US Politics

There was another round of the more-or-less endless debate about the decline of the US not long ago, focused on the weak employment growth that has characterized the current ‘recovery’. I expect that the obvious inability of the US to exert significant influence, in either direction, over the fate of client regimes in North Africa and the Middle East will provoke some more discussion among similar lines.

As a public service, I’d like to bring an end to this tiresome debate by observing that the decline of the US from its 1945 position of global pre-eminence has already happened. The US is now a fairly typical advanced/developed country, distinguished primarily by its large population[1]. Precisely because the US is comparable to other advanced countries in many crucial respects, there is no reason to expect any further decline. [2]

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Not an entirely original thought, as Google reveals, but those interested in the Palin phenomenon might find some useful historical counterpoints in the career of Queensland’s own Pauline Hanson. As far as parallels are concerned, Palin now seems to be reaching the same point as Pauline, where the official conservatives start tearing her down. In Pauline’s case, this effort was led by Tony Abbott, now leader of the opposition and led to her being jailed on the basis of an absurd technicality about electoral funding (she was released on appeal).

Apart from the general danger of relying on historical analogies, I’m less convinced than some that the tearing-down will work in time to stop Palin being a serious contender or at least a veto-holder in the selection of a Republican presidential candidate, and also less convinced than some that she could not possibly win office under the circumstances (really bad failure by Obama) where she would be a possible candidate.

At “another blog”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2011/01/women_in_the_news_in_2010.html#comment-53243, but by regular CT commenter ‘Davis X. Machina’

bq. Ms. Palin … represents a new phenomenon. Instead of trolling a message board or blog comments, she’s trolling an entire nation.

Discuss.

This “Vanity Fair”:http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102 piece on the journalistic politics of Wikileaks is well worth reading – it’s the most comprehensive account of the evolving relationship between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other news organizations that I’ve seen. I _think_ (this perhaps reflects my preconceptions as much as anything else) that the piece provides implicit support for two propositions. [click to continue…]

_Mirabile dictu,_ Clive Crook writes an “op-ed on partisanship”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d08ac79a-11f4-11e0-92d0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz19R1vzwzu that is largely unobjectionable.

bq. Just before Christmas, a group of self-styled moderates launched a campaign against “hyper-partisanship”. The group calls itself No Labels. “We are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America,” says their website.

bq. … I have another suggestion. No Ideas. Or how about: No Point? Would that be dull enough? Washington’s partisan warriors of left and right ridicule moderates as unprincipled or clueless or both. Splitting the difference does not give you the right answer, they say. Once in a while, in fact, it might – but in general the partisans are right about this, and the No Labels crowd is the proof. In a system that requires opposing sides to deal with each other – and a divided Congress is one such system – a polite exchange of views certainly helps. But there is no reason to think that the mid-point between fundamentally irreconcilable positions has any merit, even if you can say what the mid-point is, which you usually cannot.

bq. US centrists, if any still exist, need some policies and a willingness to defend them, not rules of etiquette. The middle is not an ideology-free zone, where you see “what’s best for America” the moment you take off your partisan goggles. Nothing is resolved by asking: “Why can’t we all just get along?” Centrism needs an ideology, too – the more strident, the better. Without one, it is empty. It is No Labels. What does such an ideology look like? Strange to say, but the US might need to look to Europe to remind itself. The classic form, and the template for subsequent variants, is the celebrated “social market” model of West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard and his disciples, which produced Germany’s postwar economic miracle: in a nutshell, it is social insurance plus economic liberty. It is a fundamentally pro-capitalist worldview, with an ambitious though narrowly defined role for government.

I imagine that defending such an ideology, in terms “the more strident the better,” would suit Crook far better than the plague-on-both-your-houses-but-really-on-the-vile-leftist-extremists stuff that he has shovelled out in enormous quantities in past op-eds. Crook is not, and never has been a commentator aloof from politics. He is, baldly speaking, an ideological hack. But as Max Weber “tells us at length”:http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/dss/Weber/polvoc.html, there is _nothing inherently wrong_ with being a demagogue or ideological hack if you are a politician in a democratic state. It is notable that Weber singles out journalism as a particularly important form of political practice.

bq. To take a stand, to be passionate–ira et studium–is the politician’s element, and above all the element of the political leader. His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant. … The honor of the political leader, of the leading statesman … lies precisely in an exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer. It is in the nature of officials of high moral standing to be poor politicians, and above all, in the political sense of the word, to be irresponsible politicians. In this sense, they are politicians of low moral standing, such as we unfortunately have had again and again in leading positions. … Since the time of the constitutional state, and definitely since democracy has been established, the ‘demagogue’ has been the typical political leader in the Occident. The distasteful flavor of the word must not make us forget that not Cleon but Pericles was the first to bear the name of demagogue. … Modern demagoguery also makes use of oratory, even to a tremendous extent, if one considers the election speeches a modern candidate has to deliver. But the use of the printed word is more enduring. The political publicist, and above all the journalist, is nowadays the most important representative of the demagogic species.

If one is engaging in demagogic journalism, it is much better to do so openly and forthrightly than to waver back and forth as convenience dictates between directly ideological attacks on one’s opponents and pretenses that one is above it all. The guff at the end of Crook’s piece about Democrats “flirting with straightforward anti-capitalism” is much easier (for me at least) to take as standard partisan rhetoric than as pronunciations from on high. Crook has directly and frankly identified himself with a partisan position, albeit one on behalf of a party that does not yet exist. And he is (as a good partisan should), doing his best to make the case for his own party by doing down its electoral rivals.

And while I am not sure that Crook’s partisanship could ever be fully realized (I do not know that there is sufficient political basis to create a US political party on its basis with even a limited degree of mass appeal), it still seems to me to be one that could appeal to a significant chunk of the intelligentsia. It is plausible that people, ranging from, say, Brad DeLong on the left to, say, Bruce Bartlett on the right could plausibly sign up to something like German Christian Democracy even if they would quite possibly have many other reasons to fight amongst each other like cats and dogs.

Gideon Rachman wrote a somewhat arch “article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/61f8fab0-06f3-11e0-8c29-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html#axzz182N9peXP last week, suggesting that the US should give Julian Assange a medal for “inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy.” I wasn’t really convinced by his argument (I am far from sure that he was fully convinced himself), but “this Bloomberg piece”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/wikileaks-joins-forces-with-billionaire-lebedev-gorbachev.html perhaps suggests a more convincing justification.

bq. Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow newspaper controlled by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev, said it agreed to join forces with WikiLeaks to expose corruption in Russia.

bq. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, which publishes secret government and corporate documents online, has materials specifically about Russia that haven’t been published yet and Novaya Gazeta will help make them public, the newspaper said on its website today. “Assange said that Russians will soon find out a lot about their country and he wasn’t bluffing,” Novaya Gazeta said. “Our collaboration will expose corruption at the top tiers of political power. No one is protected from the truth.”

I’ve been reading Evgeny Morozov’s “forthcoming book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586488740?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1586488740 on how the Internet _doesn’t_ release magically sparkling freedom-and-democracy ponies that transform autocracies into thriving civil societies etc, which has an interesting discussion of Russia. As Morozov notes, there is relatively little active censorship of the Internet in Russia. Instead, authorities rely on friendly websites that they can rely on to pump out useful disinformation. They can also lean on Russian’s widespread (and partially justified – if I had been the victim of Sachs, Shleifer & co’s experiments in creating a market in a vacuum, I would not have warm fuzzy feelings myself) distrust of information and policy prescriptions from the West, to prevent alternative accounts from leaking through from international media. The result is a country where the government is usually able to shape public debate with a high degree of success. Alternative viewpoints are not so much censored as shouted down.

But Wikileaks – precisely because the US government hates it so vociferously – arguably has much better street-cred than any number of Western-funded civil society grouplets. It doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a US front group . The plausible result is that Russians may be more inclined to trust it than foreign funded media, or, perhaps, domestic news sources which are too obviously biased in favor of the government.

None of which is to say that such trust would be entirely justified if it is given. Precisely because Wikileaks seems independent, it is likely to present irresistible temptations to e.g. intelligence agencies as a laundry-shop for information and disinformation. Nor, for that matter, is Lebedev devoid of political self-interest. But if Wikileaks succeeded in either becoming a major news source in itself, or of transferring some of its legitimacy to news sources which relied on information from it, it would help inject a little diversity into Russian public debate. Not that the US government should be giving it medals still – this would obviously be self-defeating. But to the extent that the US wants to see some opening up of kleptocracies like Russia, it might, in the long run, tacitly end up preferring a world with Wikileaks to one without it.

Stephen Walt “argues”:http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/21/michael_gerson_s_moral_myopia _contra_ Michael Gerson that Henry Kissinger’s remarks on the Soviet Union, Jews and gas chambers have nothing to do with foreign policy ‘realism.’ While I’m all for kicking Michael Gerson at every possible opportunity, I think that he’s closer to the truth on this specific question than Walt is.

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In First As Tragedy, Then As Farce [amazon], Zizek claims that “the only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was an unpredictable surprise which hit the markets out of the blue” (p 9). He cites the following evidence that people could and, indeed, did know it was coming.

Recall the demonstrations which, through the first decade of the new millennium, regularly accompanied meetings of the IMF and the World Bank: the protester’s complaints tool in not only the usual anti-globalizing motifs (the growing exploitation of Third World countries, and so forth), but also how the banks were creating the illusion of growth by playing with fictional money, and how this would all have to end in a crash. It was not only economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who warned of the dangers ahead and made it clear that those who promised continuous growth did not really understand what was going on under their noses. In Washington in 2004, so many people demonstrated about the danger of a financial collapse that the police had to mobilize 8,000 additional local policemen and bring in a further 6,000 from Maryland and Virginia. What ensued was tear-gassing, clubbing and mass arrests – so many that police had to use buses for transport. The message was loud and clear, and the police were used literally to stifle the truth.

The first examples are tendentious, as allegedly successful predictions of market movements tend to be. (Many predicted a crash. They always do. How many predicted the one that actually arrived, and when it would?) But I’m more curious what the last bit is about. What protest was this? The Million Worker March is all I can come up with. But that didn’t involve any far-sighted demands that financial collapse be forestalled. “Organizers have issued 22 demands, a broad array of grievances that go far beyond workers’ rights. Organizers call for universal health care, a national living wage, guaranteed pensions for all working people and an end to the outsourcing of jobs overseas. They also are demanding a repeal of the Patriot Act, increased funding for public education, free mass transit in every city, a reduction of the military budget and cancellation of what they consider pro-corporation pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.” Nothing about the dangers of mortgage-backed securities. Also, so far as I can recall – and Google seems to back me – the Million Worker March was relatively small and peaceful. So is that even what Zizek is talking about?

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I have a legal question about the Wikileaks case, prompted by this this Guardian piece, by John Naughton, linked in Henry’s comments. I must confess: I wasn’t surprised or particularly scandalized when Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its cloud, because I figured Amazon was probably technically in the right. Wikileaks had probably violated whatever terms of service were in place. I thought this sounded like the sort of thing any private company was likely to do, whether or not Joe Lieberman actually brought pressure to bear. If you have a problem customer who has violated your terms of service, you terminate service. (Just to be clear: I think ongoing attempts to shut down Wikileaks in patently legally dodgy ways are an utter scandal. Joe Lieberman pressuring Amazon is a scandal. I’m with Glenn Greenwald. I also think existing intellectual property laws are, by and large, an atrocious mess. Still, the law is what it is, so the question of how a private company like Amazon can and should be expected to react to this sort of situation is narrower than certain other more general questions about free speech and the press and so forth.)

My thought was this: Wikileaks obviously can’t own the copyright, so Amazon should not be expected to be slower to shut them down than they would be to shut down someone hosting pirate copies of Harry Potter novels. An annoying consideration, because it’s perfectly obvious that, if there is a good reason to take Wikileaks down, it isn’t because it’s like Napster in its glory days, or whatever. But there you go. But the Guardian piece says this is wrong: [click to continue…]

… let’s look ahead beyond 2012. Based solely on the likely rate of unemployment, the odds are against Obama being re-elected. As Jeff Madrick points out, the odds against a presidential re-election are long whenever the unemployment rate is above 7 per cent, and that’s a virtual certainty. There are other economic variables that reliably affect voting behavior, such as income growth, but they are just as negative. And it’s hard to see anything positive in the current political dynamic.

On the information we have at present, any Republican candidate other than Palin will have very good odds of winning. But there is also a fair chance that Palin will get the Republican nomination, despite her high negative ratings outside the Republican base. That would give Obama his best chance, but still no guarantee.

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Some feel we should take a more active approach to managing comments. I think we do pretty well on the whole (although the Lord love you, you are a grumpy lot). Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days. He was assigned what I consider to be, in John Emerson’s formulation, an Al-bot; a rotating crew of people commenting as “Al” day and night there and at Kevin Drum’s and Ezra Klein’s with the result that every single thread was derailed. Final note: why has Digby never been promoted to the big leagues, despite her obvious rightness and acerbic wit? Sexism, or a lust for mindless contrarianism that she will never satisfy?
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In comments on my post 10 days ago canvassing the possibility of a pre-emptive capitulation by Obama and the Congressional Democrats, Marc asked

When this doesn’t happen, can I ask for a mea culpa on your part?

Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to have to deliver on this.
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My small addition to the piles of verbiage on the newest Wikileaks revelations is to suggest that Saki’s classic short story “Tobermory”:http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_tober.htm tells you most of what you need to know. Tobermory – the story of a cat that learns to talk, is really about how a small group of people deal with the collapse of the polite fictions through which they paper over individual self-interest and mutual dislike. No-one guards what they say in front of a cat, leading to consternation when Tobermory suddenly learns the English language.

“What do you think of human intelligence?” asked Mavis Pellington lamely.

“Of whose intelligence in particular?” asked Tobermory coldly.

“Oh, well, mine for instance,” said Mavis with a feeble laugh.

“You put me in an embarrassing position,” said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. “When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call ‘The Envy of Sisyphus,’ because it goes quite nicely up-hill if you push it.”

Lady Blemley’s protestations would have had greater effect if she had not casually suggested to Mavis only that morning that the car in question would be just the thing for her down at her Devonshire home.

Diplomacy, even more than early twentieth century English house-parties, requires hypocrisy. Both diplomats and leaders pretend respect and even affection for regimes that they dislike and leaders whom they despise. When a source can definitively give the lie to these public remonstrations, it is obviously likely to lead to considerable friction (not necessarily because the target did not know he, she or it was detested – but because _public expression_ of this detestation becomes an insult that cannot easily be discounted or ignored. If a number of prominent states had been hit by these revelations, there might be sufficient collective incentive to sweep the embarrassing bits under the Axminster. But that’s not the case here. I imagine that there are some very interesting conversations happening in State (a few blocks from my regular office) right about now.

Back in July, no one seemed to be talking about a shutdown of the US government following the Dems loss of control of the House. Now the only question is – when?

David Dayen at FDL says it could be as soon as December (I don’t understand the mechanics well enough to confirm or reject this claim). Among those looking forward to the shutdown, the most notable, for a variety of reasons is Alan Simpson. Obama must really be feeling the gratitude there.

There’s still a chance that the Dems can manage a pre-emptive capitulation/collaboration so massive that some on the other side will be willing to cash in their gains without taking the risk of a shutdown. I imagine that would entail, at a minimum, full extension of the Bush tax cuts, effective repeal of the health care bill, no more money for the unemployed, Social Security ‘reform’ and a bunch of spending cuts directed at the tribal demons of the Tea Party. Of those, health care is the only one where I can see the White House taking a stand. I’m less clear about the priorities of the Congressional Dems.