Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Your serve

My friend Justyn has a couple quibbles with my recent column on national service. Time to bring one more blog into the fray. Point by point:

1. You didn’t address public schools!

It’s true that I didn’t address national service policies that won’t affect current college students. Alas, there’s only so much room on page four, and so much interest from the average college student before they flip over to the sudoku. However, the proposed policy for K-12 schools—to make federal funding for public schools contingent on some sort of national service program—is even worse than the tax credit, because it’s both less voluntary and more insidious.

Contra Justyn’s original column, which surmised that tying federal cash to service programs “seems contrary to the spirit of what Obama is trying to do,” Sen. Obama has said directly that “we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs.” There is no doubt that this means mandatory service for most, with the dirty work delegated down from the federal government to local school boards.

I object to this sort of plan on moral, consequential, and constitutional grounds. But I especially object to it out of respect for federalism. Tying federal money to local policies is a nasty little trick that allows the federal government to muck around in all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong. The way this plan would be implemented is just like the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise their drinking ages to 21 as a condition of receiving federal highway funds. Technically, nobody was “forced” by that bill, but it didn’t matter much—today a 20-year old can’t buy a sixer of Sam Adams anywhere in our federal Union. Leaving local democracy to the mercy of the federal government is a recipe for no local democracy at all.

If a local school board wants to put a community service requirement in place, they have every right to do so, and indeed, many already have. But the federal government has no place dictating policy to the Waldorf County Board of Education. Not on national service, not on standardized testing, not on curriculum.

The “require” rather than “encourage” bit came from Obama’s website, and is supported by statements from his wife Michelle.

2. Separating “government” from “private” matters “stems entirely from the notion that any form of government is alien to and opposed to the way people actually live and conduct their lives.”

I don’t think this is true. Government isn’t opposed to the way people live—it’s been a feature of pretty much every human civilization since forever, and people have been living with it for at least that long. As I see it, government is just a tool for implementing collective choice, and often kind of a sucky one that makes people do things they don’t want. That doesn’t make it inherently more evil than any other kind of sucky things that can make people do things they don’t want—muggers, big terrible corporations, angry mothers, &c.

There shouldn’t be a Great Wall between private and government matters, especially when it comes to the sort of civil society volunteer stuff we’re talking about here. Both are just methods of social organization. The difference is that government, which uses force instead of consensus, often has nastier unintended consequences and bigger failures.

3. Hiring the unemployed at market wages rather than overpaying college students is kind of mean.

I’ll admit that this is my least persuasive point, because I don’t think government ought to be hiring anyone at all to do these “national service” sort of jobs. But, under the assumption that we must have some sort of national service program, I’d prefer that it stays as inexpensive as possible.

The reason nobody’s lining up to fill the jobs now is that they aren’t jobs. They’re volunteer positions, for which the market wage is effectively zero or negative. The “hard-up workers” are out there looking for real jobs. Thus, any national service program offering a stipend or a tax write-off is also something of a make-work scheme. But yeah, you’ve got me on this one—it comes down to whether you value the amorphous intangible social benefits of national service more than its outrageous cost.

Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

Tonight’s most interesting observation

Courtesy of Dr. Ted Kohn of Bilkent University, who delivered a concise summary of the 2008 horserace at a panel discussion earlier this evening:

“The Obama campaign has been very adept at using YouTube, which didn’t even exist four years ago. And, as Ersin Bey [the moderator] reminds me, it doesn’t exist for you in Turkey, either.”

YouTube came up again, during a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s 3am phone call ad. It’s hard to tell just how pervasive those sneezing pandas are until they’re banned by the government.

A brief list of things I cannot do on the Internet in Turkey

"Access to this site has been prevented by court order"

1. Watch videos of sneezing pandas and cats playing the piano. A Turkish court banned access to YouTube in March 2007.
2. Download Ubuntu Linux for my laptop. A Turkish court blockaded the Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers in September 2007.
3. Visit the crappy website I made in middle school. A Turkish court censored Geocities in February.
4. Read the writing of one of my favorite thinkers, Richard Dawkins. A Turkish court blocked his website last month.
5. Keep up with my friends Dan, Anne Marie, Ke, Angela, Janet, Will, Paul, Jess, and Kasia. A Turkish court banned their blogs today.^[1]

The Turkish government has censored over a thousand websites since May 2007, when the parliament passed Law No. 5651, which banned sites containing criminal content, violating Turkish law, or “infringing on the personal rights” of Turkish citizens. It also gave the state Telecommunications Board power to directly ban sites it deems obscene and offensive, and censor others with a judge’s approval.

Since the law went into effect, the board has received 24,598 ban proposals from the public, automatically censored 861 sites, and blocked 251 more by court order. Tayfun Acarer, president of the Telecommunications Board, explained the ban to daily newspaper Today’s Zaman earlier this month: “The duty of the state is to protect its citizens and warn them against harmful Internet content.”

Still looking to Europe as they drift further and further away.

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[Back] There might have been one more entry here, were it not for an amusing typo on the part of the censors. The website “imbd.com” has been blocked since last April, which prevents access to a parked linkfarm rather than the Internet Movie Database.

A message maligned

Dave Weigel at reason also picks up on the narrowing message of the Ron Paul revolution:

The message of the march, according to the official literature, was to be “Ron Paul’s message of peace, prosperity and freedom through adherence to the Constitution.” But the accepted version of that message implied that all three of those things were only possible with rigid national sovereignty, controlled borders, and a narrow vision of trade. The final speech before Paul’s came from Chuck Baldwin, the Pensacola, Florida pastor and Constitution Party candidate, who used the little time he had (graciously having given some of his minutes to Paul) to make a concise national sovereignty pitch. “You’re either a globalist or you’re an American,” Baldwin said. “And I… am an American!” Some of the Baldwin boosters in the crowd (many from Florida) started chanting “USA! USA!”

Some of the people I talked to at the march wondered why Bob Barr had no presence there, ceding all the ground to Chuck Baldwin. I can’t speak for Barr, but I don’t think he lost anything by going to Freedom Fest instead of the Revolution March. Both events were aimed at different segments of the Paul movement choir.

A little piece of me was hoping for a Barr endorsement, which didn’t happen, to say the least. But the idea that there are two factions — one sticking with Baldwin and one that has perhaps already jumped to Barr — is both perceptive and encouraging.

The revolution will now be categorized

Saturday morning, I slogged over to the Revolution March on Capitol Hill, an all-day rally for quixotic Republican candidate Ron Paul. I’ve long been fascinated by the heterodox clan of followers that have congealed around Paul’s candidacy, and nowhere were the many faces of the Paulites more manifest than at yesterday’s march. Christian homeschoolers and sound money-seekers, college kids in robot armor, 9/11 truthers, antiwar veterans, dirigibilists and guys in colonial hats — every discrete component of the Ron Paul movement was on display.

Many have argued that the Ron Paul phenomenon is a good thing for the future of liberty in America. I agree, and I voted for Paul in Arizona’s Republican primary. But after listening to the rhetoric of Saturday’s speakers and interacting with the motley marchers, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two crucial and ultimately flawed currents within the Ron Paul Revolution.

First, the influence of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid style, the political mentality first explained in reference to that other great libertarian Republican, Barry Goldwater. Here’s how Hofstadter described his conception of the paranoid right in 1964:

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Hofstadter was no fan of Goldwater, and his essay was meant to frame him as one among a great chain of kooks in American history. But this passage hits on many of the points of Ron Paul Republicanism — where a healthy distrust of government turns into the unhealthy belief that the Fed is a sinister cabal, martial law is just around the corner, and our sovereignty will soon be undermined by a covertly-planned North American Union. Unfortunately, each of those ideas was expounded at length by at least one speaker at the rally. I’d like to think that the ideas of liberty are the most fundamental part of the Paul message, but paranoia was put in the spotlight alongside principle on Saturday.

Of course, the paranoid style is not limited to Paul and company — simply see the persistent “Barack Obama is a secret Muslim” rumors for proof. But the idea of dispossession from liberty inherent to the paranoid right is a critical part of Paul’s appeal.

That leads to the second key characteristic: widespread acceptance of Tyler Cowen’s first libertarian heresy — the belief that we are now less free than in the past, and we ought to seek to return to an earlier era. Restore the Constitution. Return to limited government, the gold standard, isolationism. You say you want a revolution — but it sure sounds like a restoration.

Problem is, there never was a golden age of American liberty and prosperity. I’ll agree that in some areas, I am less free today than I would have been in 1910. No surveillance state, no income tax, no nanny state, no war on drugs or poverty or terror distorting personal and economic liberty. But each of those developments is largely the product of technology and prosperity that simply didn’t exist back then. Further, it’s hard to argue that we do not live in a more open and equal society than in the past. White males may indeed be less free, but on balance the rest of society has far more liberty.

Plus, even if negative liberties were a wash, I have far more positive liberty than humans have ever had, thanks to unprecedented global prosperity. Hands down, I would rather live in today’s world than a century ago. There is no golden age — there is only now, and seeking to return to a mythical past is counterproductive.

I believe in progressive liberty — shaping today’s society toward a freer, more prosperous future, especially with an eye towards emerging technology and an evolving culture. And although Ben Bernanke may do dumb stuff, I don’t think he’s out to swindle me or devalue my currency to pave the way for the Amero. Neither, I’d imagine, do the vast majority of those who voted for Ron Paul this year. But for an ardent and vocal set of supporters, paranoia and nostalgia are critical components of a fatally flawed — but powerful — worldview. If there is to be a permanent Ron Paul revolution, I sincerely hope its leaders choose to ditch those ideals.