One county resident, who also happens to work for the federal government, recently wrote to the Missoulian: “Do I need a daily letter from the sheriff to enter my home and talk to my wife, or will there be provision for some sort of blanket authorization?”

Now, another Ravalli County resident wants to change the Montana constitution.

“Cathy Hackett of Stevensville this week launched a proposed constitutional initiative campaign to put the boundaries from Montana’s original 1889 constitution into the state’s 1972 constitution. These boundaries spell out, in latitudes and longitudes, where Montana is situated.

“I really think that places our state sovereignty in jeopardy if we don’t have official boundaries in our constitution,” Hackett said Tuesday.”

Hackett, who describes herself as “a bit of a rebel,” is worried that—without the state’s boundaries spelled out in the state constitution—”if you get charged with breaking a Montana law, you could very well use that as a defense and get off.”

I don’t know if this is correct or not, but then, neither does Hackett. Stating the obvious, the reporter advises us that Hackett “is not a lawyer.”

Then there’s this:

“Qualifying a constitutional initiative for the November 2010 ballot is no easy task. To do so requires the signatures of nearly 49,000 registered Montana voters, including 10 percent of the voters in 40 of the 100 state House districts. The signatures must be turned by June 18.

“There’s people all over the state I believe can help me,” Hackett said. “I was part of the Ron Paul thing when he was running for president. We still e-mail each other. I’m counting on those people. I’m confident that they’ll agree with me.”

In other words, Hackett finds it safe to assume that a Ron Paul supporter can be engaged in a quixotic and time-consuming effort to rectify a problem that no state legislator, legal scholar, defense attorney, or jailhouse lawyer has yet noticed and that mainly sounds problematic only if one has just recently begun learning about the subject in a relative vacuum.

I’m not saying this doesn’t sound possible, but—if I were among these Ron Paul supporters—I wouldn’t take the nature of Hackett’s faith in them as a compliment.

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From an interview with Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, a thinker I really admire one of my favorite bloggers (even if I find him just a tad smug self-satisfied at times):

“When our pride isn’t on the line or we’re working together on a project and we need to achieve something — maybe our job is at stake — we’re much more likely to be reasonable. But when we talk about politics or religion or whatever we talk about on these radio shows, that’s when we’re much more likely to not be reasonable and to find it more enjoyable to speak than to listen.”

Damn! Zing!

I liked this, too:

“It’s a common point in almost every person’s life when they see people around them who have beliefs they don’t quite understand and they decide for themselves that, “Well, I must just be more honest than those other people. I must be trying harder.” That’s the easiest way to explain your disagreement with other people. We do disagree, and it does bother us; we know, at some level, that something’s not right about that, and we’re eager to find explanations. The easiest explanation that usually comes to mind is just our own superior sincerity or honesty. It’s just quick and easy. We’re not very honest about considering that explanation.”

I definitely agree that people who disagree with me need to be more honest with themselves about how wrong they are.

Read the rest.

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“L.B. Namier once said that “the crowning attainment of historical study” is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only in the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Hey, I found the essay on-line, supposedly the version that was originally published in Harper’s in 1964. (I suppose it’s possible that there might be differences between that version and the version published in the reissued book I’m reading, so my apologies for any discrepancies.)

Even barrel organ players? IS NOTHING SACRED?

(Quoted from The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which quotes it from an 1835 tract by S.F.B. Morse, who probably should have stuck to dots and dashes.)

“We’ve repeatedly highlighted Kaiser’s health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster — and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats’ health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for “95% of working families”, a fact which is probably true.

I don’t particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics “fans” probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren’t watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They’re developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.”

One possible reaction to this is self-righteous anger about the willful ignorance of the electorate, blah, blah, blah. Another one is to find hope in the fact that many of these people don’t actually disagree with what’s on the table and so they can be reached.

Part of what I’m enjoying about Hofstadter is the way he does not seem to be out to get anyone or any party, but is simply describing and thinking about the way people behave. In this, there is something reminiscent of Joan Didion’s political writing.

Here’s what he means by “paranoid style” (hint: he’s not actually diagnosing anyone as paranoid).

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. …

He gives an example from 1963 that sounds like it could be from last week:

“Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, a great deal of publicity was given to a bill … to tighten federal controls over the sale of firearms through the mail …. Now there are arguments against the … bill which, however unpersuasive one may find them, have the color of conventional political reasoning. But one [person] opposed it with what might be considered representative paranoid arguments, insisting that it was “a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government” and it threatened to “create chaos” that would help “our enemies” sieze power.”

I like the reminder that reasonable people can disagree about such a bill, but unreasonable people will also make themselves heard, so it’s important not to lump the former in with the latter. In any political disagreement, there are those who—thought they hold a contrary viewpoint to yours about some specific issue—are still in touch with the reality of the situation, and so may be counted on to be reasonable in the discussion and might be willing to compromise on a solution.

The “paranoid”—as Hofstadter defines them—might not be.

“Of course, the term “paranoid style” is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than for good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents. Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” [my emphasis]

Keeping this in mind, I’m going to do my best to remember that what counts is the content of ideas, not what “team” they come from.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to reading Richard Hofstadter.

Hofstadter was a historian who wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which takes its title from an essay that began its life as a lecture delivered at Oxford University in 1963.

Sean Wilentz, another historian and writer who has penned the introduction to a recent reissue of Hofstadter’s book, describes the essay, and the book that contains it, as “a study of political cranks and zealots,” which seems to sum it up nicely.

One of the thrills of reading great fiction from ages past is to experience the pleasure of knowing that other human beings have felt the same way you do about life, love, and all the rest of it, even in entirely different times and settings. Though Hofstadter’s book is nonfiction, I’m experiencing something similar as I read his careful, measured observations. They are observations of specific times, specific events, but his reflections and analysis feel timeless.

It’s reassuring and illuminating to learn, for example, that the phenomenon of radicals pretending to be conservatives (i.e., people who want to change much more than they want to preserve about the nature of this country) has been a fairly constant one throughout American history. (Having typed that sentence, I pause to wonder what it is about that fact that I find reassuring; I suppose it’s the implication that our politics are no weirder today than in the past, and therefore that today’s weirdness is not necessarily a sign of the impending collapse of the American experiment. Well, here’s hoping, anyway.)

The title essay, published in the early 1960s, treats with what Hofstadter saw as the “pseudo-conservative revolt” that manifested in such forms as McCarthyism, the John Birch Society (ascendant again, in case you hadn’t heard), the nullificatory response of so many people to Supreme Court decisions that began in the modern era with certain rulings on civil rights, and so forth. But his more general descriptions of “the paranoid style” (which, to be fair, exists on the right and the left) feel as if they were written this morning; this seems a truly useful book for anyone interested in the current shape of American politics.

I’m not very far in to the book yet, but this is from Hofstadter’s introduction, in the course of an explanation of why—at the time he was writing—so many observers of American politics were starting to move away from “an older conception of politics” as primarily concerned with the rationalistic question “who gets what, when, how?”:

“The findings of public-opinion polls have made us far less confident than we used to be that the public responds to the issues as they are debated, and more aware that it reacts to them chiefly when they become the object of striking symbolic acts or memorable statements, or are taken up by public figures who themselves have a symbolic appeal. …

People respond, in short, to the great drama of the public scene. But this drama, as it is set before them and as they perceive it, is not identical with questions involving material interests and the possession of power. Even those who exercise power are not immune to the content of the drama. In any case, they are forced to deal, as an element in their calculations, with the emotional life of the masses, which is not something that they can altogether create or manipulate, but something that they must cope with. The political contest itself is deeply affected by the way in which it is perceived and felt.”

Sound familiar?

I think I’m going to enjoy this.

My latest column over at Went West reports on a list of demands that 175 residents of the next county over from Missoula have forwarded to their sheriff and county commissioners. Here’s my favorite:

Implement a requirement that the sheriff press county residents 18 and over into a militia, for which he will organize training three weeks out of every year. The Missoulian quotes some amplifying detail from the questionnaire: “Women must serve, but not in a combat capacity unless the men are in danger of being overrun.”

You’ll want to read the rest, especially if you’ve never heard of the “constitutional sheriff” movement.

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So, how did a little-known former nude model win Teddy Kennedy’s seat for the GOP?

Because he ran like he wanted it, and the Democrat didn’t. (I mean, no tracking polls?)

It’s that simple. And I suspect old Ted would be the first to appreciate the ironies in the situation. One begins to understand the malice lurking in the allegedly Chinese alleged curse “may you live in interesting times.”^[1]

There are some other factors. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the economy sucks right now, and that’s never going to help a party retain power.

I also think that the excitement felt by so many Brown supporters has something to tell us about most people’s relationship to politics: with the exception of residents of just a handful of states (and while I’m no expert, I don’t think Massachusetts is one of them), most people feel as if their votes don’t matter much. So when an election comes along that feels like it can turn things upside down, or when the kind of candidate who never usually wins is suddenly within spitting distance of the victor’s crown, people get energized. (I think this was a factor in Obama’s victory, too.)

But I don’t want to make excuses. One side considered this election a must-win, and the other didn’t. As usual, the game goes to the one with more heart.

Speaking of games, I hope the blame game that seems to be consuming various factions of the left lasts about five more seconds, and that then they just get back to work. There is still an opportunity to pass health-insurance reform,^[2] and the election of a man who only opposes national health-insurance reform because Massachusetts already has its own similar system is no reason to back down now.

What the situation needs is not more bipartisanship or moderation: Obama ran on reforming health care and won—by a lot—and he has yet to see the first hand extended in true fellowship from the right side of the aisle. (He didn’t even get a single vote in favor of continuing the Bush stimulus program, mere days after being inaugurated.) After the election of 2006, widely seen as a denunciation of Bush’s Iraq war, what did Bush decide to do? Reach across the aisle? Listen to criticism? No: he “dramatically expanded the US troop commitment in Iraq.”

The GOP has said it wants to scuttle health-insurance reform in order to cripple Obama’s presidency. If he and the Democrats do not have the mettle and discipline to pass this bill, that outcome will be nothing less than what they deserve. They will have demonstrated that they are not fit to lead, and I’ll be the first to admit it.

_____
1. Speaking of “interesting,” the Wikipedia entry on this “curse” is worth a read. No one can prove it’s actually Chinese (of course; I suspected that would be the case before I looked it up). But I enjoyed learning about two other curses that are supposed to be related to this one. The “interesting times” curse is lowest in curse intensity, followed in ascending order by:

• May you come to the attention of those in authority (sometimes rendered May the government be aware of you).
• May you find what you are looking for.

Scary stuff!

2. The safest^[3] course of action is for the House to simply pass the Senate bill, because there is no telling how soon Brown will be sworn into the Senate, probably dooming to death-by-filibuster any effort to pass changes to the bill there. Don’t be deceived: the official rule is that the Senate doesn’t have to swear him until Massachusetts certifies him the victor. Massachusetts doesn’t do that until all the votes are in, and in Massachusetts absentee and military ballots aren’t due on election day. But even if this process takes weeks and weeks, do you really want to give Democrats at least two additional opportunities (one vote in the House, to approve changes to the Senate bill, and then one vote in the Senate—which will take at least five days, because of the inevitability of a filibuster) to prove how disorganized and feckless they can be?

Ironically, though, there is a precedent for swearing him in right away: an exception to the certification requirement was made for Teddy Kennedy himself back in 1962. Woops! The world really is wild at heart and weird on top!

3. Depends what you mean by “safest,” of course. My usage encompasses all of those congressmembers representatives who are aware that they are in Washington to do the people’s business, and that the people really, really need this bill. On the other hand, it seems possible that many vulnerable House members will see Brown’s victory as reason to retract their support for the bill, lest their own seats not remain “safe.” Obama once said he was willing to be a one-term president if that’s what it took to pass health-insurance reform. Here’s hoping that enough potentially wayward House members will follow this example.

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