This week marked the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state. As Jeffery Goldberg at the Atlantic Monthly points out, Israel is the culmination of one of the most successful nationalist movements of the last century, and yet it still faces stark questions with respect to its identity and future.

I am Jewish by birth: my mother is Jewish, and Judaism is a matrilineal religion/culture. Like many Jews raised in New York City in a secular home with little exposure to explicitly Jewish culture, I have mixed emotions about both Judaism and Israel. I know that my ancestors were often singled out and persecuted, and that to this day Jews are still a hated minority in many parts of the world. I do not take lightly the struggles and pain of the Jewish people.

There are many things about Jewish culture that I respect, particularly its strong intellectual tradition and the fact that Jews by and large do not believe in proselytizing. At the same time, my strong aversion to organized religion puts me at odds with much of Jewish identity; I also find the notion of a “chosen people” offensive.

It is with respect to the state of Israel that my feelings are most mixed. There is something uplifting about a people so long reviled and persecuted finally realizing their dream of a state of their own, one which they have turned into the most prosperous in the Middle East. But the human costs on both sides have been tremendous; I’ve been reading about the history of the Israelis and the Palestinians for more than a decade, and I’m still not sure where the blame really lies.

Some things, however, are clear.

There is no doubt that suicide bombing is evil, and that the Arab states bent on Israel’s destruction are largely filled with vile opportunists who use the Palestinians as pawns to deflect attention away from their own corruption. Israel is not free from blame, either. The continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank clearly violates both international law and any proper sense of justice.

More importantly, the very nature of a “Jewish state” troubles me.

The essence of liberal democracy is that states are defined by ideals, not by ethnicity; yet so much of Israeli domestic and foreign policy is driven by the goal of maintaining a majority ethnic Jewish population. Because of higher Arab birth rates, this ultimately means that Israel will either have to create a two-tiered socioeconomic system (akin to apartheid in South Africa) or somehow decrease its Arab population (through expulsion or other means). In some ways the Jews may be suffering the “winner’s curse”: after thousands of years of struggle, they return to their homeland only to see demographics deny them their dream.

The bottom line is that Israel will eventually be faced with a difficult choice—either be democratic or be Jewish. Since I believe strongly in democracy, my own choice is clear; yet I can still sympathize with the fears and hopes of my ethnic relatives half-way across the world.

I hope and dream that one day humanity will be drawn together by shared ideals of freedom and universal human rights. In the meantime, religious and ethnic bonds will remain some of the strongest that both keep people together and tear them apart. Israel is ground zero for this dynamic, and will likely be for the foreseeable future.

Jason Scorse

If there’s one lesson to learn from the Reverend Wright controversy, it is that it’s past time to get religion out of politics. While Senator Obama’s pastor occupied the spotlight this past week, preachers with equally ridiculous and offensive views have been linked to GOP leaders for decades. Both Democrats and Republicans should work to keep religion out of the public square.

Both the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence make absolutely clear that religion is a private affair that should not be the basis for any government policy. At the same time there’s no doubt that candidates’ religious views influence their morals, and this is a valid topic for discussion.

It would be illuminating, for instance, to see a presidential debate in which the candidates were called on to discuss how their religious beliefs influence their attitudes towards war, healthcare, education, science, and taxation. Perhaps even more important, it would be great to hear what they think about the separation of church and state in modern-day America.

The least we can ask for is a politics free of the influence of incendiary and ignorant preachers of any stripe.

Unfortunately, as E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post points out, there’s a double-standard at work: if the preachers are white and right wing, they don’t get the same scrutiny as when they’re black and liberal (or associated with liberals). If the media paid close attention to the pastors in John McCain’s circle, the public would soon learn that his are no less offensive than Reverend Wright.

So their views would cancel each other out, and make no difference in November. This would be a great development. Senator McCain doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve, nor does Senator Obama. That means we might yet get a debate that isn’t about distractions, but focuses instead on the issues that actually matter for America and the world.

P.S. As usual, please make your views known to the traditional media—both carrots and sticks—praise them for covering real issues and rebuke them when they emphasize trivialities. I’m beginning to sense a backlash against the mindlessness, which bodes well for the fall.

Jason Scorse

The real elitists in American politics are the pundits and the news media who think that flag pins, “likability”, and the color of one’s skin or one’s gender are the most important issues in the campaign for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world. With an economy slipping into recession, no end in sight for two of the longest wars in U.S. history, an administration that has endorsed torture, and a looming environmental crisis, the nation’s major news sources have no shortage of serious issues to report on. Instead, we get an endless stream of distractions and trivialities.

Adding insult to injury, the nation’s opinion pages routinely contain lectures on what it really means to understand rural America—these from blowhards living in the posh D.C. suburbs who skip from one gala dinner to the next.

This has to stop. The stakes are simply too high.

The only way it will is if we the people demand something different. Some of us are already doing this by switching to new media sources, which is one reason why newspaper circulation and network news audiences are steadily declining. We also need to speak up loud and clear when the mainstream media stoop to new lows, as ABC did with its mindless Obama-Clinton “debate”. And of course we can continue to build alternative sources, as this website and tons of others has attempted to do.

More than anything, what has exposed the mediocrity of the traditional media is the plethora of superior perspectives put forth on the web by academics, thinkers, and concerned citizens. Many of the pieces that I read on blogs, for which the writers are generally unpaid, are better than what people are earning six-figure salaries to produce.

But let us not pretend that alternative media can do it alone. The large resources of the major newspapers and networks enable them to do the kind of original reporting that blogs and other independent sources can’t possibly match. Only National Public Radio, probably the best overall source of news, can begin to compete, and even its resources are tiny by comparison.

It is possible to envision a future in which the traditional media forego mindlessness and return to in-depth coverage of serious issues and a focus on real priorities. Combine this with continued scrutiny by blogs, and the more varied commentary that comes with them, and America could easily become the most informed nation in the world. Given the disproportionate power that we wield on the international stage, we should aim for no less.

Take-home point: Make your voices heard. Whenever you hear or read a particularly mindless story, give the media a call or send an email expressing your discontent. And when they run a great story, let them know as well.

P.S. As if on cue, an entire issue of mindlessness at Newsweek. Let the editors know what you think at: Editors@newsweek.com.

Jason Scorse

There is no doubt that Obama’s recent comments that many rural Americans feel “bitter” about their economic situation, leading them to “cling” to guns, religion, and anti-gay and anti-immigrant sentiments, represent his worst political mistake to date. Both Clinton and McCain promptly jumped all over the comments, as well as the news media (ridiculously so in Wednesday’s ABC News “debate”).

That Obama made these comments in a closed meeting in San Francisco makes them all the more damaging. We will know soon whether this seriously damages his poll numbers; Obama is that rare politician who can take a terrible gaffe and turn it into a “teaching moment” (e.g., the Wright controversy).

Back in 2005 I wrote about this issue while disputing the main thesis in Thomas Franks’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas. Franks lays out in detail the ways in which rural Americans are distracted by “culture war” issues and duped into voting against their economic self-interest. I laid out in some detail why this argument—Obama’s argument (and Jim Webb’s too)—is somewhat elitist, but more importantly, wrong.

Issue by issue, I showed that for many Americans certain “values” issues trump economics, and that voters are making rational choices, just not in the way the left and Democrats would like.

This week Larry Bartels from Princeton took up my critique, and offered a different explanation. Analyzing socioeconomic data and poll results, Bartels makes the case that low income Americans do vote based more on economic issues, while the relatively affluent take socio-cultural issues more into account (perhaps because they don’t have to worry as much about money).

In some ways the 2008 Presidential Election will present a test, however imperfect, of this thesis. Assuming Obama is the Democratic nominee, Americans will have a choice between a candidate with an unambiguously progressive domestic agenda and a candidate who believes that Bush’s domestic agenda was too progressive.

If come November, with the economy likely in a recession or just coming out of one, McCain were still able to beat Obama, we would have to conclude that the majority of Americans are not primarily swayed by economic issues when it comes to voting.

If this transpires it will usher in a day of reckoning for the Democratic Party and the entire progressive movement, both of which would need to radically rethink their view of government and American values. Stay tuned.

Jason Scorse

Voices of Reason began four years ago, a little over one year after the start of the Iraq War and six months before the U.S. presidential election. It was a time when terror alerts, “swift boat” attacks, and a blind American nationalism were at their peak. The U.S. had yet to experience the full extent of the incompetence of the Bush Administration: its complete misreading of the Iraqi insurgency, its inability to protect New Orleans and its citizens, an economic policy that would lead to record debt and a looming recession.

But reason is making a comeback.

As if awakening from a stupor, Americans of all political persuasions are starting to think more clearly and to demand rational discourse on a host of issues. Things that were once too politically sensitive to demand much attention are now front and center; political correctness is beginning to give way to an honest examination of the facts; and anti-intellectualism appears to be in retreat.

Just last week, Newt Gingrich gave a major address at the American Enterprise Institute in response to Obama’s speech on race in America. While I don’t agree with much of what the former Speaker said, and his speech was not given in as humble a manner as professed, it was definitely a sign of the times that someone as prominent as Gingrich would tell a hardcore conservative audience that they needed to take Senator Obama’s words seriously.

And for all of the criticism leveled at the blogosphere, the internet has shown an amazing power to give voice to thousands of perspectives and to provide an alternative to the pundits who for so long have dominated Americans' access to information. In my judgment this has contributed tremendously to American political discourse; Voices of Reason is just one small voice in this great and dynamic conversation.

None of this is to suggest that somehow we have found the solution to all of our problems. But we do have an opening: there is a sense of possibility in the air, and sense that we may be on the verge of something new, profound, and potentially decisive. It is my hope that this small forum can continue to contribute to America's march toward reason and help us to seize this great opportunity.

In this spirit, it would be much appreciated if each of you could invite five people to this site, and ask them to invite five more. And if you have any suggestions for future topics, please let me know.

Thanks for all your comments and feedback; may we still be going strong many years from now, looking back at the beginning of a great period in American (and world) history.

Jason Scorse

The primary characteristic of a national government is a monopoly on the use of force; without this, a state does not in any meaningful sense exist. Governments have two means to this end: fear and intimidation or moral and political legitimacy. For most of Iraq’s modern history, the former was the one employed by a succession of monarchs and despots culminating with Saddam Hussein.

Now that Iraq’s government is pseudo-democratic, its power must be derived from the Iraqi people’s faith in the notion of a coherent and unified country. This faith is tested when the government directs the military to suppress unrest in one part of the country in the name of national unity. Two things immediately become known: whether there is sufficient faith in the Iraqi government to compel soldiers to fight against their fellow countrymen, and perhaps more importantly, whether the Iraqi government has the capacity to neutralize rogue elements that threaten its monopoly on force.

The recent incursion by the Iraqi military into the southern city of Basra demonstrated not only that there are significant numbers of Iraqi soldiers unwilling to fight against fellow Iraqis (as evidenced by thousands of desertions), but the inability of the Maliki government to exert control in crucial parts of the country.

Unfortunately, the situation is actually worse than it seems.

Even with the help of significant American air power and troops, Maliki was unable to defeat Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra or any other Iraqi city. The result is a further weakened national government and a further empowered rival Shiite faction, one whose main demand is for Americans to leave Iraq.

Why Maliki decided at this point to take on the militias in the South, and to what extent he was targeting the Mahdi Army or other rogue elements, is still not entirely clear. It appears likely that the move was aimed at strengthening his party, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, before the upcoming provincial elections. So this was probably part of an intra-Shiite power play that in fact resolved nothing.

So the intra-Shiite competition is heating up. The Kurds in the North continue to hunger for independence. The Sunnis,whom we have been arming for months, are becoming restless with the lack of political reconciliation. Only Iran seems to be gaining from these developments. It continues to forge ties with the two dominant Shiite blocs, so that it stands to benefit no matter which side ultimately triumphs; and it continues to target American soldiers via proxies (although the extent of this is unknown).

As America’s reality-based presidential candidates acknowledge, the only options we really have in Iraq are bad and worse. No wonder the invasion is considered the worst foreign policy disaster in American history. There is no end in sight, and it appears that our shifting tactics are doing little to affect the fundamental fact that for all practical purposes an Iraqi nation-state no longer exists.

P.S. Seems like Frank Rich of the NYT had similar thoughts.

Jason Scorse

The controversy surrounding the comments of Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has once again highlighted a major divide in American politics. At one extreme are those who believe that America is an exceptional nation chosen by God to bring democracy and justice to the world; at the other are those who hold that America is no different than other imperial powers. Formed in slavery and genocide, it is as responsible as any other nation for the atrocities that stain human history.

Many on the left criticize those on the right for what they view as a form of mindless and blind patriotism, of obliviousness to the evils committed by Americans. Those on the right view many leftists as bordering on traitorous, unable to recognize that America has more often than not been a benevolent power that has sacrificed greatly to promote freedom around the globe.

The middle ground is rarely articulated in American political discourse, and yet this is where the truth lies. What we need is a humbler and more truthful American narrative.

Such a narrative would begin by acknowledging the great tragedies of Native American genocide and black slavery, the legacies of which linger to this day. It would recognize that slavery hardly ended with the Civil War; it continued in one form or another until WW II, and then morphed into an extremist racial segregation that continued until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In fact, of the more than 350 years of American history, fewer than 50 have been characterized by even a modicum of decency towards black Americans. It is not an exaggeration to describe the treatment of blacks in America as domestic terrorism, made all the more evil because it was perpetrated by American citizens against other American citizens who happened to be of a different color.

But the evils that were committed against blacks, Indians, and other immigrant groups throughout American history have always been tempered by the ideals set forth in our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal. This was a revolutionary doctrine, and it was always there to prick the consciences of those who realized what it said about our treatment of blacks and Native Americans and yes, women too. Over generations, the ideal that all men and women are equal helped to create one of the most multi-ethnic and economically mobile civilizations of all time. America may be a nation of sinners, but it is also a nation that strives to live up to its ideals and to overcome its moral imperfections.

Americans, believing deeply that freedom is a universal right, have also sacrificed tremendously to help spread liberty throughout the world. Americans died by the hundreds of thousands fighting Nazism and Communism, wicked ideologies bent on world domination. Today American military bases around the world do more to prevent conflict than to incite it. While Iraq makes the headlines, no one hears about the relative peace and tranquility secured by American forces throughout much of the world.

America’s foreign policy has aided and abetted heinous crimes, but this was usually done to oppose what we understood to be even greater evils. For example, while there is no real excuse for American support of dictators and oppressors, we justified these steps during the Cold War in the face of Soviet aggression and expansionism. This irrationality reached its apex during the Vietnam War, when it became common practice to destroy entire villages in order to “save” them.

Despite all the contradictions and wrongdoings, the American experience has been marked by continual moral progress: by the knowledge that we must do more to live up to our highest ideals, and by our movement toward them. America will never be perfect, but this does not take away our legitimate right to try to influence world events. American power is best used with one eye on our own shortcomings, and the other on promoting those universal human rights that represent the best of who we are.

A more humble and truthful American narrative recognizes how easy it is to commit evil in the name of good, and the need to guard against this; at the same time, the narrative gives us confidence that our highest ideals are worth promoting across the globe.

P.S. A time stamp for the comments is coming soon. Thanks for your patience.

Jason Scorse

An honest, non-ideological conversation about our current economic problems requires us to abandon the clichés of “big government” versus “small government”. The real issue is effective government: what should be done and what’s the best way to do it?

We cannot afford a laissez-faire attitude toward the banking sector. Banks cannot be allowed to fail for the simple reason that they can take the rest of the economy down with them. This means that ultimately the public sector (our tax dollars) acts as a final insurer for the private banking sector, and banks know this. Without adequate regulation they will always be tempted to take unnecessary risks, knowing that the federal government will eventually come to their rescue.

The conversation we should be having is how best to ensure that banks are not allowed to take risks of such magnitude that they can undermine the entire credit system, while at the same time allowing them to innovate and provide low cost capital to the general economy. While the details of this balancing act must be left to experts in finance and banking, the basic concept is not beyond the ability of the average voter to comprehend, nor of politicians to explain. There should be zero tolerance for anyone who simply spouts “the markets should be allowed to work things out;” the markets haven’t worked things out, and this line of reasoning ignores the “moral hazard” argument noted above.

On to another topic.

Barack Obama gave what many consider a brilliant speech on race relations in America last week, and it has already gone viral on YouTube. Obama is that super-rare politician who can take a serious liability (in this case an error in judgment) and turn it into an asset through his own rhetorical skills.

What Obama’s speech only hinted at should be the topic for a larger American conversation: the fact that social class and access to power divide us even more than race. Racism surely persists in America, as do sexism and homophobia; but the greatest drivers of American inequality are divisions between rich and poor, between the less educated and the more educated, and between the well-connected and the unconnected.

The millions without healthcare come from all ethnicities and racial backgrounds; coal miners who are dying by the dozens in the Appalachians are poor whites, and they have watched for generations as big coal companies have literally removed the mountains from their communities; the millions of manufacturing jobs that are leaving the Midwest are throwing blacks, white, and Latinos out of work; the corporations who flout all sorts of health and safety laws, aided by a Congress and a court system that caters to their needs above the public interest, do not discriminate in the harm they inflict.

The notion that class is the primary source of injustice in America was recognized by none other than Martin Luther King Jr., who vehemently attacked economic inequality in the last years of his life. While he is revered for his successes in the Civil Rights Movement, his positions on economic fairness and social class were not well received by the mainstream; at the time of his assassination he had lost much of his earlier support.

This is one of America’s “dirty secrets”: it is always in the interests of the powerful for the disenfranchised to fight among themselves for the crumbs (e.g., poor whites against blacks, Latinos against blacks) while those in the chips laugh all the way to the bank. This is not to suggest that there are no grievances with a specific racial or ethnic component, but that these are ultimately secondary to class interests. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to understand this.

At a time when the federal government is once again bailing out the elite to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars, we have a clear choice: we can remain distracted by race, or take a moment to examine the concentration of power in this country and realize how it disadvantages whole swaths of people across all racial and ethnic categories. Greed sees only the color green, and all it really cares about is power.

P.S. Check out Paul Krugman on the topic of financial regulation making lots of sense and raising real concerns. And while I find most of Bill Kristol's columns offensive here I actually somewhat agree with him.

Jason Scorse

The terrorist attacks more than six years ago supposedly “changed everything”. They changed George Bush from someone who spoke forcefully against “nation-building” and foreign intervention into a president enamored with the idea of spreading democracy by force; they led the Administration to violate the Constitution on multiple occasions through warrantless domestic surveillance and the torture of enemy combatants; they provided cover for a far-right domestic agenda that the majority of Americans opposed.

But in one critical area 9/11 changed absolutely nothing: our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the autocratic, terrorist-sponsoring regimes that benefit from this addiction.

Not only has the Bush Administration done nothing to diminish our reliance on Middle Eastern oil, Vice-President Cheney is on record mocking conservation as nothing more than a “personal virtue” (i.e., something only tree-huggers do), the GOP-led Congress passed energy bills that increased subsidies for oil companies (thereby further distorting markets against alternative energy), and the Administration sued the state of California for imposing a greenhouse gas reduction policy that would have resulted in higher fuel-efficiency mandates.

Let’s recap the results so far of this catastrophically misguided policy:

1. Oil prices (partly due to the effects of the Iraq War, which have crippled Iraq’s oil sector; see this NYT's piece on how insurgents are stealing Iraqi oil) are at records highs, which has helped stoke the highest inflation rate in decades and complicated efforts to deal with the coming recession

2. Oil-producing U.S. adversaries such as Iran, Venezuela, and Russia are awash in cash, helping to keep dictators in power and undermine democratic reform

3. So-called allies, such as Saudi Arabia, are also awash in cash, allowing them to stall on reforms and continue to funnel more money into the hands of terrorists

4. Our European allies are livid that we have not helped in any meaningful way to address global warming, which could be mitigated through comprehensive international efforts

5. Instead of tens of billions invested in alternative energy projects or tax rebates for the middle class, they’re going to the likes of Exxon-Mobil and Chevron (which routinely set corporate profit records every quarter)

Results like these all lead to the same conclusion. America’s long history of entanglement in the Middle East stems largely from our dependence on oil, and we will continue to be dragged into conflicts in the region until and unless we dramatically reduce the power of these regimes in the way that they would feel it most: their pocketbooks.

Following 9/11, a serious global push to reduce oil consumption would have sent a major signal to the Middle East regimes to either diversify their economies or witness their eventual decline. Ironically, having to face this reality would have provided significant incentives to liberalize their economies, which has proven to be one of the best paths to freedom and democracy.

Instead the Bush Administration took the low road, adopting policies guided by outdated thinking and its strong ties to the oil industry. Bush will leave behind many legacies of failure and incompetence, but this “lost decade” of wasted opportunity on the energy independence front may ultimately be seen as the most costly of all.

P.S. Check this article out in Sunday's WaPo for even more depressing analysis of how the Iraq War's impact on oil prices has hurt the U.S. economy and strengthened our adversaries.

Jason Scorse

The terms “conservative” and “liberal”, while grounded in well-established philosophical traditions, have been turned almost upside down today. In fact, what we now call conservative was considered classical liberalism in the Europe of old.

The rise of extremist Christianity in the GOP is as contrary to true conservative principles as trade protectionism in the Democratic Party is to true liberal principles. For every Republican who touts the benefits of spreading democracy by force around the globe, a true conservative is rolling in the grave; similarly, true liberals stand aghast that Democrats never meet a problem that can’t be solved by throwing more money at it. The insane war on drugs, and the cowardice with which both Republicans and Democrats approach the issue of gun control, display profound disrespect for both conservatism and liberalism.

The Republican noise machine has been particularly successful at tarnishing the word “liberal”. On the other hand, the actions of the Bush Administration these past seven plus years have gone a long way toward blunting the advantage that the term “conservative” once held with respect to political identification.

The truth is that most of the issues we currently face do not break down easily along ideological lines; at root they are issues that require pragmatism, competence, and common sense. For example, in the richest nation in the world, the overwhelming majority of Americans realize that allowing millions of children to go without healthcare is morally wrong; end of story. The debate is how best to provide the coverage, not whether it should be provided.

With respect to globalization, no one really believes that we should or could turn back the clock. The vast majority realizes that U.S. companies need to remain competitive; they also realize that America needs to maintain some form of safety net, and help displaced workers better transition from one type of employment to the other. Workers should be able to take risks, and not live in constant fear of being one paycheck from bankruptcy. Again, the only debate is how best to get there.

On the topic of terrorism, no one doubts that there are bad actors out there who mean to do us serious harm; the question is how best to find them and deal with them, and not sacrifice our core ideals and liberties in the process.

None of these issues can be resolved by adopting an ideological mindset that refuses to seek alternative points of view or consider other tactics. What is needed is a reasoned approach, combined with flexibility, attention to detail, and follow-through by top-notch government authorities who are accountable to the people.

I chose the title for this piece because I think Barack Obama is the candidate with the most potential to usher in such an era of common sense approaches to policy without the ideological baggage that weighs so heavily on the American body politic. As the conservative columnist Stephen Hayes has noted, Obama’s rhetorical skill lies in his ability to show that he understands and respects opposing viewpoints, even as he points out why a certain course of action is preferable. He rarely uses terms like liberal or conservative; he has a way of elevating the dialogue above the labels that so often get in the way of clear thinking.

While McCain is trying to prove his “conservative” credentials (which seems to mean embracing Christian extremists like John Hagee, and flip-flopping on the Bush tax cuts), Hillary Clinton is staking out a fairly conventional partisan stance. None of this is to say that Obama is the only one who could help move us beyond the ideological divide, but that he seems to have the best chance this election cycle.

Regardless of who wins in November, I think we will begin to see a movement away from the conservative-liberal divide as a new political generation comes of age: a generation less interested in notions of ideological purity, and more interested in finding solutions to the problems that all of us face.

Jason Scorse