US Politics

It was not surprising that the group recently arrested and charged with plotting to kill police officers, then those mourning at their funeral using IEDs have nowhere in the mainstream media been referred to as “terrorists” or even “terror suspects”. After all, they aren’t Muslims. But, that’s not enough for the political right. Apparently, on the “No True Scotsman” principle, it’s also unfair to refer them as “Christians“.

Suppose you have a two-party system.

One of these parties enjoys/enforces total party discipline, the other, not: members of the latter party side with their own, or cross the aisle, on individual issues/votes, as conscience or self-interest dictate. Let’s call the completely disciplined party the Partisan Party. The completely undisciplined, the Bipartisan Party (to reflect its principled commitment to always keeping the door open to the higher value of bipartisanship!)

Over time, both parties will push positive proposals/ legislation. Quite obviously, the Bipartisan Party will be at a tactical disadvantage, due to its lax discipline. Less obviously, it will have an ongoing optics problem. All the proposals of the Partisan Party will be bipartisan. That is, a few members of the other party will, predictably, peel off and cross the aisle to stands with the Partisans. None of the proposals of the Bipartisan Party, on the other hand, will ever be bipartisan. No Partisan will ever support a Bipartisan measure. In fact, all proposals of the Bipartisan party will face bipartisan opposition – as a few Bipartisans trudge across the aisle (there are always a few!) to stand with the Partisans. Result: the Partisan party, thanks to its unremitting opposition to bipartisanship, will be able to present itself as the party of bipartisanship, and be able to critique the Bipartisan Party, with considerable force and conviction, as the hypocritically hyperpartisan party of pure partisanship.

Conclusion: two measures of partisanship/bipartisanship that you might think make good heuristic sense – 1) being able to get bipartisan support for your proposals; 2) being opposed to those who can’t get any bipartisan support for their proposals – in fact aren’t good heuristics.

(Obviously it’s misleading to hint that the Democrats have no party discipline whatsoever, but the point still stands if modulated to match actually existing actuality.)

Apparently David Frum got fired from AEI. Bruce Bartlett sees it as a further sign of the closing of the conservative mind. But maybe there are two sides to the story. Or maybe just one side – a totally different side. At any rate, we shouldn’t just drink the kool-aid. Over at the Corner, Daniel Foster reveals that, apparently, Frum was offered a chance to keep his job at no pay, and declined. So I guess he wasn’t fired for what he wrote! (Why don’t more employers offer employees this sort of option, rather than firing them?) Nothing to see here. Next post up the page: K-Lo suggests Israel should change it’s name to ‘Iran’. “No pressure, no impolite diplomatic language, no pushing it to give up land.” Yes, it’s hard to see the downside, isn’t it? It’s not as though Israel receives U.S. aid – material or otherwise – in any way, shape or form that Iran currently does not. Thank goodness the conservative mind is still open and thinking things through in an altogether sensible sort of way.

No, I don’t mean: arguing fair. I think it should be ab homine. A moving (irrationally) away from the man. It’s a fallacy.

Here’s the context. Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait have a diavlog in the course of which Chait takes the scrupulous high-road position that, when it comes to charges of racism, you really have to be slow to accuse. He rolls out the standard fair-play-in-debate considerations: if the person is saying something wrong, but not explicitly racist, you can just point out the wrongness, without speculating, additionally, that they said the wrong thing out of racism. There is, he implies, no real loss in not being able to delve into dark motive.

But here’s the problem with that. In an environment in which creative and speculative accusations of bad motives are, otherwise, flying back and forth in free and easy style, a social norm against accusing people of one sin in particular is actively misleading. It inevitably generates the strong impression that this bad motive – out of the whole colorful range of diseases and infirmities of the mind and spirit – is an especially unlikely motive. Which, in the sorts of cases Chait and Yglesias happened to be discussing, is not true. So, contra Chait, an inconsistent semi-norm against ad hominem arguments encourages an ab homine error that may be less angry (that’s not nothing) but is significantly more confused that what excessive – but even-handedly excessive! – hermeneutics of suspicion would produce.

Yglesias makes this point, mostly by saying that you have to ‘tell narratives’, and the narratives have to attribute motives. But I think ab homine is snappier.

UPDATE: On reflection, ab homuncule might be still better. The aversion of the gaze from one possibly semi-autonomous, agent-like module of the overall man, conjoined with cheerful willingness to shed light on every other part of the man, motive-wise.

I’ve seen The Hurt Locker and Green Zone within a few days of one another. Purely as a piece of cinema, The Hurt Locker is probably the better film, but politically it is nowhere, and indeed it suffers from the same syndrome as many Hollywood Vietnam pictures – they are all about Americans and how they feel, and the poor natives appear as mere ciphers. Not so Green Zone, where the Iraqis appear as persons in their own right, with interests, feelings, grudges, agendas. Green Zone is, in some ways, a pretty crude film, and there’s a striking disconnect between the late-Bourneish style and the anti-war substance. Still, if that gets a broader audience remembering and thinking about what happened, and what went wrong, and why, that’s no bad thing. In the credits at the end, I was surprised to see “Based on _Imperial Life in the Emerald City_ by Rajiv Chandrasekaran”. I’m not sure what the necessary and sufficient conditions for the “based on” relation are, but this is not that distant from saying that the latest Bond movie is “based on” the official history of MI5 (although to be fair, the account of the pathologies of the CPA is recognizably, though distortedly from _Emerald City_). One thing that both book and movie reminded me of is this: that the cheerleaders for the war (be they neocon or “decent left”) didn’t just applaud the invasion. The awfulness of Saddam was such that being pro-war in 2003 was wrong but perhaps forgiveable and — as some of the barely repentant cheerleaders keep reminding us — was sometimes motivated by moral motives. They also applauded or excused the really bad post-invasion fuck-ups: the failure to control looting, deBaathification, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, etc. So thanks to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon for keeping a light shining on that.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Understandably, Cornyn doesn’t want to touch the most popular element of Obamacare, the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But unless it’s modified substantially, the individual mandate has to stay too — and therefore so do the subsidies and the minimum-benefits regs. Without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.

This is the problem the Dems faced (well, one of them), just in reverse: namely, what you want is uncontroversial and small-seeming. But in order to ask for that one thing, you have to ask for all this other heavy-duty stuff. Now, in reverse, the Reps can’t object to the heavy-duty stuff without getting pinned to the charge that they want to do really gratuitously, pettily awful stuff.

I predict that Cornyn is ahead of the curve. Soon it will have been the common wisdom all along. Basically for the reasons Ponnuru outlines. There will never be a moment when any large number of Republicans announce they’ve changed their minds, of course. (In 1994 and even until 2006 the individual mandate was moderate – then in 2009 and especially in early 2010 it was radical from the get-go – then in late 2010 it continued on, moderate as ever.)

I hereby lay my bet as to when the flip will take place: immediately after 2010 primary season. During the primaries, Republicans will be strongly and vocally in favor of total repeal, a unified front against being primaried from the right. Then, after the primaries, all that will fade, like a dream upon waking. Blogs and the conservative commentariat will be slightly slower but will catch up before the 2010 general. By 2012 the apocalyptic rhetoric will have faded so far from memory that Mitt Romney will be able to run as a Republican, without having to run from himself. Of course someone will point this out, but it won’t matter that much. Heat of the moment stuff. Ancient history.

Of course I could be wrong. What do you think?

Jonah Goldberg:

But on another level, this legislation is a superconducting super collider of culture-war conflagrations. It will throw off new and unforeseen cultural spectacles for years to come (if it is not repealed). The grinding debate over the Stupak amendment was just a foretaste. The government has surged over the breakwater and is now going to flood the nooks and crannies of American life. Americans will now fight over what tax dollars should cover and not cover. Debates over “subsidizing” this “lifestyle” or that “personal choice” will erupt. And when conservatives complain, liberals will blame them for perpetuating the culture war.

One of the most striking features of the health care reform was that it was passed over the unanimous opposition of the Republican Party. This has all sorts of implications, not yet fully understood by anyone (certainly not me). To start with, it’s now clear that talk of bipartisanship, distinctions between moderate and hardline Republicans and so on, has ceased to have any meaning. If their failure to stop the health bill works against them, we may see occasional Republican votes for popular legislation that is going to get through in any case. Obama’s Employment Bill got only 6 Rep votes in the House, but passed the Senate 68-29 (or maybe 70-28) in what the NYT correctly called a rare bipartisan vote. At least the reporter on this piece, Carl Hulse, has caught up with reality, unlike the general run of Beltway pundits who still think that Obama should be pursuing bipartisanship.

In many countries, a party-line vote like this (at least on one side) would be nothing surprising. In Australia, for example, crossing the floor even once earns automatic expulsion from the Labor party and guarantees political death on the other side. But the US has never had a really tight party system, largely because, until recently,the Democrats (and before them, the Whigs) were always split on racial issues.

One problem arising from this is that the US system is more vulnerable than most to the kinds of crises that arise when one party is determined to prevent the other from governing. Passing a budget requires a majority in both Houses of Congress, and the signature of the President. If the Republicans win a majority in either House in November, it’s hard to see this happening. A repetition of the 1995 shutdown seems highly likely, and, with the financial system still very fragile, the consequences could be disastrous. The 1995 shutdown didn’t turn out too well for Newt Gingrich, but it doesn’t seem to have pushed him in the direction of moderation, and the current crop of Republicans make Newt look like a RINO.

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The Republican campaign to rename everything after Ronald Reagan has reached new heights of absurdity with the suggestion that Reagan should replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $US50 bill. A couple of questions struck me here
(a) Wasn’t Grant a Republican himself ?
(b) Don’t the Repugs have anybody other than Reagan to name things after?
The answer to the second question turns out to be “No”, and explains the first. Looking back at Republican presidents, nobody is really keen to remember Bush I and II, Ford or Nixon, and the same applies to Hoover[1], Coolidge and Harding. But at least some effort is required to forget these guys, unlike the non-entities who followed and immediately preceded Grant.

In the 20th century, Eisenhower was successful and widely admired, but has long been denounced by movement Repugs as the archetypal RINO. More recently, the same condemnation has been extended to Teddy Roosevelt. That leaves Lincoln and Grant. This otherwise unexceptional NYT story about Texas school textbooks explains (if you read through to the end) why these founding heroes of the Republican party are being downgraded.

With the obligatory exception of Washington, the only American presidents who pass the purity test of today’s GOP are Reagan and Jefferson.*

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Ponnuru and Lowry have responded to critics of their American Exceptionalism piece, I see. I’ll just quote a bit from the end:

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

Thank goodness it never became a serious problem. It might have left scars.

The Washington Post “runs an editorial”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803429.html on the topic of the financial data privacy controversy that I “blogged”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/16/in-praise-of-the-european-parliament/ about a couple of weeks ago. Predictably, it’s an ill-informed harrumph.

bq. THE PROGRAM has been credited with helping to capture the mastermind of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people, including some 50 Europeans. … Yet almost 400 members of the European Parliament want nothing to do with it and have effectively and indefensibly shut it down. … The tool in question is the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the United States created shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in hopes of using financial transactions to trace the whereabouts of suspects. … The European Commission hashed out an interim deal to allow the United States to continue operations, but the European Parliament objected, largely on the basis of bogus privacy concerns. … The Obama administration should work with E.U. leaders to push for reconsideration. If need be, additional oversight should be considered. But the administration must not go too far. Gutting a legal and effective program for the sake of imagined privacy gains would be as unwise and potentially dangerous as having no program at all.

I know that when the _WP_ editorial team sees the words ‘tracking terrorism,’ it responds with precisely that degree of judicious consideration which you apply when the doctor whacks your funny bone with a pointy rubber hammer. But the noxious guff about “bogus privacy concerns” and “imagined privacy gains” is just that – noxious guff. The program that the Washington Post is so fond of was implemented in blatant violation of EU law for years before the NYT had the guts to reveal its existence (despite strong pressure from the Bush administration not to do so). Nor are the European Parliament’s privacy concerns ‘bogus.’ The current administration has consistently refused to provide any guarantees whatsoever about how this data might, or might not, be shared with third countries. Given that many of our soi-disant allies in the war on terror have a distinctly robust attitude to the treatment and detention of possible terrorists, Europeans may very reasonably worry that any data they provide will be used to imprison and torture people, some innocent. I’ve talked about these issues with MEPs a lot over the last several years. Their memories of extraordinary rendition and the use of shared information (between the US and Canada in this instance) in the “Maher Arar case”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar left a very bad taste in their mouth. Nor is the US willing to talk about real redress or compensation for people unjustly targeted via this data.

In any event, like it or not, the editorial writers of the _Washington Post_ are going to have to learn to live with a transatlantic relationship where an actor which cares about privacy can veto security arrangements. Abe Newman and I recently wrote a “piece”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/26/europes_parliament_takes_a_stand?page=full on Foreign Policy‘s website that talks to this.

bq. To build support for counterterrorism cooperation, the United States must explicitly accept that the European Parliament will play a key role in future negotiations. … The U.S. administration must treat the Parliament as a true negotiating partner, along with the EU member states, on information sharing and domestic security. The U.S. administration can also address the Parliament’s substantive worries by creating its own privacy oversight structures and extending its protection to European citizens…. If the United States wants to rebuild the transatlantic relationship and promote its own security interests, it must stop treating the European Parliament as an irrelevant afterthought.

The American Conservative is a mixed bag, to put it mildly, but this piece by Andrew Bacevich is well worth reading. Bacevich points out how rarely the faith of the American policy elite in military force has actually been rewarded with success. The key quote:

An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.

To consider the long bloody chronicle of modern history, big wars and small ones alike, is to affirm the validity of these conclusions.

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This story about the Mary Landrieu 4 contains an unfortunate slur against the Rutgers Philosophy department:

As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.”

Now, I do believe that he may have encountered the concepts of distributive justice and the redistribution of wealth in that department (that he finds this problematic is odd, since he seems to have committed himself to a career aimed at redistributing wealth in accordance with a partiuclar conception of distributive justice, but what can you do?). But I took a look at the faculty list, and cannot imagine who was drowning him in relativism (especially of the moral variety which is the kind that is hinted at). Not one of the normative philosophers in that department is a relativist and I imagine that most of them, like me and most of their colleagues, explain fairly clearly why most of what happens in their courses makes no sense unless relativism is false. I anticipate that some them read CT occasionally and can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d be surprised. Less honorable victims would consider suing. I’m surprised that someone with a libertarian economic tilt is willing to accept massive public subsidies to fund his education but feels no obligation to learn anything.

I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh. The only time I have been accused of political bias in my own teaching was on the day after the 2004 Presidential election. I received a vile, hate-filled, email message from a student (with a fake email address) which made reference to several comments I had made (none of them about contemporary politics) in the previous day’s class, and which blamed me and people like me for the re-election of the President. (Not the first piece of hate mail I’ve received, but the first since I became a professor). If the comments the student referred to, which any attentive student would have seen as outlining, though not endorsing, an extremely left-wing conception of distributive justice, had not been so clear, I suppose I should have been pleased that my own political views are not readily recognizable from my teaching.

I’d like to broaden John H’s discussion of the US as a center-right nation to consider the broader idea that the US is, in some sense, exceptional. As Barack Obama correctly pointed out not so long ago, every nation is exceptional in its own way, which tends to undermine the idea that any nation is specially exceptional.

Still, compared to the developed world in general, it seems obvious that the US is different in lots of ways: an outlier in terms of nationalism, military power, religiosity, working hours and inequality of outcomes and (in the opposite direction) in terms of government intervention, health outcomes and other measures typically associated with welfare states. Among these the outstanding differences arise from the fact that the US aspires, with some success, to be globally hegemonic in military terms and (with rather less success) in economic terms as well.

But, when you think about it, there is nothing exceptional here.
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