Thinking about Thinking

You can get caught up in the day-to-day swirl of current events, but that can be overwhelming. And you hear commentators ask that snarky question. What was he thinking, or she, as the case may be? On Tuesday, June 30, it was that oddest of odd governors, Mark Sanford, at it again – rambling on about his affair with that woman from Argentina, saying he had finally met his soul mate, but he was going to try to make himself fall back in love with his wife, if he could, but it would be hard – but he’d try, as that was the right thing to do. No doubt his wife wasn’t too happy with that, or about the tales of the other women he’d auditioned for that soul mate role before settling on the sultry beauty from Buenos Aires. Aside from the political problems – South Carolina may not want a lovesick hopeless romantic, a fool for love as it were – running the state in the midst of an economic collapse of epic proportions, there is the question of his apparent inability to even imagine what other people are thinking, and how they might feel about what he says and does. He does seem a bit oblivious to that sort of thing – inward turned, in the extreme. A lot of people were asking that question. What was he thinking?

The same day brought the same question about John McCain. It was the new and massive article on Sarah Palin – Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair with It Came from Wasilla. What was McCain thinking?

Purdum writes of the former members of McCain’s campaign:

They can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask – What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.”

Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off.

You can read all of the nearly ten thousand words, but it comes down to the McCain staff all asking themselves what they were thinking, and certainly what McCain had been thinking:

Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party – long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics – keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?

Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics – with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor – ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

Everyone at one time or another asks themselves just what they were thinking when they did this or that, but not quite like this:

They all know that if their candidate – a 72-year-old cancer survivor – had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.

Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The first ten days after McCain announced he had chosen her went swimmingly. After that, it didn’t go well. And this article, and the never-ending search Mark Sanford has undertaken to find his true soul mate, or make his peace with himself in settling for the wife that might have to do – yes, it reads like some paperback romance novel – will provide endless fodder for pundits for the rest of the summer. And what they write will all be variations on one question. What was he – Sanford or McCain – thinking?

But no one really wants an answer – they just want to ask the question, smugly, and have people snicker. That’s the nature of political discourse these days – it’s made media stars of Keith Olbermann on one side and O’Reilly and Limbaugh on the other – or perhaps it has always been so. But that just begs the larger question. How do people come to think the way they think?

Maybe how people think is all tied up in language. Conservatives hate the Death Tax – it’s not fair. Liberals (they seem more inclined to call themselves that these days) have no problem with maintaining the Estate Tax – taxing the very rich when they transfer enormous sums of money to heirs of no particular talent and accomplishment seems fine to them. It’s the same tax. And no one is pro-abortion, they’re pro-choice, just as no one is against choice that’s always a good thing – they’re pro-life. Words matter.

In fact, language itself matters. Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford, explains that nicely in this recent article in Edge:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let’s take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?

Well, the answer is yes, and she explains her research:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms – north, south, east, and west – to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like “Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them – in fact, forces them – to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space.

The rest is a discussion of how the same thing happens with all the major languages. Each language makes you think differently. And she settles on this:

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people’s minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Maybe that’s why we hate the French. They’re fond of the subjunctive – we don’t use that much in English, as our verbs are all about what is, not what could be. We don’t do that subtle crap – the word nuance is French, actually. Over the years that does make a difference. So maybe, within our own language, something similar is going on – the words you use, and the grammar of certainty, leads us to a certain unavoidable level of conflict, and leads to some really dumb-ass actions. What were we thinking? What we could think, given the words available. It happens.

But it may be more than language. Frank Furedi has a different notion:

Spreading conspiracy theories – stories about a world warped by evil forces – remains the pastime of marginalized groups. But conspiratorial thinking – the idea that someone, somewhere, is to blame for every misfortune – has become respectable.

This man’s latest book is Invitation to Terror: the Expanding Empire of the Unknown:

The only thing new about the “new terrorism,” Furedi claims, is the perception that it’s any more sophisticated or effective than it used to be. Citing the resilience of populations who coped with attacks far beyond the capabilities of today’s terrorists – such as the Nazi blitz and the Allied bombings of Hamburg and Hiroshima – Furedi argues convincingly that “terrorism cannot seriously threaten the integrity of society nor undermine the way of life of a nation.” Though the British and American governments do have that power, Furedi contends that the War on Terror is less a deliberate effort to cow or manipulate than it is a sincere but wrong-headed attempt to mobilize popular support -rooted in fact and genuine concern – by leaders who don’t understand that “society can absorb occasional acts of terror” but becomes disoriented and demoralized living in a protracted state of fear.

But this item is about Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History – a book by David Aaronovitch which Furedi sees as important:

The phrase “conspiracy theory” is used in various different ways today. Anyone who questions a particular version of events can be labeled a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes the term is used fairly lightheartedly to dismiss another person’s opinion. For others, conspiracy theories provide powerful evidence that all is not as it seems; adopting and accepting certain conspiracy theories can be a way of communicating ideas about bad faith, malevolent behavior and morally dubious acts.

The epidemic of conspiracy theory-talk is reflected in the world of publishing. Numerous books have been published on this subject, many of them devoted to exposing some alleged, behind-the-scenes conspiracy to defraud the public and manipulate our behavior. Such books readily resonate with contemporary popular culture, where Hollywood films and TV shows force-feed us a diet of revelations about alleged cover-ups and hidden agendas.

When the idea of conspiracies becomes mainstream, then the meaning of the c-word can mutate and lose much of its conceptual utility. That is a pity, because contemporary society needs a full and proper understanding of the conspiratorial outlook on public life today, and why it has such a powerful lure.

And here’s his problem with Aaronovitch:

The fact that some authors now erode the distinction between conspiracy theories and legitimate exposés of manipulative behavior is testimony to the confusion that surrounds this subject. Aaronovitch defines a conspiracy theory as the “attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended.” He believes that a “conspiracy theory is the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable.” This definition captures an important aspect of conspiratorial thinking. But it is far too general to account for the specific features of the conspiracy theory.

Indeed, today, attributing agency to an accidental event is a key and common response to virtually every unexpected episode or act of misfortune. Yet the fact that more and more of us blame our neighbors or employers for some accident we have suffered, or blame officialdom for floods and other acts of nature, should not be seen as simply a milder version of that system of conspiratorial ideas which “proves,” for example, that the Jews were responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.

Furedi suggests it might be wise “to make a conceptual distinction between conspiratorial theories, conspiratorial thinking, and conspiratorial culture.” He consider the first silly, and the second a nasty habit, but the third a real problem.

As for the first:

A conspiracy theory provides a view of the world that both explains the background to events and, more importantly, provides a warning for the future. Its focus is not merely on behind-the-scenes machinations and plots against groups and individuals; instead it offers a comprehensive perspective that purports to reveal the real workings of the world we live in. The main theme of the conspiracy theory is the heinous act of moral subversion, allegedly carried out by a cabal of powerful people. In order to shed light on the importance of some global conspiracy, conspiracy theorists use the ideology of evil. This ideology offers a view of the world where unexpected occurrences and acts of misfortune are re-presented as the product of malevolent forces. In providing a comprehensive account of the threats that face a community, this ideology of evil seeks to give meaning to an otherwise incomprehensible world. Historically, the concept of evil has helped to explain why bad things happened; it provided an answer to society’s need to understand the cause of misfortune and it provided guidance on who should bear the blame for such misfortune.

And it’s old hat:

During the early fourteenth century, frightening rumors swept Europe about an impending conspiracy; in some accounts the conspiracies were orchestrated by Jews, in others by Muslims; some demonologists pointed the finger of blame at lepers and witches. In the aftermath of the catastrophe that Europe suffered with the Black Death (1347-1349), fears of impending conspiracies were attached to witches, Jews and ‘plague-spreaders’. It is at this point that the Catholic Church becomes interested in the activities of sorcerers and Satanic cults.

In late fourteenth century, the Catholic Inquisition, originally set up to stamp out heretical practices, gradually began to regard witchcraft as another important form of heresy. The Inquisition constructed an association between witchcraft and heresy, which gradually led to a fundamental reorientation in the church’s doctrine. Eventually, through the contribution of professional demonologists, an ideology of evil emerged which blamed a Satanic plot involving witches for the corruption of the world. This was an early form of conspiracy theory, which successfully captured the imagination of pre-modern Europe.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, conspiracy theories in the West have taken on an increasingly secular form. …

No more powerful demonic forces – at the end of the nineteenth century we got the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and so on. And now you can choose your favorite secret cabal. But that’s just detail. Furedi frets about the underlying conspiratorial thinking:

Conspiratorial thinking is about attributing the problems and misfortunes faced by individuals to some intentional malevolent behavior. In particular, unexpected and unanticipated events are often blamed on irresponsible, and by implication immoral, behavior. Such thinking is underpinned by a sense of powerlessness and the perception that hidden forces are responsible for people’s predicament. Through conspiratorial thinking, people attempt to give meaning to otherwise incomprehensible events – and unlike conspiracy theories, which are now confined to the most disoriented sections of society, conspiratorial thinking has gone mainstream.

That’s the problem:

Advocacy organizations, political activists and the media are attracted to the idea that behind every headline there lays a hidden agenda. The idea of hidden agendas has influenced discussions on the war in Iraq, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the outbreak of swine flu.

In previous times, such attitudes mainly informed the thinking of right-wing populist movements, which always saw the hand of a Jewish or Masonic or Communist conspiracy behind major world events. Today, conspiratorial thinking has become respectable; many of its most vociferous supporters are to be found in radical protest movements or within the cultural left. When, a few years ago, Hillary Clinton warned of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, then president, Bill, it became clear that the politics of the hidden agenda had become part of everyday public life. Today, the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movement is as wedded to conspiratorial thinking as are its opponents on the far right.

Such thinking may be inevitable, but dangerous:

Conspiratorial thinking gives meaning to otherwise strange events; it offers a sense of coherence and unity to otherwise disparate and unconnected happenings. The normalization of this kind of thought is one of the most disturbing developments in twenty-first century public life. Indeed, it often appears as if Western societies have regressed and adopted a medieval perspective on acts of calamity. Back in the Dark Ages, people regarded accidents, disasters and other acts of misfortune as the work of hidden forces; accidents did not simply happen, but rather were intentionally caused by either divine or malevolent forces. Misdeeds were often seen as acts brought about by people who had been manipulated by evil forces.

Today, this primitive outlook informs how many people make sense of their personal failures, health problems and the disintegration of their communities. And since conspiratorial thinking encourages the belief that what you can’t see is more important than what you can see, it can be difficult to debunk. That is why even a fine study of this subject, such as Voodoo Histories, is unlikely to challenge it. As Aaronovitch points out, even people who question other people’s fantasies about conspiracies often embrace their own version of a hidden agenda.

We live, it seems, in an odd world with “a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces.” And we all know the narrative:

Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.

And thus we get the smug rants on television and radio:

Conspiratorial culture communicates the idea that nothing just happens by accident: somebody is at fault. Fantasies about international terrorist networks, pedophile rings, corporate conspiracies to fool people about an impending environmental disaster and neo-conservative cabals compete with one another to gain public attention. Virtually every misdeed, it seems, is the outcome of a carefully worked-out plot. Conspiratorial culture helps fuel suspicion and mistrust towards public life. It displaces critical engagement with society in favor of a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from any clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a continuous crusade to unmask the perpetrators of malevolent deeds. The media fuel this attitude by frequently arguing that what is important is not what public figures say but what their real agenda is. The media incite the public to look for hidden motives; that normalization of suspicion and mistrust is the key accomplishment of today’s conspiratorial culture.

And that’s nothing but trouble:

History demonstrates that nothing is more frightening than when a community lacks a system of meaning through which it can understand the problems it confronts. In such circumstances, people feel powerless and confused and are sometimes drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything is black and white or good and evil. What is truly disturbing about the contemporary era is that it is not only the frightened and dispossessed who have internalized this cultural narrative, but also significant sections of mainstream society.

So the issue is more than language, even if we cannot even agree on the names of things. Now everyone also knows there’s something else going on – there has to be. And we’ve built an industry that endlessly tells us that, even if what is going on is just what it seems. We’ve been conditioned. That – whatever it is – cannot be so.

But then, Mark Sanford wasn’t really hiking the Appalachian Trail, was he? And John McCain wasn’t making a well-informed, sober decision, for the good of the country, when he chose Sarah Palin. On the other hand, the first was just passion – common enough – and the second just panic at the prospect of losing what you’ve always wanted – even more common. You can ask the question – what were they thinking? But the answer is pretty simple. The real issue is how we are thinking.

Understanding Republicans and the Ghost of Nixon

Oh, events come and go – the white New Haven firefighters prevailed in the Supreme Court and Rush Limbaugh said that the court had now officially declared Sonia Sotomayor a racist who hates white people. Rush said the 5-4 decision was actually 9-0, if you think about it – and now one once branch of our government has declared her unfit for the court. It seems a bit absurd.

See Ian Millhiser here:

For 25 years, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has given employers broad discretion to reconsider a promotion test whose results favor one race over another. Judge Sonia Sotomayor followed this binding precedent when she rejected several firefighters’ claim of reverse discrimination in the now-famous Ricci v. Destefano case, as she is obliged to do as a lower-court judge. Yet, as the Justices showed in today’s 5-4 decision in Ricci, they are not bound by the same constraints that bound Judge Sotomayor. Today’s ruling creates a new standard which says that an employer’s decision to toss out a hiring test must have a “strong basis in evidence” showing that the test preferred one race over another. The Supreme Court has powers that Judge Sotomayor does not, and it used that power today.

The binding precedent is explained here and the Supreme Court decision is here (PDF format). The Supreme Court decided to change the law, she didn’t – she couldn’t.

But Ian isn’t Rush. And Rush wants her gone. And he does carry some weight. Yeah, yeah – bad joke. But Rush is fighting hard to return his side to power. He doesn’t like what’s happening. Obama is too popular, and so is she. So he warns us all of what is happening – like Obama trying to get what he calls the dim-witted Hispanic cleaning woman on the court.

Oh, there are lots of warnings. In the flagship magazine of the right, the National Review, there’s Thomas Sowell – “Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.” No one knows quite what he’s talking about – how he gets from the government bailing out GM by assuming some ownership when no one else will, and promoting a national healthcare system, to that. But it does sound scary. He also is fighting hard to return his side to power.

Of course that is not going to be easy. And if you follow such things – not recommended, really – then you watch the Sunday morning political talk shows, where the networks, broadcast and cable, interested in the sort of conflict that provides a solid floor for their ratings, book mostly Republican guests. Aside from the obligatory discussion of the wars and the troubles in Iran, and the collapsing economy, most of the talk centers on how the Republican Party will get back to its rightful place in charge of the government. What should be done about healthcare or anything else? You Republicans know – you’re the professionals, after all. What happened? As all Americans agree with you, how can you work things to win back Congress and the White House?

Of course it’s not quite like that. It just feels that way. Part of it is marketing – that conflict thing that keeps people watching the shows – and part of it may be a stab at fairness. Sure, you had eight years and you messed up everything you touched, and left the nation a mess, and people died, and anyone would be a fool to listen to your same old ideas now – but fair is fair. Both sides should get a chance to suggest policies and actions. Otherwise these shows would be boring – people would change channels and watch reruns of a senior’s golf tournament or the Food Network. Actually they do, but not all of them. Some people wonder how the Republicans – who consider themselves the adults, the serious people, the people with actual values, the people who know how to get things done and not just talk – will get back to where they say they obviously should be – in charge.

This problem may not be endlessly fascinating to most people, but political junkies love it. Nicole Belle does, and she offers this video clip – the New York Times’ pleasant and reasonable house conservative, David Brooks, chatting with David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press:

GREGORY: David Brooks, how does this Republican Party of the future chart a new course? If you look back historically from Nixon to Reagan to George W. Bush, in each case, it was not only a kind of an indictment of the past, but also the charting of a new course for the future of the Republican Party.

BROOKS: Right, I take a maximalist view. I follow the British Conservative Party. They had to lose three national elections before they changed. I think this Republican Party is going to have to lose two or three national elections. So I take a long term, most pessimistic view possible. But what is the route back? It is two things. The first thing – boring, sensible practicality. And that’s why of the potentials, Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana is the most sensible short term answer to the Republican problems. The guy is just a good manager. You got a guy, Barack Obama, in the White House. Fantastic guy – happens to spend a lot of money. And so that would be my short term. The long term is that they have to learn to talk to people in densely-populated parts of the country and to young people. And the answer to that is the same: They have to learn to talk the language of community and common endeavor. It’s been too much individual, profit, tax cuts. It has to be community, what we can do together, including in some cases, the government.

Nicole Belle is amused that Brooks is saying that Republicans should become populists:

So the answer is to appeal to young people and urban centers by admitting that as a community, we have to take care of one another and stop focusing so much on individual profits?

David, that’s called being a liberal.

She explains what she means with an anecdote:

It reminds me very much of something I experienced years ago. Back in the early eighties I was invited to attend a Young Leaders of Tomorrow conference at Pepperdine University. Given its location and the names of the scheduled speakers, I should have realized that it should have been more accurately named Young Republican Leaders of Tomorrow. I was a little bit of an odd fit, and after not too subtly challenging Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf at a session (moi, a liberal agitator? Quelle suprise!) he attempted to shut me up with this little homily purported to be from Churchill: “If you are young and not liberal, you have no heart, if you are old and not conservative, you have no brain.”

Harrumph! Didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, almost 30 years later. Either you understand that we live in a society and there are responsibilities inherent in being part of that society beyond trying to prove who has the biggest phallus/weapons program, or you don’t. And if you don’t understand that, you have no business being a Leader of Tomorrow, young or otherwise.

And that leads to a general precept:

And let’s be honest: the Republican Party doesn’t understand that. Never have and they never will. Their entire focus (and appeal) lies in that less evolved part of the brain that governs toddlers: the world revolves around you and you are entitled to whatever you want. Everyone else should be scorned and distrusted because they are trying to take what you want to have. That’s been the GOP’s modus operandi since the beginning.

Maybe so – but that’s a bit blunt, although she may be right to argue that the problem the Republicans just couldn’t overcome was that, collectively, “we don’t want a government run by self-centered children any longer.”

She then suggests the Democrats aren’t much better, but at least “they are a step in the right direction.” At least they acknowledge the concept of community – they are not philosophically opposed to the whole notion. That’s a start.

But has this always been so? Have the Republicans always been spiteful, thoughtless greedy children – have they always been such antisocial dicks? Christopher Hitchens makes the case that the answer is yes, or have been since the first Republican Dick, which would be Richard Nixon. The Nixon Presidential Library just released more tapes (they’re here) – and Hitchens argues in Slate that they tell you a lot about the Republican Party. In fact, they’ve been Caught on Tape.

Of course Hitchens is the first to admit he has his biases:

I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don’t even remember having eaten.

It seems he never got over Nixon, and these new tapes from the early months of 1973 really disgust him:

The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon’s mind was not “compartmentalized” between one issue and another. For example, like most “family values” Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be – if it were not so hideous – pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.

Nope, we are not all in this together, and after glancing at Timothy Noah’s discussion of what Nixon was saying about Jews, Hitchens suggests what is being said is rather sinister:

…as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time – February 1973 – the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don’t seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record – disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. “What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up.” To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism “in this country” is not located all that “deep down,” since it’s being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”

It’s all division, and division of the nastiest sort:

In debates with religious people, I keep being told that even if not all of religion’s supernatural claims can be defended as literally true, at least it can be said that religion encourages morality and makes people behave better. In every Nixon tape that has so far been released, he is at his lowest and ugliest and most inhuman when being incited and encouraged and sometimes outbid by the most famous Christian ever to be born on American soil. I merely pass on the observation.

But Hitchens maintains that the worst of this all is “the sheer brutal cynicism” of the conversations about Vietnam:

Nixon liked to talk tough in two distinct but related ways about this subject. To Charles Colson – another pious Christian among his consiglieri – he is heard on the tapes boasting that his massive bombing of North Vietnamese civilians would be vindicated and that those who opposed it would be held “treasonable.” (His famous confidential secretary, Rose Mary Woods, is on the tapes expressing the same hope for an arraignment of disloyal senators and congressmen.) But when talking to his most depraved of all associates, Henry Kissinger, he is full of cruelty and bluster when expressing his intention of applying pain to the South Vietnamese. If the South Vietnamese client president, Nguyen Van Thieu, would not agree to sign Nixon’s version of what was later to be called “peace with honor,” Nixon yelled on tape in 1973 that he would “cut off his head if necessary.” Thus, a huge number of American lives and an incalculable number of Vietnamese ones were thrown away to end the war on more shameful terms than had been on offer in the fall of 1968…

But this is one of his pet peeves, as seen in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. It’s old news. The news now is of Republican scandals – John Ensign the Mark Sanford and so on. And David Brooks is looking for a moderate Republican nice guy, who doesn’t dick around, and who believes in community and effective, interventionist government.

Yeah – good luck with that. Hitchens suggest that is rather hopeless, as the party has in its DNA:

The continuing problem, for those consensus builders who think that the fortunes of the GOP can only be revived by an appeal to the “center” and the “middle ground,” is that the most scandalous and villainous Republican president of modern times and his “realist” foreign-policy co-conspirator built their appeal in precisely this way. Fate, and the declassification process, have decreed that we will be supplied with ever-more nauseating reminders of this at intervals of about a year until everybody who can remember the one-time hero of “moderate Republicanism” and the silent majority of middle America has gone to a place where not even Billy Graham can bother them anymore.

But of course what some call zero-sum divisiveness others call healthy competition – the best prevail and those who cannot compete go down in flames, as it always is in life, and which always gives us the best outcomes. What’s worthless goes away – for Nixon, blacks, Jews and those pesky Vietnamese.

But that’s the extreme version of the healthy competition. Take the healthcare debate. Republicans talk about “choice” and “competition.” Everyone knows those are good things – not every Republican is like Nixon. Steve Benen points out here that Mitt Romney said on Meet the Press that Republicans “believe in allowing people to have choice in their health care.” And Joe Lieberman earlier emphasized the importance of “competition” in the system, such as it is. And Kathleen Sebelius told CNN earlier that “Choice and competition is what we want.”

He has the links if you want to look it up, and adds this:

What’s not to like? Americans are predisposed to like choices and competition, and when it comes to health care, any approach to reform that offers consumers fewer choices and less competition is necessarily suspect.

But he argues “that conservative defenders of the status quo are fighting against choice and competition.” All you have to do is look at what Zachary Roth offers in this piece of reporting on some new analysis:

The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country’s insurance markets are defined as “highly concentrated,” according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that’s led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.

Far from healthy market competition, HCAN describes the situation as “a market failure where a small number of large companies use their concentrated power to control premium levels, benefit packages, and provider payments in the markets they dominate.”

So extreme is the level of consolidation, in fact, that one former top Federal Trade Commission official working with HCAN has sent a letter to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, asking for an investigation into the health insurance marketplace.

The idea of zero-sum grab-it-all screw-everyone-else healthy competition lives on, and Benen continues:

Specifically, the Justice Department considers a marketplace “highly concentrated” if a company’s market share tops 42%. HCAN found 10 states in which one or two companies control 80% or more of the market. In Alabama, home to Sen. Richard Shelby (R), one of the strongest opponents of reform, Blue Cross Blue Shield controls 83% of the statewide market.

Individual insurance companies enjoy practical monopolies in many parts of the country, which keeps prices high, profits high, and consumers screwed. It’s why the public option is seen as such a serious threat – it would introduce at least some competition, and offer consumers some choices.

So he suggests the Democrats take a new approach, and say something like “ambitious, progressive reform is necessary for consumer choice and competition.” He says it might be framed this way – “To oppose reform and a public option is to oppose choice and competition. And everyone loves choice and competition, right?”

That may be too subtle by half. It would just confuse people. And is anyone appalled by monopolies any longer? Sure, Microsoft has cornered the market for operating systems, and Windows crashes far too often – but the home computer works well enough, most of the time. Monopoly? Was that a board game from many, many years ago? And what’s a board game, anyway?

Actually, Michael Lind has a better idea. Pull a Jonathan Swift. Use satire:

Now that the president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans, battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are conservative defenders of America’s system of for-profit, private mercenaries. The Democrats are divided among progressives who favor universal, publicly funded police who would protect all citizens against crime, and moderate and conservative Democrats who argue that any citizen security reform should leave America’s existing system of soldiers for hire in place.

“Do we want long wait times when we call for the police, like people in countries with socialized police forces?” Sen. Russell Flack, R-Ga., asked during a floor debate yesterday. “Under our system, we can choose our own police officers, as long as we pay for protection out of our own pockets. Do we want some government bureaucrat choosing the police for us?”

Progressives, however, argue that the American system of privatized policing is no longer affordable. They point to data showing that the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on police protection as countries in Europe and East Asia, where police are public servants paid out of taxes. Although the U.S. pays twice as much for police as the average developed country, more than 40 million Americans remain without police protection because their employers do not pay for crime insurance and they cannot afford to purchase it on their own.

There’s much more at the link. It’s kind of cool, especially this:

The private security industry, however, has mobilized to oppose a public police plan in any form. “A public police plan is a non-starter,” says Kay Street, the president of the powerful American Mercenaries Association (AMA). “Our system is based on using taxpayer subsidies to encourage private crime insurance companies and the mercenaries whom they hire to provide a service that could be provided more cheaply and efficiently by government. If government actually provided police protection more cheaply, the way it is done in other countries, then what would be the point of subsidies to for-profit security providers?”

Senate Minority Leader Jefferson Davis, R-Miss., agrees: “I think we should be very careful before we start down the slippery slope of socialism or fascism or whatnot. If we make police protection a public responsibility, then where will it all end? What next? Public roads? Public schools? Hitler and Stalin had public police – and we know where that led.”

That’s about where we are. And some of us just don’t understand Republicans. But that only means we hate the winner-take-all free market, because we’re losers. And this debate will never end.