Henry

John Crowley’s novel, _Aegypt_ retells the old story of the King of the Cats. A traveler hears one cat say to another, “tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead.” When he returns home and tells his wife, their family cat jumps from its place beside the fire crying, “Then I’m to be king of the cats!” and shoots up the chimney, never to be seen again. In the words of Crowley’s character, Pierce Moffett:

bq. That story had made him shiver and wonder, and ponder for days; not the story that had been told, but the secret story that had _not_ been told: the story about the cats, the secret story that had been going on all along and that no one knew but they.

There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that Susanna Clarke was thinking of this passage when writing _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_ (henceforth JSAMN). She’s surely familiar with Crowley – one of Childermass’s prophetic cards seems to have been abstracted from Great Aunt Cloud’s deck in _Little, Big_ – but JSAMN is decidedly its own book with its own themes and quiddities. Yet the passage from Crowley is helpful in identifying what kind of story JSAMN is. It’s a story of the King of the Cats. The point of the tale isn’t what it seems to be. The very title of the book is misleading: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. There’s a hidden story there, which is whispered through the gaps between the actions of the main protagonists. As the vagabond prophet Vinculus tells Childermass, the magicians aren’t so much so much actors as acted through, less the spellcasters than the spell itself; Vinculus himself, as his name suggests, is one of the chains that binds the two magicians to their allotted task. The magicians fail in their task, as they’re supposed to – the future of Clarke’s England belongs to other people than them.

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The Financial Times has an article today, suggesting that Poland may find itself suspended from voting in the European Union if allegations of secret CIA prisons on Polish soil bear out.

bq. Franco Frattini, justice commissioner, threatened the countries with “serious consequences, including the suspension of the right to vote in the Council [the Union’s main decision-making body]”.

bq. … Under the EU treaty, countries that do not act in accordance with “European values” on issues such as human rights can have their voting rights deprived – although such a step has never been taken. Poland and Romania, which Human Rights Watch, the campaign group, said were the most likely hosts of the jails, deny the claim, as do several other countries. Romania is due to join the EU in 2007.

This could prove to be an important catalyst. While the relationship between the EU and US is less overtly confrontational than it was a year ago, the US actually has less European friends than it did back then. There’s a general feeling of disgust among European political elites (including those who are usually pro-US) for America’s involvement in torture, extraordinary renditions and human rights abuses. Important allies of the US such as Blair and Berlusconi have been weakened, and likely aren’t around for too much longer. Not only that, but there are internal European politics too. There’s suspicion and dislike of the new Polish government in other EU capitals; while it certainly didn’t set up the putative prisons, it does have a distinct whiff of populist authoritarianism, and black prisons may prove to be a convenient excuse for taking action to clip its wings. Nor is there much appetite for Romania’s imminent membership of the EU either. Finally, action would be a very attractive way for EU officials to improve the European Union’s image with voters in France, Holland and elsewhere, by showing that the EU is about more than free trade and agriculture subsidies.

If evidence emerges showing that the Poles and Romanians are guilty, and the EU then takes action against them (perhaps suspending Poland; perhaps finding that Romania doesn’t seem sufficiently committed to the EU’s human rights regime), EU politics are going to get very interesting again. I still think that the odds are against this happening; there are very obvious risks to sanctioning (cf. how l'affaire Joerg Haider fizzled out, giving rise to the beefier institutions that may be invoked in this instance). But they’re a lot lower than they seemed to me a few days ago.

The Economist‘s Lexington starts an article (behind paywall) on whether Bush lied with a piece of self-justificatory hackishness.

bq. The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating their biggest weakness—their reputation for being soft on terrorism and feeble on national security. So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense. Nobody has yet produced any solid evidence for this. Sure, Mr Bush made mistakes, but they seem to have been honest ones made for defensible reasons. He genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—as did most of the world’s security services. And he was not alone in thinking that, after September 11th, America should never again err on the side of complacency. More than 100 Democrats in Congress voted to authorise the war. But being right and being seen to be right are different things. Mr Bush may not have consciously lied, but, egged on by Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he made dreadful miscalculations.

The issue, as the Economist‘s journalists know bloody well, isn’t whether the Bush administration believed at one point that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s whether or not the Bush administration mendaciously manipulated intelligence to make the public case for their beliefs. The critics mentioned in the piece aren’t making “the charge that [Bush] knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.” I’m not aware of anyone apart from a few crackpots who are. They’re making the case that the Republican administration deliberately suppressed information that didn’t support its case, and presented highly dubious information as providing a slam-dunk case for imminent war. In other words, the administration stitched up a regime that turned out not actually to have weapons of mass destruction, let alone an active nuclear programme, through spin, lies and use of ‘evidence’ that they knew at the time to be dubious. I’d like to see _Lexington_ explain exactly how the claims of al-Qaeda links, the aluminium tubes presentation, the yellowcake claims and so on were “honest [mistakes] made for defensible reasons.” But of course he does no such thing – instead he attacks his very own, custom designed straw man in an attempt to disassociate the heap of political trouble that Bush is now in from the fact that the Bush administration undoubtedly lied in the run-up to the war. Shoddy, shoddy stuff.

From a FT review of recent books on the criticism of photography.

bq. The argument relies mostly on Dyer’s uncanny powers of description and sometimes merciless wit. At the end of a section on photographic representations of the blind – in particular blind beggars and musicians in the work of Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Evans and Winogrand – he considers a photograph by Richard Avedon of the venerable critic Harold Bloom, who happens to have his eyes closed. “The impression is of a man,” writes Dyer, “so swaddled in self-regard that he can read books – and possibly even write about them as well – with his eyes shut.”

Support Bloggers’ Rights!

The EFF is running a campaign to support bloggers’ rights and to encourage new members. Over the next few years, bloggers are likely to be hit with both lawsuits and regulations, as blogging becomes normalized as a form of speech and political activity. The EFF is as close to a trade union supporting bloggers’ interests as we’re likely to get. It’s worth supporting, by clicking on the button.

Rick Perlstein writes in the _London Review of Books_ about how the American right constructed a mythology around Jane Fonda in order to delegitimize opposition to the Vietnam war. As Perlstein says, Fonda wasn’t a saint, and indeed represented a particular form of starry-eyed liberal masochism. But that isn’t the point – the Nixon administration and its supporters engaged in a systematic campaign of misinformation to make Fonda and anti-war veterans into hate-figures.

bq. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. Che Guevara spoke of creating a New Socialist Man. The president’s upright vanguardists in the Operation Homecoming travelling circus did a much more effective job of inventing a new sort of capitalist subject: New Republican Man, willing to believe anything to preserve some semblance of faith in American innocence.

While Perlstein doesn’t draw an explicit parallel with what’s happening today, it’s lurking just beneath the surface of his argument. The current efforts of various right wing propagandists to tar the anti-war left as traitors smack of Nixon’s smear campaign in the 1970’s. Perlstein’s account is also an important cautionary tale for the left. Then, as now, there was a widespread perception on left and right that the war was a disaster. Nonetheless, Nixon succeeded in using it as a wedge issue to split voters from the Democratic party, and to generate a set of pernicious myths that last to this day (not only Hanoi Jane’s treachery, but bogus stories about anti-war protesters spitting on veterans). While the public is beginning to accept that the Iraq war was a disaster, few people want to acknowledge that the US has been responsible, as it has been, for systematic abuse of prisoners and civilians, for outsourcing torture to its allies, and for itself directly engaging in torture. People are going to be looking to create scapegoats to preserve the image of American innocence, and to turn this to political gain. It’s important that they’re not allowed to get away with it.

I was at a talk that Barack Obama gave last week at the National Women’s Law Center, and came away very impressed indeed. The speech began with standard politicians’ folderol, but kept on getting better. In particular, it focused on some of the political issues that Kimberly Morgan wrote about here earlier this year, but that Democratic politicians seem to have done a fine job in ignoring. Not only that, but it linked these issues directly to economic inequality.

bq. And so women still earn 76% of what men do. They receive less in health benefits, less in pensions, less in Social Security. They receive little help for the rising cost of child care. They make up 71% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, and a full two-thirds of all the Americans who lost their health care this year. When women go on maternity leave, America is the only country in the industrialized world to let them go unpaid. When their children become sick and are sent home from school, many mothers are forced to choose between caring for their child and keeping their job.

bq. … In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to the women who lose their jobs when they have to care for a sick child – life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child born into poverty – pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Between this and John Edwards’ work on poverty, I’m actually feeling hopeful about the US Democratic party. Centrists in the party actually seem to be getting interested in inequality again, and to be finding a language that can link it to moral values. It’s the kind of hope that knows it’s going to be disappointed, if not dashed completely, by experience – but still, that’s more than I’ve had for years.

David Glenn has written an entertaining and interesting piece of intellectual history on sociologist Philip Rieff, perhaps best known these days for having once being married to Susan Sontag. While Rieff hasn’t had a lasting impact on his field, he’s inspired the fierce loyalty of a coterie of former students, and appeared as a supporting character in various works of fiction. It appears that he’s returning to the field after thirty years away, with no fewer than four books on the verge of being published. It’s unclear whether these will be important and influential works or intellectual curiosities.

Rieff sounds to be full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; still he seems to be a very interesting and sympathetic character, and an academic type that’s vanishing rare these days. Once upon a time, sociologists and political theorists used to be able to get away with speaking to literary types on their own terms; while they produced a lot of guff, they also sometimes drew some very interesting connections. Rieff’s a sort of academic Rip van Winkle, emerging from a long sleep over decades during which the world has changed. It’ll be interesting to see whether he’s able to reconnect.

I’ve complained in the past about the lack of an SSRN equivalent for political scientists (while APSA has put together a portal site for papers, it still leaves something to be desired; e.g. no stable permalinks). Now SSRN has created a new working paper series which aims to bring together “international studies in comparative law and political economy.” This looks to be a great resource – the idea is to bring scholars in relevant fields of comparative politics, comparative law, international political economy and economic sociology into a single debate. There’s a lot of fascinating work on new modes of international and domestic governance – but it’s difficult to keep track of, because it’s split across several disciplines.Worth signing up for.

The title of the latest Norman Podhoretz diatribe, approvingly linked to (surprise, surprise) by Glenn Reynolds.

*Who Is Lying About Iraq?*

The short answer to this timely question: Norman Podhoretz.

Number whatever the hell it is in a series of simple answers to unnecessarily complicated questions.

Update: See also this from Matt Yglesias at Tapped. To misquote _To Kill a Mockingbird_, it would seem that the truth is not in the Podhoretzes.

Norm Ornstein, who sometimes seems to be the AEI’s sole remaining scrap of credibility, has an op-ed in _Roll Call_ today on the Alito nomination. The original version is behind _Roll Call_’s paywall, but Steve Clemons has the relevant extracts.

To borrow and adapt a phrase, I know John Roberts; John Roberts is a friend (all right, an acquaintance) of mine. And Sam Alito is no John Roberts.

What is the difference? Roberts respects Congress and its constitutional primacy; Alito shows serious signs that he does not. Some time ago, Jeffrey Rosen, a superb legal scholar, pointed out Alito’s dissent in a 1996 decision upholding the constitutionality of a law that banned the possession of machine guns. We are not talking handguns, rifles or even assault weapons. We’re talking machine guns.

Congress had passed the law in a reasonable and deliberate fashion. A genuine practitioner of judicial restraint would have allowed them a wide enough berth to do so. Alito’s colleagues did just that. But Alito used his own logic to call for its overturn, arguing that the possession of machine guns by private individuals had no economic activity associated with it, and that no real evidence existed that private possession of guns increased crime in a way that affected commerce — and thus Congress had no right to regulate it. That kind of judicial reasoning often is referred to as reflecting the “Constitution in Exile.”

Whatever it is, it’s not judicial restraint.

… Too many judges, including some of the brightest, talk a good game of judicial restraint, but somehow find that deference is due Congress only when it passes laws they like. The smart ones find some rationale for overturning laws they don’t like, preserving a patina of consistency, but not more than that. (A few, including Clarence Thomas, don’t even pay lip service to the principle when voting to overturn legislative acts.)

Now Ornstein’s writing from the perspective of a Congress scholar who wants to preserve Congress’s role and prerogatives. But he has a very serious point. If Alito has aligned himself, as he seems to have, with a highly restrictive view of Congress’s powers to regulate interstate commerce, he’s bad news for the left.

Update: the complete column is here (thanks to schwa in comments).

While we’re on the subject of Google Map and Google Earth overlays, Kathryn Cramer and her friends have been doing some interesting and important work on importing satellite data as overlays, and using this as a means to disseminate information about, and focus attention, on natural disasters. This information can be used to discover hill carvings of knights and dragons; but it can also (and this is Kathryn’s main point) bring home what’s happening in disaster zones such as the earthquake region in Pakistan.

An addendum to the previous post: when Zywicki says that:

bq. I think this cultural temperament may reflect itself in a anti-elitist streak rebelling against the arrogance of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary and a humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.

he’s setting himself up for more trouble than he’s bargained for. Consider this recent NYT article.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more “liberal” – Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens – vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled “conservative” vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

Whatever conservative justices are showing here, it sure ain’t “humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.” But as Atrios says, the conservative critique of “Judicial Activism” usually reduces down to a rather less impressive sounding hostility to “Judgifying I don’t like.” If Zywicki genuinely thinks that lack of judicial deference to Congress is a fundamental problem, he should take the obvious next step – start pushing for a new Justice along the lines of Ginsburg or Breyer rather than Thomas or Scalia. Need I say that I’m not holding my breath?

Update: Orin Kerr and others in comments make a good point that I hadn’t considered. To the extent that conservative legal thought is more skeptical of federal law and left wing legal thought more skeptical of state law, Golder and Gewirtz’s analysis (which deals only with rulings overturning federal law) probably stacks the decks. But while this may mean that the snark in my final two sentences was unjustified, it doesn’t give a free pass to conservatives by any stretch. The conservative expressed preference for state law over federal law is hardly unrelated to the fact that (a) the state laws at issue are frequently substantively closer to conservative preferences than are federal laws, and (b) that a strong emphasis on states’ rights makes various forms of economic and political regulation much less feasible in an interconnected economy of 50 states. So too for liberals of course, but the point is that humility in the face of democratic legislatures isn’t the driving force here – it’s calculations about substantive outcomes. The political science literature here has very strong evidence indeed on how judges’ ideologies affect their rulings – Epstein and Segal’s _Advice and Consent_ finds that justices’ ideology is a “remarkably good predictor” of how they will vote on the Supreme Court. And indeed when issues of state law versus federal law collide with the substantive ideological desires of judges, the latter frequently lose, as witnessed by _Bush v. Gore_ which Epstein and Segal correctly describe as a “thinly veiled attempt on the part of the Court’s conservatives to put George W. Bush in the White House.”

It’s all confirmthem.com, all of the time at the Volokhs today; Todd Zywicki chimes in with his little bit.

bq. For those like myself (and I hazard to guess Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) conservatism is attractive because it now seems to be the party of meritocracy where one is judged on your character and ability, and not on your connections or demographics. As the doors of schools such as Princeton and Yale Law School (in Alito’s case), and the professions themselves have been thrown open to Italians, Poles, Irish, etc., individuals such as Scalia and Alito have had the opportunity to prove themselves. Among other things, I think this cultural upbringing reflects itself in a skepticism about racial preferences in college admissions and hiring. It is difficult to say, from what I can tell, that Sam Alito’s ascent to the Supreme Court came about through some sort of unfair advantage, money, or family connections. In the legal arena, I think this cultural temperament may reflect itself in a anti-elitist streak rebelling against the arrogance of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary and a humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.

The best rejoinder to this conservatism-as-meritocracy trope that I’ve seen is Walter Benn Michaels’ brilliant little essay on the neoliberal imagination for N+1 magazine (not available online – but see here for a shorter version). Michaels’ essay is devastating as a critique both of liberal and neo-liberal/conservative attempts to brush the issue of class under the carpet. When conservatives claim that in the absence of formal discrimination, merit will out, they’re making a claim that isn’t any better justified by the empirics than the liberal notion that a carefully metered dose of ‘diversity’ makes up in any substantial sense for a system that’s overwhelmingly skewed against the poor. [click to continue…]