When our current president vocally, candidly and not since Andrew Jackson oh so petulantly lambasted—in a forum no less important than the State Of The Union address—the SCOTUS for the Citizens United ruling, it prompted Associate Justice Alito to silently mouth “not true” at the numerous falsehoods spewing from the mouth of the boy-king. Our current president’s demagoguery and incitement to overrule by statute a SCOTUS ruling days after it’s been released was the most uncomfortable and disturbing moment of the SOTU.

It boggles my mind that the only understanding Liberals have of Citizens United is that it allows “massive infusions of cash and unlimited contributions to a candidate.” True to form, my generally Liberal friends have an aversion to the mixture of money and politics. I can’t say “I don’t understand” why they think this way, because I do. Sadly, many see the world as a conflict between laborers and the people who employ them. Too many believe that the State has a vested interest in igniting this conflict, that the State may gain control of the means of Production.

What they won’t acknowledge is the diametrically opposed world view that the State is a necessary evil that exists with every bureaucratic breath to control people, including the corporations they form. The State simultaneously enslaves and represents people. The difference between Liberals and Conservatives when it comes to the role of the State is how much benefit of the doubt is afforded to it.

I have little patience for the incuriosity they’ve exhibited towards Citizens United. They hear the words “corporation,” “money” and “contributions” and their ears turn to tin; their blood turns to steam. A “corporation” in the context of this ruling is nothing more than the legal entity that represents a collection of human beings. Citizens United extends the right of free speech to this collection of people, to spend their money to speak about a particular candidate.

Political speech is more free now, but not unlimited. Defamation, libel and slander laws have not changed. The reputation of a corporation is also at play. If a corporation, great or small, wants to campaign for or against a candidate, they risk facing the wrath, or receiving the love, of their clientele. They have to balance their budget used for campaigning, or else they can lose their entire business. What the SCOTUS did in this ruling is to force consequences through a more organic process.

Consider: if Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, or Bank Of America were to advertise against our current president, they risk alienating the remaining 35% of the population who lives in complete adulation of this man. A boycott is one of the most powerful influencers against a corporation, and consumers are free to spend their money elsewhere. If mom-and-pop falafel shop wants to advertise in favor of a pro-Israel candidate in their Congressional election, they can, too. They also risk raising the ire of those who would prefer the Arabs wipe Israel off the map and lose their business.

Journalistic corporations have faced the consequences of their politicking, all through the day of the election. It’s for this reason that large swathes of the news media are losing audiences while others gain. Before Citizens United, the only corporations that could spend unlimited amounts of cash through the day of the election are publications. This exemption has been abolished; instead the right to speak has been reinstated, not just for journalistic corporations, but for all institutions: labor unions, corporations, and other foundations. Isn’t free speech such a lovely, chaotic thing?

While Liberals gleefully celebrate the arrest of investigative journalist James O’Keefe, Conservatives are wringing their hands. The most telling thing I see about this, is that the young man has not even been convicted and the Left and Right have prejudiced this man for their own reasons.

For the Liberals, it’s easy. He shed light on ACORN’s corruption. He made fools out of his targets, and his work helped lead Congress to withdraw funding (if but symbolically) for this organization. They have a vendetta.

For the Conservatives, it’s easy. We need to distance ourselves from this man for fear of guilt by association. Screams of “Louisiana Watergate” have left us quaking in our boots. “Shit,” we cry, as the momentum of the worst two weeks for Democrats comes to an abrupt, shrieking halt. We have reputations to protect.

Los Angeles Prosecutor Patterico knows something about jumping to conclusions:

Look: I wasn’t there and I therefore don’t know what happened. But O’Keefe has a history of goofy, humorous, over-the-top undercover stunts to make a political point. Wiretapping doesn’t seem like his style. And the facts in the affidavit — especially the lack of reference anywhere to any listening devices in the possession of anyone in the building — suggest to me that’s not what he was doing.

The Conservative handwringing is bullshit. So far I’m the third person I know who is giving James O’Keefe the benefit of the doubt. The second is an Althouse commenter. Volokh:

It’s one thing to pretend to be a pimp when interviewing ACORN employees. It’s quite another to pretend to be a telephone repairman to gain access to a U.S. Senate office and its telephone system.

It really is different. The way I see it, it’s actually better and more justifiable to bug a US Senator than it is to spycam an ACORN office. The corrupt ACORN employees are civilians, and they were being recorded by other civilians. Mary Landrieu is an elected official and an arm of the US government, and as such is a “public official” whose rights to privacy are more limited than your typical civilian.

This is different from Nixon’s Watergate Hotel break-ins because the bugging was at the behest of a public official, a person in power no less than the President, acting against an association of private individuals. Civilians have to have the power to resonably violate the privacy of elected officials* and especially their appointed underlings. It’s for this reason that the Office Of The POTUS releases correspondence with civilians as a matter of public record. It was this same problem that our current president faced when they had to wrest his BlackBerry from his grubby clutches.

Even from a Kantian standpoint of certain actions being truly immoral no matter the circumstances, the Conservatives’ despair because he “did something stupid.” Shit, we don’t even know exactly what he did! Secondly, it seems the only moral standard these whiny Conservatives is that it’s against the law. Have we forgotten that what is legal is not always moral; what is proscribed is not always evil? The repudiation from Conservatives is indicative of a lack of desire to fight on the side of one’s allies. Lastly, this is a pattern of behavior for a number of Conservative pundits. They all-too-quickly judge one of their own and distance themselves before all the facts are in.

Liberals have shown more faith in cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal than Conservatives shown this boy. They stood through thick and thin with the corrupt employees at ACORN and in so doing reduced O’Keefe’s victory to a symbolic one. It’s one thing to follow advice from one’s enemies. It’s another to learn a thing or two by observing them.

* – I understand the possibility of the shoe being on the other foot. My test of reasonability lies in the physical and mental territories around which politicans move. A home, a hacked email account or in the case of Mme. Palin, one broken into thanks to a weak password, do not really count as “reasonable” because these are not in the public purview. I also understand that this idea is extreme and unimplementible since Senators handle important national security information, the essence has to be that elected officials should be afraid of the public, not the other way around.

Not too many people know the actual terms for the ethical concepts of deontology (formalism) and consequentialism (utilitarianism), but in their lives they feel the full conflict of these two moral “schools” when facing moral dilemmas and trying to do “the right thing.” The third school, which predates these two, is virtue ethics. As a refresher to readers unfamiliar with these concepts, here’s the important stuff, with links to Wikipedia:

• Virtue Ethics focuses on the intent and character of the doer.
• Deontology posits that there are moral duties towards a formal action, the deed itself, absent consideration of the consequences. Immanuel Kant is one of its most famous adherents, and (almost?) all religions are deontological by nature.
• Consequentialism judges the rightness or wrongness of an act based on the consequences produced. Its largest failing is that it doesn’t necessarily provide a guide as to what to do at the time of the dilemma itself.

I bring these definitions to the fore because political discussions too often unfortunately take on the nature of moral discussions. “Is it wrong or right to go to war?” “Is anything less comfortable than a hotel stay appropriate for enemy combatants?” “Under what, if any, circumstances can a pregnancy be ended, or a life ended by the state as consequence of a crime; and for that matter, what crime forfeits a person’s life?”

After years of reading, observing, studying, and participating in political discussions of this nature, I realize that disagreements over policy boil down to one party judging the other on a deontological standard while the other excuses its actions using good intentions (virtue ethics) and consequentialism. A fine example can be seen in Julian Sanchez’s The Spectre of Pacifism:

The conceptual mistake is to suppose that we’re faced with a binary choice between a pure consequentialism that just mechanically adds up all the yums and ouches or a kind of absolutist deontology that hews to a principled rule, and damn the consequences.  The point of invoking pacifism is to imply that if you want to consider any non-consequentialist moral properties of certain kinds of acts, you’re compelled by relentless logic to the most extreme possible position.  The thing is, pretty much nobody really thinks this way. Most people—the vast majority—will say it’s immoral to secretly chop up a healthy vagrant for organs to save five other people. We’re not just interchangeable tokens in some great social calculus, but individuals with individual rights that must be respected—rights that trump maximization of social welfare.  Except that if suddenly we’re sure we could save a thousand or ten thousand or ten million people by killing one innocent, most of us will at some point say, reluctantly, that it ought to be done after all.

Majority of political discussions play out this way. Pundits large and small judge each others’ quality as people based on which positions they would condone and condemn. This is also the root of the declaration that “there is no absolute morality,” in the sense that religious moral standards can fly against the face of reason. (Not to mention, of course, that different religions posit different moral judgments on certain actions.)

As another example, let’s take a look at the manufactured scandal over Scott Brown’s bikini-clad daughters. Liberal critics of this photo, as well as Scott Brown’s 1982 nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan hinge their arguments on the fact that Scott Brown and his daughters are Republican. The faulty logic goes like this:

1. Scott Brown and his daughters are Republicans.
2. “Republicans like to sell themselves as bastions of morality.”
3. Posing nude or sexy is immoral.
4. Therefore Scott Brown and his daughters are hypocrites.

The major fault in this line of reasoning is that Liberals focus on propositions 2 and 3. They exaggerate and caricature the definition of what it means to be Republican. Liberals would excuse the baring of such flesh by people with whom they agree because in their mind, these Liberal exhibitionists don’t hold themselves to a high moral standard. If Scott Brown were a Democrat, I fully expect Republicans to launch a similar line of attack, but I don’t think it would have been as effective, because Liberalism somehow reconciles with licentiousness. That Democrats would not hold Scott Brown to the standards they would hold for themselves is just one of those tactics from Saul Alinsky’s playbook. Hypocrites are, by and large, more repugnant than those who admit to, and even wallow in, their fallen nature.

The aim of a political attack based on morality is to invalidate the target’s reputation and credibility. They can be very effective, but can lead to a cheapening of the debate so much so that matters of actual policy lose priority. In the meantime, those in power continue to govern however the hell they like, to the detriment of us all.

Having grown up in the Philippines and being politically aware since high school, most of the campaigns for national office revolve around pandering to the massive throngs of urban and rural poor. Most of this pandering involves some version of eat-the-rich class warfare rhetoric that aims to promise redistribution of wealth. The Philippines is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a socialist nation, but as an emerging economy, it is fraught with pitfalls and challenges that many American observers find easy to point out and difficult to solve.

The most annoying aspect of Philippine politics is that none of the political parties have a clearly defined platform that distinguishes one form the other. You have a central personality as the anchor of the party, and everyone else rides that person’s coattails. The promises of goodies at the expense of the taxpayer is de rigeur, and some days it feels like a choice between Engels or Marx.

So when I moved here, being the short-sighted, middle-class Liberal funded by my mother’s hard-earned money, the distinction between the political parties in terms of principle is like night and day. It was refreshing, and through a long process of unlearning ideas such as entitlement and hatred of producers, I became the Conservative that so many people know and love (or revile, depending on your beliefs).

The method by which the two monolothic parties build their coalitions, also differ like night and day. Democrats build coalitions by promising fulfillment of a group’s pet issue. This is why they nail the gay vote, the woman vote, votes from different ethnic groups, name it. Republicans, on the other hand, make one issue the defining issue of a campaign, and they pick off voters from the groups that agree with them.

This is how Scott Brown campaigned. He insisted on being the forty-first vote to prevent cloture (I’m a stickler for words, a topic I intend to write about soon enough). He made opposition to the Democrat-controlled healthcare reform his single, defining issue. He built his identity around that and the people came. They came for their own reasons, of course, but he didn’t spend his campaign promising goodies to groups. He found a case that he believed was enough to get people to sacrifice their pet issues and focus on something else.

These tactics also lead to each parties’ undoing. In this country, no single party stays in power for too long. Americans remain suspicious of absolute power and prefer to tip the balance the other way. Once the issue around which Republican voters coalesce is resolved, it is up to the incumbents to find another issue to rally around. If they fail, the infighting begins: people’s instincts start to take precedence. The same people who voted for Brown in opposition to Obamacare will be the same people who will oppose him on social issues, given that Brown leans pro-choice.

Democrats, on the other hand, lose votes when they fail to deliver on those many goodies they offer (gay marriage, anyone?). They also fail when they use the groups they court as weapons against the middle, such as when the current—and soon to be dead—version of Demcare exempts union members from the “Cadillac plan tax.” They fail because they realize these concessions are extreme and divisive and come at the expense of those whose money they want for contributions.

After stating these observations, what advice do I have for the Republican party? When the pendulum swings in your favor, it’s time to use it, or lose it. For the Democrats? I have a few thoughts, but the most prudent of politicos don’t take advice from their opponents anyway.