Let’s talk for a bit about democracy. Democracy is defined in the dictionary as “A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”

The history books tell us that a long time ago, places like ancient Athens attempted democracy without elected representatives, so that every citizen who showed up could have a say in how laws were made. But Athens was a relatively small place, and only a minority of residents qualified as citizens.

More recently, democracies have gone the elected representative route. This system works pretty well under the right conditions. The right conditions include an informed citizenry that gives enough of a damn to show up and vote in elections. It also assumes that factual and honest information about what’s going on is available to citizens, and that elections are mostly honest.

Of course, democracies can be corrupted all kinds of ways, but so can any other human institution. There may be incorruptible individuals, but no collection of people ever born could not be corrupted or co-opted, in whole or in part, sooner or later.

When democracies function well, they do a pretty good job of enabling people to direct their government to serve the public good. People often disagree, and sometimes mistakes are make. But on the whole, if not overwhelmed by corruption, democracies do have a proven track record of being able to hold nations together in a reasonably stable way, so that the people living in those nations can make the best of their lives. I think most of us would say we much prefer to live in a democracy than in a monarchy or a dictatorship.

Put another way, when working properly democracy provides a stable framework within which people and communities can live and grow and innovate, with optimum personal freedom.

There are some kind of human endeavors that don’t lend themselves to a democratic model. I am thinking of the community chorus I sing with. To be in a chorus means that you agree to sing the way the director tells you to sing. The chorus does not vote on whether a passage should be sung allegro or adagio, and it’s certainly not left up to individuals to follow their own bliss.

You can say the same thing about the military, although letting the troops vote on whether they will attack the enemy or just go home might (or might not) have shortened a lot of wars. The same thing goes for workplaces. Even employee-owned businesses have leadership hierarchies.

My point is that when a group of individuals are directed to complete some kind of task or otherwise work to a particular purpose, the democracy model probably won’t work. And that’s OK, because democracy is a principle of government, and a group working together to complete a task is a very different thing from a group of people living within a government.

From its beginning, I’ve been impatient with Occupy Wall Street’s fixation on “horizontal democracy” and “radically decentralized structure.” I remember feeling dismay when I read this interview in which a woman goes on and on about building horizontalism and working groups and such.

The way in which we’re organizing is part of our politics. If you’re placing demands on an institution or the state, you’re creating a kind of dialogue, rather than creating an open space for democratic discussion within the plaza.

One, we’ve already been creating a new kind of dialogue here in the blogosphere for the past ten years or so, and it’s a hell of a lot more effective, and open to participation, than OWS could ever be. Further, in U.S. history there have been all kinds of social and communal movements that experimented with new kinds of societies and organizational structures. If you want to do likewise, throw your money into a pot and buy some land in Nebraska, and then go there and form working groups on the prairie to your hearts’ content.

But if you want to be a movement that actually accomplishes something, you have to be willing to submit to a less than democratic organizational structure. There’s no getting around that. Deal with it.

The Nation has an article on “The Fracturing of Occupy Wall Street” that describes the original Manhattan crew as divided between “activists” and “occupiers.” The activists have found office space on Broadway and are planning actions such as Occupy Our Homes. The occupiers are at loose ends:

In the month since the New York Police Department violently forced the occupiers out of Zuccotti, the people whose residence was Liberty Plaza Park have nowhere to go. Some of them had previously been homeless. Others left their homes to join the movement. But deprived of the food station, the medical tent, the things that once fulfilled their needs for basic survival, they have rapidly lost faith in Occupy Wall Street’s much-vaunted democratic process to provide the supportive community that once existed here.

The activists have found shelter for some of the occupiers, but some among the occupiers seem determined to disrupt any attempt to re-organize.

… every meeting I’ve recently attended—and from what I gather, every recent meeting I have not—has been brought to a grinding halt, the basic ability to debate and consent to proposals crippled by a determined few who will not to let things proceed until their issues are addressed. This is the reason for the backed-up business. The people shouting about their needs over the debate.

A small number have taken to obstructing everything for reasons that are not entirely clear. But my impression is that the occupiers just plain need help. For a little while they felt they had a purpose, and something important to do, and that got yanked away from them, and they are angry about that. And the occupiers with resources and education and organizational skills now are in the Broadway office with the activists, leaving the rest to mostly fend for themselves.

So you’ve got some who want to challenge the capitalist establishment; and some who seem to want another go at the old Oneida Movement; and some who want food, shelter, and purpose. Those are all valid things, but this is the work of three different organizations. And at least two of those three are not going to be functional as a “horizontal democracy.”

Related to the last post — Joshua Holland, “Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True”

Via Angry Bear — Barry Ritholtz, “Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up.”

Nicholas Kristof, “President as Pinata.”

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” — American officer in Vietnam, 1968

Conservatives like to portray the history of the late 20th century as the triumph of capitalism over communism. However, it’s looking like capitalism could be about to collapse, also. And, ironically, the chief agents of its destruction are its most ardent supporters.

However, I fear we’re going to be in for a very rough time before the dust settles. And the destruction of capitalism as we know it might not be all that collapses.

We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only. — Paul Krugman

Democracy in America already has been seriously compromised, although I’d like to think it’s not beyond hope of revival. The Plutocracy has done a masterful job of keeping us proles divided against ourselves, however. The truth could set us free, if only we could hear it above the noise.

… we’ve conjured up images of very sensible highly educated wonky people doing the right thing, even as they destroy the world.– Atrios

Paul Krugman has written one blog post after another explaining why response of the Very Serious People to the financial crisis has been entirely wrong and based on ideology rather than data; on faith rather than facts. Here’s his most recent one.

The Very Serious People keep talking about austerity, by which they mean forcing deprivation on everyone but them in an attempt to put things back they way they were before Bear Stearns went belly up. The Actual Economists, meaning the ones not taking money from any right-wing think tank, keep saying this is nuts, and that things are going to get worse, and that restricting the flow of money is exactly the worse thing to do right now.

So, basically, the Very Serious People are destroying capitalism to save it.

There’s an interesting article at Salon that argues capitalism’s failures are systemic, not political.

The systemic problem is obvious. While using very different rhetoric, progressives like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Marxists like Richard Wolff agree, first, that the economy is failing for lack of demand — and, second and most important, that this failure is now “built in” to the system. Labor unions once were powerful enough to raise wages and stabilize the system (and consumer demand). Those days are over: Union membership peaked at 35.4 percent of the labor force at the end of World War II; it is now at 11.9 percent, and falling (a mere 6.9 percent of private sector workers are now union members).

The banks and Wall Street are an appropriate first target. But the deeper reality is that the economic “system” that defined a particular brand of corporate capitalism held (weakly) in check by labor is fading before our eyes. Moreover, the same labor base gave liberalism sufficient power to enact modest reforms — including regulations to try to keep the bankers in line. That “system” is decaying too. It is further complicated by global competition, which continues to weaken the entire structure, undermining both labor and communities, even as major corporations flee the country for global markets.

I don’t know that I agree with the author’s recommendations for remedies, but I think his diagnosis of the disease is spot on. Ironically, for the past few decades capitalism has been dismantled by capitalists. The push against labor unions, deregulation of financial markets, etc. etc., all the stuff the capitalists wanted to happen, has destabilized capitalism. It will not necessarily collapse, but the longer the Very Serious People continue to steer the wrong course, the more likely collapse becomes.

The parable of the goose that laid golden eggs, or the mallard with golden feathers, applies.

Until the late 1950s, academic economics remained one of the social sciences, like anthropology, sociology and political science.. After it became the chief ideological counterweights to Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, its practitioners tried to extract it from the social sciences and re-create it as a hard science…[and] terms like “resources”..,”markets” [were] transformed into abstractions.. Economics no longer studied the economy; it spoke ex cathedra about what was orthodox and what was heresy. — Chalmers Johnson, 2000

At some point, the virtues of capitalism became part of our national religion. And we’ve replaced the old divine right of kings with the divine right of corporations. The moneyed elite are the ruling aristocracy. And a lot of Americans seem to think that if Exxon Mobil were forced to pay taxes, the gods will curse us with barren sheep and failed harvests.

People get attached to fixed views about the way the world is supposed to be, and are afraid of change, even when the change is for their benefit. It’s like horses running into a burning barn, because that’s where they feel safe. The aristocrats are so afraid of change they can’t bring themselves to make the kind of adjustments that might actually save their asses. So they cling to the fiction that they can hang on to their way of life by squeezing the peasants.

I’m reading about the (note: those at work should turn off the volume before clicking) so-called violent protests in lower Manhattan yesterday, but it sounds to me as if the only ones who got violent were the police. And get this video —

A cop uses pepper spray on a woman for no apparent reason and walks away while she screams. The Village Voice has her side of the story.

The thing is, the financial district on a Sunday usually is about as deserted as anyplace ever gets in Manhattan. Even many of the bars and restaurants close on Sunday. So who’s it going to hurt if some people get a bit rowdy? I haven’t seen any accounts that the protesters were damaging property or doing anything menacing.

I also understand the group marched north to Union Square, but on a weekend there’s always a big crowd protesting something at Union Square. It’s traditional.

The thing is, this kind of overreaction will likely give the group a focus it didn’t have before.

An evolutionary psychologist at the the London School of Economics and Political Science crunched a whole lot of data from a large U.S. sample and found that people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. Also, high-IQ men were also more likely to be sexually exclusive than lower IQ men, but the same correlation was not found in women.

“The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points,” the article says. It would be interesting to me if the same correlations are to be found in other populations, as the U.S. seems to have an abnormally high proportion of, um, cognitively challenged religious conservatives.

Newsweek‘s top ten predictions are online. Read the article for Newsweek‘s reasoning — the comments are mine — but here are the predictions.

1. Pelosi keeps the house — Dems lose some House seats in the midterm elections but keep their majority. I say probably yes.
2. GOP Ousts Reid — a Republican will take Harry Reid’s Senate seat. I think this is highly possible, and the Left should be finding a progressive challenger for the Dem primary. Who should be next majority leader, assuming Dems keep the majority?
3. GOP Blocks Immigration Reform — if “reform” doesn’t involve fences and cattle prods, they’re agin’ it. Although the real reason their agin’ it is they want to keep their undocumented household help.
4. California Stays Blue — Republican challengers for Senate seats will lose.
5. Palin Gets a Talk Show — Bravo, Lifetime, or Fox? I say Fox.
6. Florida Elects Sen. Crist — rightie challenges of Gov. Crist will backfire, and Crist will be elected to the Senate. We’ll see.
7. Senator Dodd Loses Connecticut Seat — maybe the Left ought to be looking for a primary challenger there also.
8. Obama Gets Second Court Pick — he’s bound to get another pick before 2012, anyway.
9. Obama Does Nada on Gay Rights — probably true.
10. Dems Steal Texas Governor’s Mansion — Houston Mayor Bill White will win the gubernatorial election by a nose. That would be sweet.

David Brooks tells us that Islam harbors evil:

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

Elsewhere in the news:

Roeder told reporters that the killing of Dr. George Tiller was necessary because it protected the lives of unborn children.

“Because of the fact preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger this was the action I chose. … I want to make sure that the focus is, of course, obviously on the preborn children and the necessity to defend them,” Roeder said.

“Defending innocent life — that is what prompted me. It is pretty simple,” he said.

During the 30 minute interview, Roeder did not apologize for his role in the death of Dr. Tiller. “No, I don’t have any regrets,” he said.

Let us also mention the many recent examples of media personalities and elected officials encouraging people to commit acts of violence to enforce a right-wing agenda. Recently members of the Westboro Baptist Church cult stood outside Sasha and Malia Obama’s school with signs saying “God is your enemy.”

Humans tend to be frightened of other peoples’ crazy uncles but to ignore our own. I think moderates in the Muslim world are way too tolerant of Muslim extremists, but you can say exactly the same thing about Christian and right-wing extremists in our culture. Flame throwers like Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, etc. are weaving the narrative that there is virtue in using guns to enforce one’s political agenda when elections go against you. Christian “Dominionists” also push the worldview that human history is a war between Christianity — or their version of it, anyway — and everyone else, with Christianity destined to triumph.

It is only a tiny step between such rhetoric and the belief that others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so. Scott Roeder is one who took that step.

Brooks also disagrees with people who, Brooks says, “absolved” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s responsibilities in the Fort Hood shootings by speculating that he was suffering some sort of emotional or mental breakdown. “The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.”

Personally, I don’t think there’s an either-or choice between “personal breakdown” and “Islamic extremism.” Show me an ideological or religious extremist of any sort, and I’ll show you someone who is seriously maladjusted. Which might have come first is something of a chicken-and-egg question, but often someone turns to extremism after suffering some personal breakdown, either acute or chronic.

Erich Fromm wrote that people who find autonomy isolating and bewildering often will submerge themselves in an authoritarian group. And Eric Hoffer wrote,

Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world. Once the harmony with the self is upset, he turns into a highly reactive entity. Like an unstable chemical radical he hungers to combine with whatever comes within his reach. He cannot stand apart, whole or self-sufficient, but has to attach himself whole-heartedly to one side or the other.

I have a long disagreement with people who think that looking for a psychological “cause” to a heinous act is somehow making excuses for the perpetrator. I say we’re all crazy, in one way or another, and our first moral responsibility is to deal with our own craziness. People who turn to violence or some kind of self-destruction, like drugs, as a reaction to their psychological flaws (short of psychosis) are not “excused.”

The real cop-out is to explain heinous acts the way Brooks does, by filing them under “evil.” Evil, to Brooks, is an inherent quality that some people have and others don’t, or maybe it’s an infection, like a virus. Brooks writes,

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

What Brooks doesn’t seem to grasp is that “evil” is not separate from “social maladjustment,” emotional pain, fear, hate, anger, etc. What people call “evil” are acts committed by people who are allowing their maladjustments to jerk them around. Understanding that is not about “absolving” anyone, but about understanding ourselves. To simply blame “evil” is not morally or politically serious, just medieval.

Paul Krugman, “The Politics of Spite.” Hammer, nail, etc. Then read Neal Gabler’s “Politics as Religion.”

Shorter Ross Douthat: If Democrats do not, in the next ten minutes, clean up the mess left behind by eight years of the Bush Administration, liberalism will have failed.

I can’t remember the last time I ate a hamburger. Now I’m glad I can’t remember the last time I ate a hamburger.

Read Sebastian Jones’s “Dick Gephardt’s Spectacular Sellout” together with Frank Rich’s “The Rabbit Ragu Democrats.”