US Politics

Greetings from the road. I’ve been chivvying little girls around the globe for a few weeks, which interferes with keeping up one’s CT duties. So our text today is taken from one of the few literary works I’ve had a chance to read with real discernment, at leisure. The August issue of the Delta inflight magazine! 

The article in question is a celebration of the 50th anniversery of King’s “I Have A Dream Speech”. A number of prominent Atlantans reflect on its significance, generally and personally. (Hey, you can read it online. Who knew? Who ever links to articles in inflight magazines?)

It’s the sort of feel-good, unlikely-to-offend fare you expect from an inflight magazine. But the fact that MLK, his legacy and most famous speech, are fodder for such fare is noteworthy. In 1963, who would have expected that, a mere 50 years on, MLK would be not just a moral hero to many, but a non-polarizing, nominal hero to nearly all. Democrats love him, of course. And Republicans – although they may vote against MLK day and try to chip away at his pedestal every couple of years – are really more interested in making out, rhetorically, how they, not Democrats, are the true heirs to his legacy and philosophy (which has been so cruelly betrayed by the Democrats). As Orwell said about Dickens: MLK is a figure well worth stealing.  [click to continue…]

Via “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/2013/08/democracy-in-action-missouri-edition/, this “Pro Publica piece”:https://www.propublica.org/article/how-high-cost-lenders-fight-to-stay-legal is well worth reading.

bq. As the Rev. Susan McCann stood outside a public library in Springfield, Mo., last year, she did her best to persuade passers-by to sign an initiative to ban high-cost payday loans. But it was difficult to keep her composure, she remembers. A man was shouting in her face. He and several others had been paid to try to prevent people from signing. “Every time I tried to speak to somebody,” she recalls, “they would scream, ‘Liar! Liar! Liar! Don’t listen to her!’” Such confrontations, repeated across the state, exposed something that rarely comes into view so vividly: the high-cost lending industry’s ferocious effort to stay legal and stay in business.

In the controversy over who should replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the US Fed, a fair bit is being made of the fact that Larry Summers is (to put it politely) a jerk. Without denying this, I’d like point out that, when it really mattered, Summers was thoroughly outjerked by the genuine article, Rahm Emanuel.

The occasion was the decision on a stimulus package needed immediately after Obama’s inauguration. Emanuel’s brilliant strategy was to go for as small a stimulus as possible, declare victory on the economic front, then turn to the main game of cutting a deal with the Republicans on health care reform. We all know how that turned out, [^1] and anyone who recalled the Great Depression could easily have foreseen it. I can recall how stunned I was that Obama failed to take the obvious opportunity to nail Bush and the Repubs for the crisis, and switch to a single-minded focus on economic recovery.

The Keynesian analysis done inside the White House by Christina Romer and outside by Paul Krugman showed that what was needed was a stimulus of at least $1.7 trillion. Based on his subsequent commentary, it’s clear the Summers understood and agreed with this. If he had lived up to his reputation, Summers would have pushed this through the White House by demonstrating, beyond any doubt, that Emanuel was the kind of fool he is famed for not suffering gladly. Instead, he first made Romer reduce the estimate to $1.2 trillion, then dropped it from his brief without telling her, giving Obama a range from $600 billion to $800 billion.

Summers is great at saying the unsayable when it comes to things like shipping toxic waste to poor countries or making baseless speculations about genetics and gender. But when it really mattered, he couldn’t come up to scratch.

Note: Out of laziness, I omitted the link to the piece by Noam Scheiber, on which I relied. I’ve added it now.

[^1]: Fans of 11-dimensional chess might want to make the case that Obama deliberately threw the 2010 election to the Tea Party, foreseeing that the resulting hubris would drive the Repubs mad, and therefore lead to their ultimate destruction. But I can’t impute such subtlety to Emanuel.

Since it’s timely, I’m republishing my “modest proposal”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/03/13/cheney-and-manning-a-modest-proposal/ from last year, one half of which is meant in all seriousness:

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It’s not at all surprising that most US media have yawned at “today’s news”:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ that a UN rapporteur has found that the US has treated Bradley Manning in a cruel and inhuman fashion. But it does highlight a rather interesting inequity.

On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Bradley Manning. He appears to be a confused individual – but his initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. He was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that his leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet he is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an _ex post_ carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, is treated inhumanely and likely, should he be convicted, to face life imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it _is_ the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Bradley Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would _like_ getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.

That’s the headline on my latest piece for The National Interest. It looks at the case of (retired) General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under investigation for a leak relating to the Stuxnet worm, a US-Israeli cyberwarfare exercise directed against Iran. The key points

* Like most leaks, the one for which Cartwright is being investigated revealed nothing that wasn’t known to the Iranian targets of the exercise or easily inferred by anyone who had followed the story in public media

* Unlike the leaks for which whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden have been prosecuted/persecuted, this was an absolutely standard Washington leak, done for personal gain. Assuming the facts are as alleged, Cartwright, an insider, gave information (classified as secret, but actually well known) to a journalist, in return for favorable coverage. This is such standard practice that it would be hard to find anyone in government (in DC or elsewhere) who hasn’t done it

But, Cartwright had made lots of enemies and so appears excluded from the general immunity that covers such leaks. Moreover, thanks to Obama, the stakes are high. Based on the Manning precedent, he could be charged with aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty. The only comparable case of an insider prosecution is that of Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who leaked the identity of an active CIA agent for political gain. He was sentenced to thirty months, which was immediately commuted. Even then he was prosecuted for perjury, not for the actual leak.

Having reached the point where the weapons of the security state are being turned against insiders, it will be interesting to see how things play out. Hopefully, those involved will look over the precipice and pull back.

Following up my Shelby post: Dave Weigel has a post, “Do Republicans Really Need Hispanic Votes? Nope!” He links to part two of a three-part analysis by Sean Trende (part 1, part 3). Trende proposes that even if Dems get 90% black, Hispanic and Asian, this is likely to depress the Dem share of the white vote to the point where Reps remain competitive for decades. He suggests that, electorally, the ‘Arizona model’ – i.e. apparently go out of your way to piss off Hispanics (he doesn’t put it that way) – is about as likely to work as the ‘Full Rubio’.

I have no opinion about Sean Trende and I don’t usually rely on “Real Clear Politics” for my wonky analysis, to say the least. But, whatever the merits or demerits of his specific deployments of data, this does strike me as noteworthy. It’s the first time I’ve seen a ‘wonky’ Republican suggest maybe extreme racial polarization should be on the table as a strategic option. It’s so obvious it would be a bad thing for the whole country that I find it dismaying.

I’m not a big believer in ‘heighten the contradictions’. Too Lenin-meets-slatepitch. But I wonder to what extent the Shelby decision will prove disadvantageous for Republicans because the party will now pursue measures that are inconsistent with making any credible attempt to not be a regional, ethnocentric party. Because they have to at least try this new stuff, as a solution to the problem that demographics are shifting. But surely everyone is going to notice them doing that.

Maybe it will backfire, as voter discouragement measures seem to have backfired in 2012. Or maybe it will work, at least in the near term. Minorities will vote in smaller numbers. That will help Republicans. But it seems like doom for Republican moderates, hence death for tender green shoots of Republican moderation (were one to believe such a delicate blossom could ever compete with that hardiest of conservative perennials – the extremist spasm.) No Republican is allowed to call a fellow Republican a racist, obviously. That’s beyond the pale (no pun intended!) But that means no moderate Republican will be able to talk, critically, about what their fellow Republicans are going to be up to, thanks to Shelby. Because anything the least bit negative they say about anything Shelby has made possible will be construed as a charge of ‘racism!’ by other Republians. So the most ethnocentric elements of the party will loudly drag the rest quietly along for the rightward ride. But no one along for that ride is going to look moderate in the least. The overall optics are going to be terrible.

Read this column by Matt Lewis. It’s about immigration, not Shelby. But the dynamics are the same. Just apply Lewis’ discovery that dog-bites-man – yep, it happens – to the Shelby case. The Supreme Court has made it legal to do stuff you couldn’t do before. Hence there is a practical point to Republicans talking about doing that stuff. But the talk is going to get ugly. But no one on the right is allowed to notice it getting ugly. No one who aspires to office, anyway – even though this is precisely the same lot who most appreciate that you need to keep the ugly talk to a minimum. Lewis is a Rubio fan, and I can see him worrying: in 12 years, is it going to be possible to have a figure like Rubio in the party? Or will he have died the death of a thousand cuts from both sides. He will look to minority voters like a profile in putting up with increasing amounts of crap. (At best, it will be largely symbolic stuff, intended to signal to whites that Republicans think they’re still tops. At worst, it may be much worse than that. We’ll see.) Rubio-types will look to white Republicans like a liability waiting to happen. When is he finally going to call us racists, which will have the Times all over us in a New York minute, costing us more than all the good he ever did for us, in terms of minority outreach.

You might say this only affects Republicans in the regions affected by Shelby. But other Republicans will have to comment on it, and ‘it’s not my district’ isn’t going to sound very moderate to ticked off minority voters.

Going back to my first point: it’s too clever by half to argue that vote suppression measures will surely backfire, having the opposite of the intended effect. So let’s just ask: to what extent will Shelby discourage the Republican Party from mending its ways (by liberal lights, of course)?

This one is for our American friends.

The City of Utrecht, where I live, recently decided to make this Rainbow Crossing in order to make explicit that it wants to be a city where gays are equally welcome as straight people. I took this picture a week ago and wanted to post it next Saturday when Utrecht celebrates Pink Saturday. But I think today is more appropriate. Congratulations to all American Gay activists for this huge step forward in their struggle for genuine equal rights, respect and recognition.

John Maynard Keynes met Franklin Roosevelt on Monday, May 28, 1934. Both afterward said polite things to Felix Frankfurter, who had urged the two to confer: Keynes described the conversation was “fascinating and illuminating,” while Roosevelt wrote that “I had a grand talk and liked him immensely.”

But the best-known account is probably that of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew,

Keynes visited Roosevelt in 1934 rather briefly, and talked lofty economic theory.

Roosevelt told me afterward, “I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.”

It was true that Keynes had delivered himself of a mathematical approach to the problems of national income, public and private expenditure, purchasing power, and the fine points of his formula. Coming to my office after his interview with Roosevelt, Keynes repeated his admiration for the actions Roosevelt had taken, but said cautiously that he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.” He pointed out once more that a dollar spent on relief by the government was a dollar given to the grocer, by the grocer to the wholesaler, and by the wholesaler to the farmer, in payment of supplies. With one dollar paid out for relief or public works or anything else, you have created four dollars’ worth of national income.

I wish he had been as concrete when he talked to Roosevelt, instead of treating him as though he belonged to the higher echelons of economic knowledge.

In Perkins’s story, Roosevelt did not grasp economic theory, and would have done better with a less figure-laden account of Keynes’s prescriptions. Historians often recycle her description as evidence of Roosevelt’s “limited understanding of some of the matters he had to deal with as president,” as Adam Cohen writes.

And yet we have evidence that Roosevelt was quite happy dealing with economic theory and a rigmarole of figures.

[click to continue…]

A small demonstration, from the 1770s.

Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. … This consists on the one hand of technical knowledge, which, by itself, is sufficient to ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves. While not particular to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of “official secrets” is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as commercial secrets do to technological training. It is the product of the striving for power.

All this stuff about conservative reformers – the lack thereof – is right up my alley! But I’m too busy. But here’s something. I was thinking back to good old ‘and a pony‘ days. Almost 10 years on, it’s time for a new pony joke.

Conservative reformers are such Charlie Brown figures. Lucy and the ball and all that. But that’s a bit too obvious. And it lacks ponies:

I suppose Charlie Brown is David Frum and Josh Barro and co., and Snoopy is the Republican Party, and the Little Red-Haired Girl is America. If you chop off the final panel, then Charlie Brown is Ross Douthat and David Brooks. Admittedly, the joke needs a bit of explaining – always a bad sign. Fortunately for all of us, I don’t have the time.

I’ve been reading a lot of Peanuts lately (so maybe I was lying about not having time, but it felt like I was telling the truth.) My 9-year old daughter just loves it, and the 11-year old likes it, too, which makes me so happy. (Blessed is the parent whose children actually like the old pop culture things he wants them to like, thereby feeding his adult nostalgia craving for childhood to be a certain way. You are supposed to read Peanuts! They like those old Rankin Bass holiday specials, too. Belle doesn’t really like them.) We check the fat, Fantagraphics volumes out of the library. We’re in 1967-1970 now. I think that was a particularly good period for the strip.

The “Washington Post has a story”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/irs-faces-new-scrutiny-for-excessive-spending-on-conferences/2013/06/01/e1469324-cab2-11e2-9245-773c0123c027_story.html with politicians expressing outrage about the recurring scandal of federal employees going to conferences with training videos and food and stuff.

bq. The Internal Revenue Service spent an estimated $49 million on at least 220 conferences for employees over a three-year span beginning in fiscal 2010, according to a forthcoming report that will prompt fresh scrutiny of the already embattled agency. … The report focuses especially on an August 2010 conference held in Anaheim, Calif., for roughly 2,600 agency employees in the IRS’s small business and self-employed division, a unit that assists small business owners with tax preparation and is based in Lanham. … The conference cost roughly $4.1 million and was paid for in part with about $3.2 million in unused funds from the IRS’s enforcement budget, a decision that didn’t violate IRS guidelines, according to aides briefed on the audit. … During the conference, employees watched two training videos starring division employees that cost at least $60,000 to produce, according to the audit’s estimates.

bq. Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.), who had learned about it and a television production studio at the division’s offices in New Carrollton. Boustany chairs the House Ways and Means Committee’s oversight subcommittee and also fielded some of the first allegations that tea-party-affiliated groups were being inappropriately targeted as they sought tax-exempt status. “The outrage toward the IRS is only growing stronger,” Boustany said in a statement Friday. “Clearly this is an agency where abuse and waste is the norm and not the exception.”

When _much_ more lavish conferences are held by private sector US corporations or professional associations (including academic associations, if your university doesn’t pay for it), they cost the US government lots of money too. Within various rules and strictures, they’re considered legitimate tax deductible expenses which people and (as best as I understand it) businesses can declare against earnings. You can make the case, obviously, that these conferences and events are mostly useless boondoggles. You can equally well make the case, if you want to, that they’re useful opportunities for social networking, building up esprit de corps and all of that good stuff. What you can’t make the case for, unless there’s some very subtle argument which escapes me, is a distinction under which conferences (for government employees) that cost the US government lots of money are obvious cases of abuse and waste, while more lavish conferences (for non-government employees) that cost the US government lots of money, are perfectly legitimate business expenses that we shouldn’t be bothering our pretty little heads with.

There’s been a spate of recent articles looking at a group of political writers referred to as “conservative reformers”.

The term ‘reformers’ is misleading since it tends to imply a shift in the direction of liberalism, which is not what the members of this group are hoping to do. More importantly, it implies the existence of a body of orthodox conservative thought against which the reformers are reacting. In reality, US conservatism has returned to the state identified by Trilling ‘ a series of irritable mental gestures. The ‘reformer’ label covers all those self-identified conservatives who would like to present some sort of intellectually coherent policy platform. These days, that’s a surprisingly small set – the typical list includes Douthat, Salam, Ponnuru, Barro, Brooks, Levin, and Dreher.

There used to be many more people in this group. But one by one, they’ve either abandoned ship and moved to the left (Lind, Sullivan, Frum, Bartlett, Ornstein) or descended into outright hackery, an absolute requirement for employment at any of the main rightwing thinktanks (and it’s hard to recall, but there was a time when people like Glenn Reynolds and the Volokhs seemed like serious intellectuals).

Looking at the remaining group, it’s pretty clear that Barro and Dreher are well on the road to apostasy, while Brooks and Levin are now reliable hacks, if they weren’t always. So, that leaves three reformers (Douthat, Salam and Ponnuru) still on the island.

The reactions of the remaining three reveal the pressure they are under. Salam more or less openly shills for the party line from time to time, as in his (now-deleted) attack on the DREAM Act. It seems pretty clear that he will stick with the team, come what may.

Ponnuru responded with the plaintive observation that, to accept the positions being urged on him from the left, he would have to concede that the majority of US conservatives were crazy. But, if craziness is assessed on the basis of stated views, this is evidently true, as Ponnuru surely knows.

Pluralities of US conservatives believe, or at least claim to believe, that:

The President of the US is a socialist Muslim, born in Kenya
The earth is less than 10 000 years old
Mainstream science is a communist plot
Armed revolution will likely be necessary in the near future

Ponnuru hopes that he can engage in serious policy discussion with conservatives while treating such delusional statements as mere shibboleths – harmless assertions of tribal identity

Most interesting is this piece by Ross Douthat, setting out what he sees as the reform conservative policy program. As he observes, it’s not designed to appeal to (US) liberals, and its full of arguments that have been demolished repeatedly by the left.

OTOH, as Douthat admits, there’s no sign that the Republican party has any interest in a program of this kind. More importantly there’s nothing there that would seriously upset a moderate conservative like Obama, or either of the Clintons. It’s well to the left of the revealed preferences of someone like Rahm Emanuel.

Conservative reform of the Republican party is a project that has already failed. The only question is whether the remaining participants will choose hackery or heresy.