The Irony of Geert Wilders

In America, you fairly regularly see liberals defend the rights of others to express fundamentally illiberal positions. That's why you end up with spectacles like the ACLU defending the right of the KKK to have a march, or anybody at all defending the rights of Westboro Baptist Church to picket with its homophobic signs. There's usually a lot of throat-clearing about how the liberal groups don't really share the ideas or goals of the extremists, and nobody really thinks otherwise.

That's why I'm interested in the case of Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim Dutch politician on trial for saying nasty things about Islam. It's not the kind of trial that would take place in the United States, but other countries have rather stricter limits on free speech. Lots of American conservatives have weighed in on the issue, including this typical entry from National Review:

Wilders compares Islam to Nazism, a provocative stance, to be sure. But how should such provocative criticism be received? With open debate, or with the criminalization of opinion? It is extremely pertinent in the Wilders case to ask whether his trial means that Europe’s commitment to freedom is already dead.

On the face of it, I'm in agreement. Society is best served by letting Wilders criticize Islam; Islam should be more than capable of rhetorically defending itself. But here's the thing I don't see Wilders' defenders acknowledge: the freedom they advocate for him is the freedom he would take away from Muslims.

This is a man, after all, who has called for banning the Koran:

Madam Speaker, the Koran is a book that incites to violence. I remind the House that the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code. In addition, the Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem. The distribution of such texts is made punishable by Article 137(e). The Koran is therefore a highly dangerous book; a book which is completely against our legal order and our democratic institutions. In this light, it is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state. I shall propose a second-reading motion to that effect.

That's not it, of course: Wilders has also called for a tax on Muslim women wearing headscarves and a ban on Mosque construction. Fundamentally, though, Wilders' defenders are invoking a freedom of expression for him that he would deny others.

That's not so shocking: Again, see the ACLU's defense of the KKK. What is shocking is that Wilders' defenders barely, if ever, acknowledge this tension. To read editorials like National Review's is to believe that Wilders has merely made some outrageous comments. In fact, he's advocated a course of action that would damage the freedom of Muslims living in his country.

Some American conservatives would, no doubt, suggest that Western societies are dooming themselves by letting radical Muslims take advantage of our traditions of openness. They're fine with some bit of double-standard, in other words, because the double-standard is supposedly needed to preserve the standard at all. It is stirring to see National Review unequivocally defend Wilders' right to speak his peace; when it comes to the rights of Muslims, however, there will always been room for debate.

Netflix Queue: "Space Cowboys"

Three thoughts about Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys":

* I'm shocked that Eastood and Tommy Lee Jones could appear in the same movie without Hollywood imploding under the weight of all that laconic.

* The movie was pitched to the public as an action-comedy, but it's a Clint Eastwood action-comedy. This means, among other things, that the movie is somewhat gently paced: It doesn't hit you with the gag-every-five-seconds pace of today's films. It also means, of course, that somebody sympathetic dies at the end. But it's a fun film, so it's a good death. Oh, Clint Eastwood.

* I think I prefer out-and-out science fiction and fantasy to movies set in the real space program. My mind keeps picking out discrepancies between Hollywood-NASA and real-NASA. Too distracting for an old space nerd like me.

Still, an enjoyable flick. Three out of four stars.

Federalist 39: James Madison's Confusing Sales Job

Read all entries in my series on The Federalist Papers here.

Well. No wonder we're so confused.

My writing partner Ben Boychuk and I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ron Chernow this week. He wrote the acclaimed new biography of George Washington, along with an earlier bio of Alexander Hamilton -- he knows something, in other words, about the founding of this country. In our discussion, Chernow repeated his assertion (first made in a New York Times op-ed) that today's Tea Partiers are wrong to claim an exclusive ideological heritage descended from the Founders. In truth, Chernow said, the Constitution was a compromise between competing visions of government -- powerful or limited? Instead of actually settling the question, the Founders fudged it a bit, so that the arguments of the 21st century aren't so different from the 18th.

Nowhere is that tension more evident, perhaps, than in James Madison's authorship of Federalist 39. Madison's intent here is to fend off criticism of the proposed new government as insufficiently federal -- that is, he's arguing against the proposition that the Constitution takes away too much power away from the states and deposits it in the national government.

Wait: That's kind of what the Constitution was created to do. The Articles of Confederation, which gave pride of power to the states, had already proved unworkable as a means of national government. But yesterday's antifederalists, like today's Tea Partiers, wanted to see more power left to the states -- and they were ruthless in suggesting that advocates of the Constitution were lying in their efforts to convince Americans that states still retained considerable power. Here's "A Farmer" writing in Antifederalist No. 3:

There are but two modes by which men are connected in society, the one which operates on individuals, this always has been, and ought still to be called, national government; the other which binds States and governments together (not corporations, for there is no considerable nation on earth, despotic, monarchical, or republican, that does not contain many subordinate corporations with various constitutions) this last has heretofore been denominated a league or confederacy. The term federalists is therefore improperly applied to themselves, by the friends and supporters of the proposed constitution. This abuse of language does not help the cause; every degree of imposition serves only to irritate, but can never convince. They are national men, and their opponents, or at least a great majority of them, are federal, in the only true and strict sense of the word.

Madison has tricky political ground to cover here, then, and he treads cautiously and confusingly. Let's jump to the final paragraph of 39 for a picture of the ambiguity.

The proposed Constitution, therefore is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

Got that?

Now it's true that something can be partly one thing and partly another. But this paragraph -- and the whole paper -- makes me wonder if the effort to sell the Constitution as a document of "limited" government is more a political sales job than a substantive description.

The new government, after all, will have unlimited power of taxation. It will be the arbiter of disputes between the states. It alone has the power to raise a standing army. The one power the states seem to retain over the national government at this stage is whether or not to opt-in to the system. After that, they can shape it somewhat -- through electoral votes and appointments to the Senate -- but there are no real veto points once the national government has made up its mind about a course of action. The states can give legitimacy to the national government; there's no real mechanism for them to withdraw it.

That's not to say the national government has unlimited power overall. It has its spheres of influence, and the states have theirs.

In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

But the national government's spheres of action are biggies. That's why the antifederalists fought the Constitution.

I'm not arguing for all this as a brief for unlimited central government, incidentally. I'm rather haphazardly trying to make sense of this as a pitch at the time, and looking at it in light of what actually happened in America's history. And what I'm seeing here is this: James Madison, whether he wanted to or not, left the door open to a bigger government than what today's Tea Partiers want -- or perhaps he himself envisioned.

How wide? I suspect we'll find that out in the coming papers.

Netflix Queue: "Ichi the Killer"

No.

To elaborate: There's two movies in "Ichi the Killer." One is a sly subversion of superhero myths -- particularly "Batman." We're always told that Batman/Bruce Wayne is kind of a freak, but really: If you were a billionaire industrialist, wouldn't you be tempted to become a city's crime-fighting savior with really cool cars and utility belts? But our "hero" in this movie, Ichi, really is twisted and broken. The villain, Kakihara is reminiscent of the Joker with his facial scars, but takes his penchant for chaos-born-of-ennui to depth that Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger wouldn't have been able to contemplate for a mainstream American movie. And there's a third, very important character: the henchman. For him, the story isn't an exciting villain-versus-hero duel -- it's a tragedy. The subversion extends all the way to the movie's confrontation between Ichi and Kakihara.

Unfortunately, that movie is buried beneath another one so filled with torture-porn style violence and misogyny that I can't possibly recommend it.

I want to like "Ichi the Killer." But despite its merits, it feels harmful.

Michelle Rhee and School Reform

Ben and I talk about whether the ongoing, never-ending process of school reform is endangered by the resignation of Michelle Rhee as Washington D.C.'s chancellor of schools. My take:

Certain "reformers" are rushing to make Michelle Rhee's resignation a morality tale for the nation's education system -- an example of the corrupt power of teachers' unions and the rot of public schools. But there's less to the development than meets the eye. If "reform" is the message, then Rhee was an imperfect messenger: It is time for her to move on.

Reform, after all, remains the agenda for D.C. Mayor-in-Waiting Vincent Gray and Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson -- a Rhee protege -- have promised that efforts begun under Rhee will continue. As Melinda Hennenberger noted at Politics Daily, "The plan under Henderson is Rhee's exact reform agenda, so how does giving someone else a chance to implement it amount to disaster?"

It doesn't. But some conservatives interested in education reform have a second, extra-educational agenda: Politics. They want to undermine teachers' unions that -- not incidentally -- have proven a powerful ally of Democrats in past election seasons. It's in the critics' interest to portray those teachers as obstacles to reform; unfortunately, unions all too often protect the jobs of bad teachers and give those reformers ample material to work with.

There's a better way. In September, the New York Times profiled Brockton High School in Massachusetts, a large and previously underperforming school that has seen dramatic rises in student test scores. How did the school do that? With a renewed emphasis on reading and writing skills, even in classes not devoted to those subjects.

Teachers weren't the adversaries at Brockton; they drove the process.

And, as the Times notes, the school "scrupulously honored the union contract." Teamwork, it turns out, is better for students than constant political bickering.

If education reform is to succeed, teachers cannot be the enemy -- both for political and pedagogical reasons. Michelle Rhee apparently didn't understand that. But her resignation doesn't have to mean the death of reform.

For No Reason: My Favorite Shows on TV Right Now

I don't actually have a TV. What we have are a couple of computers, and we cobble together our video entertainment out of an amalgam of Hulu, Netflix and a few other legal (I swear!) video-streaming sites. That means my access to current TV programming, while not bad, is somewhat limited. Still, these are the shows I most enjoy watching right now:

* JUSTIFIED: It lacks some of the complexity and depth of star Timothy Olyphant's previous series, "Deadwood," but it's got style to spare. Nice dialogue and a series of great guest-star appearances make this show as entertaining as any on TV.

* LOUIE: F/X makes ambitious series on small budgets, and this might be the best current example of the model. Louis CK is -- in his public persona, at least -- a humanistic misanthrope, not to everybody's tastes. This show goes some dark places, not all of them funny. But it's almost always compelling.

* COMMUNITY: It's joke-a-second meta-commentary on TV sitcoms could get tired if it didn't also have heart. It's a seriously funny show that deserves a much wider audience than it has.

* MODERN FAMILY: Shows that a family sitcom can have actual wit.

And, well, that's it. Those are the shows I have to see each week, when they're in-season. The end of compelling and complex sci-fi operas like "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" in the last year have left me without a meaty drama to sink my teeth into. ("Mad Men" doesn't do it for me; I hear "Breaking Bad" is pretty good though.) I'll take any recommendations. What am I missing?

Suicide Bombers May Not Always Hate Freedom

These findings shouldn't be all that surprising. It's human nature: People don't like outsiders coming into their country and running things. Careful diplomatic talk about sovereignty isn't all that useful if people in Kabul or Baghdad see that it's actually American troops keeping order; that's going to rub folks the wrong way.

That doesn't mean America never fights abroad. But if we want to be greeted as liberators, we should liberate and leave. And if we don't think ahead of time that's possible -- after an honest accounting of the facts instead of Rumsfeldian apathy to the concept -- then we need to calculate whether such an intervention is really likely to be worth it. In most cases, it probably won't.