New York Rep. Peter King is planning to launch his chairmanship of the House Homeland Security Committee with a hearing into “Muslim radicalization” in the United States, the process by which Muslim Americans become radicalized to the point of supporting international Islamist terrorism or, worse still, committing or attempting to commit, terrorist acts here at home against our own country. It’s a very serious topic and a good subject for an important congressional hearing, but there is every reason to fear that this may be a counterproductive rather than useful exercise, possibly disastrously so. So far we don’t know much about the potential date, content or witness list of the hearing, although Steven Emerson is enraged at his apparent exclusion (more on this at the end of this essay), but King’s upcoming appearance on a new TV show hosted by probably the most extreme anti-Muslim fanatic in the United States, Brigitte Gabriel (who claims things like “Arabs have no souls”), about whom I have written on the Ibishblog in the past, is the worst possible indication about where this all might be going. The interview was taped on November 10 and will be broadcast on February 5.

The recent massacre in Tucson by Jared Lee Loughner might, one would have thought, have reminded King and others that there are many different kinds of Americans who can get radicalized to the point of violence by an almost endless plethora of ideologies, including left-wing radicalism like the weathermen of old, environmentalism, anti-abortion fanaticism, homophobia, white supremacy, Christian identity gobbledygook, black nationalism, KKK ideology and, of course, the latest addition to the paranoid and sometimes violent style of American politics, the tea partyers.

While this is not to say that there isn’t a growing problem with ad hoc radicalization, especially through the Internet, of young Western Muslims, including in the United States, and a real potential for violence as a consequence, it is to say that there are a lot of other dangers and pretending that this is the only source of potential mayhem and violence, or even the main one currently facing our country from an internal, domestic source, seems particularly misguided after Tucson. But King has been on the hobbyhorse about “disloyal” Muslim Americans for a long time, and now that he has his chairmanship, he has his bully pulpit too.

But King and many of the other most vocal alarmists about homegrown Islamist terrorists and the “Islamic threat,” expressed in a generalized way that promotes fear and hatred of the Muslim American community in general and indiscriminately, are carrying some serious baggage with which they will, ultimately, have to deal. In fact, a lot of them have a history of sympathy for and support of terrorist organizations they either identified with ethnically or ideologically, or whose targets they despised enough to welcome or at least defend their terrorism. In other words, there is a very long history of double standards on the question of terrorism, and most assuredly a lack of moral clarity, from not only Chairman King but many of his friends and supporters in this “Muslim radicalization” movement.

Let’s begin with King himself. In fact, he has a very long history as an ardent supporter of the IRA and its American front organization, Noraid. While his stance on the IRA toughened in 2005 and he became a convert to supporting the peace process and disbanding the organization, historically his support was pretty unequivocal. As the New York Sun noted:

He forged links with leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ireland, and in America he hooked up with Irish Northern Aid, known as Noraid, a New York based group that the American, British, and Irish governments often accused of funneling guns and money to the IRA. At a time when the IRA’s murder of Lord Mountbatten and its fierce bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland persuaded most American politicians to shun IRA-support groups, Mr. King displayed no such inhibitions. He spoke regularly at Noraid protests and became close to the group’s publicity director, the Bronx lawyer Martin Galvin, a figure reviled by the British. Mr. King’s support for the IRA was unequivocal. In 1982, for instance, he told a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County: “We must per can of the pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.”

The Sun also pointed out that, “Much of the conventional weaponry and a great deal of the money necessary for IRA violence came from Irish-American sympathizers. Mr. King’s advocacy of the IRA’s cause encouraged that flow and earned him the deep-seated hostility of the British and Irish governments.”

There couldn’t, after all, have been anything philosophically in common between the IRA, an avowedly Marxist, globalist and internationalist terrorist movement, and the conservative Republican congressman from New York. It seems a pretty fair bet that the only thing drawing King to Noraid and other IRA front organizations which he was so enthusiastic about was pure ethnic tribalism. He’s an Irishman; he wanted Ireland united and entirely free of any form of British control; and if terrorism was part of the strategy, so be it. By any means necessary, as they say.

This history makes it especially difficult to stomach his blanket condemnations against the Arab and Muslim American communities generally when he has such a specific record of supporting what was at the time, by any conceivable definition, a terrorist organization. I suppose one could argue that the IRA was at war with the United Kingdom and not the United States, so the element of disloyalty is mitigated. Well, the same logic could speciously be applied to supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, who would also claim to war with only Israel but not the United States. This accusation of disloyalty because of support for terrorism would have to be then reserved those rare supporters of Al Qaeda and other so-called “Salafist-Jihadist” groups that have openly declared war on both the United States and the governments and societies of the entire Arab and Muslim world, and have actually and deliberately attacked American interests directly. However, numerous organizations around the world that have never directly or deliberately attacked American interests have been placed on the State Department terrorism list from its outset and remain there. It’s partly a matter of cooperation with foreign governments that feel threatened by those organizations and partly a recognition that certain acts constitute terrorism no matter who the culprit or victims might be.

And, it must be acknowledged that the IRA was never itself actually placed on the State Department “designated foreign terrorist organizations” list, which was first published in the late 1990s. That list was specifically pursuant to the 1996 “antiterrorism and effective death penalty act,” which made otherwise lawful “material support” for organizations to be designated as foreign terrorist groups by the State Department a serious felony. However, in earlier reports, the State Department described the IRA quite accurately as a “deadly terrorist group unconcerned about innocent bystanders,” and it was formally considered a terrorist organization by the United States in the same way that Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and many other leftist and insurgent groups during the Cold War had been. In the end, there can be no doubt that it was largely political pressure from King and numerous other politically powerful Irish-Americans that kept the IRA, although not all of it’s more extreme splinter groups, off the formal, criminalized State Department foreign terrorist organization material support list once it was issued in the late 90s.

In other words, this all reeks of hypocrisy of the worst variety, and of the idea that terrorism by my friends is okay or at least understandable, but it makes your friends, or at your least compatriots or coreligionists, the biggest villains in the entire world, unspeakable demons outside the realm of normal humanity, nothing less than homo sacer.

Another example of this outrageous double-standard, in which my terrorists friends are just fine but other terrorists are uniquely evil, is the growing constituency in the United States, especially in Congress of all places, in favor of the bizarre and violent Iranian terrorist cult, the so-called Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK). It’s been on the formal US State Department designated list of foreign terrorist organizations from the outset, because of numerous terrorist acts inside Iran including car bombings, assassinations and other atrocities.

Prominent American MEK defenders or supporters include former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and anti-terrorism advisor to President George W. Bush, Francis Townsend. Self-appointed terrorism experts such as Daniel Pipes are also big fans. In Congress, Sen. Sam Brownback, and Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee, Bob Filner (probably the most enthusiastic leader of the effort), Dana Rohrabacher, Ted Poe, Judy Chu, Mike Coffman, Lacy Clay and Edolphus Towns, among others, have urged its removal from the terrorism list.

The MEK’s psychopathic ideological combination of Marxism, feminism and Islamism is primarily characterized by a bizarre personality cult centered around Maryam Rajavi, but the organization may well be led in practice by its former central public figure, her husband Massoud Rajavi. Strongly supported by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the MEK was largely based in Iraq and conducted numerous terrorist attacks in Iran aimed at the regime, and the society in general. Since the American invasion of Iraq, its main redoubt has been Camp Ashraf in Diyala province. The United States has been hard-pressed to decide what to do about the MEK in Camp Ashraf. Iran has repeatedly accused the United States of using the MEK, operating out of that base, to conduct attacks inside Iran, but has provided virtually no evidence to demonstrate any such thing. But there’s no doubt that the United States has used the MEK as a source of intelligence on Iranian realities and activities, and, while disarming it, has also provided it protection within the camp. Consistent speculation has held that the MEK is regarded as a bargaining chip by the United States, and possibly by the new Iraqi government, vis-à-vis Iran, which has traditionally regarded it as its most threatening armed domestic enemy.

It would be almost impossible to overstate the sinister characteristics of the MEK’s ideology, which reminds me more of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge than anything else I can think of. Rajavi claims mystical powers and connections to prophets and messiahs; has instructed her followers to divorce all of their spouses and maintains an extremely bizarre attitude towards gender, personal and sexual relations; conducts cult-like, quasi-Maoist, “self confession” sessions in which members are encouraged to confess their supposed flaws and sins; and the group is said to practice torture and various abuses against its members in order to maintain organizational discipline. Many reports would suggest that’s the least of it, and that while we may not be dealing here with the world’s weirdest organization — that title probably belongs to the “Lord’s Resistance Army,” a Christian fundamentalist gang of absolute lunatics in Uganda — it’s almost certainly somewhere in the very top tier. (In 1977, the virtuoso Spanish surrealist film director Luis Buñuel probably thought he was making a great joke by naming a terrorist organization in his final masterpiece, That Obscure Object of Desire, “The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus,” but by 2011 it distressingly doesn’t sound quite as ridiculous anymore as it must have then.)

However, since the MEK’s terrorist actions and political agitation are aimed at overthrowing the properly despised government in Tehran — although their own rule would undoubtedly be almost unimaginably worse — certain American public figures, commentators and members of Congress have begun to champion their cause. That they are plainly completely insane and also terrorist by any definition of the term is beside the point. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or at least not my enemy. If they want to use terrorism and other despicable tactics to destabilize the government in Tehran, so be it. Let’s take them off the terrorism list, if not hold fundraising events and provide material support once, or indeed even before (as it can be argued a number of these people already have), they are removed from it.

And then there’s the little matter of the anti-Castro Cuban terrorists who have been the subject of so much public support from prominent Americans over many years. Two names come to mind in particular: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Bosch is the leader of the so-called Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which the FBI has described as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization.” It is not disputed that in 2008 Bosch told Dade County criminal attorney Stewart Adelstein that he was responsible for bombing Cubana Flight 455, a civilian Douglas DC-8 traveling from Barbados and Jamaica containing 48 passengers and 25 crew, resulting in 73 fatalities and no survivals. Bosch, Carriles and two others were tried in Venezuela, where the attack was apparently planned, with two men sentenced to 20-year terms, Bosch released on a technicality, and Carriles fleeing the county for Miami while awaiting sentencing. Bosch defended his brutal terrorism with the infamous claim that, “All of Castro’s planes are warplanes.” Sound familiar? To Middle Eastern ears, it certainly should.

Once back in Miami in 1987, Bosch was held for six months on a parole violation and then released, where he has been living unmolested ever since. The campaign to pardon Bosch was led by the new incoming House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and her ally and then political campaign manager, and future governor of Florida and presidential brother, Jeb Bush. Ros-Lehtinen reportedly helped organize an “Orlando Bosch Day,” of all things, in his support. She has also defended one Velentin Hernández, a Cuban exile convicted of murdering Luciano Nieves who was advocating negotiations with the Castro regime. Her attitude towards violence against objectionable political leaders was characterized by her statement to the BBC that, “I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.” She claimed that the filmmakers had doctored her statements, but releases of the original unedited recordings demonstrated her calling at least twice for the assassination of Castro, and confirmed the veracity of the original quote.

As for Posada Carriles, AKA “Bambi,” a former CIA operative, he has been convicted in absentia of the Flight 455 bombing, a series of bomb attacks mainly in 1997 on fashionable Cuban nightclubs and hotels, and various other crimes including the attempted assassination of Castro in Panama in 2000. There is virtually no doubt that Carriles is an unrepentant and habitual terrorist, and has plausibly claimed that Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), was well aware of his activities but that the two agreed never to discuss them. To say that Carriles has never been properly investigated, charged or held to account by the US authorities, which it is bound by international treaties (particularly the 1971 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation) to do, would be an understatement. He has been briefly held on immigration charges, but was released in 2007, and a judge has ruled that he may not be extradited to Venezuela, where he is wanted for some of these crimes, on the grounds that he may be tortured there. Special rendition for some, special protection for others. The US has sought to deport him, but unsurprisingly no country will accept such an individual. Suffice it to say that some terrorists go to Guantánamo Bay, and some don’t.

Carriless still faces charges of immigration fraud and of lying to US authorities about his criminal activities, but this is in the context of his potential deportation process, not a full-blown criminal investigation into his apparently extensive terrorist career. And while CANF denies all knowledge of and involvement in his crimes, in 1997 the organization issued a statement that has been characterized as “supporting un-conditionally all terrorist attacks against Cuba,” and its chairman at the time, Francisco Hernandez, stated that “We do not think of these as terrorist actions”. Of course not. Meanwhile, Carriless openly boasts of his participation in the 1997 bombing campaign and merely faces immigration charges and is not, as far as I can tell, incarcerated in any form at the moment.

The point is not that Peter King, the MEK defenders, or Rep. Ross Lehtinen are fans of terrorism, should be held in any kind of contempt or subject to federal investigation or any other aspersions against their characters. These facts should not be held against them as human beings or as political leaders. But there is an important point to be made, which is that it is extremely difficult for any human being to hold to a single standard that opposes terrorism in all its forms: the use by, at the very, least non-state — and many would argue also state — actors of attacks on civilian targets in order to achieve political goals. It’s very easy to get worked up about people who use these despicable tactics against one’s own country or one’s own friends, relatives, co-religionists or compatriots. It’s also very easy to rationalize the unfortunate necessity, or perhaps understandable if deplorable excesses, of such actions by those whose causes, or sometimes merely identities, one sympathizes or affiliates with. There is much more to be said about the King hearings as more becomes known about them. Right now, it doesn’t look good because Rep. King has long held a jaundiced view of the Muslim American community generally as essentially disloyal or at least insufficiently loyal. He’s wrong about that, as I’ll demonstrate in a future posting very soon.

There’s also the question of who is going to be testifying, and not. Self-appointed terrorism expert and chronic errorist Steven Emerson (who blamed the first World Trade Center bombing on Serbs when it fact it was Islamists, and then blamed the Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City on Islamists when they had nothing to do with it) apparently is not. He and his supporters have tried to imply that he somehow anticipated or predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but a review of his work up to that point shows nothing of the kind: he did warn that there was a growing movement in support of Muslim extremism in the United States, but nothing I can find (admittedly I haven’t been able to bring myself to an exhaustive reading of all of his ramblings) in his pre-9/11 work suggests any understanding of the kind of international Al Qaeda scheme dreamed up in Afghanistan, plotted in Hamburg, organized in various parts of the United States and funded from various as yet to be fully determined sources. In other words, he was as unprepared for such an assault as everybody else even though he was raising a ruckus about a rather different sort of Muslim extremist. There are one or two people who could plausibly claim to have anticipated the 9/11 attacks, particularly Rick Rescorla, but not Emerson.

Emerson’s bizarre and angry letter to King, which is worth reading merely as an indication of his emotional condition and questionable self-opinion, protesting the fact that he was not going to be included in the list of witnesses can only be regarded as a good thing. That doesn’t mean that King is necessarily going to be presenting a fair hearing representing multiple and contending different points of view; allowing those who would severely criticize the American Muslim community in general and unfair terms to be pitted against Muslim Americans who can contradict these claims with eloquence and veracity, or disgruntled former law enforcement officials or Bush administration appointees and other opponents of the Obama administration to use the opportunity to score political points, but also with a fair hearing given to currently serving law enforcement and counterterrorism officials or Obama administration policymakers. That’s what a fair hearing would look like: panels of credible individuals from different positions and perspectives making their cases respectively. King may, in fact, produce such a hearing, and Emerson’s exclusion is certainly a good sign, but forgive us for not holding our breaths.

But one thing that the buildup to the King hearings demonstrates is that the challenge for all of us — Arab and Muslim Americans; Irish-Americans; Cuban-Americans; Iranian Americans; and those who hate, possibly with the best of reasons, regimes such as the ones in Havana and Tehran — is to maintain a simple, single standard when it comes to terrorism: attacks deliberately targeting civilians for political purposes are unacceptable. It’s not a defensible position that my friends and relatives get to do this because of their special circumstances whereas yours don’t. There is no moral clarity in distinguishing between the legal, moral and political status of what are obviously terrorist organizations or acts on the grounds of agreement with their political goals, or alleged lack of alternatives.

Inconsistency, and indeed hypocrisy, from those who have been most angrily pointing the finger at entire communities rather than specifically those Arab and Muslim Americans who have been sympathetic and occasionally even materially supportive of Islamist terrorists (and who should be criticized and, when warranted, prosecuted for that) is simply not acceptable. A good long look in the mirror of those who had, or still have, no problem with the IRA, the MEK, and the likes of Orlando Bosch and Luis Carriless is essential if there is to be any hope of clarity on the question of terrorism as a legal, moral and ethical matter. If it’s simply a tactic that we are happy or at least willing to see employed by our friends or against our enemies, then let us be honest and say so openly. But if we are really and actually sincerely against terrorism — and I am against it in all its forms by whoever carries it out and for whatever cause — then let us be clear, consistent and honest about that, for goodness sake. Otherwise questions regarding radicalization, terrorism, political violence, extremism, etc. will merely be exercises in political grandstanding, point-scoring and demagoguery. They will make matters worse rather than better, and make our country less rather than more secure.

The following Ibishblog interview was conducted a few weeks ago with Chris Lehmann, author of the new book Rich People Things (ORBooks, 2010). I heartily recommend this excellent satire of contemporary American class politics and the cultural mores, and I think Ibishblog readers can get a great sense of what's in the book and what Lehmann has to offer in general through the following conversation.

Q: Let's start with the title of the book and the genesis of the online column that gave rise to it. What I really like about it is how malleable this progression of non sequitur words really is. They could be three utterly separate words simply following on each other randomly, or it could be, as in the most obvious interpretation, things that belong to rich people or characterize the activities, beliefs and interests of rich people, which is the manifest meaning. Or it could be rich people ARE things, a hostile objectification of rich people which is I think the latent meaning of the title.

A: I think it works on all those levels and in various chapters of the book and various columns there will be times when I do just write about anything, like the chapter on Damien Hirst and his art and how that reflects the money culture.

Q: There are quite a few columns that talk about individuals, turning rich people into things.

A: Exactly, and their own jobs, one could argue, is to turn their own carbon lifeforms into rich people playthings.

Q: They have commodified themselves.

A: They have commodified their argument, or a certain vision of success, cultural achievement and the way that reward and punishment are distributed in the economic realm. These are all rich people things and they are all things produced by and for rich people, so I think even though it was very much a retroactive title slapped on an accidental column, it's proved a really good way to conceptually frame whatever it is I'm doing here.

Q: What is it that you're doing here?

A: I'm trying to insist that economic populism is an issue, or shall we say there is a useful way of looking at social and political class as an American cultural issue, and what's interesting to me is how that stable of ideas has been systematically subverted, buried or distorted beyond recognition in the official ways in which we have of understanding our economy, politics, and media culture. There are times when the columns in the book are a kind of media criticism. I try to think of my task as to go beyond the casual kind of deceptions, and lies frankly, about what it means to have a discussion about tax policy, say, where it's permissible to think of anyone making even more than $250,000 now as essentially middle-class. Right now in the debate over tax cuts the Republican Party has rather brilliantly framed this debate as Democrats trying to foment "class warfare" as it's called, which as you will note is something that is only discussed in America as coming from the bottom up, never the top down.

Q: Yes, there is only one class that engages in class warfare here.

A: Right, and it's also the least organized, least ideologically disciplined class is the one in question, so if they're making war, they're doing it with foam rubber swords. And, meanwhile, the Republican mantra that comes up whenever the subject of tax cuts arises is that "we want to extend the Bush tax cuts for everybody." That sounds so inclusive and unifying, right? Who doesn't want to pay lower taxes? What's interesting, at this very moment, as this debate is going on in Congress, is that there was a poll released by CBS at the end of last week that only 26% of Americans, when the issue is explained rationally to them, say that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for people earning $250,000 or more. So we're in this kind of Lewis Carroll moment.

Q: So, your book is a general attack on mystification.

A: Yes, that's the word I was trying to summon up earlier. How did we get to this point where the party that says it's representing “everyone” in this debate is actually contravening the stated will of 74% of the American public?

Q: Class warfare from the top down, but not recognized?

A: Yes, and cleverly concealed. If my book has a use, it's to insist on that concealment and point it out.

Q: And that's your conclusion, which is about mystification and the gutting of signification in economic language, class language etc.

A: Right, so we are in this through the looking glass moment where the other mantra you hear from the right now is, and every day you see examples of this, where Republican leaders will get up and deride elitists. But only liberals now are elitists. I often thinking casually scanning the news that an alien visitor would come to this country and encounter all this discourse and expect a liberal to basically be wearing a periwig and bloomers, with a snifter of some sort. The genius of this kind of rhetoric is that the GOP now represents the heroic mass resistance to these elitist fops. Just last week the incoming governor of Ohio, John Kasich, who used to be a Republican congressman, gave this barnstorming speech about tax cuts where he said that all conservative governors want from Washington, all we're telling to the leaders in Washington, is: let my people go. That is to say, stop all this talk of increasing taxes and let us destroy the barriers to wealth creation and let the economy get started again. This is a trope from the civil rights movement, going back to the book of Exodus indeed, but somehow I missed the moment in which Pharaoh became the Liberal tax hikers. It is rhetorically brilliant, but you also can't believe that things have deteriorated to this point.

Q: Some of this is very old. You find that an incredible swath of Americans consider themselves to be middle-class ranging from a household income of $20,000-$150,000 per year. And that has been true for a long time. It's almost meaningless as a term.

A: No, there's nothing new there and what's brilliant is that mathematically the term “middle” has no meaning, because again you are spanning the low 20Ks to, now, in the tax-cut debate rhetorically millionaires will be included in the middle class. So what does the middle mean in that situation? We should just get rid of the term and call it the baggy undefined class or something. The class that has no name.

Q: The point is it's not a class, it's a whole group of very separate registers in the economic spectrum with different interests.

A: Yes, and various actors in the economic and policy debate can rhetorically say things like “let my people go.” If you're savvy enough you could step forward as the Williams Jennings Bryan or Che Guevara of these oppressed people and they could be anyone. And usually, it's a funny thing but in the 70s it used to be, when I think this shift in debate started, that the middle class were the people who worked hard and played by the rules. Let me mention my first column in this series. My former employers at New York magazine looked at the uproar over the AIG bonuses when we had spent $70 billion bailing out AIG at the beginning of the financial crisis and they were paying out these lavish bonuses to executives and this, you'll remember, was one of the times in the media where there was this phony kind of anxiety about a populist uproar, and will Obama be angry and populist in response to the public's anger over this. New York magazine, and I knew this would happen having worked there, looked at this issue and decided, “well, we have to get Wall Street's side of the story.” Because, you know, these are the victims, these are the people who now say they feel unsafe and they need to hire security guards outside.

Q: Obviously the arsonist's point of view of the fire is very important.

A: Exactly, so they duly went out and reported a piece of which the short-term inspiration was, as you may recall, an AIG executive at the time who wrote this op-ed in the New York Times saying, I wasn't in the financial services division that is principally responsible and yet I'm tarred with all this and I'm quitting my job. It was this Spartacus-like statement, striking a blow on behalf of his fellow financial industry professionals.

Q: He was mad as hell and he wasn't going to take it anymore.

A:  Exactly, to use another populist trope from the 70s. So, this New York magazine piece quoted that and interviewed a number of other similarly aggrieved Wall Street executives who said things like, “people don't understand how hard we work," and "we are creating wealth,” and all that stuff you continue to hear constantly from these characters. And they were treated very sympathetically as the misunderstood Randian elite.

Q: It was a psychotherapy piece, basically?

A:  In terms of how it was framed, yes, that's right. Let's talk about the feelings of these misunderstood financial professionals. They're still getting seven-figure bonuses but they're hurt. And it was all framed as well as the public conversation about compensation and something about that in particular rankled me because here we are in the gravest financial crisis since the Depression, and you'll recall during the new deal, FDR took a very different tack. During the '36 campaign he got up at the biggest rally of the campaign in Madison Square Garden and announced that he “welcomed” the hatred of the bankers. And they hated him. At several points in the book I try to make the point of drawing that contrast because I think it's very telling, because now we have a political culture where we are worried about the feelings of these people, in official media culture anyway. And it's a very different climate.

Q: One of the things that you say about your book at the end of the introduction is that you hope it will have a tonic effect. So it seems to me you wanted to have a kind of therapeutic quality, for you and for the readers. There is a kind of venting going on here isn't there?

A: Well, absolutely, and I think part of the challenge going ahead, certainly for me personally and anyone else interested in these issues from a democratic standpoint is you do have to learn to both swat down the official social mythology about wealth in our society and figure out how to talk about it yourself in a way that's compelling, because I do think that no matter how debased the populist tradition has become at the hands of the right, there is a lot left that's worth reclaiming as well. Because God knows, the government and the financial elites understand their own class interests so we have to get in the habit of isolating that, detecting when they are speaking dishonestly about it, but also to discern what our own class interests are. Like, it doesn't make sense for our elected representatives be pushing for a tax cut extension that the vast majority of us oppose and will not only not benefit from but will be actively harmed by.

Q: We will pay for it. It's going to be a bill for us.

A: We'll pay in all sorts of ways, not only in marginal taxes but also the looting of Social Security, the social safety net which is already threadbare. One of the many absurdities of this particular moment is that we are debating this at the same time Congress has let federal unemployment benefits lapse. I don't know how much more dramatically to put this.

Q:  But, as you say, there has to be a register at which a lot of this populist rhetoric is recuperable even if it has been debased by the right because there's so much overlap between the critique that runs through your book and a lot of the critique of the tea party.

A: No, and I often wonder where is the left's tea party? But you have to look at what's tactically very smart, and I'm sure well intended on the part of the tea party, for example the appropriation of the whole idea of patriotism, you know, it's been a weird problem on the left.

Q:  But that's another thing that happened in the 70s, isn't it?

A:  Yes, you had the rise of a certain kind of identity politics, and while I don't subscribe to the conservative critique of political correctness, there is a difficulty pointed out by a very good former Clinton speechwriter who wrote a really good book called Speaking American, in which he pointed out how the '92 Clinton campaign rhetorically did a very good job of putting the first Bush presidency very much on the defensive especially around economic issues. It was more than just the slogan, “it's the economy stupid,” but it's hard to go back to that time because in 1992 Bill Clinton championed universal healthcare, and had a pretty compelling and thoughtful critique of trickle-down economics, but the problem is he never intended to govern along those lines. He was very effective in framing a populist campaign, and there's a chapter in my book on how the Democratic Party's economic profile beginning with the first Clinton term and certainly by the end of the Clinton years is the party of the rich. The rich now have a much broader range of choice. You can go with the party that is culturally more permissive and good on separation of church and state and other sorts of social issues, or you can go with the hard-line theocrats who will be there when the shit goes down, as we're seeing now.

Q:  Yes, but taking the layer of control and rhetoric at the top of the tea party out of the equation for a second, and looking at some aspects of the grassroots outrage that's genuine, how much is there separating that sentiment and those interests from a populist position in fact? Isn't it possible to argue that in there are all the elements of a genuine left populist critique?

A:  Well, not all. I would say the tea party is kind of emotionally populist, which is what gives populism a bad name, and justifiably so in many cases because that can degrade into bigotry and ugly anti-Semitism and all sorts of other stuff. It's emotionally populist and philosophically libertarian, because this is the other thing when you look at our recent political history that in my view is so essential to understand: the idea that market libertarianism has become dominant and, even for would-be dissenting movements like the tea party, hegemonic. You cannot move outside of that force field. So during the healthcare debate you had this first order delusion in the tea party protests where you would have older people coming out to town halls and telling their elected representatives, “I don't want universal healthcare because it will take away my Medicare.”

Q:  Or, I want don't government healthcare because it will interfere with my Medicare.

A:  And that is a first order delusion but behind that is the idea that they don't think of their government benefits as government benefits. What's happened is that something like Medicare has become disaggregated from a mass politics and it's become this sort of inviolate, individual right. That is to say, it's MY Medicare, it's not our Medicare, and keep your goddamn hands off it. That, in a nutshell, is the triumph of market libertarianism in my view. It's going to be a problem for the people on the right who, believe me, would love to see Medicare go away, because it can't be done.

Q:  This is the great thing about public healthcare. Once it's instituted you can never get rid of it. I've spoken with some hard-core libertarians in both developed and developing countries like Costa Rica where they have universal health care and I've never met a single one who, no matter how doctrinaire they are, thinks that it's either a good idea or politically plausible, whether or not there's any point in critiquing public healthcare as a theory, but as a fact, once it's there, it's a done deal and becomes unchallengeable. Which ought to tell you everything you need to know about public healthcare. Once it exists you can never get rid of it because people will lynch you in the streets if you try.

A:  It turns out they really like it. I mean Rush Limbaugh went to Costa Rica to get treated, for gosh sakes.

Q:  I'm sure he went to private hospitals, but it was funny that he said that if national healthcare were instituted he would move to Costa Rica, one of the few developing countries with national healthcare, which seems to elude him entirely. But I take it back. It's to give him credit for being sincere in any way. He just talks crap so I shouldn't even bother pointing out the glaring contradictions.

A:  Exactly.

Q:  So the problem you've identified is one of narratives. The free market libertarian sort of narrative that has become so hegemonic that there is no space for any other critique, in other words if there is a critique to be made it has to be a free-market critique of the free market. There is no other narrative. But why is there no other narrative? Obviously this is an overdetermined question, but I'd like to know what you think. Is it because the other narratives have simply failed to coalesce or is it because the existing non-free-market narratives have been discredited by performance in some way?

A:  Well, I think the first thing we have to understand is that there has been a 30+ year war on the new deal social contract and it actually began a long time ago. Jimmy Carter was a fiscal hawk, and he went after a lot of government spending ahead of Reagan. So, this is something that has very deep institutional roots in Washington. This idea of the vampire state or a demonized federal state has taken root in this country to such a degree that it's very difficult for anybody politically to challenge it. One of the very specific pieces of this dilemma is that Reagan not only declared war on the new deal social contract, he specifically declared war on the labor movement. So now we've gone from the mid-1950s where more than 30% of American workers were unionized, to where now it's 7% and shrinking. That is a shorthand way of explaining why the only popular planks now of liberalism are Social Security and Medicare from the Great Society because we still have old people. We don't have unionized workers, but old people vote. So as we've seen in the recent debate over healthcare, what ultimately won out was not the thing that was most popular in political terms, there was very strong support for a public option and single-payer wasn't on the table, but if it's ever explained as a rational policy people actually really like it. So the challenge then, if you're part of this force field of market libertarianism in Washington, is to ensure that it never gets to be part of the conversation and that's where the narrative comes in. It instantly got demonized, even before it was “socialist” in the rhetoric of the '09 health care fight it was “a foreign idea,” you know Canadians have it and, worse, the French! And that feeds into this debased populism because it's usually nationalist.

Q: You mentioned anti-Semitism. Have you seen any anti-Semitism from the tea party?

A: They've been very vigilant about it at least at the leadership level of routing out both that and racism.

Q: But there's been a decent amount of Islamophobia hasn't there?

A: Yes, and it's been underreported and undisciplined.

Q: Homophobia and Islamophobia, there's been plenty of both.

A: Those are acceptable. And you do see, like at the Glenn Beck 9/12 rally, racist signs too.

Q: Glenn Beck. Is he a mentally unbalanced subject? The only question I think worth asking about him is, does he need help, because someone like Limbaugh is plainly a businessman, he's making money, he's playing a role, and no need to ask what drives him. Is there something deeper and darker at work with Beck?

A: There is something deeper, and what I think it is, is that he has been treated: he's a recovering alcoholic who's become a Mormon convert. What's interesting about Beck is that he has the zeal of a convert, and that he actually uses this very particular image that's drawn from something that Joseph Smith supposedly said in the 19th century that “when the Republic is hanging by a thread the Mormon church will basically take charge.” It is a vision of theocracy.

Q: He subscribes to this?

A: Yes, there are many moments if you look through transcripts of his shows when he says that, and it's significant because it bespeaks a broader understanding of the world that is very much theocratic. In his view the Mormon faith saved his life and it will also save the American Republic in this time of crisis.

Q: So, America is an alcoholic basically?

A: Yes, which would explain the violent lurches of motivation that he attributes to the country.

Q: I wanted to ask you about the general category of rich people things for a second. What about the inverse, what about poor people things? Much of what's in here, also in its own way, are poor people things or working-class people things, or non-rich people things.

A: That's true, and I've tried to make a point in my weekly column of that. But the book is independent of that.

Q: There are some people who get particular opprobrium from you, and I was especially struck by your take on Malcolm Gladwell, who you seem to be particularly distasteful of. He generally speaking has a very good reputation, although I agree with you, so the question is what's the matter with Malcolm Gladwell?

A: Well, he's a very fluid writer, his prose is very readable, and he loves the move of going to the counterintuitive academic research and constructing a narrative such that everything you know about subject X is wrong.

Q: But, it's usually right isn't it?

A: Yes, and Steven Pinker has made this argument much better than I could, he sets up this straw man of common wisdom: what we all believe is X, but what the research really bears out is Y. His book Outliers is a perfect example, because it's an effort ironically enough to sort of take a very soft blow at the idea of the American meritocracy, and it turns out that material success doesn't correlate one-to-one with academic achievement, or that NFL quarterbacks who perform well are not necessarily the top draft picks. But as Pinker observes, college admissions offices or NFL coaches are betting in a system that guarantees a certain floor, it's not based on the performance of your number one draft pick or your summa com laude student.

Q: So, he's not looking at the whole casino, he's looking at the individual bet.

A: Right, and he doesn't understand that the house wins.

Q: Counterintuitive analytical gestures are often very rich but counterintuitive work based on research, alleged research, with an extraordinary degree of frequency turns out to be bogus, and Gladwell's an example. Foucault is another example, right? The analytical points he makes are extremely interesting, but he's wrong on almost everything factually. The great archivist was sort of completely full of crap and yet because his thinking is rich, he's still interesting. But Gladwell just only has the error, not the insight.

A: Right, he hasn't exactly filled out a persuasive analytical framework, it's just everything you know is wrong and also what ends up happening is that because the you he is tacitly addressing there isn't the average American, it's you the magazine editor or reader, and his book Blink is a perfect example of this. That's how he ends up drawing such exorbitant speaking fees from management seminars because he bears the message in Blink that every gut instinct you have is probably right, so if you are this middle manager at a major corporation and you're trying to develop some new sales pitch or some get rich quick scheme, then trust your instincts. And this is exactly what these people want to hear. It's a kind of mind cure, actually.

Q: It's a kind of anti-intellectualism of a rarefied variety.

A: You don't have to think analytically or critically about anything, just do it.

Q: Well, we've seen how that works at the level of national policy, under Pres. George W. Bush where much was determined apparently on the basis of gut and look where it got us, for example in Iraq. So there's some space left to defend the analytical, isn't there?

A: And it should be a growing space right now.

Q: But it's closing.

A: No, I agree, especially now in the wake of the last election the Obama administration seems determined to prophylactically surrender.

Q: You don't like the Obama administration.

A: Certainly I don't like its economic policies. To hark back to the experience of the new deal, what happened when the banks failed? Under FDR, he declared a bank holiday, he introduced a whole body of radical reforms saying to our financial institutions: you're doing business differently now, you can't co-mingle commercial banking and investment banking, there's going to be federal deposit insurance to ensure that you keep a minimum balance of holdings.

Q: Real reforms, structural reforms.

A: Yes, and what's just happened now is we've just had a bailout. And also three of the four bad actors in the '08 crisis were still making economic policy: Ben Bernanke,  who I think if Obama had any FDR instincts his head would be among the first to roll; Tim Geithner, who crafted TARP when he was head of the New York Fed and got a fucking promotion to go head the Treasury Department; and then as if all that weren't enough he brings back Larry Summers, the genius who as treasury secretary under Clinton dismantled all these new deal protections and created the basis for the crisis. So, in economic terms, this administration has been a big disappointment.

Q: Is there anything about the administration you like?

A: Well, I mean…

Q: I mean other than the fact that we have a black president, and more importantly a black First Lady, and maybe most importantly two African-American little girls growing up in the White House in front of the whole country?

A: That's true.

Q: From my perspective the most important aspect of the Obama administration is probably Sasha and Malia. If we get eight years of watching them grow up in the White House, the country will never be the same, culturally.

A: No, I totally agree with that. Part of this whole attack on the new deal social programs obviously involved race, and attacks on the black family, and this is a very significant moment in symbolic terms.

Q: But on policies, is there anything good, or is it one degree of disappointment or another?

A: That is our lot.

Q: I was going to say that if you have to reach back to Roosevelt for anything good to say about any administration then the question can only be asked in deep hindsight. I mean we could have sat here in the 30s saying, “he hasn't done anything about segregation.”

A: Fair enough, but why indulge in the soft bigotry of low expectations?

Q: How is it that in the midst of this catastrophe driven by greed, driven by unrestrained excess, lack of regulation, etc., that Ayn Rand has become the heroine? How the fuck does that happen? But it's a serious question. A more loathsome figure you couldn't imagine, and a less appropriate one. How could she possibly be a corrective? It would make more sense to become a Jesus freak.

A: Only in America my friend. But no, it's a real question. But you're right, there is a religious quality to the veneration of Ayn Rand but it can only be religious because logically, as you were saying, nothing in this moment recommends her.

Q: Well, it's particularly gruesome in that her most accomplished disciple, Alan Greenspan, would be the villain in chief in the grand narrative of this calamity. So the mastermind of his philosophy which caused all of this has become the heroine promoted as the corrective of the very thing which her ideas produced.

A: Yes, not only do we have a political culture that is often anti-intellectual we have zero historical memory.

Q: So, we are perfect postmodern subjects? We know nothing, we remember nothing, we are 300 million Sgt. Schultzes?

A: And that's why when, at the height of the furor during all the bailouts and when the tea party took off, you saw people wearing T-shirts and brandishing placards saying, “who is John Galt?," the famous refrain from Atlas Shrugged.

Q: I. can answer that: one of the worst characters ever dreamed up by one of the crappiest novelists who ever put pen to paper, and who was particularly unable to write characters.

A: Yes, I dallied with her work as many American teenagers do when I was a kid, out of curiosity, and I reacted with revulsion.

Q: Was she popular with your peers?

A: Oh yeah, I grew up in central Iowa and the appeal of Ayn Rand is particularly to an adolescent mentality because it's all obviously the cult of the creative genius, the Howard Roarks.

Q: It's an Oedipal fantasy, you're asserting your own phallic power.

A: Yes, and in this case that is no metaphor. There is a raging phallic mayhem in all of her novels. And it's no accident that in literary terms most successful one and her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead, is about an architect who rapes his protagonist.

Q: And who builds giant phallic structures. Plus it's in the title anyway. It's pretty undisguised, as crude as the James Bond films I wrote about a few weeks ago.

A: But there is at least wit in the James Bond films.

Q: There is wit, and there is lots of conscious self-deprecation and self-parody. They don't pretend to be a grand philosophical project to overthrow the evil Immanuel Kant.

A: The other thing about the prototypical Ayn Rand character that I noticed when I reread a lot of this stuff for the book is that they have no family relationships unless they are fiercely Oedipal as you're describing.

Q: And as Whittaker Chambers pointed out, there are no children in any of her writings and no possibility of children. It's not a world for children.

A: In a weird way, it's almost Soviet.

Q: I really loved Chambers' review even though I don't identify with the spiritual side of it because his main rejection is of her materialism, but he had her number like nobody's business, and there's this great passage where he says that like her protagonists, she can't like children because she creates names of bankers like Midas Mulligan, and you can fool adults with this but children will always squirm uncomfortably knowing something isn't right, but not knowing exactly what. But they'll know something is all wrong with this. It's certainly a sociopathic worldview.

A: Society is a delusion that's used to enslave the creative individual.

Q: It's a philosophy that would be embraced wholeheartedly by an irate panther, living alone in the rain forest not wanting to see or meet another panther except once or twice in its life strictly for purposes of procreation, sleep most of the day and just emerge at night to kill and drink.

A: I kind of feel like you're maligning panthers.

Q: I probably am: they're just doing what panthers do, whereas she's telling people to do what people don't normally do. I am maligning panthers — they're noble creatures. Whereas her characters and people who follow her “philosophy” or dictate are ignoble. So I may be maligning panthers, but still you wouldn't want to hang out with somebody with the mentality of a panther.

A: And you definitely don't want them making your economic policies. There was this comical moment when Alan Greenspan was finally dragged before Congress and asked, “Jesus, dude, what happened here?” And he confessed. He said he had this core faith that the markets would regulate themselves and it seems to have been a flaw in his thinking. My bad. Except, and this is the beauty of the Randian worldview, there is zero personal guilt.

Q: Well, since he fulfilled his will perfectly, what's the problem? He fulfilled his own destiny. The consequences are beside the point.

A: Everyone else has to deal with it. Early on during the worst of the subprime loans when they were targeting inner-city neighborhoods, a number of the community activists and others went before the Federal Reserve and said, you don't have to be a genius to see that these people aren't really going to be able to pay their mortgages, especially when they go up. And Greenspan actively dismissed their concerns and said moreover that it's not the job of the Federal Reserve to do this kind of regulation. To which, I think, our national response should be: what the fuck is the job of the Fed in that case? It's supposed to control the money supply as an instrument of making economic policy. So maybe he could've referred these issues to HUD or Congress but he didn't do that, he just batted the concerns aside derisively. There is a perfect specimen of the Randian faith in market self-regulation.

Q: Sticking with popular culture for a second, because that's where Ayn Rand lives being utterly dismissed by any intellectuals and academics worth their salt, and certainly one of the worst writers I've ever read…

A: Well, her books are readable at a certain level.

Q: Gladwell is, but what with Midas Mulligan and everything I just can't deal with Ayn Rand.

A: You go through it much more quickly when you're 14.

Q: One of the most surprising entries in your book is the one on reality television, which I wouldn't necessarily think was a rich people thing except insofar as all TV shows are made by rich people. But it raises some very interesting questions. First of all, the whole category is an oxymoron. There couldn't be anything further from reality than TV and never the twain shall meet.

A: And there's something especially perverse about manipulating the appearance of reality to make it seem as though it is documentary vérité. I only came upon this as a subject because my wife was a TV writer and critic for a long time, and consumes it a great deal.

Q: My mantra was always do TV but don't watch it. I did go through a period of doing a lot of it, but now I try not to.

A: I know, it's an unhealthy relationship to have.

Q: Very. Toxic, is it not?

 A: So she was watching all these shows and it suddenly dawned on me that the topics were not surprisingly based on, because who else would want to do such a thing, desperate people who wanted a quick buck.

Q: It's what always drew people to become circus freaks.

A: I think the right analogy is that of the geek, the original geek, someone who would bite off a chicken head for cash. Two things gradually struck me. One was, there is literally a show on VH1 called “I love money” in which people really scheme and debase themselves and subject themselves to horrible, total exposure and at the end of the show they go to the vault where you're voted out and it's all very symbolically rich and repulsive. And you have this show called “toddlers in tiaras"…

Q: Sounds like kiddie porn.

A: It's very close. It's kiddie beauty pageants.

Q: How disgusting.

A: I will literally leave the room any time my wife has this on.

Q: You mean you've actually seen this?

 A: In passing. And only for purposes of research.

Q: They always say that.

A: I read it for the articles. But seriously, what I realized is that in all these spectacles, what they are doing is they are presenting a public theater taking poor people who have the wrong sort of ambition and punishing them, humiliating them publicly. The tacit script of all these shows is, despite all the mythology about social mobility in America, there evidently is a class of people who we relegate to geek status. For all the talk about economic reward, and we should be having a conversation about what Wall Street gets paid or whatever, this is the economic punishment side. This is the moment where we hold that these people who are just less educated, vulgar, have bad social skills and family relationships, and we just say, you don't belong.

Q: So it's similar, in that sense, to another place on TV where the same kind of thing happens on those daytime sort of spectacle shows where they'll bring on the goodies and baddies, people who are supposedly deviating from the normative bourgeois mores of American society, and the audience is supposed to boo and hiss or applaud in order to reinforce the way you're supposed to behave.

A: It's a symbolic kind of show trial. In a Sally Jessy Raphael show in the 1990s, and this is a perfect example, economics aside, about how there is something immoral, to use a quaint term, about this because what they are doing is fucking with people's heads. They took this homophobic man and had a gay coworker of his publicly confess a crush, and humiliated him, and eventually the guy went and killed him.

Q: That was bound to eventually happen, wasn't it?

A: You invade other people's psyches, and you humiliate them publicly, and what the fuck do you think is going to happen eventually? All these spectacles have that undercurrent of risk, and what's going on beyond that though is your making the statement that there is a class of people who it's okay to fuck with. And they signed a contract, so we are legally covered, and let the gladiator exhibition began. It is hard not to think of ancient Rome.

Q: The chapter I disagree with the most is the first one, the one on the Constitution. Your critique is often sound, and it's very rooted in the kind of classic revisionist view of Charles Beard and so forth, and there's a very long tradition of this in the 20th century, particularly the first 70 years, of this sort of critique. My own sense is that there are places in which you are unduly harsh. I don't think there's anything you've said about the Constitution that's wrong, but I think there is a whole other angle to it that isn't there. So it's perfectly true that in the parts of the Constitution that were constructed to protect minorities, the minority that they had in mind was the propertied class, the creditors. And, what they wanted to protect them from was the wrath of the majority, that is to say the debtors. And so they were very concerned that if you create a democracy people would vote themselves out of debt, vote themselves into property, vote propertied people out of property, and this is not acceptable. But it didn't take that long for those provisions to metastasize into legal protections for all kinds of minorities and it continues to happen, so even if there is some kind of very questionable origin of some of this stuff it's played out in a way that's often been very salutary and you don't really allow for that.

A: Well, I don't dismiss it.

Q: You don't dismiss it, but to my reading you don't give it enough credit.

A: That's a fair criticism. I would say, though, that, as is the case in dealing with mystifications, one has to be firmly insistent at times.

Q: I wouldn't ask you to back down on your assertions about the propertied class. No one who is aware of the founding and the debate at the Constitutional convention and the arguments between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists can doubt it. That's what they were worried about: non-propertied people and their use of voting rights, they weren't worried about racial minorities or women or anything like that. They were worrying about poor people legislating against rich people. That's what they were arguing about.

A: And your point is well taken that the genius of the document is that as a social basis of American democracy expanded, the Constitution was able to adapt and move forward and use the language and provisions it contains to apply to other purposes and categories. Which is true.

Q: In other words, it seems hard for me to simply look at the Constitution and say, “oh, rich person thing.” It is of course that. But at certain crucial moments, and decisively so, it's been available to others as well. Now of course not without sometimes the permission of rich people, or the thwarting of rich people against their own anger and resistance, usually by other rich persons such as during the new deal.

A: You need a defecting group within the ruling class.

Q: Well, and also they defected in order to save capitalism from itself. They were not Bolsheviks, and that was their whole point: we don't want to become Bolsheviks but the next step is a bunch of Bolsheviks. So it wasn't very much of a defection.

A: And you need an expansive welfare state in order to save capitalism from itself, and that was the new deal. I'll stipulate that FDR was wrong in this move, but he felt it was necessary to try to pack the Supreme Court and add justices after the court struck down the national recovery administration to preserve the new deal as constitutionally robust. In a way, the same Janus-faced argument applies to the Supreme Court. The court has extended the reach of the Constitution, and vindicated the rights of formerly oppressed minorities, but at the same time, especially right now, we are looking at a court that is unbelievably skewed toward the propertied classes.

Q: I don't have the same problem at all with your chapter on the Supreme Court. The court has always been an explicitly political institution, the third branch of government, and only attenuated from the political system in certain ways. There is no one except the most mystifying law professors and historians who could be naïve enough to say of Bush v. Gore, well that was an extraordinary thing. They voted along party lines and they reversed their normal positions in order to do so. Okay, wow! Who'd a thunk it? Well, me and everybody else with half a brain, that's who. Because this is a political institution based on political appointments and it's the product of the political process. The Constitution's relationship to the political process is much more indirect than the courts', although of course it is the court that determines what the Constitution says. At least for now. It's still completely a document that serves to legitimate what power wants to do, but it functions in a radically different way than the court.

A: Yes and no. Because it exists in our common life as it is interpreted by the Court. But yes, I understand your point that once these core principles were instituted and made the founding document of our nation they took on this life of their own.

Q: It seems to me the biggest critique in economic terms to be made of the way the Constitution has been interpreted and applied has to do with the personhood of corporations. Which is simply a bizarre reading of the document, but it also seems to have been inevitable. It is not in the Constitution, and you have to torture that poor document to get it in there, dragging it back and forth between the rack and the chamber of little ease before you can get it into the right shape for that, by stretching it and crushing it and stretching it and crushing it, but it couldn't have been any other way. The social and economic structure of this country demands that. You really couldn't have had another interpretation, no matter how bizarre it is. It had to be there. Much in the same way that some things liberals like about privacy rights and such, again not to be found anywhere in it, have to be read into it.

A: What's the famous phrase from Rove v. Wade, shadows of penumbras or whatever? There's clearly no guarantee of a right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution.

Q: Except that we now hold there is.

A: And there is no direct language about separation of church and state either. So you have on the left people wanting there to be privacy for the sake of abortion rights or people on the right, even though the Constitution disestablishes state religion, will say it's not in the Constitution to separate church and state.

Q: Well here's the thing: it's just a pile of language, so has no inherent meaning, other than the meaning through which it is interpreted. One chapter you don't have in your book that might be there is one on so-called constitutional “strict constructionism.” Strict constructionism is certainly a rich person's thing, but it's also a no thing, so to speak, given the fact that at the time of the adoption of any of these passages in the Constitution itself, or the Bill of Rights, or any of the subsequent amendments, almost never has there been, or at least rarely has there been, unanimity or even consensus among the people who adopted the language about what exactly they thought the language meant. There was merely a consensus of the choice of words, but at the time raging battles about what they meant even though people could agree on the literal words. So this is all fatuous, and not only fatuous from the point of view of anyone who understands how language actually functions, but also fatuous in terms of the historical record.

A: Absolutely, and in part that's why it's interesting to me that taking the strict constructionist or originalist view of the document I think you can make a strong case that the most incontrovertible stuff is the economic stuff, it's about contract law, it's about no state can make their own currency because that would cause inflation and decrease the value of credit.

Q: Except for the crucial thing: the legal personhood of corporations, which we could not do without.

A: Yes, it had to be tortured through the 14th amendment, which of course was originally designed to protect the rights of the freedmen, former slaves.

Q: And from there it becomes a charter for corporate personhood.

A: Yes, and from there you have the Citizens United decision.

Q: By the way, it really does sound like an extremely bad S/M movie: “Strict Construction.” Doesn't it?

A: And, in a sense, it is. Dudes in black robes.

Q: Well, I guess that's it. Congratulations on a great new book and I hope everybody reads it. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to doing this again very soon.

An Ibishblog reader, who I respect greatly, writes:

Hussein, I agreed with much of what you said in your recent Huffington Post column, but this really puzzled me:

"In our own country, the most vociferous proponents of the Arab and Muslim victimization narrative, those who blame the West, especially America or "the white man," for all the ills that befall the Arabs and Muslims, and those who most loudly advocate against the legal and societal harassment of Arabs and Muslims in the United States, take full advantage, as they are entitled to, of the American system and find shelter in the comfort and security of its freedoms. The damage they do in being the loudest and most anti-American voices emanating from the vulnerable Arab and Muslim immigrant communities, who already feel besieged, is to provide ammunition to the demagogues and profiteers of racism and peddlers of hate and fear of Arab and American Muslims, and to empower and encourage the worst racist and chauvinistic tendencies in this country."

Who, exactly, are these groups?  And are you suggesting that our discourses here should be restrained by the risk that our criticisms of the US can be appropriated by al-Qa'ida to justify their terrorism?

I'm glad you asked. First of all, I can only speak for myself in this case because the commentary in question was co-authored by my colleague, ATFP Pres. Ziad Asali. Indeed, the passage you cite from our collaboration was originally drafted by him, although I agree with and stand by every single word of it. But let me give you my own personal view of what I think we mean in this important passage.

The groups we are referring to are many and various, which is why we were not specific in naming them. They run the gamut from the Islamic religious right to the Arab nationalist left, and therefore cannot be placed in a straightforward ideological category or box. It's more an attitudinal issue: a way of looking at our country from a jaundiced point of view, with an attitude of hostility, unjustified hyper-criticism, an obsession with its faults and disregard for its virtues, and the knee-jerk reaction that blames everything that is wrong with the Arab or Muslim world on Western intervention alone. The fact is there are very loud voices among the Arab and Muslim Americans that not only blame the West in general and the United States in particular for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East, including much of which is plainly and unmistakably self-inflicted by the Arabs and the Muslims without any help from anybody else, and that these are influential voices. They sing the siren song that it's not our fault, that someone else is to blame, and that all we have to do is sit back and complain loudly enough and everything will ultimately be all right. If you're not familiar with such voices, you don't read the Arab blogosphere at all, because that's mainly what's in it.

The irony were getting to in this passage, I think, is how easy it is to vilify the West from the comforts of the West; to hypocritically take advantage of the financial and professional opportunities afforded by a country like the United States and, even more hypocritically of the political freedoms it provides, and yet to maintain an attitude of utter hostility towards it at every level and blame it for anything and everything, including the bad weather. This is a discourse that holds that even bad actors in the Arab world, whether it is the oppressive regimes or the demented and violent extremist groups are all either respectively acting at the behest of, or simply producing an inevitable and natural reaction to the policies of, the West. It's a set of arguments that essentially alleviates Arabs and Muslims from any responsibility for their predicament, and that reduces the Arab and Muslim American role to one of being almost entirely critical of our own country in a very unhealthy and unrealistic way, and in a manner that ensures political self marginalization and total and utter irrelevancy.

In other words, there is a tremendous degree of hypocrisy in the radical chic anti-American attitude expressed in so many online forums by younger (and older, for that matter) activists who sit in the comfort of US universities or other American places and spaces and fulminate against the evils of the United States day and night. It's not a question of love it or leave it. That's preposterous. But it is a question of having the minimal integrity of recognizing that the country you choose to live in obviously has something to offer you that you're taking advantage of, not least a degree of political freedom to castigate it without any potential repercussions of any serious variety. The fact that some people hide behind pseudonyms or do so anonymously only underscores their hypocrisy. There is a striking lack of personal, political and professional integrity at work here that deserves to be pointed out. It's not courageous, although it might be tragically hip. From a political point of view, it's completely self-defeating and while it may gain one fans in the online echo chamber of social media and the blogosphere, insofar as it has any influence at all, it helps consign the entire community to the political margins, which is where some people openly say they are determined to stay because the American political system is inherently corrupt and/or corrupting.

The damage such voices do to the Arab and Muslim American communities is almost incalculable, because not only do they encourage self-marginalization and determined, calculated irrelevancy, leaving an open field for our adversaries (something they have enjoyed for decades and continue to take full advantage of), but because by being reflexively, irrationally and unfairly anti-American they feed into the narrative that Arabs and Muslims in the United States are a potential fifth column. None of this is to say that principled opposition to misguided US foreign policies is not important or essential. Anyone who's followed my career over the past couple of decades will know that I have not hesitated to voice strong, passionate and sustained critiques of policies I thought were indefensible and damaging to the national interest such as the misguided, and indeed I think disastrous, invasion of Iraq. But the only attitude worth taking if one is in the least bit interested in political viability is that of the loyal opposition. It's one thing to make a patriotic critique of a policy on the grounds that it will not in fact strengthen the country or achieve consensus policy goals. It is another to denounce the entire political system of the country, imply that it needs to be overthrown, attempt to influence foreign policy by simply vilifying policymakers and the entire system of policymaking and stand militantly outside it waving real or virtual impotent placards, or to give our fellow citizens every reason to feel that we might be, as the anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes like to suggest, fundamentally disloyal.

Principled, patriotic, measured and sensible criticism of US foreign policy or other aspects of American behavior, conduct or culture is not only a useful thing: it's a patriotic duty. And I don't think there is the least danger that any such discourse can be “appropriated by Al Qaeda” to justify their violence. This certainly isn't what I think we were trying to suggest. But I do think it is essential for Arab and Muslim Americans to shed their tin ear — their apparently chronic inability to hear how our words will sound to our fellow Americans — and begin to pay serious attention to crafting a message that conveys our fundamental interests and concerns in a receivable manner that can have a positive impact rather than reinforcing the worst stereotypes and stoking the deepest fears of disloyalty. Angry people will probably regard such a suggestion as an appeal to kowtow to chauvinistic American attitudes or unreasonable expectations. I don't think that's the case at all.

All that is required is to embrace one's position as a loyal American with as much seriousness of purpose and sincerity as possible, and begin first and foremost always with the national interest at heart. From then it is a fairly simple matter to craft arguments centered around the national interest (and I mean as commonly understood, and not the alternative Dennis Kucinich left wing alternative version or the Ron Paul right-wing one) that advance issues we believe in such as the urgent need to end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Or, for that matter, to have advocated against the Iraq war and in favor of its rapid drawdown. Or to advocate in favor of an intelligent and fast-tracked drawdown in Afghanistan. Or to oppose irrational and counterproductive “national security” measures that unfairly target Arab and Muslim Americans based on their identity. And so on and so forth. It's not terribly complicated, once you accept the proposition that we are Americans, that our first duty is to our own country, and that there is nothing we legitimately want that is incompatible with our American national interest.

But the truth is that the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States ARE vulnerable on many fronts, especially to charges of disloyalty. It's totally unfair and irrational, but it is the reality and we ignore it at our peril. Our point was that irresponsible, juvenile and unthinking rhetoric that plays into the hands of the anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes is something our community just can't afford, and yet many of the loudest voices on social media, the blogosphere and other decentralized forms of communication produce exactly that. This is a definite danger, because it gives ammunition to the worst of the racists and bigots. And, of course, politically it not only doesn't achieve anything, it makes matters worse. It's not a matter of declining to say something that really needs to be said out of fear of  the reaction of others. It's a question of having a healthy respect for the sensitivities and sensibilities of our fellow Americans — something we frequently and correctly demand Westerners and especially Americans show to Arabs and Muslims — and trying to understand the difference between a receivable message that can have a positive impact as opposed to venting, preaching to the choir and providing the likes of Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller with more ammunition to spread their fear and hatred. It's just a question of being smart rather than stupid.