Henry

So Foreign Policy has a new frontpage, with lots and lots of blogs by a variety of international relations and journalists. I’m considerably more optimistic about this stable’s odds over the long run than I was about the last effort to create a quasi-academic superblog ( the now defunct ‘Open University’ at _The New Republic_ ) since they haven’t made the mistake of relying on famous or semi-famous people who have never blogged before, and have lots of other commitments and obligations that are likely to come first. Instead, there are a number of people (Dan Drezner, Marc Lynch, Laura Rozen) who are well known in their own right, but who also have an established track record in blogging. Nor (and again, I think this is a good thing), have they tossed a bunch of very disparate people into a single group blog, instead providing a mixture of some group blogging among people with similar ideological predilections, and some individual. The only disappointment that this leads to is that I’d been quite looking forward to seeing how Stephen Walt and Philip Zelikow handled being blogmates after this little contretemps (read letters 2 and 3) – it would have been entertaining to watch from a distance.

I’ve a piece in the current issue of the _American Prospect_, which is now available on their website. The argument, in a nutshell, is that there is likely to be a clash between Obama style post-partisan politics (which builds on a general anti-party sentiment in American political thought and in recent arguments from Putnam, Fishkin etc about civic renewal), and the quite partisan electoral machine that he built in order to win the election.

The rebirth of civic participation this year is not a product of experiments in deliberative democracy or a new interest in league bowling. Rather, it is based on party politics, coupled with and accelerated by new opportunities provided by the Internet. Skocpol’s claim that “conflict and competition have always been the mother’s milk of American democracy” tells part of the story.

The one regret I have is that I hadn’t read Nancy Rosenblum’s _On the Side of the Angels_ (Powells, Amazon) before writing it. Rosenblum’s new book is the first serious political theoretic defense of partisanship that I’ve ever read. More on that when I work my way through the other items on my queue …

Many CT readers will be familiar with the work of Tom Geoghegan. We’ve often talked about his book, _Which Side Are You On_ which is a simply wonderful piece of political writing – brilliant, complicated, beautifully written, arguing with itself the whole way through. Now, he’s running for the Democratic nomination in Rahm Emanuel’s old district. I’m usually a bit chary when intellectuals run for office – they (we¹) are usually not very good at all at dealing with the day-to-day grind and compromise of politics. But Geoghegan, as James Fallows says is different.

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan’s case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point. The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it’s an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.

This is a purely personal endorsement; as a general rule, we don’t take collective positions on issues or people at CT. But I can’t imagine anyone more likely to contribute more to American political life than Geoghegan. I’ve contributed money to his campaign – if you want to do so too, you can do it easily here. There’s a Facebook group here (with a good bio attached).

¹ In case it’s not clear, the term ‘intellectual’ here doesn’t refer either positively or negatively to intellectual worth, but to social position.

Obituary here. I’m very sorry to hear this – he was one of my favourite writers, both under his own name and his Richard Stark pseudonym. A few of his Dortmunder novels were perfect, in the same way that P.G. Wodehouse’s best Jeeves and Blandings novels were perfect – beautifully made confections of style, wit and adept plotting.

Update: This post from Jo Walton puts it much better than I could.

He was a writer that writers like. I have often been in a conversation with writers about writing and someone will bring up Westlake and everyone else will nod and agree. Westlake’s books have wonderful characters, complicated evolving plots, they’re tightly paced and incredibly readable. When he’s funny, he’s genuinely funny with humour arising unforced out of situations. Characters are always themselves, they act the way you know they would act. They’re acutely observed and like like people. Yet his plots are clockwork masterpieces—he winds them up and off they go, not just ticking away but producing wonderful pyrotechnics. He could be gentle and he could be as hard as steel. I’ve often recommended that beginning writers study his books if they want to see how to do these things right. They’re hard to study though, because they suck you right in. There’s a quality of writing there isn’t really a word for except “unputdownable” and Westlake had it in spades.

If you haven’t read him before, I’d suggest starting with What’s the Worst That Could Happen, because that’s where I started. It’s the story of how the thief Dortmunder has his ring stolen, and how he tries to get it back, pulling off more and more complicated heists on the same person, who thoroughly deserves it. The series actually starts with The Hot Rock where Dortmunder and his friends steal the same jewel over and over. He has one more Dortmunder novel coming out in July, Get Real, so that’s something to look forward to.

This _Washington Post_ story on what happened at OSHA over the Bush years tells the usual story of flacks being hired as political appointees to gut enforcement, scientific advice being ignored, internal dissenters being punished and so on. But this bit seemed unusual, even by Bush administration standards.

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations. Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. “We’ll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened,” said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter. In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place “performance metrics” not previously used at OSHA.

Happy Christmas to those of you who are so inclined; happy Festivus/religious or non religious holiday of your choice to those who aren’t. And in honour of those of you who have spent a large chunk of the day trying to open presents for the pleasure of impatient children, I present you with the iSlice, a ceramic blade purpose-designed to ‘open difficult plastic packages,’ such as those heat-sealed plastic packs ones that many toys and electronic devices come in. And what does the iSlice arrive in? Why a difficult-to-open heat-sealed plastic pack of course.

The Washington Post

This season’s animatronic Baby Alive — which retails for $59.99 — comes with special “green beans” and “bananas” that, once fed to the doll, actually, well, come out the other end. “Be careful,” reads the doll’s promotional literature, “just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the ‘potty’ and sometimes she can’t!” (A warning on the back of the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.”) …

_Withnail and I_ some twenty-two years ago (or forty, depending on how you want to measure time):

The Irish Times has the story, although it concentrates on his not-especially successful political career rather than his intellectual contribution. I found his later work (both books and newspaper journalism) to be very nearly unreadable, less because of its sometimes reactionary politics than because of how badly it was written. There was plenty of choler and spleen, but little real humour. But his earlier books – I’m especially fond of _States of Ireland_, which really remade the debate over Irish national identity – are still a joy and a delight to read. His best writing was liberal in the most expansive sense of that term, clearly thought through, open to its own contradictions, generous where generosity was warranted, and witheringly accurate where it wasn’t (he had a near Galbraithian facility for cutting through the bullshit with a pungent description).

Ari, over at _Edge of the American West_, comes across a site saying that the Wild Things were Jewish.

The original concept for the book featured horses instead of monsters. Sendak said he switched when he discovered that he could not draw horses. The Wild Things (except “Goat Boy”, of course) were named after (and are presumably caricatures of) Maurice’s aunts and uncles: Aaron, Bernard, Emil, Moishe and Tzippy.

Maybe this is common knowledge to lots of folks; I did know the story about the horses. But it reminds me that when I was reading _Where the Wild Things Are_ to my son two nights ago, I spotted that the moon in Max’s bedroom is three quarters full in the early illustrations, changes to a full moon when he begins his travels, and remains full when he returns to his bedroom, and (presumably) normality, linear time, and all that good stuff. Suggestions about what this is supposed to mean (and other _WTWTA_ trivia) welcome in comments.

This piece by Benjamin Kunkel (whom I usually have time for), is really, _really_ annoying.

The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. … The main formal consequence, then, of a withered moral imagination has to do not with subject matter (love, crime, the future) but with character. Fictional character derives from moral choices made, contemplated, postponed, or ignored—morality is the page on which the stamp of character appears—and the signal formal trait of genre fiction is nothing so much as its lack of complex characters. This deficit entangles even an acknowledged generic triumph like Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, and the basis of the 1982 movie Blade Runner) in a certain incoherence. The ironic burden of Dick’s novel is to stick up for the warm-blooded humanity of androids (read: clones), and in this way imply the cold-bloodedness of any society that denies fully human status to some category of person. The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world. [click to continue…]

The _Financial Times_ published an article based on an interview with Jean-Claude Trichet today (the article itself seems to be borked, along with the rest of the FT’s website, but the interview itself, which is more informative in any event, is available here ). In the interview, Trichet suggests that large scale deficit spending is a bad idea because of ‘Ricardian effects.’

Consider the Ricardian effects, the level of confidence or the lack of confidence that you observe in the various constituencies of economic agents, particularly at the level of households: they suggest that there are certain situations where if you do not behave properly you might lose more in terms of confidence than what you are supposed to gain through the additional spending.

and

Every nation has its own Ricardian effects and its own assessment of the situation. I do not want to comment on any particular country, because my duty is to look at the continent of 320 million fellow citizens as a whole. But I fully accept that there are differences in the capacity of households in various cultures to accept a deterioration of their situation, and again, the Ricardian channel tells us that one might lose more by loss of confidence than one might gain by additional spending.

Is this plausible? The broad political economy literature on consumer behaviour that I’m aware of would suggest that this argument rests on some fairly heroic assumptions about individual information (and in particular their awareness of the possible long term consequences of government spending – and this leaves aside the claim that for some reason they will systematically _overestimate_ the consequences tomorrow of deficit spending today). As best as I’ve been able to tell from a quick glance at the WWW, the claim that Trichet is making is a controversial one, which lacks solid empirical support. But then, my understanding of macro theory is based on fast-disappearing memories of my BA coursework. So is there any solid empirical basis for the claim that strong Ricardian effects exist and are a real issue for policy makers? Or is this just a theoretical figleaf to cover over the less abstract political-economic reasons (to do with institutional prerogatives, inter-state relations, worries about defection etc) why the European Central Bank really wants to keep controls on national spending? This is not a rhetorical question – I honestly don’t know the answer, and would appreciate information from those who know this literature better than I do.

Robert J. Samuelson turns the stupid up to 11.

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that. Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they’re its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals — mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

Should people pretend to take this sort of horseshit seriously? One, could, for example, point out to serious academic research that completely contradicts Samuelson’s claims, such as Larry Bartels’ finding that “[US] senators are consistently responsive to the views of affluent constituents but entirely unresponsive to those with low incomes.” (p.275, Bartels 2008; Bartels also finds that Republicans are roughly twice as responsive to the views of high income constituents as Democrats)? Or should people just point at the silly man, and laugh (Samuelson’s claims are so pig-ignorantly ridiculous that they’re _not even competent hackery_ )? I’m genuinely of two minds.

Update: Bartels speaks further to this at Ezra Klein's blog.

I know of two systematic attempts to measure the relative influence of affluent, middle-class, and poor people on government policy. One is in the next-to-last chapter of Unequal Democracy, where senators’ roll call votes are moderately strongly affected by the preferences of high-income constituents, less strongly affected by the preferences of middle-income constituents, and totally unaffected by the preferences of low-income constituents. That’s the more optimistic view. My Princeton colleague Marty Gilens (in a 2005 article in Public Opinion Quarterly and a book-in-progress) has a parallel analysis focusing on aggregate poilcy shifts over two decades. He also finds no discernible impact of low-income preferences, but argues that middle-class people also get ignored when they happen to disagree with rich people.

As Ezra says:

Bartels explains his research in further detail here. Marty Gilens’ work is here. I’d be interested to hear Samuelson respond to their findings, or describe which aspects of their analysis he finds insufficiently rigorous.

on an otherwise dismal day. The UFCW has finally succeeded in unionizing the Smithfield meatpacking plant.

Workers at Smithfield Packing Co. voted in favor of unionizing, a stunning victory for labor organizers who have waited 16 years to gain a presence in the world’s largest hog processing plant. … Tonight’s victory marks a major inroad for organized labor in North Carolina. … After the union was defeated in the 1990s, the voting results were challenged with allegations that management harassed and intimidated workers. In May 2006, a federal court ruled that Smithfield must stop anti-union tactics and allow a vote.

(Longtime CT readers may remember a disgracefully dishonest _Economist_ story on how great the Smithfield plant was for immigrants from a couple of years back and a series of increasingly ludicrous posts from Megan McArdle, then writing at said journal, defending same)

Chris Hayes has a nice piece in _The Nation_ about how the term ‘pragmatism’ is used in US public debate.
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