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Can the Klan Save Public Education?
One normally thinks of the Ku Klux Klan as a sort of far-right social mobilization. Nevertheless, I'm reading a book called No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland which reminds us that things are never so simple. Aside from its anti-black agenda, the Klan of the 1920s, especially in the North where the African-American population was small, was big into the evils of Catholic immigrants. As a result, the Oakland Klan busied itself campaigning for things like "the separation of Church and State" and good "free, universal public schools" in an effort to assimilate immigrants and limit the Church's political power. They were also, in the Oakland of the day, associated with campaigns against the corrupt "ethnic" political machine of West Oakland and did things like campaign for the awarding of contracts on a competitive or, even better, for the direct delivery of services. Relatedly, I suppose, Woodrow Wilson was a progressive in many ways (and continues to be thought of as such) but was also responsible for implementing a lot of new segregation policies on the heels of Teddy Roosevelt's relatively enlightened administration.
None of this is to rehabilitate the Klan in our historical memory or to suggest that liberals pick up racist nativism as part of our political strategy. It is to say, however, that in an era of rising movements for school vouchers, home schooling, the privatization of this and that, and a general effort to dismantle the public sector, it's worth thinking about the ways "left-wing" opposition to these measures can be given a nationalist gloss. Part of what happens if we privatize the education sector is that we dismantle the main vehicle by which people are socialized into American culture and society. Some conservative voucher-lovers would welcome this development, as it allows them to isolate their kids from American pluralism and have them raised purely within the context of (white, Protestant) Christian culture. Bringing first- and second-generation immigrants into play, however, changes this dynamic. Does the right really want a country in which immigrant parents live in immigrant neighborhoods and send their to ethno-religiously segregated private schools at public expense? Some elements probably do, but others could be attracted by the notion that only real public schools can help build the civic identity whose continued existence is vital for the continued viability of the American project. The trouble here is that this line of argumentation (still represented by the "Blaine amendments" to many state constitutions) is currently in a bad heir due to its descent from white supremacist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reconstructing it apart from that context is a difficult endeavor. Probably the closest thing I've seen to a serious effort to make this happen is Steven Macedo's Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy, which rests at a such a high level of abstraction that it's political and policy relevance may be somewhat doubted. Still as this review in Education Next, probably the leading journal of rightwing education thought, suggests, this is a line of argument that, though coming "from the left" in Macedo's case, gets a sympathetic hearing on the right.
Bush as McKinley; Rove as Egomaniac
Karl Rove, or so they say, likes to think of himself as Mark Hannah to George W. Bush's William McKinley. Now I think there's a revisionist scholarship on McKinley (there is on everything) but in a vulgar context like a strategist talking to reporters, I think it's safe to say he was talking about the traditional view of McKinley. Why make an analogy like this? There are some similarities. McKinley one in an election marked by a sharp regional divide (albeit by winning what is roughly the reverse set of states; it's also interesting, if you look at it, to see how overwhelmingly William Jennings Bryan won the rocky mountain states) and established a string of wins for the GOP. McKinley, like Bush, was more a pro-business than a pro-market guy. McKinley, like Bush, fought a "splendid little war" on dubious pretexts, and John Judis has analogized the second Gulf War to the Philippines conflict. And as Bush is constantly harassed by erstwhile co-partisan John McCain, McKinley faced competition from McCain's idol, Teddy Roosevelt. The analogy even goes deeper as Roosevelt disagreed with McKinley on many matters domestic, but liked his muscular approach abroad and, indeed, wanted to make it more muscular.
But there's the rub. The relevant era was dominated by Roosevelt, not McKinley. McKinley wins the 1896 election but soon enough he and his GOP "regulars" are getting worried by the more dynamic, more popular reformer, Roosevelt. They make him the VP nominee for the 1900 re-election campaign hoping to kill two birds with one stone; they'll gain some of his popularity, but take away all of his substantive power. McKinley, unfortunately, gets killed and Roosevelt becomes president, implementing a significantly more progressive agenda. Roosevelt is re-elected in a landslide and, as the youngest president ever, stands an excellent shot at winning a third term. But he declines in favor of his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, who goes on to win in 1908. Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Taft turns out to be more McKinley's heir than his own (again there's a revisionist literature here, but that's how it was seen at the time). Roosevelt tries to recapture the GOP nomination in 1912, but the party is in control of the bosses and he fails. So Roosevelt mounts a third party campaign, finishing an unprecedented second in a three way race, and throwing control of the White House to Woodrow Wilson. It's not a sequence of events that reflects especially well on the McKinley-Hannah complex of political leaders. Other realigning presidents (Jackson, Lincoln, F. Roosevelt, Nixon [?]) built political coalitions that endured, and passed control of their party on to ideologically sympatico figures. McKinley had the party hijacked by his rival almost immediately, regular Republican re-control was established purely through TR's misjudgment of the situation, and then the party fell apart in a manner without precedent in American history. Unlike other realigners, moreover, he left no real national legacy -- his great accomplishment was a prolongation of the gold standard era by a few decades. Indeed, the only thing about the narrative that actually seems appealing from a Rovian perspective is that in virtue of McKinley's untimely death, Mark Hannah rather than McKinley, actually emerges as the key "regular" figure in this saga. Modeling his boss on McKinley, in other words, seems more like a consequence of Rove's ego than of any kind of sound political instincts. Another reason, I think, to doubt that the Boy Genius is really any kind of genius at all as opposed to a guy who lucked into a poorly designed ballot in Palm Beach County.
Long Philosophical Rant About Spider Man 2
This film's gotten nearly universal acclaim in the blogosphere and, indeed, it is a very good time. Lots of funny moments, some touching moments, good acting, a neat "look," one of the best credits sequences I've ever seen, quality emotional dynamics between characters, etc. That said, I think there's a rather big problem with the story. SPOILER.
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Preempting the Platform
When I see this kind of thing I begin to despair:
The first draft of the Democratic platform that will be presented to the party's convention late this month calls for a wholesale rewriting of President Bush's national security strategy, declares that Mr. Bush's "doctrine of unilateral pre-emption has driven away our allies," and promises far more focus on reforming intelligence agencies and preventing nuclear terrorism. Or, we could just promise to lose the election. Look, if you say this, here's what people are going to say: We've got a country over here and our intelligence says it's going to launch an attack on the United States. Republicans will act to pre-empt that attack, with UN or NATO support if possible/convenient, but without it otherwise. Democrats will head to Turtle Bay and if the French say "no," just stand aside and wait for Americans to get killed. Who are you going to vote for? There's nothing wrong with a doctrine of unilateral pre-emption. If there's an attack to pre-empt, then you'd damn well better pre-empt it, unilaterally or otherwise. The problem with the Iraq War isn't that it was pre-emptive, but that it didn't pre-empt anything -- there was no looming attack, there were no ties to al-Qaeda, and there were no WMD with which to launch the attack. The Iraq War was, at best, an effort to shift global Saddam-management policy (since sovereignty had been off the table since 1991) away from something that was becoming untenable in the medium term and that is the sort of thing that shouldn't be done unilaterally. The whole point is that there was no moment of crisis (no "imminent threat" as the saying goes) to necessitate drastic action that undermined the international security regime. Besides which, in a campaign document you want to put together the most shallow critique possible so as to build the widest possible overlapping consensus of critics of the status quo. The least common denominator of criticism of the Bush administration has to do with competence (Drezner's process critique) so that's probably the one you want to go with. But back to preemption. The crazy thing here is that I'm quite sure no one means what that platform statement says. I've talked to a lot of Democratic foreign policy people over the past ten months and heard many others speak publicly. Not once has anyone said what the quoted statement means. Of course you pre-empt a real attack from a real threat, the point is that you don't pre-empt imaginary threats and you certainly don't invent threats as part of a public-relations strategy. Ashton Carter, who, unlike whoever wrote that, knows what he's talking about says this: Mr. Carter added that the Democrats were not seeking to end the use of pre-emption, but rather "return it to where it's been in history as an act of last resort.""It's the difference between pre-emption as a doctrine and pre-emption as an option," he said. "You want the preventative diplomacy so that if you have to act pre-emptively, other countries are with us. And we want to focus on figuring out what you do after a pre-emptive action, which is what we didn't do in Iraq." That's good post hoc spin, but why not have the platform actually say that in the first place. "The Bush administration's elevation of preemption from an option of last resort to a doctrine pursued even in the absence of an actual imminent threat to American security has driven away our allies." Still time to change it. I used to be a semi-professional speechwriter, happy to help out....
Preemption versus Prevention
Of course the whole "preemption" debate has not been helped by neoconservative insistence on using the word "preemption" to mean what international relations people have typically called "prevention." A primer.
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Fusionism
Found a link lurking in the corner to this very smart essay by Ramesh Ponnuru on so-called "fusionism" (basically conservatism-as-libertarianism). This is not the best analytic point in the article, but it's certainly the funniest:
The influence of fusionism has not been wholly positive. Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to "the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program." Reminiscent of David Frum's insistence that aid to handicapped schoolchildren was a leading cause of moral decline. Oh well. You sometimes catch liberals arguing that federal funding of Catholic schools is the leading edge of total social disintegration even though it's been done for decades in Canada without ill effect. We all have our moments.
Independence Day!
Well, that was yesterday. I remember back in 1997 talking to a Czech guy who was confused as to why Americans would have a holiday commemorating Independence Day. The real point, though, is this: Not be an left-wing America-hater about it all, or to deny that our Founders had some legitimate grievances* but in retrospect wouldn't America and the world both be better off if the USA had remained more closely associated with the British Empire and her Commonwealth? After all, if the erstwhile "greatest generation" had gotten in on the Hitler-fighting action at the same time as Canada and Australia did, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided. See also World War One.
In that light, it seems to me that while the Revolution should not be condemned, it is something to be regretted: a failure of Imperial policy and an inability of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to work out some thorny governance and burden-sharing issues. Not much of an occassion for fireworks. But if fireworks we are meant to have (and apparently we are) then must they really be accompanied by the 1812 Overture? The United States, after all, was on the other side of that particular war,** which I think renders it pretty unsuitable for patriotic occassions.
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More Spiderman 2
Good point from Brayden King and good point from Henry Farrell -- all objections are withdrawn and I can now give a wholehearted endorsement. Either way, it's a sign of how well-made the film is compared to most of what Hollywood turns out that a viewer can even clearly identify a theme and then worry whether or not the ending is really true to the theme. That's why the fact that the film's plot clearly has some holes winds up not detracting from the experience: There's a point to the sequence of events so it's not a problem that in a first-order way there's no account of why things would happen like that. SPOILER.
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Go Bush, Go!
Did the president really gut the Endangered Species Act yesterday while no one was paying attention? So I've heard, at any rate. If so, good riddance. You'll all yell at me, I suppose, but really: Who cares? Species die, shit happens, get over it. Clean air, clean water, and lower carbon emissions I'll get behind that stuff impacts, you know, people.
Unconvinced
Kos says not to worry:
Gephardt might not the most exciting choice, but he gives the Republicans zero ammunition. And that fits in nicely within Kerry's strategy. Nice thought, but no. Suppose Kerry needs to explain his wishy-washy position on the war. He'll want to say that he would have been happier with the Biden-Lugar resolution but, unfortunately, it was scuttled . . . by his vice presidential nominee. Oops! In general Gephardt will give the GOP about seventeen million new votes to scrutinize for further flip-flops and differences with Kerry's. Also -- people hate him. Also -- no one likes him. I'm not saying that if Kerry picks Gephardt that then all of a sudden voting for Bush becomes a good idea, but picking Gephardt is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea and choosing that bad idea will reflect badly on Kerry. There's no getting around that.
Good Points
Randy Barnett on Michael Moore:
Having read the lengthy piece by David Kopel, Fifty-six Deceits in Fahrenheit 911, I was struck by the sheer cunningness of Moore's film. When you read Kopel, try to detach yourself from any revulsion you may feel at a work of literal propaganda receiving such wide-spread accolades from mainstream politicos, as well as attendance by your friends and neighbors.
Instead, notice the film's meticulousness in saying only (or mostly) "true" or defensible things in support of a completely misleading impression. In this way, Kopel's care in describing Moore's "deceipts" is much more interesting than other critiques I have read, including that of Christopher Hitchens. Kopel's lawyerly description of Moore's claims shows the film to be a genuinely impressive accomplishment in a perverse sort of way (the way an ingenious crime is impressive)--a case study in how to convert elements that are mainly true into an impression that is entirely false--and this leads in turn to another thought.
If this much cleverness was required to create the inchoate "conspiracy" (whatever it may be, as it is never really specified by Moore), it suggests there was no such conspiracy. With this much care and effort invested in uncovering and massaging the data, if there really was a conspiracy of the kind Moore suggests, the evidence would line up more neatly behind it, rather than being made to do cartwheels so as to be "true" but oh-so-misleading. If the facts don't fit, shouldn't we acquit? That's 100% true. The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote "The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush" (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I've read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged "lies" weren't lies per se (and, indeed, they're mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don't really prove that the presidents' policies are actually wrong. The really funny thing, though, is that while George W. Bush is president of the United States and wrecking (a) the country's foreign policy and (b) the country's fiscal policy, Michael Moore is a somewhat famous guy who makes movies. Get it?
Iranian Nukes: So What?
It's one of the fixed-points of the American national security discourse that it would be A Very Bad Thing if Iran had nuclear weapons. And I won't argue that it would be preferable for them not to go nuclear. But what, exactly, is supposed to be so bad about it? The question is an important one, because our policy options for preventing the emergence of a nuclear Iran are rather poor. They differ both in cost and in likelihood of success. Some options that are relatively likely to succeed, but also relatively costly, may not be worth pursuing, even if the alternatives are unlikely to succeed. Or perhaps not. Perhaps a case can be made that a nuclear Iran is such a bad thing that's it's worth preventing by any means necessary. But it's not a case I've heard.
Continue reading "Iranian Nukes: So What?" »
Iran Links
Via a commenter, a MEMRI report on Iranian nuclear intentions:
Nuclear Weapons Can Solve the Israel Problem
Rafsanjani said that Muslims must surround colonialism and force them [the colonialists] to see whether Israel is beneficial to them or not. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel's possession [meaning nuclear weapons] - on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam. That reeks of empty talk to me, but if I'm sitting in the Knesset I guess I don't want to blithely dismiss it. There was an interesting New York Times report a couple of days ago on Iranian efforts to influence the course of events in Iraq.
Yay!
John Kerry makes the right call. As I see it, this is good for three reasons. One, it makes it more likely that starting in 2005, George W. Bush will no longer be in office. Two, VP nominees have a way of becoming presidential candidates down the road, and Edwards would be a better president than Dick Gephardt. Three, and most least importantly, I'd gone way out on a limb with the Gephardt-bashing and wasn't looking forward to needing to defend him after all once he got the nomination. All in all, A Good Thing.
UPDATE: Well, that'll teach me to ever write a joke.
World War One As Preventative War
David Adesnik says my account of world war one as a preventative war "was once quite popular but now has much less support" among historians. That may be right since it's what I learned in high school, and what is high school good for if not propagating outdated scholarship. On the other hand, David says "Germany attacked Russia because the German leadership wanted to divert the working class' attention away from domestic politics" which sounds like it's either a joke or else a Michael Moore documentary.
Er...
I dunno about the Ackermanian spin here. I mean, I'm not gonna cry if some RPG-toting masked goons go behead Zarqawi but it all sounds to me a lot more like the next step in a downward spiral of chaotic behavior than grounds for optimism.
Convention Blogging
A mighty silly article in the Washington Post breathlessly reports that so-called "bloggers" will be at the conventions this summer:
But neither party has ever allowed bloggers to cover one of its presidential conventions firsthand -- and the decision seems to promise a clash of two very different cultures. The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public. Independent blogs -- especially those focusing on politics -- are far more freewheeling, their authors mixing fact with opinion and under no obligation to be either fair or accurate. For the first time ever! Imagine that. I wonder if the bloggers were kept out of the 2000 convention because they didn't, you know, exist at the time. That's probably an angle worth exploring. More amusing, however, is the implication that regular, less feewheeling reporters are just hankering for the opportunity to be unfair and inaccurate, held back only by an obligation to behave otherwise. I actually think it's a bit of a revealing slip. Obviously, no one means to write unfair and inaccurate copy, for newspapers for the web, or otherwise. What happens, though, is that real reporters -- those covering domestic politics at least, things seem different for foreign correspondents -- aren't allowed to write up honest assessments of what they think is happening. Instead, they have an obligation to be "fair and accurate," meaning construct a story around a balanced number of direct quotations from two sides of a dispute. The result is copy that's extremely accurate -- it doesn't assert anything other than that other people have asserted X and Y -- in a tendentious sense, and "fair" in the sense of giving both sides equal opportunity to spin. But is it informative? Entertaining? Actually accurate?
Why Not Edwards?
Today had me thinking for a while that I wished Edwards had gotten the nomination instead of Kerry. He's certainly the better politician, and I think he'd make a better president besides, though it's hard to be 100% sure about this since he doesn't have any dramatically different issue positions. But then I thought back to what I thought during the Kerry-Edwards phase of the primary, which is that Edwards would have been slaughtered on national security by the Bush team. I think an Edwards Administration would do fine on foreign policy, and Kerry's 'nam experience and generally dull demeanor obviously aren't real national security assets, but politically I think they help, even the dullness, which normally hurts him.
It would be too easy to paint Edwards as the wrong man for the times, while Kerry can project an atmosphere of seriousness, courage, and guts that will convince at least some of the electorate. In this I think the hoi polloi of the primary electorate showed better judgment than liberal elites inside the Beltway who were overly impressed by the fact that substantively Edwards is good on security. If you could win votes with substance well, then, we'd have ourselves a very different world. The reality is that 2004 just didn't put forward a really ideal Democratic contender, though you had lots of guys with good elements. If you could somehow merge Kerry's (or Clark's) biography and Edwards' skills together, you'd have had a damn good candidate, and an Kerry-Edwards ticket is a reasonable approximation of that. And of course in 2000 the GOP nominated an inexperienced, regionally inappropriate dude with no national security cred whatsoever who was dumb to boot, and they got away with it. I've got to think, though, that on some level the smarter conservatives out there wish that they'd nominated someone a little more competent and a little less driven by blind dynastic ambition. All-in-all, the Democrats are in pretty good shape, even if Kerry's not blessed with particularly impressive political skills.
Taste
Chris Bertram has very good taste. My few dissents: Mac over PC, Eliot over Yeats, there's nothing "annoying" about High Fidelity, and Manet over Monet either way. I don't also don't think the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky comparison can be made without some further specification of what we're talking about. Tolstoy is, I think, the more consistently excellent author, but Dostoevsky soars to much higher heights of human achievement. Sometimes I feel that since a novelist is supposed to be writing novels not snatches of prose, that Dostoevsky's genius-mixed-with-crappy-parts technique is cheating -- Anna Karenina is, I think, a much better fully-realized work than, say, The Idiot -- but on the other hand, the good parts of Dostoevsky just contain such a large portion of what needs to be said about humanity that it seems churlish to deny him.
Democracy Now?
Why, it's almost as if I wrote this post as a cover story in a prominent political magazine several months ago. Oh well, I'm glad to see the meme spreading either way. I think it's very important for liberal not to concede the premise that what Bush is doing doing amounts to some kind of noble democratization initiative, even a noble democratization initiative gone wrong. It's not that there's some huge number of votes at stake here, but this issue is very important among elites, and it does make a difference. The notion that Bush has adopted some variant of the traditional liberal concern with spreading American values while Democrats have retreated to traditionally conservative Realpolitik has a vice-like grip on the American discourse, but there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this is what Bush has done, and only a tiny sliver of evidence that this is what the Democrats have done.
Instead -- in an outburst of laziness so massive that I can only describe it as shocking -- the good people of the media seem to have decided that looking at the transcripts of the president's speeches is an adequate substitute for looking at the content of his policies. But if we're promoting democracy, then where are the new democracies? If Bush had a plan to build new aircraft carriers one would look to see if any were built, or at least under construction. New democracies? There's one, maybe, in Georgia and some vague hope that one might emerge in Iraq. Meanwhile, the administration has embraced dictatorships from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan to Pakistan in an unprecedented manner, while collaborating with Vladimir Putin's steady dismantling of Russia's fledging institutions of liberalism and democracy. Paul Wolfowitz -- allegedly the pro-democracy ideologue of the crew -- encouraged the Turkish military to stage themselves a little coup to gain support for the Iraq War. It's become increasingly clear that there are a large number of people in this town who use -- and have been using -- the term "Iraqi democrats" to mean "Ahmed Chalabi's cronies" which two things are not, in fact, synonymous. Jason Vest wrote a nice sidebar to my piece about our plans to turn the Eritrean dictatorship into a kind of on-shore aircraft carrier. One could go on and on. The press corps seems to grasp that it does not follow from the fact that John Kerry says "I have a plan to create 5 million new jobs" that he does, in fact, have a plan to create 5 million new jobs. To do that, one has to ask, "where is the plan?" One then needs to scrutinize the plan, and discern whether or not its implementation would lead to the creation of 5 million new jobs. Similarly, saying "look at my forward strategy of freedom -- it's great!" is not actually evidence that there is such a strategy or that it is, in fact, great. You need to look at what's actually being done.
Clunky?
Certain persons whose names I don't care to acknowledge have alleged that Dostoevsky has a "clunky" prose style. Well, now. Check out the brilliant Part One of Notes From Underground:
Continue reading "Clunky?" »
The Moore Manoever
Just a clarificatory word, since some people don't seem to get this. When a liberal media personality such as myself responds to attacks on Michael Moore by saying: "Look at what the president is doing!" we are not constructing a "two wrongs make a right" or a "fight fire with fire" argument.
Rather, this is what's going on. I believe that it is very important to have a national conversation about the massive dishonesty of the president of the United States and the administration he leads. Nevertheless, one cannot write columns with headlines like: "Don't you see, the president is a liar!" week after week or else people will think you are a crank. Paul Krugman in particular experiences this problem. Others among us only have limited opportunities to appear on the broadcast media, and do not get to choose the appointed topics for discussion. In either case, it is convenient to take criticism of Moore's film either as a jumping-off point for your column or as a pretext to go on the radio or what have you. One's access to the media stream is limited, and topic-selection is not entirely under one's control. When one does gain such access, however, one would be foolish not to attempt to steer the conversation to what one regards as the crucial issues of the day. The fact that an uninformed viewer may leave Fahrenheit 9-11 thinking that Bush invaded Afghanistan to build a pipleine is regrettable. I hope that few people who did not already believes this have been caused to believe it by the film. The fact that an uninformed citizen may leave a Bush speech believing that Iraq was a major backer of al-Qaeda, that contemporary Afghanistan is a democracy, that lawsuits are the leading cause of health care inflation, that the current budget tragectory is sustainable, that the current job market is strong, and that the institution of marriage is threatened by gays and lesbians is an outrage. Given the opportunity to shift the conversation from Topic A to Topic B, I would be remiss not to do so. UPDATE: Couple of unclear sentences up there on Paul Krugman. I don't think he's a crank. A lot of people accusing him of being a crank, however, because he doesn't adopt the sort of "balanced" tone that you see from a Kristof or a Friedman. Under the circumstances, he does well to vary up his tune when he gets the chance. His column on Moore was, I thought, a good way of doing that. So I've got no problem with Paul Krugman, either in general, or on that column in particular. Some of my more vociferous commenters, however, are probably going to be very unhappy with what Krugman has to say once the Kerry administration is in power...it's worth remembering, he really isn't very liberal.
Ex Ante
I was playing poker with some folks last night, and one thing that definitely dawns on you is that there are no expected value theorists in a gambling den. Watching a whole big stack of chips vanish after a series of bets that were perfectly appropriate given one's ex ante knowledge, the fact that if the same scenario were to play itself out ten more times you'd likely turn out way ahead provides small comfort. When you've lost, you've lost. So that's prologue.
Brad Delong makes a point that many have made in response to my post on the American Revolution. I may be right about some of what I said, but the Revolution certainly seemed like a good idea at the time: I, however, firmly endorse and support the American Revolution, in the sense that it looked like the right thing to do at the time. Remember that the political evolution of Britain toward democracy was not foreordained as of 1775. (Indeed, the pressure exerted by the example of the United States was a powerful democratizing force in Britain throughout the whole of the nineteenth century.) Britain in 1775 was a corrupt monarchical oligarchy--albeit one with much softer rule, a much more effective state, and a much broader and more open system of political competition within the oligarchy than has been standard in human empires. It is quite likely that--absent the American Revolution and the Great Democratic Example across the seas, and absent the long reign of Victoria--the political evolution of nineteenth-century Britain would have stuck where it was at the accession of George III, or even moved backward away from democracy to some degree.It is one thing to be a Dominion in close alliance with and owing some degree of allegiance to a rapidly-democratizing Britain. It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords. That's almost certainly right. I wouldn't want to be understood as saying that the Founders should have known better than to rebel. There's no way they could have seen the sort of geopolitical conflicts between the English-speaking world and various Teutonic and Slavic (and now, perhaps, Arab) tyrannies, nor is it by any means clear that Britain and her dominions would have developed such benign governance structures absent the Revolution to cause them to rethink a thing or two. I just want to consider what sort of emotional response we should have to the fact of the Revolution.
Continue reading "Ex Ante" »
Bleg
I hate to go all Jonah Goldberg on y'all but the small intern army of my dreams has failed to materialize, so if any readers recall noteworthy columns or magazine articles fitting the following formats:
- Conservatives conceding that Bush is a bit dumb, but that that's okay.
- Liberals or moderates saying Bush's critics should stop calling them dumb
It would be very helpful of you to leave a note in the comments. Because there are so many ways of saying dumb, and because "intelligence" also refers to the CIA it's very hard to Nexis for this kind of stuff.
My Shrimp Are Too Cheap
Thank God the president took care of that little problem. See me, I'd been going into stores to pick up some shrimp and thinking -- Gods! this shrimp is too cheap, if only there were some kind of federal policy that could make it more expensive. And then along comes George W. Bush with his shrimp tax. Brilliant! That'll teach them Vietnamese to try and make a living. But yes, yes, yes, I know, John Kerry used to talk about "Benedict Arnold CEOs" so every good free-trader has a duty to vote for Bush....
Honor And Integrity
Well, I'm just sure that the Bush administration would never be using national security as a political tool, so it's obvious that Spencer Ackerman and John Judis don't know what they're talking about here. More later.
Condi For VP?
Bruce Bartlett makes the case:
Thinking along the same lines, Arnold Beichman of Stanford's Hoover Institution made a strong case for Mr. Bush to replace Mr. Cheney with National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice in these pages of The Washington Times on July 1.Said Mr. Beichman, "It is now time to open a new dramatic episode in American history, one that would show the world what our democracy means: the choice of an extraordinarily talented African-American woman to run for president of the United States on the Republican ticket, the party of Abraham Lincoln." My main reservation against Miss Rice is that she is untested electorally, having spent most of her career as a Stanford political science professor. Also, we know nothing about her views on issues outside her area of expertise, foreign policy. What is her position on abortion, tax cuts or Medicare? Even she may not know since she may never have had any reason to think about these or the thousand other issues on which presidential candidates must have positions. That may be Bruce Bartlett's main reservation about Condi Rice. My main reservation would be that she's done an absolutely terrible job as National Security Advisor. But what really makes this impossible is that she's a single woman who's widely rumored to be a lesbian. Obviously I don't have a problem with lesbians, or with single straight women, or even with women who simply choose not to date for whatever reason. But certain elements in the Republican Party don't feel that way at all as you may have noticed over the years. Now if Cheney were to just die or something, letting Bush put someone new on the ticket, that would probably be to Bush's advantage. Actually dumping him, though, would be a mess. So many people have written that "Cheney could leave the ticket and pretend it's for health reasons" that you really couldn't pretend it was for health reasons, and it would create all sorts of awkwardness to admit that the 2000 pick had been a mistake.
Counterfactual Fun
The madness spreads to the Volokh Conspiracy, where Eugene foresees an American takeover of the "British" empire while Tyler Cowen has North America groaning under the yoke of social democracy. Free marketers would do well to avoid mentioning New Zealand, however, whose welfare state was producing sub-par economic growth, provoking a major bout of neoliberal reform after which they started doing even worse (interestingly, New Zealand and Argentina provide just about the only historical examples of rich countries becoming un-rich and they don't seem to have much else in common). But all this speculating got me thinking about the earlier dispute over whether or not world war one should be understood as a preventative war.
However you want to understand it, though, it's pretty clear that Germany could have avoided it by telling their friends in Austria that the Kaiser had no interest whatsoever in launching a general war over the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination and that the Hapsburg's either had to work something out with Serbia (which had put forward a reasonable compromise) or else face the tender mercies of the Czar all alone. Since the Germans went on to lose the war, we can safely say that that would have been the right call, though this may not have been apparent at the time. Now world war one doesn't get much play here in the USA (I'm told it's huge in France) but thinking about this reminds us of just how enormous its consequences were. After all, both Communism and Nazism arose in its aftermath so the entire landscape of twentieth century history would have been radically different. Beyond the most obvious points, the dismantling of the British and French colonial empires would have gone very differently without the financial pressures of the war, the disruption at the French imperial center, the need to mobilize the ideology of democracy as part of the war effort, and the rise of Soviet anti-colonial propaganda. One is inclined to say that having wealthy democracies possess vast overseas empires was totally untenable in the long-run either way, but they might have lasted much longer. And without the impetus of world wars and the coldwar, America, like the contemporary EU, might just be some big rich place without much in the way of military capacity. Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War argues, rather more implausibly, I think, that Britain should have simply sat things out and let the Germans overrun France. This lets him write a chapter called "The Kaiser's European Union" which is a fun euroskeptic kind of thing to do, but also a bit silly.
A Word On Rumor-Spreading
I don't think journalists should just go around spreading rumors. On the other hand, when the existence of a Beltway rumor is an important factor in people's thinking, as in the Condi Rice case, then it does seem important to me to draw attention to its existence. I myself know nothing about Rice's personal life and wouldn't care either way, but that is the rumor and it does effect the Bush team's thinking. Similarly, Bill Richardson's prospects as a VP were hurt by talk of unspecified (or at least not specified to me) sexual skeletons. This strikes me as the kind of thing people should know about, not because the underlying facts are relevant, but simply because if you want to understand what's happening in DC you need to know this stuff.
Husband, Eh?
Got myself a little letter from the old high school asking alumni to, among other things, help out with their effort to build a stronger career development program. One question asks:
(c) Career Information (Please check all that apply & explain below):- I could speak at assembly, class or workshop or do a demonstration on the following topic.
- I could offer an internship or job opportunity to a student or alumni.
- I could give career information or advice to students.
- I have a husband, relative or friend who could help with one of the above.
Husband? Is it so inconceivable that a Dalton alumnus might have a wife who could provide career help to someone? Or is the possibility that a woman could have an important job just too outlandish to contemplate? (What'll be next: woman Senators? National Security Advisors? Managers of major-party presidential campaigns? Just imagine!) Perhaps this is a legacy of the fact that, until relatively recently, it was an all-girls high school, so the alumni office is assuming that I'm a woman, but on the other hand you would expect a formerly-girls-only establishment to exercise a little more gender-sensitivity than that. At any rate, aspiring political commentators of the world, you know how to reach me....
Conspiracy/Counterconspiracy?
The thing about "conspiracy theories" is that when they show up in reputable magazines you need to erect a counterconspiracy to explain how that happened. Maybe TNR just made the whole thing up (it's happened before) and that explains it. Or maybe TNR's sources are lying to the reports. Or maybe the story is right. I don't see a whole lot of other possibilities, and I think Spencer, John, and Massoud have a lot of ex ante credibility so if it's not story three, then it's got to be story two. So why, exactly, would Pakistani intelligence sources be making this stuff up? Now, clearly, they might be, but I'd like to hear some account of why someone would think that's what's happening.
The Keynsian Left?
This is a pretty correct Andrew Sullivan post but whence this "Keynsian left" that believed in "massive new domestic spending combined with 'deficits don't matter.'" That's a good summary of Bush's policies, as Andrew says, but what does it have to do with a Keynsian left? The Keynsian idea was that you should use deficit spending to get out of a recession, and then bring the budget back into balance over the course of the economic cycle. That's exactly what happened during the Roosevelt-Truman years where we started off with a 4.5 percent of GDP deficit that peaked in 1943 (there was a war on) at 30.9 percent of GDP and then began to fall. Starting in 1947 the budget was roughly balanced, with small surpluses alternating with small deficits. Kennedy and Johnson ran smallish, constant deficits and Nixon (a self-proclaimed Keynsian one) ran slightly larger constant deficits. It's not until Reagan that the accelerating peacetime deficit becomes a feature of American policy before going away, only to return with the second Bush administration.
And even Reagan mostly increased defense spending while cutting taxes and, once it became clear that the deficit was exploding, turned around. Sullivan's "Keynsian left" policies are a wholly novel innovation of the George Bush economic team, not something they cribbed from anyone else.
A Word On Money
One neat thing about this election cycle is that Bush-hatred has inspired a lot of the young people to throw little parties and other social events where they ask everyone to bring a $25 (or whatever) check for the Kerry campaign. Just got another evite right now. Word to the wise, though, is that donating to the Kerry campaign at this point is a very bad idea. He has a lot of cash on hand, and very little time in which to spend it. He's not allowed to save pre-convention cash and spend it afterwards. So if you want to raise money for someone, either adopt a Senate candidate (I like Brad Carson) or else figure out how you can funnel money to mysterious 527 outfits. John Kerry doesn't need your money, it's just going to go into some campaign staff tequila fund or something.
Endangered Species
Since everyone loves Fafblog, and no one agrees with me about the Endangered Species Act, everyone will want to read Fafblog mocking my post on the ESA and explaining to me my gross ignorance of the wonders of biodiversity and the fact that we're all part of a vast interrelated Gaia. On the other side, here's some writing from a little while back on the subject by Tyler Cowen and Lynne Kiesling.
Blood for Oil?
I'm a bit surprised to see Josh linking to this. I think the "no blood for oil" critique is about on a par with the "preemption is evil" critique. Both pretty drastically understate the nature of the strategic failure here. After all, if you fight a war for oil, at least you get some oil at the end of the day. People like oil. But we don't have any more oil than we could have had otherwise. Indeed, we have less. And we didn't preempt anything. We've got nothing! Near as I can tell, the Michael Moore / Ted Rall UNOCAL pipeline didn't get built either.
In the minds of Bush's lazier critics we're now awash in affordable fossile fuels and threats have been pre-empted. Back in the real world, we've got diddly squat. It's a much rawer deal than this crowd understands.
War for X
I think I should just say in re: the whole "blood for oil" issue that I don't think inquiring as to what the subjective understanding of the war's architects was is a really good way to think about these kinds of issues. For one thing, they doubtless had some disagreements. For another thing, I think that if you somehow used your mind-reading device to peer into the brains of the relevant folks, you would come up with some distinctly non-damning stuff. In this sense, I bet it probably really was a "war for the protection of the United States against a serious threat and to spread democracy and goodness all the world 'round."
The issue isn't really whether they never meant to spread democracy and goodness or never really believed in the threat, the issue is what's happening. We didn't stop an actual threat, we aren't getting an actual democracy, and neither the American consumer nor even American oil companies are getting the black stuff any cheaper than we could have just bought it from Saddam for. Israel is less, not more, secure than it used to be. The war wasn't fought in order to bog down US forces while enhancing Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf, but that's what it did and that's what's important.
Cash Money
I've gotten word from seemingly informed folks that this post stating that donating money to the Kerry campaign would be unwise is, in fact, totally wrong. I'm not sure I grasp all the mechanics here but apparently there's something called the "John Kerry Victory Fund" which has a higher donation limit and which will be financing state coordinated campaigns and other important efforts. Moreover, part of what happens when the VP joins the campaign is that expenses for relatively mundane stuff like travel and security shoot way up at just the moment when you can't afford to lose a step with banal cash flow problems.
Now I think giving to a good House or Senate candidate is also a worthy venture, but the White House is, clearly the biggest prize. And there's always the DNC which has greater flexibility than anyone in particular with where the cash winds up and therefore has the ability to adjust to unforeseen contingencies.
Election Needed Now!
Ugh. I can't believe we have to have the politicized intelligence debate again. A lot of days I just really, really, really want to get this election over with. I can't stand the same arguments -- so...do you wish Saddam were still in power? -- over and over and over again....
And of Course The Science Thing
Part of the aforementioned debate fatigue is that it's a bit hard to say I'm shocked and outraged by the facts Chris Mooney and the Union of Concerned Scientists bring to light in what really should be a troubling post. Information like "Bush handles factual information in totally inappropriate way, introduces political considerations into apolitical contexts," has just become so dog bites man.
No Shit
Baffling NY Times headline: "Falluja Pullout Left Haven of Insurgents, Officials Say." That's usually what happens when you take a town full of insurgents, go in, kill a few of them, and then leave and put the survivors in charge of the town.
Ever since the dual occurences of the Falluja pullout and the decision to drop the indictment against Muqtada al-Sadr, I've been wondering what job, exactly, the "finish the job" crowd thinks it is that we're finishing. Both decisions are, I think, potentially defensible examples of good times to surrender, but they were both just that -- surrenders -- surrenders in sub-conflicts that we shouldn't have started in the first place. They're only defensible on the understanding that we've given up and are now seeking an orderly-looking withdrawal from Iraq. But if that's what we're doing, the president should make that our explicit policy. If it's not what we're doing, then we can hardly just leave the leaders of insurgent groups just lying all around the country.
Right About Now
Why did the Intelligence Committee Democrats take a fall and sign off on the recent Senate report? At the time when the Committee was starting its work there were reports that the Democrats were developing a strategy to use the media to help combat the institutional advantages of the Republican majority and try to ensure that the report got at some of the real issues. Then it didn't happen. We haven't gotten juicy leaks, we haven't gotten protests, we haven't gotten a minority report, we haven't gotten a refusal to endorse the thing. What happened?
No one seems to know, or at least they're not explaining it to me. Hill Democrats are said, however, to be quite mad at Senator Rockefeller for fouling this up. Fair enough, but why wasn't the leadership looking over his shoulder 'lo these past few months and leaning on him?
Fertility and Gay Marriage
Jacob Levy throws a slap or two in the direction of Sam Brownback's argument that gay marriage will lead to a declining birthrate. It's worth noting that, among rich countries, there's actually a rough correlation between social conservatism and relatively low birthrates. Traditionalist societies like Italy and Spain do relatively little in the way of social policy to ease the burdens of motherhood, whereas highly postmodern countries like Sweden have lots of free day care and other such things. The result is that Catholic Southern Europe has lower birthrates than the secular north. The marriage laws, as Jacob says, have nothing to do with it.
So if boosting birthrates is really what you're interested in, socialism is the only way to go. Banning gay marriage won't change anything.
Remembering Rudy G.
Kristof, like many others of late, mention Rudy Giuliani as a possible Cheney replacement though he is not, in fact, possible in light of his pro-choice and (especially) pro-gay views. But beyond this, I wonder how much we really even know about his views.
In order to be viable in New York City he needed to emphasize his social liberalism and, of course, we know all about his theory of police management. My recollection of growing up in Giuliani's New York, however, is this. During the 1993 campaign the sort of white liberal Manhattanite circles in which I traveled were deeply skeptical of him and his program. In office, though, his program seemed to be working out quite well. So he cruised to re-election with pretty strong support everywhere outside of the African-American community and then seemed to have a very promising political future. He turned out, though, to be an extremely limited single-issue candidate. From January 1997 to September 2001 most people continued to appreciate his "tough on crime" tactics and, indeed, this became such a consensus view that all the major Democratic contenders promised to continue his appoach, though without the part of the strategy where he would act like a jerk every time the cops wound up killing someone. But -- and it was a big but -- his anti-crime strategies worked too well. There was nothing new to be done on this front. And since his opponents wouldn't take the bait and propose reversing them, there was no content left to this agenda. And he didn't have any real ideas on any other fronts. So he could have continued on being a popular, do nothing caretaker mayor. But he had a kind of frenetic personality so he wanted to do something. But he didn't have any real commitment to other policy areas so he did not, for example, become a leading proponent of conservative ideas on education reform. He didn't have an economic development strategy beyond the (not far from wrong) notion that as long as crime stayed low business would keep booming. But this was still somewhat self-limiting unless you could fix the schools, where he didn't have many ideas. And his 2000 Senate campaign was looking like a flame-out even before the cancer incident. Senators don't change local policing policies and, again, he really didn't have any other issues. On 9-11 he engaged in some effective charismatic leadership and regained his 1996-98 sort of popularity. Since then he's become one of these generic "don't you know there's a war on" kind of hawks, but he certainly doesn't have any foreign policy expertise. Indeed, his hawkishness seems to be 40% the Israel-pandering of any white NYC politician (listen to Chuck Schumer, for example) and 40% a desire to recapture the lost glories of September 2001. There's no real content to it. So that's really the tragedy here. He was a good mayor for his first term, and what was good about him became part of the New York consensus. But he didn't -- and, I think, never will -- manage to build on those accomplishments and play on a larger stage. He'll long be remembered in non-black New York circles as the man who saved the city, but also as a kind of disappointment. A could-have-been, not a was.
The Clash Explains It All
Part of a continuing series. Is not "The Call Up" a good rough translation of "al-Dawa"? I think that's right:
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
'N' you must not act the way you were brought up
Who knows the reasons why you have grown up?
Who knows the plans or why they were drawn up? There's also an obvious pertinance to the military overstretch issue here.
Second Thought On Giuliani
I wrote below that we "know all about [Rudy Giuliani's] theory of police management," but that's actually wrong. What we know is what he says about his theory. Since several aspects of NYPD conduct were changed more-or-less simultaneously, there's actually a lively dispute as to which policies were and were not efficacious and what was effective about them. There's also a great deal of lingering uncertainty as to what, exactly, it is that zero tolerance policing achieves. Does cutting down on "quality of life" offenses actually reduce the violent crime rate, or is casting a wide net simply a useful way of incidentally arresting people who were actually committing more serious violations that the police don't necessarily know about?
Kerry Versus Bush On Trade
The question of who would be the better free trading president is of interested to the highly important swing electorate of hawkish libertarian academic webloggers who are disappointed in the Bush administration's competency, so here are my toughts. Obviously, both Bush and Kerry are not opposed to some obfuscation in this area. Their records, however, are pretty clear. Bush thinks that the best strategy for him is to talk like a free trader and then become a protectionist fairly frequently for political purposes. Kerry, on the other hand, h
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