Things I Like About Liberals, Transportation Policy Smackdown Edition

The focus of this blog is the contradictions and failures of liberalism: how liberals see themselves as supporters of social justice and international cooperation, but how in reality they support both capitalism, the structure of which guarantees massive inequality and crushing poverty, and imperialism almost as much as conservatives.

But there are some things I like about liberal blogs, or else I wouldn't read them. Take this post from Matthew Yglesias, one of my favorite liberal bloggers:

Randall O’Toole is a relentless advocate for highways and automobile dependency in the United States. Consequently, I don’t agree with him about very much. But the thing I consistently find most bizarre about him, is that the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have both agreed to agree with O’Toole that his support for highways and automobile dependency is a species of libertarianism. For example, O’Toole whines a bunch about how Ray LaHood wants to spend less money on highways and more on transportation alternatives before denouncing this agenda as “central planning.”

Central planning, of course, is the reverse of libertarianism. So if promoting alternative transportation is central planning, then building highways everywhere must be freedom! But of course in the real world building highways is also central planning.

This is a brilliant 30-second smackdown of a really stupid conservative argument. But I do have to disagree with Yglesias about one thing. Explaining the history of transportation policy in the US, Yglesias says that

beyond the interstates, American cities made a collective decision in the early part of the twentieth century to totally reconfigure their streets so as to become more convenient for car traffic—they’d be paved in an auto-friendly way, and the streets divided into a (larger) cars-only portion and a (smaller) people-only portion.

What Yglesias calls a "collective decision" was in fact a decision made for Americans by automobile manufacturers:

In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.

Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, "virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system."

But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.

The campaigns varied, as did the economic and technical health of many of the systems themselves. Some now argue that buses would have transcended many of the rail lines anyway. More likely, they would have hybridized and complemented each other.

But with a varied arsenal of political and financial subterfuges, GM helped gut the core of America's train and trolley systems. It was the murder of our rail systems that made our "love affair" with the car a tragedy of necessity.

This is a classic liberal move: describing a decision that was actually made by capitalist class interests as a democratic, consensual choice.

Casey Says US Will Be in Iraq for Ten Years

On Tuesday, Gen. Casey, the Army chief of staff, said that the US was going to keep troops in Iraq for ten years. As far as I can tell, the White House hasn't issued any response Casey's comments, although though they obviously contradict Obama's plan to pull all US troops out of Iraq by August 2010. There also hasn't been any comment on this from any of the liberal bloggers I've checked. Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman (or rather, his guest bloggers, since he's on vacation), Atrios and TPM have all been silent.

It's hard to tell exactly what this means. Casey has gone on record as contradicting Obama's policy, yet there has been virtually no media coverage of it, no response from the White House or the Secretary of Defense and no pushback from liberals, all of which are disturbing. One thing it definitely implies is that Obama does not have control over his generals. But what is Obama's response going to be? Over the next year and a half, there are going to be numerous forces within the military, the Republican party, and among Obama's own advisors and other Democratics pushing to continue the occupation of Iraq. They have already won victories in Obama's decision to keep a "transitional force" in Iraq until 2011, the extension of Obama's withdrawal timetable by three months and the decision to seek exceptions to the June deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi cities. Obama is going to need to be very steadfast to maintain his commitment to a complete withdrawal. Will he do what it takes?

Carl Levin Wants to Build a "Guantanamo North"

I find this funny in a really sick way: via Matt Yglesias, Democratic Senator Carl Levin wants to build a "Guantanamo North" in his home state, Michigan. What I find funny about this is the way that the needs of the "war on terror" dovetail with Obama's stimulus package: for Democrats, it's a two-birds-with-one-stone situation. Plus, Michigan is in a lot of economic pain because its auto industry is dying, so maybe building new prisons can help plug the hole. The prison-industrial complex is one of America's biggest growth industries, after all.

Yglesias says that we don't really need another prison, but he's blind to the irony of prison-building as a solution to Guantanamo, and certainly doesn't oppose expanding the prison-industrial complex on principle.

On a more serious note, the idea of Guantanamo North is a reminder of the fact that while Obama has curbed some of the abuses that happened at Guantanamo--granting prisoners there habeas corpus rights and ending the use of torture--he is continuing many of the foundations of Bush's enemy-combatant detention policy. He is relying on military commissions rather than civilian courts to try "enemy combatants." He is continuing to deny US prisoners held on foreign soil (at Bagram prison, for instance) all legal rights, leaving them even worse off than Guantanamo detainees were under Bush and safeguarding Bush's end-run around the US judicial system. He has also pledged to continue to incarcerate an undisclosed number of Guantanamo prisoners even if they are never convicted of any crime:

The most tricky category, Mr Obama said, would be those detainees who could not be prosecuted but who posed a "clear danger to the American people".

...

"We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people," he said.

Yet he asserts that this policy will somehow be "defensible and lawful."

Finally, there are the individuals who are already facing Guantanamo-like conditions within the US, which suggests that even if all the Guantanamo prisoners were transferred to the civilian courts (which Obama isn't even proposing), they would still likely be the victims of serious miscarriages of justice.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia user Piotrus.

Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall Debate Imperialist Strategy for Afghanistan

Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall are kicking around the pros and cons of American strategy for the Afghan invasion. Marshall has previously supported escalation of the invasion, but is now starting to have some doubts:

Furthermore, if you look at the history, the role of Afghanistan going back over the last few decades, wasn't so much that it allowed for safe havens but that the guerilla, semi-irregular wars there spun off thousands of violent, highly-trained and religiously intoxicated extremists who later spread out around the world spreading terror right and left. And that makes intensifying the conflict in Afghanistan to prevent the growth of safe havens a logically questionable proposition.

This is correct. Al Qaeda emerged out of the CIA-funded resistance to Russia's invasion. The Taliban emerged out of the resistance to the formerly CIA-funded warlords once they'd taken the country over and were running it into the ground. What this tells you, if you didn't know it already, is that when imperialist powers invade weak countries, the result is mass death and destruction, social breakdown, political chaos, and a power vacuum, which in turn lead to the rise of dictators or warlords, which in turn invite yet another round of imperial invasion, starting the cycle all over again.

This exact process is repeating itself right now in Pakistan. The US invasion of Afghanistan temporarily pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan and forced them to take refuge and regroup in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan, where they had already established themselves. Meanwhile, US pressure on Pakistan forced the government and the army to turn at least partially against the Taliban, which the army and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, had historically supported. This created a war between the Taliban and the Pakistani army that the army is now losing, which in turn is being used by the US to justify escalating its intervention in Pakistan.

Yglesias agrees that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan, but disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the US's goal should be the elimination of "safe havens" for terrorists. Instead, he think that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to prevent Pakistan from being further destabilized. He thinks that this requires a political rather than a military solution, and that the US should therefore reduce its use of aerial bombardment, which frequently kills Afghan civilians, in favor of "protecting" civilians from the Taliban, which will supposedly stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and turn public opinion against the Taliban.

There are several problems with this. First, the US and its warlord allies are no better at protecting the welfare of Afghans than the Taliban, and quite possibly are worse: the warlords, who the US put in power in the first place, are just as brutal and repressive as the Taliban, including in their treatment of women, and always have been, while economically, the Taliban was a significant improvement over the warlords. The US's various interventions, together with the Russian invasion, have been the cause of Afghanistan's instability, not the solution to it.

This pattern of imperial destabilization of Afghanistan doesn't start with the US and USSR. If you go back to the nineteenth century, you find Britain and tsarist Russia competing to dominate Afghanistan. The post-Stalin USSR continued Russia's role as imperialist power, while the US picked up where Britain left off. The current invasion of Afghanistan and its extension into Pakistan fit neatly into this historical pattern. Far from being a stabilizing influence in Pakistan (the ultimate goal of Yglesias's proposed Afghan policy), our invasion of Afghanistan is what destabilized Pakistan in the first place.

The core problem is that Yglesias is under the illusion that invading and occupying a foreign country are somehow going to lead to political stability. This is a dangerous and misguided notion, as I pointed out last week.

Finally, the most important point in this debate is one that neither Yglesias nor Marshall mentions: this invasion is morally intolerable. Strikingly, but unfortunately not surprisingly, neither Yglesias nor Marshall even bother to consider what the effect of the invasion is on Afghans and Pakistanis; their only concern is how it will impact American "national security." Thus, Yglesias writes:

Consider air strikes. If you define the goal as “eliminate safe havens” then maybe airstrikes that accidentally kill Afghan civilians aren’t that big a deal. By contrast, if we’re there to help Afghan civilians, then killing Afghan civilians is a very big deal.

Yglesias thinks that if all the US cares about is eliminating "safe havens," then killing Afghan civilians isn't a big deal. It all boils down to a policy choice for him: we only have to care about killing Afghans if we decide it's in our interest to.

I couldn't come up with a better illustration of the imperialist mindset if I tried.

Matthew Yglesias and the Whitewashing of Social Democracy

When American liberals look at the social democracies of Europe, they see generous welfare states whose policies they'd like to emulate. When liberals turn their attention to the social democratic parties' past, however, they often ignore these parties' history of militaristic and imperialist policies, resulting in serious distortions of the historic record.

This post by Matthew Yglesias is an excellent example of liberals' downplaying of these uncomfortable facts. In it he correctly notes that there was significant resistance to the Nazis from the SPD in the late twenties and early thirties. He also correctly observes that the Communist Party's strategy in 1929-33 of attacking the SPD as "social fascist" was a huge mistake. This policy was implemented by order of the Third Communist International (aka the Comintern), to which the CP belonged. At this time the Comintern was in its "third period" and under the firm control of Stalin, whose catastrophically bad strategies not only helped bring the Nazis to power in Germany but also led to the defeat of socialist forces in the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27. But Yglesias's assertion that the SPD were a force of resistance to the Nazis ignores the SPD's role in paving the way for the Nazis' rise to power during the German Revolution of 1918-23.

Even before the revolution began, the SPD had already embraced militarism and imperialism wholeheartedly. Like other reformist socialist parties in Europe, the SPD supported its home nation's entry into World War I, in gross violation of the basic socialist principle of international solidarity, which demands that workers not murder one another for the benefit of their national ruling class.

Prior to the war, the SPD, like all pre-war socialist parties, had claimed to support the principle of international solidarity and vowed to oppose any outbreak of imperialist war. As soon as this verbal commitment was tested, however, the SPD quickly repudiated it. The socialist parties that made good on their anti-war commitments split from the pro-war parties at the Zimmerwald Peace Conference of 1915 to form a new group under the leadership of Lenin that became known as the Zimmerwald Left.

The SPD again showed its reactionary tendencies in October 1918, as it was becoming apparent that Germany was going to lose the war. At this time, the kaiser invited the SPD to join the government with Prince Maximilian of Baden, the kaiser's cousin, as chancellor. The only catch was that the SPD would have to defend the monarchy, whose existence the SPD had always opposed in the past, and attempt to forestall a revolution that would overthrow it and replace it with a republic. The SPD acquiesced without any hesitation.

However, the SPD's most disastrous embrace of militarism was yet to come: its authorization of the creation of the Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary organization, and its use of the Freikorps to crush all further revolutionary outbreaks after the overthrow of the monarchy. The Freikorps were first put to work during the Spartakus uprising of January 1919. The uprising was initiated by a group of workers who seized control of several newspaper buildings, including the SPD's Vorwarts, after listening to militant speeches by Karl Liebknecht of the Spartakists and Ernst Daumig of the revolutionary shop stewards. However, neither Liebknecht nor Daumig had called for the occupations; that was done entirely on the workers' own initiative.

Once the uprising began, it quickly became a mass movement under the leadership of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), who had been ejected from the SPD in 1915 for their opposition to World War I, the revolutionary shop stewards, and the Spartakists. At the behest of the SPD, the Freikorps entered Berlin on January 11 and brought the uprising to a brutal end, murdering 158 people, including the Spartakist leaders Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches.

Over the next five years, numerous outbreaks of revolutionary action occurred, and each time the SPD deployed the Freikorps to crush independent workers' organizations and the Spartakus League/CP. By 1923, workers' power had finally been definitively crushed throughout Germany, while the forces of fascism had been greatly strengthened thanks to the government's support of the Freikorps and the military generally.

Both Stalin's decree of the "third period" in 1928-35 and the SPD's policies during the revolution of 1918-23 were catastrophic, but the fact that they happened wasn't an accident. Stalin and the SPD both claimed the mantle of socialism, but both of them were in fact opposed to many of the central tenets of Marxism, such as workers' solidarity, democracy and anti-imperialism. The SPD's behavior in the German Revolution proves that it was no less brutal or reactionary than Stalin or Hitler, and in fact laid much of the groundwork fo the latter.

To bring this back to Yglesias, the moral of this story is the close parallel between the SPD's professed socialism but actual militarism and Yglesias's professed liberalism but actual imperialism. While Yglesias has recanted his early support for the Iraq war and has become a prominent critic of the Iraq war, that hasn't stopped him from supporting Obama's surge in Afghanistan and extension of the war into Pakistan. Does Yglesias honestly believe that the Af/Pak war will succeed where the Iraq war failed? Until he repudiates imperialism completely and recognizes that thre is no such thing as a "good war" under imperialism, he will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

(For an account of the German Revolution, see Chris Harman's The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918 to 1923 or Pierre Broue's The German Revolution, 1917-1923. For more information on the Third International, see Duncan Hallas's The Comintern: A History of the Third International.)