US Politics

There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading Left2Right. Here’s its mission statement, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.

bq. In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.

bq. Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.

The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

The news services report the latest effort by legal officials of the U.S. Government to get Americans to agree that the use of torture by the military is no big deal:

WASHINGTON — U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday. The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners said some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due-process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the prisoners “have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon asked whether a detention would be illegal if it were based solely on evidence gathered by torture, because “torture is illegal. We all know that.” Boyle replied that if the military’s combatant status-review tribunals “determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due-process clause prohibits them from relying on it.”

I look forward to some analysis of this exchange by a good lawyer. (A good lawyer with some sense about what issues are worth their time, I mean.) It seems to me that the government wants to let military tribunals do whatever they like. Boyle’s claim seems to be that in balancing the reliability of any piece of evidence against its “questionable provenance” (i.e., whether it was beaten out of a detainee), the status-review tribunal should not only lean towards reliability but also get to pick and choose how questionable a “provenance” is too questionable.

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Brian Gifford of Pub Sociology has an Op-Ed piece in todays _Washington Post_ arguing that the pressure on the U.S. military in Iraq is much greater than simple comparison to casualty rates in previous wars would suggest:

To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15. Compared with two per day so far in Iraq, the daily grinds of those earlier conflicts were worse than what our forces are currently experiencing.

On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. Adjusted for the size of the armed forces, the average daily number of killed and wounded was 4.8 times as many in World War II than in Iraq, but it was only 0.25 times greater in Vietnam — or one-fourth more.

These figures suggest that our forces in Iraq face a far more serious threat than the public, the media and the political establishment typically acknowledge or understand. Man for man, a soldier or Marine in Iraq faces a mission nearly as difficult as that in Vietnam a generation earlier. This is in spite of the fact that his contemporary enemies do not field heavy armored vehicles or aircraft and do not enjoy the support and patronage of a superpower such as the Soviet Union. …

The focus on how “light” casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a “victory.”

There is a tension in warblogger rhetoric between the wish to emphasize the great sacrifices that soldiers are making in Iraq and the desire to deride those who worry about the casualties. The former leads them to emphasize the hellish nature of battling guerilla forces in urban settings, but the latter demands they argue that fatality rates are trivial compared to Vietnam or other much larger wars. Brian treats the fact that the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained and best-supported ground fighting force in the world as more than just rhetoric. As he argues, this should force us to see the casualty numbers in a new light.

I linked last week to an op-ed by John Allen Paulos about the conclusions that might (or might not) be drawn from the recent Presidential election. Now he’s written a piece about the possibility of election fraud , which draws on work by Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania. His conclusion in part:

bq. The election has prompted extensive allegations of fraud, some of which have been debunked, but many of which have not. In several cases non-trivial errors have been established and official tallies changed. And there is one more scenario that doesn’t require many conspirators: the tabulating machines and the software they run conceivably could have been dragooned into malevolent service by relatively few operatives. Without paper trails, this would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to establish. Hard evidence? Definitely not. Nevertheless, the present system is such a creaky patchwork and angry suspicions are so prevalent that there is, despite the popular vote differential, a fear that the election was tainted and possibly stolen.

In completely unrelated news US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared of the Ukrainian elections :

bq. We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse. We have been following developments very closely and are deeply disturbed by the extensive and credible reports of fraud in the election. We call for a full review of the conduct of the election and the tallying of election results.

Lynne Cheney Tops National Christmas Tree.

Mike Hout and some colleagues at Berkeley have a working paper called “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections”. A summary is also available as well as the data itself. Hout is a well-respected sociologist, so if he thinks the data for Florida show some anomalies he’s worth listing to. Hout et al try to estimate whether the presence of touch-screen electronic voting made a difference to the number of votes cast for Bush, controlling for various demographic characteristics of the counties as well as the proportion of votes cast for the Republican Presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Here’s the punchline:

bq. As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate. Electronic voting has a main, positive effect on the dependent variable. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting, and between baseline support for Bush squared and electronic voting. Support for Dole in 1996, county size, median income, and Hispanic population had no significant effect net of the other effects. Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on changin percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties. … Summing these effects for the fifteen counties with electronic voting yields the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting; this figure is 130,733.

Hmm. I’m going to go mess around with the data for a while and see what we can see.

*Update*: OK, I’ve looked at the data, and so have others. I think the case is not proven. More below the fold.

*Update 2*: Mike Hout has added a comment below.

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Duncan Black has it about right:

bq. The Dems should be going after the techno-lib vote by fighting against the Intellectual Property grab which is currently going on. Give people their porn, their Napster, and their unfettered Tivo. And, yes, I am respectful of genuine intellectual property rights but DMCA, the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act copyright extension and the inevitable progeny of both will soon make it impossible to say or do anything without handing over a license fee.

To which I can only add that the Democrats should be doing this anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Just because the movie and music industry are ‘our’ plutocrats doesn’t mean that Democratic politicians should be supporting their attempted land grab. One of the few real rays of hope for the modern left is the public domain and Creative Commons movement. The left should be supporting what it’s doing – helping to create a free space for collective and individual endeavour. Handing the strangling cord to entrenched interests probably isn’t good politics; it’s certainly bad policy.

John Allen Paulos has a useful piece in today's Guardian on the meaning of the US election and the tendency people have to draw sweeping conclusions about the US electorate from the numbers:

bq. Excuse my mathematician’s obsession with coin flips, but consider this. There is a large bloc of people who will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and a similarly reliable Democratic bloc of roughly the same size. There is also a smaller group of voters who either do not have fixed opinions or are otherwise open to changing their vote.

bq. To an extent, these latter people’s votes (and thus elections themselves) are determined by chance (external events, campaign gaffes, etc).

bq. So what conclusion would we draw about a coin that landed heads two or three times out of four flips (or about a sequence of two or three Democratic victories in the last four elections)? The answer, of course, is that we would draw no conclusions at all.

Alabama’s Amendment 2 is due for a recount on November 29th, because the vote was so close, but most commentators apparently expect it to be defeated. For those who weren’t paying attention, Amendment 2 would revoke the post-Brown constitutional amendment passed to mandate segregated education, impose a poll tax, and, most cruelly, specify that Alabama’s children have no right to a state funded education. Of course, revoking it would not guarantee a right to a state-funded education, but a central, and spurious, argument in the campaign against Amendment 2 was that revoking it would provoke lawsuits claiming that the state’s unequal provision of education was unconstitutional. Leading the charge against the Amendment: the Christian coalition. Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy and excellent discussion of the case and its implications. Although myself an atheist, I have found Russell’s post-election thoughts very helpful. His thesis, which I share, is that progressives would do better to relate to evangelicals and their ilk in new and different ways. The Amendment 2 story is good ammunition for those who disagree with us. Is there an upside? I can’t think of one, though it is notable, that, again, Governer Bob Riley is more-or-less on the side of human decency.
(I’ve turned off comments because you should be discussing this at Russell’s place).

I promised I’d have plenty of unsolicited advice for the Democrats this week, and I do. However, after reading round the web about all the things that are wrong with “the Left” and how they’re not in touch with the “real America” (no links provided, they’re not exactly hard to find), I got a bit depressed. So I invented this game to cheer myself up.

I call it “Six Degrees Of This Googlewhack Is A Serious Problem For The Left”.

It kind of combines the fun of the Kevin Bacon game with the fun of Googlewhacking, and at the same time helps you generate yet more self-flagellating theories about the election results, which must be fun or people wouldn’t do it so much.

The idea is that, it seems, you can connect almost anything to the phrase “this is a serious problem for The Left” in much less than six steps of argument. So the name of the game is to start with a googlewhack from the site and end via a chain of fairly close reasoning with an argument that the Democrats need to consider your googlewhack in depth.

Thus, gesticulate tatties is a googlewhack (or at least it is until this page gets indexed), and it links to the Life and Opinions of Sir Andrew Wylie. On page 14 of this document, there is the line:

No man in his senses would ever expect to see an ignoramus bush, far less a doddered holly-bush, take up a pen to write a book

which is clearly an example of an aristocrat, who is British, referring to President Bush as an ignoramus. This is the sort of high-handed patronising attitude that the Real America hates, and is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

Meanwhile, liposome yarmulke not only has undertones of anti-semitism, but the actual googlewhack is to a spam page pushing cheap Viagra. As long as the Democrats don’t have a credible healthcare plan or a definite policy on parallel importation of pharmaceuticals, they will always be the party of Hillarycare and this is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

And so on. There is perhaps some small kudos for any CT reader who can find a Googlewhack so obscure and nonpolitical that it can’t be used as a stick to beat the democrats with. There is also slightly more kudos for anyone who spots an “in the wild” application; a breast-beating “death of the Left” essay that looks like its original kernel was a googlewhack. Have fun.

Adam Posen at the IIE has an interesting article in today’s FT about the political motivations and consequences of Bush’s economic policy.[1] For me, the key quote:

bq. However, the Bush administration is putting its political staying power ahead of economic responsibility – indeed it is weakening the independence of those very institutions on which Americans rely to check economic radicalism. For example, the current Republican congressional leadership is trying to override the constitutional design whereby the Senate acts as a brake on the executive branch and on the self-interest of “majority faction”. Bill Frist, senate majority leader and George Allen, the Republican senate campaign committee chair, said their unprecedented direct campaign against Tom Daschle, the defeated Senate minority leader, should warn moderate Republican and Democratic senators not to be “obstructionist”, even though that is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended the Senate to do.

bq. … Markets tend to assume that the US political system will prevent lasting extremist policies so, even now, observers discount the likelihood of the Bush administration fully pursuing – let alone passing – this economic agenda. If the thin blue line of Democrats and the responsible Republican moderates in the Senate bravely fulfil their constitutional role, perhaps the damage will be limited. If not, we can foresee the US economy following the path to extended decline of the British economy in the 1960s and 1970s and of Japan in the 1990s.

I think that there’s an important message for the anti-Bush opposition here, if it can only articulate it clearly and simply. The current administration claims to be both conservative and strict constructionist; it’s neither. In fact, it’s trying to short-circuit the basic constitutional checks and balances of the US political system in order to ram through its agenda. The US apart, presidential democracies are extremely fragile, in large part because presidents tend to grab all power to themselves. This is exactly what the Bush administration is doing, both in its sweeping constitutional arguments about the extent of presidential privilege, and in its efforts to impose strict discipline on the Senate. This is something that shouldn’t only be worrying to lefties – it’s something that should be of deep concern both to serious conservatives, and to libertarians who are worth their salt.

fn1. No hyperlink because it’s behind their paywall.

As a complement to Kieran's post, Michael Gaster, Cosma Shalizi’s and Mark Newman’s electoral map where area is proportional to population is fascinating, as well as weirdly beautiful – like butterflies exploding. Gaster-Shalizi-Newman also have a really interesting analysis of the distribution of votes for for the Republican candidate – go read it now.

Update: according to Cosma, the histogram on his site showing 300 odd counties with 99% Democratic support was the result of a coding error – however the map is accurate.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/cartcolors.png!

In the aftermath of the elections, it doesn’t look as if anyone in government will be calling on me for frank and fearless advice[1] any time soon. So this seems like a good time to get my records in order. My piece on time management elicited some follow-up discussion along these lines, notably here, with followup here . For those who are looking for moderately constructive routine activities in the wake of recent catastrophes, here are some (not very organised) thoughts.

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I put my post about how to best represent county-level election data on my own weblog as well. Yesterday it got linked to from this thread on the CSP Gun Talk Forum. Apparently, trying to present the data honestly is a problem:

Re: Don’t let “them” get away with it!
Posted By: those Sore Losers
They are rewriting history as we speak …….. !!!
Look at the map below >>>
then Go to the link below the map for the real shock >>>

Then they provide their own analysis:

bq. The only reason New Mexico and Colorado have any blue counties is because of all the idiot Kalafornicators that moved there. The only reason south Texas is blue is because of all the illegal mexicans that live there. It is sad the dimocrap city slickers want to force their pitiful way of life on the rest of us country folks…….maybe we need to wall off the large metro areas of the country…..chris3