, while the market is a mighty engine of social organization, it cannot govern. Nor does it serve self-governance to contend ad nauseum that a market-centered selfishness can substitute for a disciplined responsibility to the commons. It cannot. Finally, our election campaigns, drawing on lessons gleaned from marketing, are now as often framed around pillorying opponents as they are around offering any positive notions for the roles that governance can play in society. To the extent that these dominate public rhetoric and narrative they are unlikely to encourage an empathetic response among dissimilar groups mobilized around scapegoating and blame-casting claims against others in society.  Empathy is indeed a critical human attribute, but it is not magic and it must be supported if it is to play socially beneficial roles, both for ensuring the conditions for peace and for self-governance. One may hope our policy-makers will soon begin to understand this reality and begin to behave accordingly.

            A friend contacted me following publication of this column last week to ask whether I might be concerned that framing, as I did, the challenge of alterity using examples from other nations might lead some readers to imagine that such is an issue for those “others” and not here in the United States. I surely did not mean to imply that such is the case. Sadly, human beings everywhere, including certainly, in this country, appear to have a penchant for declaring other individuals as invidious and/or imagining that they are somehow less than they are. This behavior can be rationalized on many grounds, including real or imagined differences of many sorts. Whatever its “justification,” once one establishes such a belief as a foundation, it becomes much easier to treat the targeted population with discrimination, disdain or worse. Indeed, because one has decided those groups are “less than,” one can “other” them with impunity and regard them accordingly. I profiled two cases last week in which this process led to the murder of an innocent woman and attempted murder of a teenager. Those perpetrating these crimes had defined their victims as “others” and “less than,” and in so doing crafted a supposed rationale for their deeds. Each victim could be the target of wanton cruelty because each had been reimagined as something contemptible and alien.

            One recent example of these behaviors in the U.S. occurred in August 2012 in Steubenville, Ohio. The episode found a profoundly inebriated young woman who had fallen essentially unconscious repeatedly sexually violated by members of the local high school’s football team as those young men carried her, largely naked, by her legs and wrists from party to party one evening. The members of the self-named “Rape Crew” shared their exploits as they undertook them on social media and via cell phone photographs and video. Many fellow students witnessed their actions and shared text messages and photos, but did not intervene. One of those privy to many of the events that night was reported to have tweeted, "Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana,” and "Some people deserve to be peed on." Sadly, others promptly shared this drivel, whose malignant character speaks for itself.

            While this case did not involve murder, it was nonetheless heinous and a horrific example of the viciousness that can be unleashed by the process of “othering” another human being. Like their counterparts in Pakistan, those responsible for this outrage regarded their 16-year-old victim as less than human and somehow worthy of the shameful treatment she received, as did at least a share of those who observed the events. Obviously, the victim was very much a human being and those principals engaged in raping her have since been convicted of crimes for their actions. The court did not punish those “celebrating” the travesty, although such may yet occur as an investigation continues. In any case the football players and the many who witnessed their atrocities and did nothing to stop or report them, surely acted with reckless disregard for the humanity of their victim, if not also with hatred and malevolence.

            In short, Americans are by no means immune from the cruel pestilence that can so readily result from the pervasive condition of alterity. As with human beings around the world, the question is not whether some of our citizens will so behave, but how to use acculturation and law to minimize the likelihood that they will. The questions that I raised in my last commentary concerning citizens of other nations are just as relevant to our own. I confess I do often wish it could magically be otherwise.

            I have been pondering for some time now the attempted murder five months ago of Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl who spoke out for young women’s rights. I have likewise been reflecting on last week’s murder of her fellow Pakistani and activist for the poor, Parveen Rehman. I saw the good news this past week that Miss Yousafzai, whom supporters call by her first name, Malala, has now returned to school in Birmingham, England, where she had been hospitalized while recovering from her injuries. She cannot return home to Pakistan since those who sought to kill her have announced their continuing intention to murder her should she do so. Nonetheless, learning of her recovery from her grievous gunshot wound to the head gave me a brief moment of joy. Sadly, neither I nor anyone else will savor such a moment for Parveen Rehman. Those who perpetrated the violence toward Malala Yousafzai have suggested they sought to kill her because she “promoted Western thinking.” A government investigation continues into Ms. Rehman’s death (few such efforts ever “clear” the crimes investigated in Pakistan), but it is already known that those who murdered her did so aggrieved by the fact that she was assisting the socially marginalized.

            One question that joins each of these tragedies is how those who undertook these deeply malevolent acts possibly could have rationalized them. How could one head out on one’s motorcycle with the sole intention of killing an innocent woman or an equally blameless adolescent? Those who carry out such actions seem always to be young men who rarely appear to act out of any volition original to them, but at the behest of others, so it may also be of moment to ask who persuaded them to do so, and how and why? Are these cases of the misguided leading the deeply unwise or unknowing? Or of evil or malevolence manipulating the weak? Or are these instances of some other phenomenon altogether? What profound need for meaning making is fulfilled for these individuals by committing these heinous acts? How do these actions help each perpetrator to order their world? What combination of reason and/or blind emotion or constructed hatred leads them to these unspeakable acts?

            I confess that irrespective of how much I ponder these questions, I just cannot grasp how one rationalizes the intentional murder of innocents in cold blood. I should also note parenthetically that my perplexity is not new. I likewise have yet to come to grips with the wholesale slaughter that occurred in the Rwandan genocide in which countless countrymen went off together singing to murder innocents  (often their neighbors) each day. Nor have I reconciled myself to the Holocaust or Srebrenica or many other such horrors. That is, I realize the concern that troubles me so deeply in the current episode is not new.

            Nonetheless, it seems to me these issues are continually worthy of contemplation for they raise enduring questions. Do these individuals, and those who send them forth, act out of fear of the unknown or change? Do they fear a loss of power or place in their society, and act to retain it? Are they guilty, as one doctoral student with whom I work observed, of a profound arrogance of belief? Are those who kill somehow jealous of their victims? While I find some of these proposed rationales helpful, I am ultimately not persuaded by any of them and I frankly do also wonder, were I to accept them, whether they actually trivialize the horrific act they seemingly “explain” or “justify.” So I am left puzzling. This said, I sense this is an enigma of enormous significance for self-governance, for freedom and for humanity itself, and so I shall continue to reflect on this Gordian Knot. 

            National Public Radio (NPR) sometimes touts the poignancy of a share of its reports by labeling them “driveway moments,” stories so affecting or engaging that listeners are willing simply to sit in their cars after turning off the engine to hear them out. NPR Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep supplied one such moment for me on March 14 when he reported the drive-by murder of a Pakistani woman he had met in 2008 while reporting on that nation’s continuing turmoil. Parveen Rehman literally gave her life for the profoundly marginalized poor in the large informal communities her organization, the Karachi-based Orangi Pilot Project, served. No one is certain, but it appears that her interest in helping this population to assist itself and to demand its rights had run afoul of an extremist group in Pakistan. Many have pointed to the Taliban. At all events, Inskeep reported that assailants on motorcycles had murdered this deeply dedicated and courageous woman with impunity in her car, and then, typically and sadly for Pakistan, simply drove away.  The perpetrators left Pakistan’s poor without a vital voice and advocate for their rights. That population, and especially the most poor within it, continues to lack access to the basic human rights nominally available to them.    

            This singularly tragic episode set me musing about how many people in our own culture regard the poor and vulnerable members of our society; that picture may not be so dramatically heinous, but it is no less sad for that. Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), House Budget Committee chair, recently released his party’s budget proposals to address our nation’s current accounts deficit and balance the federal budget during the next decade. Like his 2010 proposal, Ryan’s latest plan promises to reduce tax rates for the nation’s most wealthy (again) by more than a third (39.6% to 25%), to address unspecified loopholes and to reduce deeply, eliminate or completely refashion many of the country’s most significant programs for its poor and vulnerable citizens. Ryan, for example, calls for essential repeal of our recent national health care law via budget reductions, demands that Medicaid become a block grant program (permitting states unsympathetic to the poor and the impaired to reduce support for those groups still further) and assumes that Medicare, too, will be made into a voucher program, resulting in seniors of all incomes bearing a much higher risk, financial and otherwise, should they fall catastrophically ill.

            It is worth noting that none of these steps is necessary to secure Ryan’s posited aim, which, as I have argued previously, is singularly misguided as policy in the short term. Moreover, as before, he does not provide evidence to support his assertions that his proposals make sense and add up. Indeed, most non-partisan analysts contend they simply do not. Instead, what they do evidence is a “doubling-down” in the Republican Party’s ongoing ideological war on the commons in American society and a continuing implicit bedrock assumption that all individuals, irrespective of their circumstances, can succeed in the United States without social support, and if they do not, there is something wrong with them. In this view, society (at least in the guise of government or the public via that instrument) owes the poor nothing to help them escape the difficulties they confront that are beyond their control. But it does owe its wealthiest citizens more and more tax breaks on the view that they will invest the dollars provided in developing their businesses and providing Americans employment. As with Ryan’s budget claims generally, however, there is very little empirical evidence to support this argument and much that casts doubt on it. In any case, Ryan does not offer contentions about what sorts of aid should be provided to the poor and vulnerable and why, so much as he implicitly and stridently evokes a deep cultural and ideological belief that resonates with many in his party’s constituency that, put clearly and coldly, those who are rich are somehow worthy while those who are poor are just as surely lacking and, as often as not, deserve only contempt.

            In this assumption and attitude Ryan and his counterparts have some surprising company around the world. The most marginalized and poor Hindi dalits heap contempt on their Islamic counterparts who otherwise share their desperate circumstances. Yemenis, living in desolate poverty in that nation’s informal communities, still regard the Akhdam population in their midst with contempt. One might speculate endlessly on why this disposition exists across cultures and income groups, but it surely represents a sharply constricted view of the role of community in assisting its most vulnerable, even among many who find themselves in that group. All the more reason then, that the national government of a democratic society that purports to care deeply about equality of opportunity recognize that not all individuals begin from the same circumstances and that it may be deeply inimical to the realization of human rights and genuine social opportunity to pretend otherwise. One may well debate how such is to be accomplished, but it should be attempted, and in no event should public policy result in jettisoning the principle of human equality and dignity that underpins it. That is ultimately what is most concerning about Ryan’s and others’ posturing about human liberty in the United States political debate. His stance concerning how “freeing” it is for the immiserated to remain in that condition (without, of course, recognizing or stating its consequence) ultimately and systematically robs those individuals of both their freedom and dignity, surely a misguided and unacceptable premise for a democratic republic.