Blogs: Sara Robinson

Why Change Happens: Ten Theories

Sara Robinson — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:41:27 -0400

One of the grandest -- and most frustrating -- things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In fact, there's simply nothing like the Internet if you want to be thrown together with people who have ordered their entire lives around fundamental propositions that would never have occurred to you if you lived to be 100. Behold your fellow earthlings, in all their bizarre and twisted glory….

A lot of these disconnects have to do with all the weird and wonderful theories people have about why change happens. Because we each have our own pet theories of how the world works, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what's likely to happen next. Since these often unspoken understandings are among the things futurists are trained to look for, I thought I'd offer a short taxonomy of the various assumptions people bring to their thinking about what drives social change.

Professional futurists have, through the years, boiled down all the various change theories down to about ten basic classifications. (There may be others: the list changes with new information, and we're always open to suggestions.) But, as a practical working thesis, almost any theory you can name can be sorted into one (or, occasionally, more) of these bins:

1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.

2. Development. Change happens because people want to build a decent life, which naturally leads societies toward increased specialization and complexity. Individuals don't have much control over this process. The real change masters are social engineers -- mostly experts, academics and political leaders of various sorts -- who direct the pace of development. Improvement occurs when people build relationships; over the next 20 years, we will continue to see networks of expert change agents emerge to manage increasing complexity.

3. Technology. Change happens because humans are motivated to solve problems, which requires the creation of new technologies, which in turn drive progress and social change. The real masters of the future are the scientists and technologists who will solve our current problems; and people participate in this change to the extent that they adopt and apply these solutions. Progress depends utterly on the amount of support we give to research and development efforts. Over the next 20 years, biotechnology and new sustainable "green" technologies will create the biggest changes in how we live.

4. Ideas. Change happens when culture changes through the dissemination of new ideas. One good idea has the potential to change the world. The real power to create change belongs to the media, which edits, frames, and disseminates ideas. As individuals adopt these ideas, they participate in the creation of change, and experience personal growth as well. Progress depends on how effectively we work to change people's thinking. Over the next 20 years, better ideas will be promoted by greatly improved media. The world will become more enlightened as human consciousness grows.

5. Markets. Change happens because people seek to acquire creature comforts -- desires which push entrepreneurs and industries to innovate. Industry leaders and economists are the leading experts here, but consumers and their choices are the main change drivers. Progress depends on encouraging people to produce, trade, and consume freely. Over the next 20 years, the world will generally continue to become more consumer-driven as standards rise in less-developed countries (though there may be bumps along the way).

6. Cycles. Change happens according to predictable patterns, which can be discerned by studying history. These patterns are usually seen as cycles or waves, with periods of great change alternating with periods of rest and recovery. ("History doesn't repeat itself -- but it rhymes," said Twain.) In this view, change is viewed as a natural process, with a lifecyle that includes birth, maturity, and death; and people have limited influence on how this cycle plays out. The greatest insight into these patterns belongs to historians and theorists who have studied them. Progress depends on our ability to learn from the past, and use that knowledge to surf the change waves as they come. Over the next 20 years, long-wave theories call for very large energy, technology, and political shifts.

7. Conflict. Change happens when groups of people engage in a struggle to improve their lot. Those who understand change best are Marxists, union leaders, political organizers and activists, and social justice advocates. People succeed in creating change only if they're willing to fight for it, and progress occurs when we pursue our own interests to the fullest. The next 20 years will be dominated by conflicts over resources, and by smaller countries who will try to assert growing independence from the US-led order.

8. Power. Change happens when powerful people and groups decide to alter the status quo to further increase their power. Nobody really understands the future unless they're part of this elite; and the majority of us will have no say in their machinations. (Some Power theories argue that it's better just to let these well-connected people make the decisions anyway.) Over the next 20 years, they will continue to consolidate their control over nations and industries.

9. Evolution. Change happens when the physical environment changes, and organisms adapt in response to those changes. Ecologists have the deepest understanding of change; the rest of us are co-participants, but nobody really knows what will ultimately come of our efforts. Our best chance of progress lies with our ability to understand the world around us, and find the most appropriate ways of responding to emerging issues. Over the next 20 years, we will either come to terms with our responsibility to nature, or risk extinction. Global warming, mass extinction, and the rise of virulent, drug-resistant organisms are among the biggest concerns.

10. Chaos, Complexity, and Criticality. These are three different theories that have all arisen in the past 40 years as our understanding of systems theory has grown. What they have in common is that they describe system behavior that appears to be non-rational and random; but becomes somewhat comprehensible when you understand the larger system at work. Nobody can really understand all the variables at work; but those who take the time to study a system and its interactions may get an upper hand -- or, at least, be prepared for the extreme behavior the system can deliver.

Each of these basic change models has its appropriate uses, its explanatory strengths, and its limits. You can go through almost any comment thread on any blog and find several of these assumptions at work. Most of them aren't mutually exclusive (and some, like Conflict and Power, are two ends of the same conversation); but we shouldn't be afraid to have reasoned debates about which model most accurately fits the situation we're discussing. In fact, making sure we're working off the right change model is critical if we want to make plans that will actually get us where we want to be.

And many of the political debates we have -- with each other and with conservatives -- are, at their core, conversations between competing theories. Market theory, left in a vacuum, looks pretty good. Put it alongside the limits of nature, and it looks like a recipe for disaster. Evolutionary thinking explains much about nature, and Richard Dawkins argues persuasively that it may also work for cultural ideas; but when you apply it to social issues, you can easily end up with social Darwinism (which is implicit in the Power model). Not good. And so on. If you're going to make good guesses about the future, you need to choose your model carefully, stay mindful of its drawbacks, and be sure it actually fits the circumstances of the scenario at hand.

It can also be very instructive to spend some time thinking about the theories that make the most sense to you, personally. Most of us have two or three dominant ones that we think explain just a whole lot about the world; another couple we're quite comfortable with; and at the other end, one or two that we find genuinely unpalatable. I've noticed that whenever I write about my own views on change (which pick and choose from the whole menu, though I'm particularly partial to Ideas and Cycle theories and think that #1, linear progress, was pretty much refuted by the Dark Ages), I'm sure to hear from partisans of other theories.

Part of the strength of the liberal worldview lies in our diverse views of how change happens. Progressives tend to gravitate toward Development, Ideas, and Conflict (though a few forward-thinking ones also like Technology and the "Three C's" of #10); but most of us are broad-minded enough to entertain other theories, if only as thought exercises. Conservatives agree with us wholeheartedly on Ideas -- and that conviction is at the heart of their passion for full-on culture War. Other pet theories on the right include Markets and Power, both of which have been deeply embedded into their ideology. They've also got some very different ideas about the potential and appropriate uses of Technology; and both the religious right and the neoliberal economists offers visions of the future that can probably best be classified as (dystopian or utopian, respectively) Progress theories.

I'm offering this in the hope that it will give us another way of thinking about our hopes, fears, and disagreements -- both when it's just progressives talking, and also when we're trying to figure out where in the hell the other side is coming from. It's tempting to dismiss people as clueless idiots who just don't get the point, when all they're really doing is interpreting events through a different change assumption. And maybe yours is better, and maybe theirs is wrong; but that's a discussion reasonable people should be able to have.

Reclaiming Mother's Day

Sara Robinson — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:01:49 -0400

Progressives have always loved holidays, which may be why we've created so many of them. There are Saturdays, of course, brought to us with no small help from the early 20th century unions. And May Day. And Labor Day.

And Mother's Day, which started out as the first and perhaps greatest progressive holiday of all.

You may have noticed that all the holidays I've just mentioned are in deep trouble. May Day hasn't been big in the US since the last loud, proud Commie folded up his red flag in the late 1930s. Saturday, as you can testify yourself if you're reading this from work on the day it was published, is also gravely endangered. Not only do more and more of us work on Saturdays; if you're on salary, you're doing it for no pay at all. Labor Day is a boon to the travel industry, since for a lot of us, those three days are the only summer vacation our bosses will let us have. And it's likely that most Americans, if pressed, would cynically tell you that Mother's Day was the nefarious handiwork of a secret cabal -- a shady backroom marketing deal concocted by executives from Hallmark, FTD, DeBeers, and Russell Stover.

Conservatives don't like holidays unless they can use them to sell stuff. They have special reason to really not like this one.

Back to the Roots
Mother's Day got its start as the fusion of two holidays created by two women, both activists protesting the carnage of the Civil War. The first was a young homemaker from West Virginia named Ann Jarvis, whose established the first Mother's Work Day in 1858 to improve sanitation among her Appalachian neighbors. When the war came up to their doorsteps, Jarvis's homegrown peace group tended the wounded on both sides; after the war, they worked to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors in the state.

The other was Boston socialite, suffragette, and poet Julia Ward Howe -- an incandescently bright woman who spoke five languages and ran the New England Institute for the Blind with her husband, Dr. Samuel Howe. Howe is still best remembered as the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic -- the abolitionist anthem that captures much of the righteous fury of the Union cause. For 40 years after the war, she was one of the most popular public speakers in the country, getting the full-on rock star treatment wherever she went.

Howe also got involved with the "sanitation" issue while caring for soldiers during the war. The experience changed her rhetoric, but did not soften it: in the years after the war, she became a determined and outspoken pacifist. In 1870, she wrote the original Mother's Day Proclamation, setting out her vision of a new American holiday in which women brought their moral authority to bear in the cause of peace:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

In 1907, Ann Jarvis's daughter Anna established the first modern Mother's Day in a Methodist church in Grafton, WV. The idea caught on, and in 1914, Woodrow Wilson declared the first Mother's Day to honor the mothers who had lost sons in war -- the ones we now call Gold Star mothers. Predictably though (this being America after all), within a decade, the event had become so commercialized that Anna Jarvis herself was publicly opposing its corruption. But the damage was done; and so far, it's proven stubbornly irreversible.

But that doesn't mean we can't begin to recover some of what's been lost.

Guns and Roses
Our new progressive movement has a historic opportunity to bring it back. Code Pink, among other groups, has begun to overtly reclaim Mother's Day, and restore Howe's passionate purpose to the occasion. As the nation begins to reckon the true costs of the Iraq atrocity, tomorrow is as good a day as any to reflect on a sobering fact: As with every other war men have ever fought, women will, in the end, bear much of the cost of this one.

It may be that the cost of war to women and their families is so overwhelming that we can't even bring ourselves to contemplate it. Women who choose to become mothers spend 20 years (and our skinny young figures, our dreamed-for careers, and the most productive season of our lives) nurturing children. For most of us, raising our kids will be the greatest work we ever do. It will certainly be the most demanding. And maintaining our marriages to the men who join us in the task may come in a close second.

What right does anyone -- especially our government -- have to ask us to sacrifice those beautiful babies, and all the time, money, and energy we invested in creating them, as cannon fodder in rich men's wars? What right does it have to take our warm-hearted husbands and turn them into coldblooded killers? All the cant about "patriotic duty" and "protecting our way of life" is a massive diversion from a deeper truth: our society has such fathomless contempt for women, and so completely devalues their labor, that it thinks nothing of asking us to give our children and spouses up to the war machine without even discussing how we should be compensated for this supreme sacrifice.

After all: when our government makes us the mothers and wives of soldiers, it not only seizes everything we've already invested in our kids and our marriages. It stakes a claim on the rest of our lives going forward, too. It is us, not the leaders who sent them into battle, who be forever haunted by the memory of our dead children. It is us, not the government, who will be burdened until our last day with taking care of sons and daughters and partners who are too damaged to make their own way in the world when they get home. We are the ones who will pick up the pieces when their lives shatter, over and over; who will raise the children and grandchildren they can't properly parent; who will lie with them at night and hold them for hours while they battle demons we can never see or understand.

There is no amount of money that can ever repay America's families for this. When so-called "family values" conservatives vote to deny veterans anything less than the best available care, those veterans' mothers and wives (and fathers and husbands) will be the ones left picking up the slack. In the years ahead, the financial and emotional burden will break a great many of them. Mother's Day is as good a time as any to take a good hard look at those costs -- not just the unimaginable opportunity costs of the war, but the private toll it will continue to take on American families for the next several decades.

It's not that I have anything against chocolate, flowers, and a nice champagne brunch in bed. Bring it on (and while you're at it, I wouldn't say no to a nice foot massage, either). But I would gently suggest that it's high time we reclaimed the original meaning of this great progressive holiday, and create some new traditions to remind the country what it really means to respect the work of mothers, all the way down.

So, tomorrow, send your mom a corsage. Send a dozen roses to a Gold Star mother. Send a check to Code Pink. Send Julia Ward Howe's proclamation to every mother you know. And if you think of some other way we can mark the occasion more fittingly, drop it in the comments.

If we really value women and families as much as we claim to every year on Mother's Day, we will do them the real honor of never asking them to send their children and partners into combat again without a damned good life-or-death reason.

Outright Barbarism vs. The Civil Society

Sara Robinson — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:35:14 -0400

I live in a nice place.

I mean that literally. It took some getting used to. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, where people put a premium on being direct and to the point, have no time to waste on small talk or personal sharing, and will call a stupid idea stupid to your face, moving to Canada required a whole lot of gearing back on that brusque American aggressive-in-your-face thing. The humbling fact was: We had to learn to mind our manners.

Much of the adjustment work that first year involved re-learning the art of Being Nice. We had to get used to meetings that started with 10 or 15 minutes of personal chit-chat. We had to train ourselves to stop interrupting people, and to be more careful to say "please" and "thank you." We had to discover (sometimes, the hard way) that losing your temper with Canadians means that you will invariably lose the conflict. The more terse and irritated you get, the more determinedly calm and polite Canadians become, until you're standing there looking like a raving idiot and they're still firmly in control (though they're very sorry you're having such a bad day).

We also learned the unofficial Canadian motto, which is "I'm sorry." Canadians will say "I'm sorry" even if you were the one who bumped into them. (Americans, on the other hand, won't say it at all: apologizing is admitting fault, which is an invitation to lawsuits.) We used to respond to this by pleading with them out of our own misguided sense of Niceness: "No. Please. Don't be sorry. It was MY fault." But after a while, we gave up, went with the flow, and started apologizing for everything, too. It was really...well, nice, once we got used to it.

The whole world makes fun of Canadians' resolute civility -- but once I'd read a little Canadian history, I realized that this Being Nice thing isn't just a cute cultural quirk. In fact, up here, it's is a deadly serious matter of national survival. Canada's 13 provinces and territories are, effectively, three separate nations—each with its own culture, language, religion, and history. On top of that, the country is the world's largest importer of new immigrants, a large fraction of whom are from cultures very different from Canada's aboriginal and European bedrock. The federal constitution that binds all this together is very weak (it's not unlike the U.S.'s original Articles of Confederation), and the overwhelming bulk of government power is still tightly concentrated in the hands of the provincial premiers (that's Canadian for "state governors"). Secession is eminently possible, as the Quebecois so often like to remind us.

In the face of all that, there's the constant possibility—which does not exist in the U.S.—that one cranky politician having one bad day could stand up and say one idiot thing that would cause one faction or another to decamp en masse, thus precipitating the instant demise of Canada-as-we-know-it. The threat is real. It could happen. And the only thing that keeps it from happening is that resolute collective determination to stay calm, keep the peace, and Be Nice.

Civility is, in a very real sense, the glue that holds this big, diverse nation together. Name-calling, othering, and losing one's temper is, quite simply, un-Canadian and unpatriotic. Failure to be civil in public is the fastest way (perhaps the only way) to get Canadians genuinely peeved at you. In the land where "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is supplanted by "peace, order, and good government" as the organizing values, there is simply no excuse at all for that kind of behavior, ever.

Our essential reliance on civil discourse—and the big trouble that awaits us when we try to function without it—is the same idea that Jeffrey Feldman explores, far more pointedly, in his new book, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. Feldman, whose indispensable Frameshop blog has done a lot of the heavy lifting in deconstructing the way the American right uses and abuses language, briskly and thoughtfully deconstructs seven specific ways 30 years of us-versus-them rhetoric has polarized the country, forced us into unnecessary conflicts against each other and everyone else, and virtually destroyed our ability to govern ourselves.

Dave Neiwert, who coined the term "eliminationist rhetoric" to describe the language Americans have so often used to justify violence against each other, has carefully outlined the process by which ugly talk can easily devolve into horrific action. Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. Feldman's book breaks out another side to this conversation, by showing that the right wing has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms.

For each of the seven topics Feldman calls out, there's one conservative spokesperson who's led the rhetorical race to the bottom -- and one specific long-term conservative political agenda item that got served as a result. In his first example, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre sells a "vision of the world where violent assaults on individuals are inevitable, all laws and institutions are powerless to stop them, and the only guarantee for survival is for citizens to be prepared to fire a gun at the oncoming danger." Feldman argues that America can only adopt this worldview at the cost of its own democratic ideals, by fostering a "command-obedience" relationship between the governors and the governed—one that places the use of force outside the rule of law and beyond the control of the people's government. In the presence of arms, people are silenced, and the creative give-and-take required for good problem-solving suffers. Those who hold the guns prevail. This way, he warns, lies tyranny.

Then there's Pat Buchanan, leading the charge against immigration, which he insists is a calculated, well-planned "Reconquista" which has enlisted millions of triumphant Mexicans to invade America and exact their terrible revenge for the defeat of Santa Anna 160 years ago. Our only defense against the barbarian horde is to kill or be killed. Feldman notes that this kind of overheated eliminationist framing has been a boon to corporate conservatives, because it's made it impossible to have a nuanced (or even coherent) conversation that acknowledges NAFTA's grotesque destruction of the economy and the environment on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.

"Immigration has become a political issue because of trade, not because of race or 'civilization,'" notes Feldman. "At its most primary, political level, America's immigration problem is a product of what David Sirota has aptly named the 'hostile takeover' of key economic policies in our government by vast corporations in control of unimaginable wealth."

But as long as we're talking about anchor babies and bilingual culture, we won't be talking about that. And that's just fine with those who are making a killing of their own on the status quo.

Ann Coulter's success is largely built on her ability to take any issue and instantly use it to justify violence against the right wing's favorite targets. Feldman traces the way this dubious gift has defined the trajectory of her career, culminating in her insistence that liberals need to be eliminated because they're traitors who are ready to hand the country over to al-Qaida. That's always the bottom line with Ann—and that quickness to write off anyone capable of a creative or nuanced thought creates a climate that stifles our ability to solve problems together, which is the essence of democratic government. It also effectively discourages people from participating in politics at all, lest they become targets of people who've learned their moves from Ann. "Coulter's rhetoric," writes Feldman, "poisons the soil in which civic identity takes root."

Feldman goes on to unmask Bill O'Reilly's bluster as a smokescreen that makes it impossible to talk seriously about national security and the things that really threaten us; John Gibson's "War on Christmas" as an assault on our ability to teach diversity in schools; and James Dobson's weird ideas about child discipline and family authority as a noxious cognitive pattern that influences the way we approach larger issues of community, authoritarianism, citizen discipline, and even foreign policy (inasmuch as some policymakers tend to view smaller countries exercising their sovereignty as wayward children in need of correction).

In the final chapters, his dissection of Dinesh D'Souza's rhetoric ties it all up with a bow. According to Feldman, every issue D'Souza touches down to the inevitable conclusion that liberals are to blame—a broad and breathtaking act of scapegoating that makes it impossible for us to get a collective handle on the true chain of responsibility that resulted in everything from 9/11 to the disastrous war that followed.

Taken as a whole, Feldman argues persuasively that the right wing's use of violent language and imagery over the past 30 years has gravely, deeply—perhaps even mortally—wounded the American body politic. As social theorists from John Dewey to Miss Manners have pointed out—and as my Canadian neighbors seem to understand as the central fact of their civic existence—civility is the necessary ingredient that allows democracies to function. Without it, there is no common good, no mutual respect, no reason to have faith in our ability to govern together wisely and well. When these basic agreements fail, so does our ability to self-govern. Reading this book from my peaceable perch on a mountainside in western Canada, the destruction of America's civic order, as Feldman describes it, looks utter and complete.

Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other. And, as simple as it sounds, it may start with a determined resolution that we are going to be civil to each other. Always. Even to your obnoxious Dittohead neighbor. Even to your annoying fundamentalist sister-in-law. Even to that jerk with the faded W'04 bumper sticker who stole your parking space. Even to the whinging concern troll in the comments thread. Catharsis feels like a birthright in our I-want-it-now society; but it's a luxury that progressives can no longer afford. Every time we give into it, the culture splits a little wider, and our odds of ever healing again it grow a bit more remote. It's time for progressives to step up and show the rest of the country how grownups behave. We've got an example to set, and a hundred million people to educate.

It's a lot to ask of "please" and "thank you." But the stakes are too high to ignore.

If we want democracy, we need to be able to see our fellow citizens as human beings, possessed of their own inherent worth and dignity.

If we want justice, we need to grant them the same rights and respect we feel entitled to—even when they're strenuously disagreeing with us, or when their interests and ours line up on opposite poles.

If we want security, we must first learn to be safe with each other, and trust ourselves as guardians of our collective well-being.

If we want to rebuild the country, we need to remember that we are all heirs to the same vast trust of social, political, and physical capital built up by previous generations; that our livelihood and liberties depend entirely on how well we can manage to sustain that common legacy; and that we share a duty to ensure our children's future by passing all of that on to them, not only intact but richer yet.

The only disagreements we should have are over the best means to achieve all this. The goals themselves should be beyond question. Feldman gives us a useful primer on how the right wing has carefully and deliberately separated us from both our founding goals and the means to achieve them. It's up to us to put put it all back together, and that starts with Being Nice.

A final note. The idea that Being Nice is a sign of weakness is, as noted above, inherent in the conservative narrative Feldman describes. Anger merchants like Coulter and O'Reilly have sold an entire generation of Americans on the idea that the mere desire to gather facts, contemplate them calmly, and discuss them rationally with people who might have other points of view makes one a traitor to the nation—weak, ineffectual, and dangerously liberal.

The horrifying result of this is a political climate in which many Americans believe that those who can throw the biggest tantrum deserve to get their way. (Which is not democracy, or anything like it. It's rule by bullies.) If you want to know why American politics sounds like a sandbox fight in the kindergarten playground, there's one good answer. Look at it this way, and it becomes clear that the Obama/Hillary partisan pissing matches of the past many weeks are, once again, playing right into conservative hands. Never mind the fact that when those two fight, McCain wins. Look beyond that to the more distressing fact, which is that too many Democrats have finally become every bit as ugly as the GOP has always been. They've gotten to us. We've finally become what we most despise.

For the record: Being Nice, done well, has a ferocious strength all its own, as anyone who's watched a CBC news interviewer or dealt with a Canadian school headmaster can tell you. Over the past four years, I've seen fastidious politeness and heartbreaking compassion used in the hands of master practitioners, and marveled at the power of sheer civility to defeat hotheads, deflect crazy ideas, and send shit-stirrers right out the door. It's a skill we need to relearn, and soon. Fortunately, we have 32 million neighbors and authors like Jeffrey Feldman to show us the way.

Jeremiah Wright: What (Else) Is Going On

Sara Robinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:38:13 -0400

Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week -- and the media doesn't quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they're stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him?

Lost in the tortured pondering over this narrow question -- apparently the only one that matters, to hear them tell it -- is a lot of deeper context, without which none of Wright's current situation and status make a whole lot of sense.

Some of that context has to do with who Wright is, and what role he plays on the larger stage of American religion. Some of it of it is rooted in popular narratives about religion that the GOP has worked overtime to sell; and that the media (along with many Christians) have never questioned. Some of may have to do with the way our broader assumptions about the role religion can and should play in 21st-century American culture and politics could be changing. These three factors are driving a whole backstory that nobody's talking about; but which provides the deeper subtext we need to have if we're going to understand what Jeremiah Wright represents, and the role he plays not just for Obama, but for the country.

Since the corporate media isn't remotely up to the job of explaining all this -- and probably wouldn't if they could -- let me fill you in on what else is going on here.

Liberation Theology versus the Prosperity Gospel
The basic elements of this backstory are deftly laid out in Sarah Posner's thoughtful new book, God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. The book takes a hard look at the explosive growth of the "prosperity gospel" evangelical subculture, which is frequently found in suburban megachurches -- and is supplanting Martin Luther King's liberation theology in some black churches around the country as well. Posner describes the essence of this consumerist "Word of Faith" gospel:

Word of Faith...emphasizes the power of the born-again believer in Jesus Christ to call things into existence, including the believer's own physical and mental health and, more important, the believer's financial prosperity. Because of its emphasis on the believer's divine right to physical well-being and financial riches, Word of Faith is often called the "prosperity gospel" or the "health and wealth gospel."

...Yet while it presents itself as a benign message of hope and purpose, critics of Word of Faith charge that it is a heresy that robs its followers of spiritual fulfillment, an affinity fraud that robs them of their money, and a distortion of the Scriptures, run by authoritarian preachers who rob their followers of their autonomy.

According to the "Word of Faith" panjandrums, whatever followers give to their preacher, God will return several times over. Forget the bank: if you need a thousand dollars, give the church a hundred, and wait for your supernatural return on investment. Forget the doctor: if you're sick or injured, a little extra in the bucket will incentivize God to restore your health. In an unapologetic return to the glory days before the Reformation, the system even allows people to buy indulgences: you can atone for your sins by helping the pastor buy that new Palm Springs golf retreat his ministry so badly needs!

Taking these mites from desperate and hopeful widows nets top prosperity gospel ministers millions of dollars a year: successful Word of Faith ministers own numerous homes, private jets and expensive cars. And these preachers' followers support their imperial lifestyles wholeheartedly. Jesus said, "By their fruits you shall know them." According to this theology, you can tell the Elect, because they're the ones with the biggest bowl of fruit. It's a belief system tailor - made to justify the most rapacious consumer society in history.

(This divinely-ordained pyramid scheme has not gone unnoticed. Six months ago, Senator Charles Grassley -- R-IA and a staunch Baptist -- took an interest in the way these ministers are using their non-profit status to generate vast fortunes. He asked six of the richest ministers, including Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, to open their books and submit to investigation of their operations. Four have complied in whole or part; two, including Copeland, are refusing outright, howling that this is a breach of the church-state wall -- you know, that same one they've been working overtime for years to tear down.)

The movement also a strong conservative political undercurrent, which Posner makes explicit:

Politically, Word of Faith is essentially a conservative movement that benefits from conservative policies....The prosperity gospel doesn't need regulation or legislation. A believer doesn't need the government to regulate corporations. If you don't make enough money, it's your own fault for not believing enough, for not speaking the word, for not claiming what is divinely yours. A believer doesn't need a government safety net if things go wrong. As [Rod] Parsley says, "The best thing government can do to help the poor is get out of the way. If government reduced taxes, removed industrial restraints, eliminated wage controls, and abolished subsidies, tariff[s], and other constraints on free enterprise, the poor would be helped in a way that AFDC, Social Security, and unemployment could never match." ...His gospel is the ultimate laissez-faire capitalism, regulated only by the invisible hand of God.

Starting in the Reagan years -- and with considerable practical and moral support from the GOP, which Posner documents -- the prosperity gospel swept through the country's Pentecostal churches, both black and white. To give you some idea of how incestuously this movement is bedded down in GOP politics, consider the fact that John McCain claims Rod Parsley and John Hagee -- two of the nation's biggest purveyors of the prosperity gospel -- as his "spiritual advisors." (A lot of us wondered why he chose these two, who are regarded as nutcases even by many Evangelicals; but reading Posner, the political ends being served become obvious.)

Needless to say: not everybody welcomed this new gospel with open arms. Millions of devout Evangelicals who've read their Bibles and noted Jesus' contempt for greed, as well as those who hew to older and more rigorous theologies like the Social Gospel and King-style liberation theology, find the whole thing beyond offensive and verging on blasphemy. From the beginning, some of the country's leading ministers, both black and white, have taken public exception to the idea of reducing God to the status of a personal ATM machine -- and have pushed back hard against a movement that they feel is a not only an IRS-sanctioned form of fraud, but also a heresy against 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

And here's where Jeremiah Wright comes into the story. According to Posner, Wright has been a visible and articulate critic of the GOP's new pet theology over the years -- one of a noisy clutch of ministers who've made no bones about the mischief inherent in this new theology. He's also a respected and insightful proponent of black liberation theology, holding King's torch high in the face of unscrupulous preachers who think they're helping poor people by cajoling them to vote away their safety net and toss their government checks in the offering plate.

Beyond that: unlike the vast majority of these ministers, most of whom attended small Bible colleges of dubious accreditation (if they attended seminary at all), Wright has degrees from Howard University and the University of Chicago Theological Seminary. It's gotta go down hard that he's a black man who is far better-educated than they are, and can argue circles around them about the Bible or anything else. Take it as a whole picture, and it's not hard to see that Wright is very sharp thorn in these people's sides. As long as he and his friends out there, their 30-year investment in the whole Word of Life movement is at risk. Obama's candidacy put him in the spotlight, and thus magnified the threat. So now he has very powerful enemies on the religious and political right.

Furthermore, turning Wright into a national demon was a two-fer. They could not only tank the Democrats' front-runner; they'd also take down a serious and persuasive theologian who's been calling them out hard on one of their longest-running and most successful efforts to sell the conservative worldview to the very people who stand to be most harmed by it.

That's a big part of what's driving the animus against Wright. It's the issue he was addressing head-on at the National Press Club on Saturday, when he talked about how the storm of criticism surrounding his remarks was, in effect, criticism of the traditions of the black church. It also answers the burning question of why the GOP and the corporate media will not let this go. What's happening here is bigger than just Barack and Hillary and John. It's a struggle between two competing Protestant theologies, both of which claim tens of millions of adherents -- and a galvanizing figure who hasn't gotten the hint, and still keeps standing up for his flock against those bent on shearing them.

A Voice for The Silent Majority
There's another part to this backstory as well. It has to do with the media's dominant narratives about religion in general over the past three decades.

Ever since Reagan came to power, media stories having to do with religion have almost always reflected a basic duality. On one hand, you had urban secularists (including the media people themselves) who had no connection at all to religion, which they regarded as backward and the sign of an inferior mind -- a contempt that was reflected in their generally incomplete and inaccurate coverage of the subject.

On the other hand, you had far-right preachers with loud voices and red faces hollering ignorant and irrational rants about gays, feminists, and liberals. To the secularists, these preachers' histrionics came to represent the evils of all religion; and furthermore, they verified every bias they had against every form of religion. And the hostility was returned in full: to these preachers and their followers, the condescending media coverage nourished their already overfed inferiority and persecution complexes, driving them further and further out of the mainstream.

This polarization was a boon to the conservative movement, because it's exactly the kind of us-versus-them story that conservatism feeds on. It was a key split that created the space to define the preposterously unreal stereotypes of the coastal latte liberal versus the "real American" -- the heartland values voter. And it made those two positions the only acceptable ones in the political or religious dialogue. It forced people to take sides in a war that nobody but the right wing even wanted to fight.

And in drawing that false and forced line, it also rendered vast stretches of America's religious, cultural, and political landscape absolutely invisible. The vast majority of Americans -- educated and moderate believers of many faiths whose understanding of God informs their passionate belief in justice, compassion, equality, and democracy -- got cut out of the conversation entirely, because they lived in a far more nuanced place that didn't look like either side. You never saw their intelligent, well-modulated religious leaders on TV talk shows; you never read interviews with their thinkers and writers in the paper. There was simply no place for them in that artificial narrative -- and since they didn't fit, the vast majority of America's religious people simply ceased to exist as a public or political entity at all.

The conservative ascendancy depended on keeping these people completely cut out of the conversation; and the media, driven by their own biases, dutifully cooperated for years in accomplishing that goal. Without the balance these other voices could offer, the religious right was free to define "religion" (including civil religion) on their own terms, and claim full control of the country's discourse. The first thing they did, of course, was declare all the moderate and liberal people of faith to be apostates, which only silenced them further. They've been out there, quietly fuming and frustrated, ever since.

But Jeremiah Wright appears to be turning his current notoriety into a bully pulpit from which, at long last, that forced silence might finally be broken. Listening to his interview with Bill Moyers last Friday, I felt like I was hearing something strong and intelligent and real and wise -- the kind of nuanced spiritual voice most of us have never heard on TV in our lifetimes (though the fortunate among us have always heard them in our churches). It was the voice of that suppressed and silent majority, the people of faith whose concerns and insights have been so thoroughly stifled that they've been utterly absent from the discourse for three long decades. Wright gave us a sharp reminder of what liberal Christian voices can sound like at their best. I hope he also whetted an appetite for out-of-the-box moral thinking that will allow us to hear more -- not just from Christians, but from many traditions. The broader the perspectives and the more corners we hear from, the better our responses to the current challenges will be.

Wright's current media blitz is no doubt an effort to capitalize on his infamy -- and, perhaps, help Obama by leaning into the controversy rather than shying away from it. (Honestly: does he have any other choice?) He may be hoping that the more we see of him, the more people will understand who he is, and the harder it will be for the slanders to stick.

But whatever his motives, I wish him well. It's just so remarkable, after all these years of blackout and blacklisting, to hear a moral voice that's not bought and paid for by the religious right, and not out there selling more fraudulent scams in the Great Republican Con. In Wright, we've finally got strong voice out there who knows how to call them on their game.

How Dangerous is The FLDS?

Sara Robinson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:41:34 -0400

One of the trickiest parts of dealing with the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy -- or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror.

it's a question worth asking in the wake of the state of Texas' intervention in the Eldorado colony of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. As the country is thrust into a fresh debate over individual religious freedom versus our collective interest in protecting people's civil rights, we're struggling once again with the deeper question: When should we leave people alone? And when does the state have a public duty to intervene?

As it turns out, enlightened governments have been pondering this same question for the past two decades. In the post-mortems on Waco and Ruby Ridge and the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Tokyo; in preparations made a decade ago for possible millennialist terror; and especially in sussing out which Islamic radical groups are dangerous and which are likely benign; government agencies throughout North America and Europe have been forced to think clearly about what constitutes a real threat, what's just a bogeyman, and how to respond to both. Over time, they've worked out a solid consensus on what the danger signs look like when a religious or political group's passions are beginning to spin toward violence, and worked up policy documents to help them move more wisely in the future.

The most public of these documents is one issued by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that summarized some of the tell-tale signs they look for to determine who's gone over the edge and around the bend, and might be turning into a security threat. (The American government has its own less public documents that lay out similar guidelines.) The signs are simple and elegant -- and useful rules of thumb for anyone who's trying to decide if a group is just disaffected, or likely to become real trouble.

A few months ago, I did a fairly in-depth examination of this report at Orcinus (you can read the three parts here, here and here). This article compares the 12 main signs of brewing trouble discussed in the CSIS report to the church's recent behavior, and scores the FLDS on a five-point risk scale for each of the signs.

A Few Words Before Beginning
Let me begin by saying that I believe that the raid was necessary, and long overdue. The FLDS has a 60-year history of abusing women, raping young girls, and exploiting or abandoning its boys. Those who have long familiarity with the church know beyond a doubt that it violates the civil rights of its members in more ways that one lone blogger can possibly recount. (I've outlined some of these recently at Orcinus, and will be writing more there in coming days.) People in authority have been well aware for over 50 years just what this group was up to. But, for one reason or another, nobody found the political will to stop it until just a few years ago.

But as various public authorities begin to examine and dismantle the group's incredibly complex community defenses, we also need to be aware that these interventions may come at a cost of their own. As we'll see, the FLDS fits almost all of the known criteria for a potentially dangerous group in the making. And unless we tread carefully, there's strong potential that the things we do could make things worse, even as we're trying to make them better. The possible trouble spots will become clearer as we review the CSIS criteria, and see how they apply.

The Twelve Criteria
1. Marching Toward the Apocalypse -- Dangerous groups invariably hold to the urgent and fervent belief that the End is Near. The world is about to end in fire, ice, Rapture, or a Racial Holy War, and people had better be getting themselves right with God. Groups that believe that history is about to come to an end (even a peaceful one) have already taken one giant step back from consensus reality.

The FLDS' focus on polygamy is directly rooted in their own apocalyptic view of the future. While mainstream Mormons believe that polygamy exists in heaven and is God's preferred way of organizing families, they also accept that 21st century America is neither the time or the place to practice that principle on earth. The FLDS, on the other hand, preaches that because the end is so near, pious men who intend to rule in heaven can't afford to be bound by the mainstream church's sinful accommodations to man's law. They need to get right with God now -- and that starts with taking at least three wives each. This is a mandate that cannot wait; and that strong sense of apocalyptic urgency is why most of the church's founders left mainstream Mormonism in the first place.

According to Daphne Bramham, author of a new book, The Secret Lives of Saints, this obsession with the coming end has intensified in recent years, as officials in Utah and Arizona have taken a wide range of official actions against the group. One side effect of this pressure has been to lower the age of marriage even further, as more and more men try to catch their three-wife minimum before the looming end arrives. If securing the men's salvation means they have to marry off their 13-year-olds, well, it's better to marry than languish forever in the Outer Darkness.

Score: 4 out of 5

2. A Theology of Violence -- Almost all violent religious or political groups hold a specific set of beliefs that set the stage for -- and ultimately, justify -- violent action. These beliefs include 1) us-versus-them or good-versus-evil thinking; 2) a view of themselves as a persecuted elite; 3) the conviction that the apocalypse is imminent; 4) a desire to bring on the final conflict by their own actions; and 5) a belief that participating in that conflict will guarantee their own salvation and a better world to come.

Whenever a group embraces in-group/out-group thinking to the point of paranoia -- and to where it's actively anticipating, preparing for, and perhaps even making plans to precipitate the coming end -- you can safely say it's veered into dangerous territory.

The FLDS's status here is mixed. It does hold to a strong us-versus-them view of the world -- much of it the result of earlier rounds of official persecution (such as the Short Creek raid in 1953) and the knowledge that what they do is held in contempt by much of the larger culture. They absolutely view themselves as a persecuted elite, and comfort themselves with the thought that come God's kingdom (in heaven or here), they will be set up to rule over us all. As noted above, they believe the apocalypse is imminent. On the first three beliefs, count them a strong yes.

However, on the last two points, they diverge from the pattern; and these differences may explain why they've never set out to force a confrontation in all their six decades. For one thing, historically, they've been more of a fertility cult than a warrior cult. They stake their salvation mainly on their own sexual behavior, rather than visions of glorious combat against the infidel. For another, their theology doesn't tell them that they can bring about apocalypse by instigating war, or promise them salvation if they participate in that war. The absence of holy war narratives may be one reason their past encounters with authority haven't turned them into an armed camp, as it does with many other groups.

At this point, they just want to be left alone to pursue salvation in their own way. But, as we'll see, with the right kind of outside instigation -- or the rise of a prophet with a raging case of paranoia -- that could change very quickly.

Score: 3 out of 5

3. The Chosen One -- At-risk groups are almost always dominated by a charismatic leader who dictates every detail of the members' existence, and co-opts their moral centers. In most cases, the group will fold after he dies or (as often happens) is sentenced to a long jail term. He convinces followers that society's rules no longer apply to them because they follow his "higher code," and this belief opens the door to antisocial or violent action. And the leaders themselves, unanswerable to any other authority, often create a culture of violence by heaping unchecked and escalating abuse on their own followers over time.

The FLDS has gone through several brutal succession battles; but so far, they've always ended with relatively peaceful acceptance of a new leader. This continuity is unusual among violent groups, and suggests a relatively low level of threat.

However, there are signs that the overall level of control exercised by FDLS prophets -- and the amount of abuse they dish out on their flock -- rose dramatically when Warren Jeffs succeeded his father as Prophet in 2002. Even though Jeffs is in jail for the next several years, the control and abuse levels in the group are considerably higher now than they were just a couple decades ago. And it would fit the pattern if the church's next prophet (one has not yet been named) responds to the present situation by becoming even more controlling in the future. Past history and current long-term trends suggests that if the church survives, its future leaders are at high risk of becoming far more domineering with time.

Score: 4 out of 5

4. Goin' Up To The Country -- The decision to withdraw to a closed rural compound is often the first overt act of paranoia in the development of a dangerous group -- and a Rubicon that, once crossed, greatly increases the likelihood of violence. Groups withdraw because they believe mainstream authority is "out to get us." They may also be strongly asserting their intention to live outside the law.

The isolation frees leaders to consolidate their arbitrary control over the group's members, intensifies the followers' dependency, and fosters growing suspicion of outsiders that feeds their sense of persecution. Groups turning dangerous will respond to all these developments by arming their compounds and making other preparations for an expected apocalyptic showdown.

The FLDS has turned "goin' up to the country" into an art form for the ages. They have at least half a dozen colonies stretching from Canada to Mexico, and shuffle members around between them to keep inquiring authorities on goosechases. As the CSIS predicts, this isolation, which was rooted in their determination to break the country's marriage laws, has bred deep suspicion of the outside world. It's also created an ever-deepening dependency on the Prophet, and allowed him to greatly consolidate his control over every aspect of his followers' lives.

While earlier prophets have seemed willing to let the apocalypse come in God's own time, many people familiar with the FLDS found Warren Jeffs far more worrisome. John Dougherty of the Phoenix New Times, reporting in 2005 on the group's mass migration from Colorado City to the new colony in Texas, noted that Jeff's shiny new YFZ Ranch was far more tightly defended than the twin towns were. Former members told Dougherty that Jeffs was preaching "blood atonement" (the practice of killing apostates to save their souls) and took steps to install a crematorium in the YFZ temple capable of burning DNA. The New Times concluded that Jeffs was laying the groundwork for a violent Waco-style confrontation with authorities -- a confrontation that may have been averted when he was captured and convicted as an accomplice to rape last year.

Jeffs resigned as prophet last November. Since the church hasn't yet publicly named a new leader, it's hard to know how the community will respond to its current troubles. Where there's no strong leader in place, there's some opportunity for lasting change. But if a new leader uses these events to consolidate power by rallying the faithful against an outside enemy, the church may adopt a far more militant and confrontational stance going forward.

Score: 4 out of 5

5. Political Influence -- Despite their urge to retreat from society, at-risk groups also seek political power, often by corrupting or recruiting officials, or by putting their own members in positions of civil authority. And this is one of the areas in which the FLDS has proven most effective -- and most dangerous.

Since the late 1940s, the FLDS has made its headquarters in two dusty towns that straddle the Arizona/Utah border. Hildale, UT blends almost seamlessly into Colorado City, AZ -- though the border between them comes in handy when outside authorities start sniffing around. Both are fully incorporated cities, completely with city councils, police forces, schools, an airstrip, and a hospital; yet all the land in both towns is owned by a church trust that was until recently in the sole control of the prophet.

These towns receive all the same state and federal funds that other small towns get to sustain themselves. In 2005, according to the New Times, it was estimated that the two cities were getting upwards of $20 million per year in welfare and food stamps, health care and education subsidies, and shared revenue grants -- much of which ended up in church coffers. Until the two states intervened a few years ago, every single council member, doctor, nurse, cop, and teacher was an FLDS member who swore his or her first loyalty to the church's prophet.

That infrastructure meant, in effect, that the two towns' 8,000 members knew to no law but the Prophet. The police were there to enforce not the people's law, but the Prophet's will. Judges based their decisions on church scripture and the Prophet's edicts. Teachers openly taught the Prophet's curricula in the publicly-funded schools. Doctors ignored mandated reporter laws and quietly delivered babies from 14-year-old girls, and slipped women Prozac or committed them to mental institutions when they complained about their lives.

According to Dougherty, some of the resources used to build the YFZ ranch were diverted from the Colorado City government to the new private Texas colony. City employees were dispatched to work on the ranch for weeks at a time. City property was moved to the site under questionable circumstances. This was possible because the church so thoroughly controlled the entire political, fiscal, and civic infrastructure its followers lived under, and used that control to deprive them of any recourse to their rights. There are few religious groups in the history of the country that have done such a thorough job of co-opting civil institutions for so many illegal ends.

Score: 5+

6. Takin' Care of Business -- Buying country property and turning it into a self-sufficient redoubt costs money. A lot of money. So, sooner or later, most extremist groups go into some sort of business. And these businesses often evolve into a handy legal cover for illegal activity.

The Fundamentalist LDS's United Effort Plan started out as a church cooperative that ran the businesses and properties belonging to the church. As originally set up, members' tithes went into the trust, and all members were its beneficiaries. Under Rulon Jeffs' careful management, the trust holdings eventually included grain farms, cattle ranches, aerospace companies with NASA contracts, and tin mines in Bolivia. These businesses provided jobs for the faithful, and money to expand the church.

However, over time, control over the trust was gradually concentrated into the hands of the Prophet; and the beneficiaries received less and less benefit. By the time Warren Jeffs came to power, the trust had become the Prophet's personal piggybank and extortion racket. Men went into debt so they could tithe the tens of thousands of dollars the Prophet demanded of them every year. Those who failed to pay were subject to getting fired, excommunicated, evicted from their homes (typically, homes they'd built at their own expense on church-owned land), and/or having their wives and kids reassigned to other men. As noted before, the UEP has also been the vehicle for financial sleight-of-hand that appropriated civic money for the personal profit of the prophets. One example: until the state of Arizona intervened, Rulon Jeffs and his elders had an airplane, private cars, and personal credit cards all paid for by funds diverted from the Colorado City school district.

Daphne Bramham also reports that UEP businesses in some colonies have relied heavily on the slave labor of the church's "lost boys" -- unmarriageable (and thus expendable) boys who are put to work on dangerous jobs like logging, roofing, and roadbuilding without adequate training or safety equipment, and are paid wages well under a dollar an hour, if that. This unlimited access to virtually free unskilled labor, along with the willful violation of OSHA regulations, has allowed FLDS-owned businesses to undercut local contractors (who pay the prevailing wage and follow sound safety practices) for large jobs throughout the Intermountain West. To my knowledge, this situation has never been seriously investigated by authorities.

Score: 5

7. Crimes of Intimidation -- Groups heading toward violent confrontation usually start with threats and petty violence against members and outsiders who dare to cross them. (Occasionally, these people end up dead -- which only makes them a useful warning to others.) Knowing that they can intimidate and silence people raises the leader's sense of invincibility, and teaches him that violence works. Both lessons raise the odds he'll resort to more violence more quickly in the future. It also makes life much harder for investigators gathering new information on the group as the risk level rises.

For FLDS members, the cultural atmosphere has always been one of dawn-to-dusk intimidation. As noted, men who don't comply will simply lose everything. Women risk being sent away from their families, reassigned to other households or colonies, or committed to mental hospitals. Children have no choices about marriage, work, or education. Whatever the Prophet says, goes -- and God have mercy on you if you dare to refuse.

The New Times account strongly suggests that Warren Jeffs was rapidly ratcheting up the overall level of intimidation within the group -- and hinting strongly at violence -- before he was arrested. His growing paranoia led him to purge dozens of men from the church as suspected enemies, banishing them and seizing their wives on a scale no prophet had dared attempt before. Removing him from the picture may have slowed the group's acceleration toward violent confrontation; but if he comes back -- or another leader takes up these same themes -- the group could once again move into the danger zone. After all: they live their lives on the edge of that line.

Score: 4 out of 5

8. Increasingly violent rhetoric -- Strong words are often a rehearsal -- a promise of strong action to come. According to the CSIS, you can usually hear a fundamental shift in a group's rhetoric as the gear up for violent confrontation. In the early stages, they establish the lines of conflict by obsessively focusing on the group's enemies and denouncing their essential evilness. In the later stage, the talk turns overtly eliminationist, and the group starts expressing its clear intention to eradicate those enemies. When they shift to the second stage, it's a sign that they have mentally committed themselves to violent action -- and have justified it to the point where they may be actively planning something.

Those who were around when Warren Jeffs succeeded his father in 2002 say that this shift in rhetoric pretty much defined his behavior as the church's Prophet. Where the elder Jeffs had seen to the group's security by acquiring money, land, and political power, his son was more focused on building a more secure and isolated compound, punishing his enemies with every means available to him, and allegedly making plans to dispose of bodies in an untraceable way. He knew who his enemies were -- and he was making specific plans to get rid of them.

There's no way of knowing whether Jeff's successor will be inclined to that same paranoid edge. However, having the Texas Rangers invade their compound is just the kind of event that could trigger a resurgence of Jeffs' eliminationist spirit within the group, as they identify new enemies and make plans to fight back.

Score: 4 out of 5

9. Blaming the government -- It's a truism of conspiracy theories that no matter who the bad guys start out to be, sooner or later it'll turn out that they're all in cahoots with the government. Paranoia is a close cousin of narcissism, and people who believe they're locked in a Great Cosmic Struggle tend to assess their own importance by the size of the enemies they attract. In that sweepstakes, Uncle Sam is the biggest contender this side of Satan -- so it follows that if the government is out to get you, you must be somebody Very Important Indeed.

This belief adds layers of meaning to every encounter between authoritarian group members and any kind of government authority. A simple traffic stop or construction inspection sets off all kinds of alarms (They know! They're watching us!). Congressman Leo Ryan probably didn't understand this when he decided to respond to constituent requests and fly down to Jonestown; but Jim Jones and his followers were strongly predisposed to view his visit as a hostile invasion, and over-reacted accordingly.

This, too, is a signaling shift, as first-stage beliefs that "our group is above the law" harden into a second stage belief that overt revolt against the state is necessary. When the rhetoric calls for revolution, it's one sign of looming trouble.

The FLDS isn't there -- yet. They've been so successful at co-opting government for their own ends that revolution has hardly been necessary. Why bother to kill the beast when you can keep it alive and bleed it? However, it's very likely that attitude could change as the community regroups in the aftermath of the YFZ raid. They now have a clear government enemy: the Texas Rangers, the courts, and the social workers whom they will view having instigated a military assault on them. They wouldn't be the first group to interpret a criminal investigation as an overt act of war -- and make plans to respond in kind.

Score: 3 out of 5

10. Intensification of illegal activities -- As violent confrontation becomes imminent, the group starts behaving in more overtly illegal ways. Petty crime goes up, and people who were never much trouble before are suddenly coming into frequent contact with the authorities. This is a sign that the group has begun to adopt an attitude of open defiance and contempt toward the larger society, and is moving into the strongly oppositional stance that precedes a large-scale attack or confrontation.

The CSIS observes that this pattern of increasingly lawless behavior almost always goes hand-in-hand with weapons laws violations. When they reach this point, the group is probably arming up to either defend its home turf from perceived enemies, or making concrete plans to eradicate those enemies.

As far as the FLDS goes: the YFZ Ranch was clearly built to be a well-defended fort; but there's no evidence yet that the group was stockpiling weapons. (This assessment may change when the Rangers tell us what they found.) Furthermore: FLDS members haven't been any more confrontational than usual; in fact, if anything, they've been more honest and forthcoming about their lives in recent years. This is a very late-stage sign of approaching trouble; and it seems clear, based on what we know, that the FLDS isn't anywhere near there.

Score: 1 out of 5

11. Shaming the Leader -- The final flashpoint is almost a triggered by a specific event that humiliates the group's leaders, or makes them feel that they're losing their control over the group and its vision. Unfortunately, their egos are huge and their need for control is insatiable -- and, therefore, even relatively small events have the potential to set them off in very big ways.

All I can say to this is: Thank God the YFZ raid didn't happen while Jeffs was still free, because it's terrifying to contemplate how he might have responded. As it is, the community is embarrassed and chastened by these events, and it's a safe bet that they will never be allowed to operate anywhere without close government oversight again. But it could have been so much worse if all of this had gone down with a paranoid leader's pride riding on the line -- especially a True Believer like Jeffs who believed his word was God's. It could have been a real mess.

Score: 2 out of 5

12. Blundering Authority -- In the end, the final confrontation is too often triggered when authorities -- not realizing their special place in the unfolding eschatological drama -- blunder right into their assigned role. As the CSIS put it: "Authorities often fail to appreciate the leverage they have over doomsday movements, which depend upon them to fulfill their apocalyptic scenarios. Failure to fully comprehend this symbolic role often results in actions that trigger violence." They also note that law enforcement agencies are especially prone to respond to small acts of defiance with punitive force -- and that groups spoiling for a confrontation will interpret this as an assault, and vastly escalate their response. This creates a "spiral of amplification" that can very quickly spin toward catastrophe, as it did in Waco.

That's why the authorities in charge of these confrontations need to move slowly; avoid humiliating the leader or backing him into a corner; keep the cops in the background; and rely on negotiators who have a detailed understanding of the group's specific worldview and belief structure, and can describe how each unfolding event is being perceived on the inside.

Fortunately, the officials in Texas have given us the textbook example of how this is done. They have moved slowly and deliberately, taking the time to explain to everyone -- not just the people involved, but also the entire nation -- just what they were doing, and why. They have been very careful not to back the church's leaders into unnecessary corners. Wherever possible, they have tried to behave with compassion and great cultural sensitivity; but they have not allowed that to compromise their firmness in enforcing the law. It's obvious from every news report I've seen that the state government has learned the lessons of Waco, and taken them very much to heart.

Score: 0 out of 5

Conclusions
Total score: 39 out of a possible 60. The FLDS has clearly assembled all the basic ingredients required to create exactly the kind of authoritarian group that's at high risk of souring into domestic terrorism and violence. They've got the right kind of apocalyptic theology, the all-powerful leaders, the thoroughly intimidated and dependent followers, the remote compounds, the political and business infrastructure, and a truly audacious contempt for the laws the rest of us live by.

However, these steps describe an unfolding process; and while the FLDS appears to be all packed up and ready to head down that road, they haven't yet made the whole journey. The evidence suggests that Warren Jeffs, had he remained at large, had the requisite level of grandiose paranoia to take them there over the course of the next few years -- and was, in fact, making concrete plans to do just that. But with him safely out of the way for at least another few years, that bad outcome is far less likely.

Now, there are choices. Over the past several years, the governments of Utah, Arizona, and other states hosting FLDS colonies have begun to work together to dismantle the infrastructure that kept the church beyond official reach for so long. The Utah attorney general put the UEP into receivership. State authorities have forced reforms in the Hildale/Colorado City police forces, courts, and schools. Other states are keeping a close eye on the new colonies rising in their jurisdiction. And the State of Texas has put everyone on notice that it will not look the other way while the FLDS breaks its laws.

Polygamous Mormons won't go away. There are several other groups (the FLDS wasn't even the biggest of them) that will carry on, quietly and mostly lawfully. And the FLDS community itself will probably regroup and continue, in one or more of several possible forms.

The worst case is that another equally paranoid patriarch uses these events to consolidate power, resurrect a large piece of the community, and proceed on the path Jeffs seemed so determined to follow. Resolving that they will never again give up their children to Gentiles, these members will be determined to retreat completely from this evil world. They may finally succeed in turning one or more of their colonies into an armed camp -- and ultimately force a confrontation tailor-made for their apocalyptic fantasies.

The best case is that the Texas authorities continue to move deliberately, with transparency and compassion -- and don't stop until every aspect of the church has been properly investigated, prosecuted, reformed, or dismantled. Along the way, some members will be arrested. Some will move to the emerging colonies in Idaho, Colorado, or South Dakota. Quite a few may decide they like life on the outside after all, and leave the church for good.

In the meantime, we can only hope that the national conversation we're having about this case will help us refine our collective understanding about where the line between religious liberty and collective responsibility and security falls. Whatever happens, the FLDS will never be the same. And, in the end, neither will we.

How to Kill An Army: A Scenario

Sara Robinson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:04:03 -0400

John McCain, who from the early 1980s worked hard to establish himself the one of the Senate's shining champions of Vietnam veterans' issues, completed his betrayal of the Iraq-era troops today. Brandon Friedman of vetvoice.com has the details:

Yesterday VoteVets.org delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the office of Senator John McCain. Through that petition, we asked him to support Senator Jim Webb's new GI Bill. And less than 24 hours later, we have an answer:

"Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seemed to give a thumbs down to bipartisan legislation that would greatly expand educational benefits for members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the GI Bill...."

The reason for McCain's refusal to support the bill is about the most disturbing rationale one could imagine....Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college.

Friedman observes that McCain's no-college-for-grunts position essentially says to the troops: "Thanks for your service and your three combat tours in five years. Now get back to work."

Jim Webb has been trying to update the GI Bill to restore its original intention -- which was to reward returning vets for their service by giving them a full education, lifetime health care, and the foundations on which to build a comfortable and successful civilian life. But, says Friedman, the Cons have apparently abandoned that noble goal. And in doing so, they're unveiling an entirely different vision of our troops' future relationship to the rest of America.

McCain makes it clear that he wants to make the GI Bill so weak and useless that troops will have no choice but to stay in the military for life. Friedman argues persuasively that this is not only a breach of a sacred trust Americans have upheld with their troops for over 60 years; it's also a slap in the face to military recruiters, who ask families to give up their children to the war machine -- and now have nothing compelling to offer them in return. And in the long run, it ensures that the military will become the career of last resort for those who have no other options.

Reading this, it strikes me that, as usual, the conservatives aren't being nearly careful enough about what they wish for. In fact, it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario in which this new relationship to our military—which forsakes the last vestiges of America's traditional civilian militias and creates a new class of involuntarily indentured permanent soldiers—creates far-flung changes that may undermine the stability of our democracy.

How We Got Here
The GI Bill is recent -- but the deal it represents is as old as history. It's one of the great recurring patterns: in most times and places, the best way for a young man full of brains and ambition but short on money and connections to move up in the world was to join the military and distinguish himself. (The other typical mobility paths were to become a teacher, scholar, or priest.) It was a huge risk: the odds of becoming a combat hero and rising to the officers' ranks were slim compared to those of coming home crippled—or not coming home at all. But the potential upside was equally enormous. If you wanted to get off the farm, marry well, and launch yourself into the ownership class, becoming a war hero has usually been your best way out.

With the GI Bill, America democratized this ancient deal. It guaranteed that same shot at a solid middle-class life to everyone who signed up and did their tour, regardless of what their service entailed (and, in doing so, also somewhat reduced the incentive for ambitious soldiers to secure their civilian futures by instigating unnecessary battles. Combat hero or clerk typist, you were part of the effort, and you'd still get yours.). In a country that had usually resisted the very idea of raising a standing army, the GI Bill fostered the new post-war military industrial complex by normalizing military service. It was the deal that allowed families to send their sons (and later, their daughters) off in the belief that the military would open the doors to a better life. It was also the sugar that—for a while, anyway—took some of the bitterness off of universal conscription.

Generous GI benefits became even more important in the aftermath of Vietnam, as the country abandoned the draft in favor of an all-volunteer army. The country's war hawks approved of this move: The Vietnam-era draft had touched every family in America, regardless of class; and it was the middle and upper-middle classes' unwillingness to consent to that sacrifice that had so forcefully politicized the war. A military comprising troops who'd voluntarily agreed to be there would not only be easier to discipline and manage; they'd be much easier to deploy without creating major political upheavals.

The brass also knew from the start that going all-volunteer would increase the class divisions in the military. The bulk of those new recruits—both non-coms and officers—would be kids from working-class families looking for a shot at college. As the conservatives cut back on government-backed college grants and loans, the GI Bill and ROTC would step up to become the country's new college-aid programs. Given that this realignment happened alongside the re-tooling of a new high-tech military that required an extremely skilled and disciplined corps to function, this new model wouldn't work—couldn't work—unless the benefits and working conditions were good enough to attract a huge flow of smart, stable, high-quality volunteers.

Predictably, the number of volunteers has fallen off markedly in the Bush era, as the war has dramatically raised the risks associated with service, and the promised benefits have vanished. Working-class kids may not have many prospects left; but they can do the math, and they're staying away in droves. To keep the warm bodies coming, the military has begun to compromise on quality. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the number of new recruits coming in on conduct waivers is up. So is the number of convicted felons, gang members, avowed racists, and people with substance abuse problems. The military is increasingly turning a blind eye to solider misconduct, because it can't afford to lose the boots—so racist activity, rape, and other criminal acts are going largely unpunished.

Maybe McCain figures that this new crop of kids isn't all that interested in college anyway. Maybe he's decided that down here, with the bottom of the barrel coming into sight, we're getting the kids for whom the military isn't a ticket to college, or a way out of anything. It's just a better alternative than a lifetime of unemployment—or worse, cycling in and out of jail. And maybe he's being a realist about that. It's certainly where we seem to be headed.

But we don't have to go there. And if we think this all the way through, we'll do whatever it takes not to go there. Because if McCain is serious about stripping away the barest promise of benefits and turning America's high-tech army into a dumping ground for the country's undereducated, pre-criminal, behaviorally unstable, and economically desperate—then there's another possible future looming, and it's the stuff of our worst nightmares.

What Lies Ahead
What follows is a scenario—a little concatenation of what-if stories about what could happen if America breaks its historical pact of guaranteeing education, health care, and a middle-class future to its service men and women. It's not a prediction. It's just a look at some of the ways McCain's new view of what we owe our troops could play out if we don't change course.

Inside the military: As kids with any kind of prospects at all flee from recruiters who have nothing left to offer them, the sliding standards of the past few years become a fast tumble to the bottom. Soon, America's military is nothing more than the employer of last resort. It's society's dumping ground for people with inadequate education, drug problems, criminal records, and unaddressed behavior issues—people who can't even hold down McJobs, and for whom going to war and getting shot at is a marginally better choice to going to jail and getting knifed.

What happens from here is a scene from The Dirty Dozen—or the last years of Vietnam —writ large. Faced with battalions of armed misfits—including a large number of sociopaths for whom punishment is meaningless—officers can't hold down the fort. The result is anarchy, followed by the rise of internal drug-running gangs, racist militias, God squads of fundamentalist holy warriors, and other assorted warlords. (Some of these have close ties to existing civilian organizations such as prison gangs, white supremacist militias, and far-right dominionist groups—as if any of these groups need to have their own government-trained army units.) Unit cohesion fails as these groups go freelance and compete for control of military resources. Fragging becomes common; and good officers become much harder to find. (Anybody with a college education will find something better and safer to do.) The goal of teaching them useful civilian life-skills is quickly abandoned.

In the name of American foreign policy, these troops are exported to other countries, where they set up operations abroad -- thus bringing America's worst authoritarians to the the world's least stable corners, and giving them a prime government-subsidized opportunity to go global.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Of course, the intended goal of this system is to keep recruits inside it until they're too old to do much damage. Once they do get out, though, the results look like another movie —and this time, it's The Godfather.

Since these veterans have no connection to the larger culture—and no way of getting the education that will outfit them for anything else besides war—they have every incentive to organize themselves into civilian subsidiaries of the military gangs that sustained them. They get jobs as mercenaries, working abroad for private armies and cartels. Or they come home, and set up local outposts of this emerging global Mafia. Soon, city and state governments are dealing with a far bigger gang problem than they've ever seen before, and are completely unprepared to confront. Turf battles—or holy wars—erupt between the race- and religion-based gangs. In some towns, the gangs muscle out small businesses, start up extortion rackets, run their own candidates, and seize control of local politics. They also infiltrate whatever legitimate institutions will have them—just as the Mafia took over unions and the construction trades on the East Coast so long ago. Modern prison gangs are small mom-and-pop operations compared to the vast global criminal network that could arise in time.

This sounds far-fetched, but it's the historical way of armies gone bad. When you have combat-hardened warriors who have no place in the civilian world—and governments that feel no further responsibility to the troops that risked their lives to defend them—they will make a place for themselves. And that place will usually be well beyond the reach of government.

The Citizens Respond: There are several ways Americans might respond to the broken-down military that results from the boneheaded decision to abandon the covenant represented by the GI Bill. Let's look at the best case, the worst case, and the most likely case.

The best case is that Americans quickly realize that the military culture is fusing with the prison-based gang culture, and that the combined forces are threatening the foundations of the country. Driving this case is the fact is that we don't generally fund government programs that only benefit people without political power. (That's why it's so important that even the rich get Social Security, and why the upper classes need to keep their kids in public schools.) As long as the most politically influential people see that these things benefit them, they'll support them. As soon as these programs look like they're just for the lower classes, the political will to sustain them vanishes.

Turning the military into a dumping ground for the unwanted underclass (not to mention a vast channel through which taxpayer dollars are funneled to organized crime) devalues it socially and politically. Nice people won't send their kids there, any more than they'd voluntarily send them to prison for three or four years. Nobody with any brains will want to become an officer, either. And when the blowback from this long-term neglect begins washing up on the tree-lined streets of America's suburbs, there could be strong political pressure to defund the military, reform it, or abolish a standing army entirely.

The worst case is that we don't act in time, and the gangs simply take over. The government is overwhelmed, or corrupted. Democracy fails, along with domestic order. Security is in the hands of local strongmen. If that's the way it goes, the story begins to look like something out of Mad Max, and it will take nothing short of a violent patriot uprising to eliminate the gangs and take back the country. (And the bad news is: They have all the weapons, and know how to use them.)

This scenario is scary. And it should be. Worst-case scenarios aren't fun for me to write, not least because they can so easily become grim and over-the-top. What I find most frightening about this one is that you don't have to be a futurist to see its plausibility; you just have to have read some history. Broken-down armies that come home and take it out on the home folks are as common as dirt. They're stock characters in the stories where revolutions begin, and empires end. But we need to be aware that this could very easily happen to us—and blowing off our commitment to the troops the first tangible step down that road.

The most likely case is that we come to our senses in time, and realize that the GI Bill is not entitlement, not a privilege, and not a handout. It's what we owe our troops for their service. It's fulfilling our basic obligation to return them safely and sanely to civilian life, and to give them a fair stake in the country's free and democratic future. And, as long as we choose to maintain a standing army and act as an empire, it's an essential investment in our own domestic peace, security, and political stability that we cannot afford to scrimp on. If we think the price is too high, then we should reconsider whether we want to be an empire. But as long as we commission soldiers, defaulting on this debt is not an option.

No one who is willing to tear up that ancient contract between a nation and its veterans, and thus consign our nation's defense to people so dangerously incompetent that Wal-Mart won't even hire them, should ever be this country's commander-in-chief. And McCain, of all people, should understand that better than anyone. It's a shame that, after all these years building his career on the backs of veterans, he still doesn't understand what's at stake.

Two Kinds of Americans, Part II: From "Us versus Them" to "We the People"

Sara Robinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:59:20 -0400

In last week's essay, I noted that our ability to function effectively as a nation has been deeply compromised by the conservative movement's reflexive reliance on Us-versus-Them politics. Allowing a winners-and-losers worldview to dominate our country is a dangerous self-indulgence, I argued. History is littered with the corpses of great empires and economies that were toppled when their people got distracted from their shared identity and goals, and gave in to internal culture wars that weakened their countries to the point of eventual collapse or conquest. And it's all too clear now, looking back on what 40 years of wanton right-wing civil war has wrought, that America cannot hope to be history's first exception.

When the conservatives declared their "culture war" and effectively seceded from America in the early 1970s, they recklessly (and, on at least some fronts, knowingly) doomed us. When we reckon the toll -- the loss of a broad middle class and the educational, financial, social, and physical infrastructure that produced it; the criminal abuse of military and police power; the squandering of the intangible capital of our economic and diplomatic prestige in the world; and now the complete structural inability to address the most important issues we face -- we can no longer deny that the conservatives' inbred compulsion to create and fight external demons has weakened us militarily, economically, environmentally, and culturally.

Our survival depends on finding an alternative. Fortunately, there is one.

Several commenters on last week's piece fretted that I might be winding up to the suggestion that we get all kum-by-yah and fuzzy with the conservatives, admit they were right, and find a way to build bridges to them. Fret not. I grew up with these people, and have written extensively on how and why the hard core authoritarians among them -- the intransigent 12-15% -- can never be reasoned with. They have always been among us; and they always will be. But -- and here's the point of this week's essay -- we have not always allowed their paranoia to run the show. For much of America's history, we chose another path. And it's a path we can get back to, if we choose, with progressives showing the way.

Two Kinds of Americans, Revisited
The legendary historian Arnold Toynbee postulated that all cultures throughout history have run under one of three basic cultural operating systems (or, more often, a hybrid of two or all three in which one was usually dominant). These essential storylines appear in all cultures; and every culture has unique variations on these archetypes at play. Most importantly: each of the three has its own internal logic; and that logic deeply influences the way we view the future, interpret reality, and assess events.

The first of these cultural archetypes is Us versus Them (or Winners and Losers), which is all too familiar to anyone who's spent the past 30 years in America. In this view, the world is seen in polarities: black/white, right/wrong, male/female, either/or. Humans are driven by competition and conflict; life is a zero-sum game in which survival depends on your ability to seize control over a piece of a finite pie. Winners (who are assumed to be high-prestige males) matter, and deserve to dominate. Losers deserve whatever happens to them; and winners cannot be bothered to care. Evil is caused by the deliberate workings of the enemy, and its existence is proof that that enemy must be defeated at all costs.

Us versus Them exists because it's a useful and adaptive worldview in a few limited circumstances. It's the natural logic of war and revolution -- and also of political elections, class and race conflicts, and fundamentalist religion and holy warriors. Business often operates in this mode (though not always). So do certain professions, most notably law enforcement. But, as we've seen, this winners-and-losers logic can corrode the foundations of a civilization if we allow it to dominate every aspect of our lives, or stay stuck in it too long. It's useful in short doses, but extremely toxic in the long run.

The biggest danger of Us-versus-Them is that it makes it almost impossible for cultures to invest in the common good, let alone plan coherently for the future. When people are in this mode, ideology and fear carry every decision. Those who want to discuss other worldviews or see a wider range of possibilities are considered traitors; and this forecloses almost all creative responses to problems. Furthermore, every resource the culture has must be diverted to winning the battle at hand, without regard for the future costs. Over time, relying on the Us-versus-Them archetype drives societies to eat their seed corn, leaving them bankrupt on every possible front. Still, this is the worldview that defines conservatism.

The second archetype might be called "Challenge and Response." In this view, problems aren't seen as evidence of evil; and they're not framed in terms of victory or defeat. At best, they're character-building opportunities for personal growth or gain; at worst, they're just a natural part of life that must be responded to with wisdom and ingenuity. Identifying allies and enemies is incidental to the larger goal -- which is to fix the problem, not the blame. There is no Them. There's just Us, and We have a situation on our hands that We need to figure out how to handle.

Challenge-and-response thinking is the natural logic of extended families and towns of all sizes. It's the basic habit of mind for a wide range of professions -- medicine, agriculture, engineering, management, and all the creative arts. You can't blame a virus, blight, gravity, or the behavior of markets on an evil Other -- and it's a waste of resources to try. Your job is to deal with the situation you're given today, as intelligently and resourcefully as you can; and think through preparations that will allow you to respond better or avoid this kind of problem entirely in the future. In these cultures, your level of status and prestige depends at least as much on your proven reliability as a wise and effective problem-solver as it does on how much of the pie you control. (Furthermore: owning more of the pie increases both your ability and your obligation to solve problems.) This is the world most progressives would far prefer to live in.

On a grander scale, solving problems and recovering from great challenges together builds up the internal levels of mutual trust and confidence within a society, which in turn fosters ambitious and well-considered future planning and encourages large investments in the common good. It enables groups to forge lasting alliances with other groups, expanding their networks of influence and trade. It lends itself to the establishment of meritocracies, flatter hierarchies, and other types of social order that are highly adaptive and flexible in the face of change. According to French historian Emmanuel Todd, every successful empire the world has ever seen ran on an expansive, inclusive challenge-and-response paradigm during its glory years -- and invariably fell apart when that ecumenical view devolved, for whatever reason, into defensive Us-versus-Them blame games.

One of the advantages of a Challenge-and-Response culture is that it provides a secure playing field for small and often very productive Us-versus-Them games. Police can be set to catch crooks, under the authority of the state; an army can be raised, as long as it remains under civilian control; the zero-sum games of business can be played for keeps under the watchful eye of government regulators and courts. But this only works as long as none of these zero-sum activities is allowed to become the society's guiding purpose. According to Toynbee and his modern heirs, successful societies throughout history grew and prospered as long as Challenge-and-Response remained the dominant mode -- and lost ground rapidly when that balance changed.

(Toynbee's third archetype, which isn't really germane to this discussion, is the logic of evolutionary change. These narratives assert that human cultures are prone to grow and mutate slowly over time. Evolution stories can be positive (things are slowly getting better) or negative (we're in a gradual state of decay). You often see this assumption at work in technology, biology, some of the social sciences, and certain religions; and it's not unusual to find it blended up with one of the other two archetypes as well. For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to sidestep this less common archetype, and focus on the first two.)

Both of these major storylines feature largely in American history -- and both are accessible (and usually operating simultaneously, with one dominating) at any given time. We've slipped back and forth often as history demanded different things from us. Breaking a frontier and building a farm is a Challenge-and-Response endeavor. Starting a revolution against a distant king -- or fighting a Cold War -- is Us-versus-Them.

However, over the grand sweep of our history, America has drawn strength from its persistent preference for the logic of challenge and response. And looking back, it's easy to see how our historical commitment to this confident, trusting, open-minded worldview had a lot to do with our eventual rise to power.

But it's also easy to see how the growth of the postwar military-industrial complex, and its entrenched position at the core of our economic and political life, has empowered an elite who are constantly seeking to pull us away from Challenge-and-Response, and plunge us into a permanent (and permanently profitable) state of Us-versus-Them. In recent decades, the two narratives come into serious competition, with Us-versus-Them enjoying a level of widespread, long-term acceptance we've seldom seen in the country's history. Right now, it's not clear which one will dominate the country's discourse in the years ahead.

Getting Back to Challenge and Response
But we do know how the shifts between these two worldviews happen -- and it's almost always through some combination of design and default. Something changes in the world, and a historical moment opens up that requires a different response. And, usually, there's a leader -- often backed by a movement -- standing by, ready to seize the wheel and turn it in the other direction.

FDR took power at the worst economic moment in the nation's history, as Us-versus-Them power struggles were threatening to destabilize the nation -- and then leveraged that chaos to discredit entrenched power, and justify a great progressive restructuring that unleashed our best problem-solving instincts. We have nothing to fear, he told us, but fear itself. It was a classic challenge-and-response thing to say.

Nine years later, that same president confronted the devastation of Pearl Harbor, and moved us deftly and productively back to an all-out Us-versus-Them war footing.

After the war, JFK captured the rising challenge-and-response spirit of an optimistic nation, and aimed it directly at the moon.

Conversely, Bill Clinton came to power as the Communist world was collapsing -- but failed to realize the full potential of that extraordinary moment because he failed to reckon with the ferocity of the old cold warriors' backlash. He might have had it in him to slap down this resurgence of Us-versus-Them -- but this time, that mindset turned out to be more fiercely stubborn than anyone thought. Failing to locate any other new enemy to demonize, the conservatives settled for destroying Clinton himself.

We've been stuck in the resulting mess for the past 15 years. At this point, it seems, we no longer know who We are unless we have a Them to triangulate ourselves against. Vast sectors of our economy are now invested in identifying, tracking, and defeating Them. And our increasingly desperate and paranoid search-and-destroy missions to root Them out wherever They may lurk have made Us a serious threat to much of the rest of the world.

If we want to change this, here's what we need to do:

1. Be clear on where we're going. The open-ended, inclusive communal problem-solving style of challenge-and-response cultures is inherently progressive -- and deeply ingrained in the American character.

Half the battle is simply being aware that we have a choice -- and then making the true nature of that choice clear to everyone involved. We can listen to the blamers and take the counsel of our fears -- and produce cramped, narrow solutions that usually benefit a few a at the expense of the many, and will in time doom the nation. Or we can remind our fellow citizens -- over and over, for as long as it takes -- that Americans have always done best when they've taken on big problems with implacable courage, extravagant generosity, and incandescent ingenuity. Moreover: they've often enriched the entire culture in the process. Which way to go? It's a choice we get to make all over again with every fresh problem we face.

Another way to keep the difference clear in our minds is to find and celebrate the people who are making challenge-and-response politics work -- people like Majora Carter and Van Jones, who received progressive service awards at Take Back America. Those people are everywhere (and remember: they're not all progressive), and they're creating a vast store of intangible social capital that makes us all a little wealthier. In a time of grinding and intractable Us-versus-Them thinking, we need to make an affirmative example out of everyone who's choosing to operate the other way.

2. Be ready for the moment. You can push and push until you're black and blue; but this kind of shift doesn't happen until the stars line up just right and that historical window pops open. Still, the best definition of "luck" I've ever heard is that it's what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And, after 15 years of non-stop conservative hatemongering, you gotta know that moment's not too far off now.

And that's why we organize and blog and write letters and donate money and support new media and volunteer down at the party office. We're gaining skills and building the infrastructure of a movement -- and one of the goals of that movement is to be standing by, ready to lean hard on our leaders and make them do the right thing when the moment comes. Even Bill Clinton might have made different choices when his moment came if we'd been this organized in 1993.

3. Leaders matter. We all know this anyway, but this is one major reason why. The right leader can act in ways that help us make the most of those moments when we must transition from one set of assumptions to another. As we've learned bitterly every day since 9/11, the wrong one can seize those moments and turn them into ruinous disaster. And a truly extraordinary leader may even be able to create the shift from one paradigm to the other without any kind of external moment presenting itself at all.

When we vet candidates, this should be one of the major traits we look for. If we want a challenge-and-response culture, we need to elect people who operate naturally in that mode. If we elect people who play a mean game of Us-versus-Them, we'll have nobody but ourselves to blame when their worst authoritarian impulses kick in, and our politics curdle back into fear and division.

The difference between these two modes of thinking -- Us versus them and Challenge and Response -- is one of those things that's so obviously simple (and so simply obvious) that we seldom stop to realize that it is the core difference between civilizations that prosper and flourish; and those that rapidly spiral into decline and death. The difference is not in the specific problems we face; it's in the logic and processes we choose when we set about solving them. In deciding which of these two worldviews will govern our decisions and our politics, it's not an exaggeration to say that we are deciding nothing less than the country's future.