US Politics

Megan McArdle has a post up grousing about how ‘but we have rationing already’ arguments are facile. Pardon me for not seeing her point (although I am willing to concede there may be overuse of the term, as we shall see). Let’s say the rationing in question is some guaranteed minimum coverage (public option). Obviously minimum is not maximum. That’s what people mean when they call it ‘rationing’, and that’s an ok use of the word. But lets start by noting that, paradigmatically, rationing needs two elements: it provides a minimum for everyone in a group by forbidding anyone from getting more than a certain maximum. Rationing means using the latter mechanism to ensure the former result. In that sense, the proper thing to say is that the guaranteed minimum coverage doesn’t really involve rationing.

Suppose, instead, we were talking about a guaranteed minimum income (as was proposed in the 70’s, and as such free market luminaries as Milton Friedman thought made a certain amount of economic sense, if memory serves.) Lots of folks would be opposed to guaranteed minimum income today (to put it mildly), but would anyone say a guaranteed minimum income was bad economics because it would amount to ‘rationing of the money supply’‘? And fiat rationing (as McArdle says) is inefficient. I don’t think economists would see this as a problem. Why not? Because there is no reason why the volume of money overall should be a function of – critically constrained by – some minimal income provision. That’s just not how the money supply would be determined: there wouldn’t be some iron economic law that there couldn’t be more money than everyone times the minimum. [click to continue…]

Here’s a thought I’ve been meaning to write up for a while. This post has inspired me. Your opponent says healthcare reform will put us on the slippery slope to socialist soylent green serfdom. You reply by acknowledging the objection, in outline: ‘You’re worried Obama/liberals want something different from what they are willing to ask for, for fear that they would lose public support. You are also worried that what is being proposed may have bad, unintended consequences.’ (See if you can lock your interlocutor in on these two points. Which shouldn’t be hard. Now move on to step two.) ‘Fine. Suppose you’re right. Suppose they are lying, or half-lying. They don’t want the moderate stuff they say they want at all. They want something radical, or at least something more.’ (See if you can get agreement to that.) Also: ‘you are right. Something this big and sausage-like sure could work out badly in practice; that’s something to worry about.’ (Now you spring the trap.) ‘But suppose someone said these things and meant them. Suppose Obama were just the liberal he presents himself as. Call this guy Bizarro Obama if you want to emphasize that you aren’t fooled for a second into believing our Obama is this guy. Fine. Would you have any objection to Bizarro Obama – the actually just moderately liberal one? Also: suppose the policy worked more or less as proposed. Not perfectly. But suppose it didn’t just totally blow up. I know, I know, you don’t believe this policy will work. That’s fine. But suppose it did. Would you have a problem with that. If so, what’s the problem.’

Call these: sticky slope arguments – or – the argument from intended consequences. I think you see where I’m going with these names, and maybe you see as well why leading your opponent down this path might leave your opponent a bit deflated, rhetorically. Which might then be an opener for saner debate. [click to continue…]

The Internets are buzzing with the latest survey showing, among other things, Republicans are split on the Birther issue with only 47 per cent accepting the claim that Obama was born in the US. That’s almost exactly equal to the 48 per cent who agree that global warming exists – it’s evident from the public debate that the overlap between Birthers and opponents of AGW is very high ).

But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that over 50 per cent of Republicans are conspiracy theorists who believe in a secret plot to impose a Kenyan-socialist dictatorship as part of the UN/IPCC system of world government. On the contrary, the proportion is only about 25 per cent (more in the South). As on the global warming issue, the balance of opinion within the Republican Party holds to the sensible “sceptical” position: the science isn’t settled, the birth records are unclear, sightings of black helicopters need further investigation and so on. That’s good to know.

My contribution to the Open Left Debate at Demos is here. I offered them a long and a short version, and am rather relieved that they went with the short version, mainly because it contained something that on reflection I wish I hadn’t said (but, since its not published I’m under no obligation to divulge it!). For what its worth, the long, and more didactic (but also more tentative) version of my answer to the first question, “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?” is below the fold; but please go to Open Left to join that debate.

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Brandon del Pozo is a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with plenty of experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor too). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY. He has sent us a post with a different perspective on police discretion and the Gates arrest than that of my last post. We are publishing his post in the interests of furthering serious debate. Brandon asked me to make it emphatically clear that all views expressed here are purely personal, and that he is not acting as a spokesperson for the NYPD in any way. His post is below.

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From my own experience and what I have learned about the incident, I highly doubt that I would have ordered the arrest of Professor Gates for any charge. I do, however, think that based on his actions as alleged by Sergeant Crowley, his arrest was somewhat plausible within the universe of possible outcomes to the incident. That still does not mean that the cops in question weren’t acting “stupidly,” as President Obama suggested. It is possible to do a lawful thing that is stupid, and that is why officers have discretion in many cases. While it can be misused, discretion is there to prevent them from stupidly enforcing the letter of the law. That the arrest was unwise and imprudent has also been made clear by how quickly the charges were dropped and the apologies issued by the government of Cambridge.

On the other hand, I do feel that Professor Gates seems to have acted inappropriately. There was no good reason for him to converse belligerently with the responding officer from his first words, or accuse him of racism, or refuse to answer basic questions directly related to the scope of the officer’s legitimate investigation. Of course, Gates also had the prerogative to say nothing at all, but this is different from saying nothing constructive, and instead issuing verbal abuse. This is not how people should relate to police officers as officials who are ostensibly trying to ensure public safety, but at least as importantly it is not how people should relate to other people in their community whose behavior they haven’t had the chance to independently assess. Police officers are expected to bear much greater burdens than the average citizen in this regard due to the nature of their job, but the limits on these burdens acknowledge their core personhood.
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A moment of silence for Hilzoy, who’s retiring from blogging this week.

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I’m still writing a long, substantive-ish piece responding to Larry Lessig’s twin posts on the dangers of confusing socialism with collaborative stuff on the internet, but it may be no harm to try to expel the less substantive stuff from my system in the meantime. And I do have some stuff to get out. I usually like Lessig’s stuff, even when I don’t agree with it, but these two posts are a horrible, horrible mess.

Post the first:

It is completely unreasonable to call [Kevin Kelly’s argument] “socialism”—at least when the behavior described is purely voluntary. It’s like saying “Because Stalin set up a competition between different collective farms, it’s not unreasonable to call that free market capitalism.” … The thing that Smith was pointing to (and Hayek too), is not “socialism.” It is not reasonably called socialism. Because “socialism” is the thing Smith was attacking in the 6th edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Socialism is using the power of the state to force a result that otherwise would not have been chosen voluntarily by the people. … Coercive government action is—IMHO —a necessary condition of something being “socialism.” It isn’t sufficient—there is plenty of coercive governmental action that doesn’t qualify as socialism, like raising taxes to fund national defense, or to pay the police. … I’m not an opponent to all things plausibly called “socialist” … A graduated income tax could properly be called “socialist,” because it is coerced … But all of the examples of proper “socialism” begin with pointing to coercion by the state. A conservative Baptist church is not “socialist” when it voluntarily collects money to give to the poor, even though the result is similar to the result of a “socialist” plan to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. … sloppiness here has serious political consequences. When a founder of the movement which we all now celebrate calls this movement “socialist,” that plays right in the hand of those would attack everything this movement has built. Again, see Helprin. Or Andrew Keen.

Post the second:

There’s an interesting resistance (see the comments) to my resistance to Kevin Kelly’s description of (what others call) Web 2.0 as “socialism.” That resistance (to my resistance) convinces me my point hasn’t been made. … It is not even that never in the history of “socialism” have people so understood it (there have of course been plenty of voluntary communities that have called themselves “socialist”). Instead, my argument against Kelly was about responsibility in language: How would the words, or label, he used be understood. Not after, as I said, reading “a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term.” Rather, how would it be understood by a culture that increasingly has the attention span of 140 characters? … In reading the reactions to my argument, however, I realize that in using the term “coercion” I was committing the same error that I was accusing Kelly of making. People associate the word “coercion” with Abu Ghraib or Stalin. And certainly, the “coercion” of socialism isn’t necessarily (or even often) that. That’s fair. By “coercion” I meant simply law—that “socialism” is a system enforced by law, and enforced contrary to the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate. … So I didn’t mean anything necessarily negative by the term “coercion.” … Again, if you doubt that, think about American critics of “socialism”: None of them are complaining about people voluntarily choosing to associate however they choose to associate (except of course if they are gay). They are complaining about people being forced to associate in ways they don’t choose to associate.

Over the last week or two, there has been a lot of discussion of the idea of Obama leading from “two steps behind”, initially in relation to the Iran protests¹, and then as a general description of his operating style. There’s an obvious link to the famous quote attributed to FDR, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

But, how should Obama’s supporters respond to this, particularly on civil liberties issues such as detention withour trial where Obama is not only two steps behind but often appears to be going in the opposite direction? Suppose that Obama really wants to deliver on his campaign rhetoric about openness and due process, but is facing powerful resistance from within permanent power centres such as the CIA. Hence, it might be supposed, Obama has to put up a show of resistance, and needs his supporters to make enough noise to compel him to fulfil his promises

How, if at all does such a situation differ from one in which Obama is a natural centrist wants to backslide on promises made to secure his base in the election year, but can be held to his promises by sufficiently vociferous pressure?

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Whether or not Theory jargon incapacitates humanities folks, communication with regular folks-wise, I think it might provide a leg-up when it comes to understanding Republican governor infidelity pressers. Here’s Mark Sanford: “And the biggest self of self is indeed self.” True, untrue, or neither? Discuss. Defend your answer on the grounds that it is necessary for the progress of World-Spirit.

Here’s the context:

But I’m here because if you were to look at God’s laws, in every instance it is designed to protect people from themselves. I think that that is the bottom line of God’s law. It is not a moral, rigid list of do’s and don’ts just for the heck of do’s and don’ts, it is indeed to protect us from ourselves. And the biggest self of self is indeed self. If sin is in fact grounded in this notion of what is it that I want, as opposed to somebody else.

What do you make of this?

Henry and a few others suggested I was a bit hard on Douthat for not being hard enough on Helprin. Douthat may be guilty only of the venial sin of obligatory civility in the face of a bad book, not the mortal sin of Higher Broderism. (Although one hopes the critic’s motto is not ‘if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’) It really was his last paragraph that set me off, and it’s worth saying why. I’ll leave Helprin and even Douthat mostly out of it. [click to continue…]

Via Arthur Goldhammer, this is a very interesting post.

The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. …The FLN’s use of terrorism—in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns—served as the rationale for this “exhaustive interrogation” of “suspects.” … The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States’ “war on terror.”

As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. … what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. … The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. … historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. … cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn’t argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because they didn’t have to: they didn’t have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL. In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, “deny, deny, deny” (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. … Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everything.

Its good to see that John Ensign is consistent on the issues: voting for a constitutional ban on marriage for same sex couples, and taking direct action against the institution of marriage for opposite-sex couples.

So I’m back from the AAUP national meeting, and I’ve decided that I’m a bad person for not blogging about Garcetti v. Ceballos or Hong v. Grant (.pdf) until now.  (Marc Bousquet was all over it more than a year ago.)  The Hong case is just one example of what I call the Children of Garcetti, and if you teach at a public university in the United States (or if you know someone who does), you should know about Garcetti.

Here’s the Oyez summary of the case.  Since Garcetti involves the fate of a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was whistleblowing with regard to what appeared to be a fraudulent affidavit, most people didn’t realize that it might have implications for academic freedom.  Ah, but not the AAUP’s legal staff!  They were on the case, so to speak, from the start (here’s a .pdf of the brief).  Which is yet another reason you all (if you’re college professors) should have joined the AAUP by now, because (a) the AAUP sees these things coming when most of the rest of us don’t and (b) helps to fight ‘em in court.  Indeed, the AAUP/ Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brief seems to have caught the attention of David Souter, who, bless his retiring heart, wrote in dissent:

This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write “pursuant to official duties.”

In response, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, citing Bugs Bunny, replied, “ehhhhhh … could be!”  Though the actual language was this:

There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.

In other words, we’re leaving that door open, thanks—if any lower courts want to walk through it, just make sure they wipe their feet on the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom.

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This is a follow-up to the distinctly non-sober but not wholly unuseful thread attached to my post on the Boston Review piece on Malhotra and Margalit’s survey research on anti-semitism and the financial crisis. The authors have asked for a chance to explain themselves, and their methodology, which has come in for a lot of criticism of an unavoidably speculative sort in comments to my post. Let’s hope this clears a few things up. Let’s try to be civil, shall we? The following is, obviously, not by me but by Malhotra and Margalit. And not edited by me in any way. – John Holbo

We are glad that our article generated thoughtful discussion, and we would be happy to address some of the questions people raised in the comments section. If our responses do not specifically address your particular comment, apologies in advance. Our goal here is to touch on some of the main issues. [click to continue…]