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Lieberman and the Meaning of Party

Posted July 3, 2006 By Dave Thomer

So, confirming speculation that’s been buzzing for a while, Senator Joe Lieberman announced that he will begin circulating petitions to run for re-election as an independent. Lieberman is still running in the Democratic primary this August, but he’s facing a challenge from businessman Ned Lamont. So he’s decided to hedge his bets – if he loses the primary, he can still run in the general election and hope that independent, Republicans, and Democrats who didn’t turn out for the primary can put him over the top. Many of the progressive blogs that have been beating the drum against Lieberman for the last few years are unsurprisingly upset by this move, urging readers to call various Democratic politicians and campaign organizations and demand that they support the Democratic nominee.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Joe Lieberman. I think I would be happier if Lamont wins this Senate seat. But if I may indulge in a bit of navel-gazing, this line of discussion has had me thinking about the definition of a political party. What’s it mean to be a member of a party? What are the responsibilities that go with it?

Being a member of a political party as a voter carries few responsibilities and in some cases it doesn’t even bring any particular privileges. In some states, voters can vote in any primary they want, regardless of their registration. In Louisiana there is no separate primary at all. In states like Connecticut, party affiliation does matter. But Lieberman says he is going to remain a registered Democrat. So the requirements are clearly different for an elected official, and that makes sense.

As an elected official it seems to me like the clearest and most significant issue when it comes to party affiliation is how you caucus – which side will you vote for when it comes time to organize the chamber? This can’t be the be-all and end-all, because there are two members of Congress right now who are independents who caucus with Democrats. And the Democrats have endorsed one of those independents, Bernie Sanders, in his race to replace the other one, Jim Jeffords, as Senator from Vermont. But if you’re going to be a registered Democrat and caucus with Democrats, which Lieberman’s said he will do, is it right to say that you’re not a Democrat?

The key argument might be that the Democratic voters of Connecticut wanted a particular candidate, and if you’re running against that candidate you’re going againt the will of the state’s Democrats, and thus by definition you’re working against the party and can’t be a member. The scenario I’ve always considered that would work against this standard is based on the idea that primaries tend to draw fewer voters than the general election. What if Lieberman ran i nthe fall as an independent and won, getting more Democratic voters than Lamont? Couldn’t you make an argument that Lieberman, as a registered Democrat caucusing with Democrats and receiving the support of the most Democratic voters, is still a Democrat even if the letter “I” appears after his name instead of a “D”?

After a lot of mental back and forth, I would finally say no. As an elected official within a party, you have certain leadership responsibilities. One of those is helping other candidates from your party. A fall campaign where Lieberman is running against the Democratic candidate is not going to be good for other Democrats running in Connecticut, from a media attention or fundraising perspective. And refusing to accept the verdict of the primary voters is absolutely a rejection of the party and its structure. Perhaps there are a lot of Democrats in the state who like Lieberman but can’t be bothered to vote in the primary. That’s their fault for not voting and Lieberman’s for not mobilizing them.

Most significantly for me is a point I’ve seen several blog commenters make. If you’re like me and you believe that, given the structure of American politics, we’re stuck with a two-party system and that the way to promote change is to work to change the party from within rather than run against the party as an outsider, then you simply can’t turn around and say it’s OK for the establishment to run against the party as an outsider when those who want change succeed within the system. You just can’t change the rules in the middle of the game like that. And if you’re a party leader, as Lieberman is, you just can’t send that message that the party’s procedures aren’t valid and still call yourself a member of the party in good standing.

Filed in So Now What?

Superman Returns Review

Posted July 3, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Pattie and I caught Superman Returns over the weekend. I really enjoyed it; it may be #3 on my superhero movie list behind Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles. (It’s really amazing to me that we’ve gotten so many good additions to the genre over the last couple of years.) My full review is over at the LogBook.

Before the movie, Pattie and I were joking about whether or not Bryan Singer would have an eight-minute credit sequence a la Richard Donner’s 1978 version. He didn’t, but both of us broke out laughing when we saw that he did emulate the style of those credits, complete with zooming names. Gotta admit I got a goofy grin on my face when I saw that one.

Filed in Culture and Media

Learning from an Extra Life

Posted July 2, 2006 By Dave Thomer

One of the books Earl loaned me to read this summer is David Bennahum’s Extra Life, his account of how computers influenced his education and childhood. It’s a very good book, and I’ll point you to Earl’s fuller review of it for the details. But there’s a point Bennahum makes a few times, when he’s discussing his early school years when he wasn’t really striving to excel academically but was putting a lot of attention into games and computer programming, and I wanted to highlight some passages.

On Big Trak, a toy truck that could be programmed to move along a predetermined path:

Here was a form of responsibility, of active participation, thinking, and analysis that crept into my time with Big Trak. The process was instinctively modular, a breaking apart of goals into subgoals, building back up to the whole from the smallest unit of problem solving. The act of laying out graph paper, modeling a room, and associating each square with a unit of distance meant I had to measure the room first and then think about what scale to use. Each square served as the smallest unit of measurement and gained meaning by pulling back, much as dots in a newspaper photograph or television screen fuse together when looked at from a suitable distance. I used a lot of math to make Big Trak work. At school I consistently received Cs in math, yet at home I eagerly applied principles of arithemetic and geometry. What made these laborious tasks worthwhile was the experience of making a finished product that happened to be thrilling to a ten-year-old. (32-33)

And a few pages later, on his summer spent playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends:

The games we played began to alter my abilities. Up to then my analytic activities were limited to theoretical exercises in math or science class, like seeing what happened to plants when we stuck them in a closet with no light (they turned white and drooped, or pointed to the seam of the door if any light came through). Now, of our own free will, we were taking on problems – math, probability, mapping, the mechanics of which were rarely called upon for most ten-year-olds. More subtly still, we were doing a special kind of problem solving, what some might call systems analysis. (37)

Bennahum eventually graduated from Harvard, but his academic turnaround can be traced to the fact that there were things he wanted to accomplish in his non-school life, and he had to develop certain skills in order to accomplish them. This is not to say that formal education is unimportant, but I think it does say something about the need to get students engaged in that process. “Why do we have to know this?” is still one of the deadliest questions a teacher can bump into. People like Bennahum show how teachers can find answers to it. (Indeed, I really recommend the chapters where he talks about his high school computer teacher, and the teacher-led but cooperative culture he created.)

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Playing Gods

Posted June 28, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Those interested in the ethics of genetic screening of embryos should head over to hyper-textual ontology or Technoprogressive, where Robn’s started an interesting thread. I’ve already started commenting in the h-t o thread, so I’ll just point you over there and encourage you to join in.

Filed in Philosophy

Burning Issues

Posted June 28, 2006 By Dave Thomer

So the Senate has once again attempted to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to pass a law against burning the American flag, and this time it came up one vote short. I will repost the following excerpt from the linked article without comment:

“Is this the most important thing the Senate could be doing at this time? I can tell you: You’re darned right it is,” said Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), the measure’s sponsor.

More generally, I think this issue matters more in symbolic terms than practical terms. But symbols have their effect, and I personally don’t like the symbol of elevating the flag (a symbol itself) above the principle of the right to free speech. I’m glad this failed, I hope it fails the next time it comes up, and I hope it fails by a wider margin.

Filed in Public Policy

Nightcrawling

Posted June 24, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Looks like there’s a release date for Pete Yorn’s next album, called Nightcrawler – August 29. And it looks like you can listen to a song from the album on Yorn’s myspace page. Sounds pretty good, pretty typically Yorn, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Filed in Culture and Media

Drowning in Paper

Posted June 24, 2006 By Dave Thomer

So I’m breaking in a new shredder because I busted the old one. No fault of the older machine, a very nice model by Fellowes, but of the operator who forgot to check his junk mail to make sure there wasn’t one of those fake credit cards in it before he put it through the shredder and completely jammed up the machine. I really hate shredding my mail. The breakdown is usually

  • 30% credit card solicitations
  • 30% political donation solicitations
  • 10% student loan consolidation solicitation
  • 30% desperate pleas from various charitable organizations with noble purposes, no awareness that grad students and recently-graduated students are not the most fertile ground for philanthropy, and an unerring capacity to make me feel like the most uncaring schmuck on the planet.

On the other hand, it is nice to have a lot of that paper someplace other than the office floor. I’ll take the small victories where I can get ’em.

Filed in Life in Practice

Blogging Dewey: Reality-Based Discourse

Posted June 20, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Nick Shay has a series of posts on Democrats’ approach to political discourse and his suggestion for a new approach. He draws heavily on Dewey, James, and other pragmatists in the later osts, but it’s probably worth checking out the whole thing. Shay’s basic argument is that Democrats appear to be too focused on “discovering truth” about the world and not focused enough on the power of language to shape the world. The launch point for his discussion is the phrase “reality-based community,” which was fairly prominent during the 2004 election. In the fifth part of his series, he says:

When we think in this way, it becomes clear that speech itself is a mode of action. It does work in the world because of the uses that we give it. Language is, according to pragmatist thinkers like Dewey and Richard Rorty, entirely made, is not something that is simply found “out there� in the world, and is not frozen in some predetermined, unitary relationship to reality. It is less a medium that stands between the self and the reality that we are trying to comprehend and more a performative tool.

This means that the history of linguistic expression is not a progressive history. Our language is not something that becomes better fitted to a reality that is somehow separate and distinct. Any true statement is only true as long as it is functions as a tool that we can use. When the language that we employ no longer does the work that we want it to do, when we find that it is getting in the way of the production of new forms that could be put to more effective use, it does us no good to hold onto a particular linguistic tool. We have to constantly be aware of the fact that we are making choices between many competing vocabularies, and we have to decide which language we want to take up for a particular purpose or end. Each word that we use, however, is a not a solution in and of itself. Instead, a word or collection of words is something we put to work in our stream of experience as a possible indicator of the ways in which existing circumstances or experiences can be changed or shifted.

I think it’s significant that Shay includes Rorty in this passage, because the notion he’s putting forward draws more on Rorty than it does on Dewey and James. Yes, the pragmatists emphasized contingency and change. But they were undoubtedly empiricists. They felt that there was a stability to the world that we experience, such that we can use language to make predictions about it. We can test our linguistic constructions for how well they match up with the actual world of experience. James emphasized that verification was vital to truth; Dewey looked to empirical results to show us whether we are warranted in saying something.

This isn’t to say I totally disagree with Shay’s argument. I think the emphasis may be a tad too much to one side, but that may be the result of Shay’s effort to correct what he sees as a leaning too far in the other direction. And there is something of the idea that discourse changes the world that is very much in keeping with the classical pragmatist tradition. In “The Will to Believe,” James argues that it’s OK for us to believe something even before we have completely solid verification of it – so long as it doesn’t actually contradict any of the things that we have verified. And in fact, he says it’s necessary for us to do so, because those beliefs motivate us to act in ways that help verify and make the belief true. If you believe a particular candidate or policy will have a positive effect on the world, you may be motivated to act to support that candidate or policy, by voting, donating, campaigning, or whatever. If the candidate/policy then wins, and turns out to have the beneficial effect you anticipated, that change became real because you, and others, believed in the change before you could verify it. So there’s no doubt that part of creating a better reality is finding the words to help other people see the possibilities that you see.

Filed in Philosophy

Took Him Long Enough

Posted June 19, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel held a news briefing today to try and remove his foot from his mouth a few days after he tried to defend the legislative pay hike that got many Pennsylvania voters riled up enough to toss a bunch of legislators in the recent primary. “I stand here today to acknowledge that I’ve been defending something that the people of Pennsylvania have deemed as indefensible,” he said today. Which, y’know, you think he would have figured out about 30 seconds after the election results came in.

I’m not someone who’s reflexively against higher salaries for lawmakers. I think government work is difficult work that, if done well, benefits everyone, so I have no problem with providing incentives for people to enter the field. But Perzel’s recent attempts to attract sympathy just seem tone deaf. According to the piece I linked to, most PA lawmakers make a hair over $72,000 a year. That isn’t chump change, especially when you consider many lawmakers have enough time to have other business interests. (My former state senator owned a beer distrubitor while in office.) And that’s to say nothing of the expense accounts and per-diem perks that come with office – another Philly-area lawmaker has bought thousands of dollars of books on his expense account.

I guess we shall see if Perzel’s managed to close the books on the issue, or if it will still be festering come Election Day.

Filed in Public Policy

Not Arthur Frelling Dent

Posted June 13, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Small rant to get off my chest before I either go to sleep or do something constructive. Earl sent me a copy of The Anthology at the End of the Universe, a Benbella “Smart Pop” book devoted to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Books. I found the book kind of uneven, but I don’t want to do a full-blown review here. There’s one essay, though, that I have not been able to get out of my head, and I would like to exorcise the ghost here. Susan Sizemore writes the only really negative essay about Adams, called “You Can’t Go Home Again – Damn It! Even If Your Planet Hasn’t Been Blown Up By Vogons.” Sizemore basically reports that when she was doing research for her essay in the book, she discovered she didn’t like any of the Hitchhiker stuff anymore, but she had already agreed to write an essay, so she was stuck talking about all the things she no longer liked. At one point she brings up subsequent stories that she thinks have explored the same material as Adams, only better. I’m not sure I agree with many of her points, but I didn’t come skidding to a mental halt until I read on page 116:

Then there’s Farscape. When this show whips an everyman from Earth onto an alien spaceship, they make him far funnier and tougher than Arthur Dent and his adventures far more relevant.

There is no small bit of irony here, since one of John Crichton’s pop culture references is the line I used to title this post and because Hitchhiker actor Mark Wing-Davey was one of Ben Browder’s acting instructors. More to the point, and I say this as a big fan of Farscape and Ben Browder, but calling John Crichton an everyman suggests that most of us are seriously underachieving.

For starters, Crichton gets flung through space in the first place because he’s a test pilot. Test pilots are pretty mythologized figures, certainly not considered your average folks. But just being a test pilot isn’t enough for ol’ John. He designed the spaceship that he’s test flying, because he has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Sciences. (Man, I never see that department in the college brochures.) He’s such a smart, stand-up guy that he impresses a wise alien, who then plants super-secret information in his head such that John Crichton becomes the target of multiple interstellar empires.

All of which eventually drives Crichton just about as stark raving bonkers as Arthur Dent chasing a sofa, but anyway.

The point is, Crichton’s not an everyman. Crichton’s a hero, one of the best and the brightest, just waiting for the circumstances to test him and reveal his potential. Arthur Dent is just a guy who got up one morning. Much as I wish most of us were Crichton, I tend to think we’re a lot more like Arthur.

On the other hand, Arthur does learn to fly. So it’s not all bad.

Filed in Culture and Media
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