Is a secular "church" a legal possibility?

I've wondered about this for quite a while and I figured I'd put the question to you guys as legal experts.

The idea really became well formed in my mind when I was working on the printing press and would regularly read a Jewish newsletter for the Chicago area that we ran. It set me thinking about how valuable a resource a religious organization can be for it's members. They're really excellent models for how many non-market-based services can be provided outside of state action.

Prior to the major involvement of the state in things like charity (welfare), education, and health care, religious organizations were the major providers of these services. To some degree they still do provide these sorts of services and others which the state does not provide, such as social networking and adult education.

So, could you create a secular, tax-exempt, organization that has a set philosophy (humanistic, for instance) which provides adult education, social activities, private schools, scholarship funds, recreational facilities, counseling, etc., exclusively to members?

Election 2008 -- Viewing Guide

I've collected a few sites to check on election night as the polls come in.

First, here's Nate Silver on what to watch for.

Here are the poll closing times:


Intrade's realtime electoral vote predictor:


CNN Election Center:




MSNBC results:

American Politics

I was just watching a very good MIT panel on Media coverage of the presidential election when I heard a quote (1:56:50) I just had to transcribe and post here. John Carroll says:

I would like to think that actual reasoned conversation and argument might actually have some effect on people's perceptions and how they vote. I mean, that would be a giant step forward I think. But I'm not sure that's actually going to happen because the two sides have hardened so much. I think Tom [Rosenstiel] writes about this in his book, that there used to be a shared set of facts that people would argue from. They would agree on some basic facts and then, they would argue from there. I think people don't agree on basic facts anymore and I don't think that anybody allows for the possibility that someone who disagrees with them can have a reasonable point of view, a legitimate point of view. I think it's all about delegitimizing the opposition. I think that that makes a very hard dynamic for anything positive to happen.

This inspired me to make a post I've been meaning to add for some time. I've been feeling more and more in the past couple of months that the political climate in the US is becoming fatally ossified and polarized. Political discussion seems to be pretty much dead.

I don't own a TV, and I don't feel that either of the major parties comes comes close to representing me, so I haven't been following the election closely. I do however do some occasional reading at the Economist, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. What has gradually given me this creeping, skin crawling, feeling that political discourse has fallen into the abyss, is reading the comments which are ubiquitously attached to online articles. These pain me deeply.

I've been a long time user of the internet. Trolling and flaming on boards, forums, and news sites are nothing new to me. That is, I have a baseline. Yet, of late, I've found the comments on site like those I mentioned above to be particularly discouraging. A very high percentage of comments are incredibly hostile, loaded with vitriol and ad hominem attacks. It really doesn't depend on the article. Left or Right leaning articles tend to draw the predictable attacks from the opposing side (though it's disappointing that these are being phrased less and less in constructive and reasonable ways), but the really scary thing is that the articles that draw the most fire are those that take a neutral or centrist position. That is, the sides have become so polarized that any viewpoint that does not openly align with one camp or the other is fair game for vicious assaults from both.

The above panel helped me to think about why this is happening. The proliferation of the media, the creation of new cable channels and the new media, while adding depth and breadth to the discourse available to the average media consumer, has actually had a tendency to narrow their field of view. There are so many sources of information from any given perspective that a person can read many blogs and news sites, and watch several political TV shows while never actually exposing themselves any alternative viewpoints. While, a few decades ago, there may have only been a handful choices in terms of channels and papers, the very universality of these media sources required that they cater to both sides of the political divide. Today's media sources are so extensively diversified that we can each choose to steep in a carefully selected set of opinions that precisely support the very perspective that we have already chosen to adhere to.

My gut feeling is that this is leading us toward further calamity. I think that this trend toward polarization and the disappearance of sincere public discussion and debate has been underway for some time. I think our current circumstances (the Iraq war and the financial crises, the biggest political and economic disasters in recent memory) are the fruits of this trend. We are reaping disaster, and yet what we are sowing today is far more corrupted and virulent than the seeds that brought us our current sorrows.

I think this relates to what I have described in the past as the anthropomorphization of our problems. That is, we tend to blame the problems we see on the direct action and intention of other people. We implicitly believe that, if we can counteract the actions of these evil people, we can undo the problems of the world. Hence it makes sense to mobilize the base of our party at whatever cost. In our all out war we sacrifice the truth for political expediency. But if the problems are in fact much more complicated than we appreciate, the ends do not justify the means. In fact, the means do not lead us to our ends at all, but rather to folly and destruction.

Opens Source government.

I just posted the following on a /. thread about the idea of an Open Source model of government.

In response to:

Open source is a much closer model for no government - or, in other words, anarchy. The last few years have been pretty clear to me that democracy doesn't produce government that works in the people's best interest. A linux model for government would allow people to choose how to organize themselves on a voluntary basis. Government, even the democratic version, rests on the application of force. So the two ideals really are mutually exclusive.

I replied:

Quite right.

Government, logically, is force. The government is that entity in a society which has a practical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Insomuch as there are others able to ignore the dictates of the government or to use force to their own ends (think corruption/organized crime), the government is not sovereign.

In this sense the Open Source approach is not suited to government. The actions of government apply to everyone and are supported by the application of force (i.e if you disobey you will be arrested, if you resist arrest you will be shot) while an Open Source project is defined by voluntary action and a pluralistic, meritocratic, approach to system design. The two are inherently contradictory.

I think that to apply Open Source principles to government would require a Minimalist, Libertarian, style government. The Government Proper, the entity with the monopoly on force, would be restricted to ensuring that the various open development units don't attempt to use force against each other. Other than that policy would be left up to non-government units.

For instance, rather than having a monolithic federal welfare system, we could have a plurality of nonprofit organizations for the reduction and alleviation of poverty. If you have resources or skills and are concerned about poverty, you could join one of the existing organizations (the one which takes the approach that you find most appropriate) and contribute your time or money to helping them. Or, if you don't really identify with the approach of any of the existing organizations, you could get together with a group of like minded people and start an organization of your own.

Rather than taking a single ad hoc approach to solving civic problems we could have a diversity of parallel approaches being undertaken. Those that prove most effective will draw more and more contributors and donors, and, if they become too big and crufty, concerned members can fork off, or fledgling organizations can step in to break new paths and undercut the giants.

Under such a system, enlightened people would ask each other what organizations they work with, rather than what party they support. Instead of flaming each other in bars about which set of leaders should rule us, we could argue about which social projects take the best approach. Instead of sitting around reading the news and getting pissed, we could be designing new tactics and strategies for our favorite organizations. In other words, we could have real participatory "government" (as opposed to submitting a laughable, 0 = Democrat, 1 = Republican, every two years).

I think that this has been the major failing of the Libertarian movement. They've failed to paint a picture of a compassionate Libertarian world. Eliminating federal programs to assist the needy (poor, unhealthy, undereducated) does not mean that we'd all selfishly go around ignoring impoverished people begging on our doorsteps any more than legalizing drugs would mean that we'd all be out shooting heroin the next day. It just means that, instead of passing off our problems as a people to some faceless bureaucracy, we'd take responsibility for them ourselves.

Individualism isn't about greed. It's about standing on your own two feet and taking care of the world yourself, like an adult, rather than handing all of your problems over to our paternalistic government and then wallowing in childish self-pity when the world goes to shit.

I'd like to develop this sort of thing further. I definitely think that this sort of 'fleshing out the alternative' is a fruitful avenue for more writing. I think political discussion tends to be so frequently futile because we have such strong emotional associations around a lot of our ideas. If you associate your opponents ideas with images of bleakness, desolation, and misery and your own, with images of hope, enlightenment, and progress (and vise versa), then obviously there is virtually zero chance of either of you convincing the other of anything (because how could you possibly be convinced that bleakness is better than hope).

Unless we engage people at this deeper level of meaning, feeling, and association, (with images of how you feel the world could be) people will probably continue to talk past each other.

The Republican Strategy: Straight from Sesame Street

For some time, I have been meaning to post a couple of thoughts I had after reading The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. At the time, I was worried that the book would launch a wave of attacks similar to those that hit Kerry in 2004. Thankfully, that didn't happen--largely due to prompt responses by the Obama campaign and supporters. The media has since moved on to other things (e.g., Palin-mania), but I wanted to get my points out there anyway.

The book epitomizes two of the things that trouble me deeply about politics today, particularly as it is played by the core of the Republican party (aka, the "religious right"). First is the abuse of science and academics to prop up completely bogus claims. "Dr. Corsi," and others in his camp, attempt to mimic the methods of scientists and academics but ignore the most critical aspects of those disciplines (such as refutability in science), in a blatant attempt to support their own views rather than to discover the truth. Second, there is a subtextual campaign to divide the world into "us" and "them," with McCain-Palin in the "us" camp and Obama belonging to "them." You remember the Sesame Street song that goes, "One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong ..."? That about sums up the theme of The Obama Nation, and for that matter the entire Republican strategy this election season. (Though in all fairness, I don't think that's the message that the Cookie Monster was promoting.)

Lessig on Technology Policy

Here, in just over 15 minutes, Larry Lessig says basically everything I've ever tried to say about telecom policy on the blog (in the context of a critique of John McCain's tech platform). Take a look, it's well worth the time:



Also, for a number of weeks I've been meaning to post a link to this ars technica article on customer-owned fiber. Projects like this, or like Utah's UTOPIA seem to present the best way forward for the domestic telecom market.

A Gaffe That Draws Blood

I have to concede, I am really quite pleased that John McCain started running his mouth about the Anbar Awakening. Before he did, the Conventional Wisdom on the Surge was so firmly established as to appear immovable. Everybody knows, the Surge worked. The fact that there is very little evidence to support that assertion really never came up. And if anyone tried to bring it up, they were scoffed at (as Obama was in the USA Today editorial above). Now that McCain has brought to the fore the fact that the Anbar Awakening, one of the most critical elements of our recent success in Iraq, was unrelated to the Surge, we can start to revisit the Conventional Wisdom.

What I think we'll find is that the real root cause for the turnaround in violence in Iraq had less to do with the additional 20,000 troops than with a change in tactics of which the Anbar Awakening was one element. The dramatic rise of David Petraeus marked the military's final grudging acceptance of the need to engage in actual counterinsurgency operations. After several disastrous years fighting the insurgency, it dawned on the Pentagon that their only real successes came where officers like Petraeus and H.R. McMaster eschewed the major operations that were up to that point the mainstay of the Iraq occupation and adopted classic counterinsurgency tactics. Hell, Petraeus wrote the book on the topic. Petraeus's ascension and this shift in tactics is what made the Anbar Awakening and the later success of the Surge possible.

This is a fairly important distinction, for a couple of reasons. First, is its obvious political impact. McCain has staked much on the fact that he supported the Surge when few others did, and the apparent success of the Surge is supposed to justify any number of prior errors of judgment with respect to Iraq (note how the USA Today article asks Obama to admit he was wrong about the surge, but it doesn't ask McCain to admit he was wrong about invading). If the Surge was not the answer, what does McCain have left to hang his hat on? Even if McCain did back counterinsurgency tactics, and it's not clear he did, that wouldn't be a terribly unique position. This humble blogger criticized the major ops approach to fighting the insurgency as far back as 2003, called for the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics in early 2004, and praised the military's movement in that direction in late 2005. Where was McCain all that time? I could have used his help back then.

Aside from the 2008 election, this debate has other long-term implications. Crediting the Surge for all that has gone right serves the right-wing's ever-popular Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy. According to the Green Lantern Theory ("GLT") any military failure is caused by a lack of willpower, and any military objective is achievable given a sufficient reserve of willpower. A corollary to the GLT is that any domestic criticism of either the decision to engage in a military conflict or the conduct of such conflict is a direct attack on the one resource necessary to win such a conflict (willpower) and thereby equivalent to treason. Proponents of the GLT have long scorned concepts such as nationbuilding, the exercise military restraint, respect for local culture, winning of hearts and minds, and, indeed, just about every other element of a traditional counterinsurgency operation. Not only are such things considered to be pointless, but they might weaken our resolve and are therefore deemed harmful to the cause.

Pinning all success in Iraq to the Surge is a perfect narrative fit for the GLT. Just when everyone else wanted to discuss withdrawal, George W. Bush rode the rescue with bulging reserves of willpower and not only refused to withdraw, he upped the ante as a tangible demonstration of his generous endowment of resolve. And lo, victory was achieved. If this is the narrative that comes out of the Iraq war, we will all live to regret it. The United States and Iraq alike paid a painful and bloody price to learn the lessons that the GLT proponents hope to obscure in a haze of Surge-o-philia.

In truth what we learned this time around are a lot of the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam. Indeed, Robert McNamara basically did learn those lessons. It is no coincidence that so did David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster. Petraeus wrote a doctoral thesis at Princeton titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam." McMaster also wrote a doctoral thesis on the mistakes of the American military in Vietnam. The lessons were there to be learned, but few among conservative policymakers and the Pentagon brass did, enamored of the GLT as they are. Will we walk away from Iraq with the public and policymakers learning all the same wrong lessons so that the next time around we will, at terrible cost, have to rediscover the right ones all over again? I surely hope not. And I hope that McCain's gaffe will open the door to a more robust public dialogue on this topic.

Too Big to Be Privatized

There has been buzz for the past several days that the federal government would move to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now appears the rumors have proven correct. This follows not so long after the bailout of Bear Stearns. I don't know enough about the banking market to say whether the government has made the right moves with respect to these bailouts, but it strikes me as odd that any private entity should be considered "too big to fail". It seems there two potential routes around this: either ensure that no single firm in a given market obtains enough market share to make its collapse catastrophic, or simply put the critical functions under public control. The former option is problematic in that a) it would require a far more robust (and I mean FAR more) and aggressive type of antitrust regulation than we currently have, and b) it is easy to imagine that, even with a larger number of firms, intense competition might lead the firms to adopt similar approaches such that numerous firms would teeter on the edge of collapse at the same time, and a bailout would be required anyway. The latter option is problematic for the obvious reason that markets are generally more efficient than government management. But this system where private companies are free to reap really impressive profits (as the investment banks have), but the public ultimately bears the downside risk seems untenable.

This problem has always been at the foundation of my opposition to any sort of privatization of social security. In fact, it's worse for social security than for the banking system, because with social security you've got two levels risk to deal with--the institutional and individual. Because even if whatever private institutions we hand the system over to don't fail, if a significant number of individuals managed their risk poorly and get cleaned out, I find it inconceivable that the government wouldn't step in to rescue them. That is, after all, the entire point of the program. It's social security. And once that happens, of course we'd expect everyone else to try to shoot the moon with their investments, because what's the downside? This is the sort of risk we don't want to be distributed. It only works when the risk is pooled. Look for similar problems with some sort of hybridized public/private health insurance. Once we've made a social decision that some service is necessary, for whatever reason (economic stability, national security, moral obligation), handing it over to private entities will necessarily create serious problems with risk management and moral hazard.

I'm not necessarily arguing that, for example, our entire banking system or health care system should be government run. But I do think that in terms of structuring the mix of government and private management of such critical functions we need to try to identify key breaking points and either put them under direct government control or develop some clever system to ensure that private entities approach these functions with the right set of incentives.

Update (7/14): Sebastian Mallaby appears to have a similar take on the issue to mine.

Public Service Announcement

It's been quite some time since I've done a public service announcement, but I just randomly happened upon this, and people ought to know. I haven't really heard anything about it, but I figure you can't go too far wrong with Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion. Here's the story. The first act is out on Tuesday.

Policy Outcomes

It may not always be immediately obvious what the consequences of screwing up telecom policy will be, but here's an illustration. To be honest, I'm not sure that broadband penetration is a terribly meaningful statistic at this point. There are some outliers in difficult to reach locations who still have no access to broadband, but as a general matter, broadband in some form or another is available to those who want it, at least in those in the countries towards the top of these charts. The more meaningful statistic is the average throughput. Japan, Korea, and France have all passed the threshold where IPTV is practical. In fact, just based on those bandwidth numbers I ran a search for IPTV in France and came up with this. Broadband in the United States, by contrast, is five times slower than Korea or France, and ten times slower than Japan. The real kicker is that we pay more for that privilege than consumers in those other countries. We must be paying extra for our wonderful customer service... The other key point is that around the time of the dot.com boom, the United States was the clear global leader in Internet and broadband service. Japan and Korea, in particular, were late to the game and got to where they are now almost entirely as a result of aggressive regulatory policy. Our steady decline is similarly tied to our moronic telecom policies. Rambling on about the power of the free market (as an alternative to regulation) doesn't get you too far when you're dealing with non-competitive markets, and at some point that starts to show.

A Bear Market for Ideas

Early in his primary campaign, Barack Obama indicated that if his Republican opponent opted into the public financing system for the general election, he would follow suit. In a highly publicized decision last week, Obama decided to forgo public financing. In a column for the Atlantic, Reihan Salam uses Obama's decision as point of entry to a general condemnation of campaign finance regulation. I've written on this topic before (here, as well as several other occasions), and don't want to rehash everything I've said previously, but I do think Salam's column merits a response. Salam cites examples like Stewart Mott contributing massive amounts of money to Eugene McCarthy as laudable examples of civic participation. I have a number of objections to this line of thinking. For one it strikes me as a terrible subversion of the one person, one vote principle. For another, it seems inconceivable that massive contributions would not alter the behavior of politicians (Salam's attempt to brush this off as a "theory" in the same sense that the Loch Ness Monster is a theory is cute, if not perhaps the mark of someone engaging in an honest discussion). But my previous posts on this topic cover those objections pretty well. Instead I'd like to consider a basic premise of Salam's column and of the campaign finance discussion in general: the money is somehow fundamental to (or even indistinguishable from) political speech.

The basic point of raising all of this money is to pay for television advertising. This is no secret, and Salam's absurd vision of candidates launching nationwide chains of day-care providers aside, this assertion is unlikely to elicit much objection. I think it is critically important to frame the debate in this manner. To refer to the money as being for political speech makes it sound considerably grander than it really is. It is really money to bankroll TV ads. To be sure, TV ads can be a form of political speech. But they make up a very narrow category, and one with some rather noteworthy characteristics. Think about the most important and memorable political TV ads. Like this one. Or this one. Or this. And this. And this. (As an aside, I would have included the Clinton 3 A.M. ad, but it has apparently, and remarkably, vanished from the internet now that Hillary has dropped out.) When we talk about campaign finance, we are not discussing political speech writ large, we're discussing a very narrow subcategory of political speech that consists almost entirely of non-substantive, emotionally manipulative, and often misleading, but objectively speaking highly-effective, advertising. This sort of political speech is representative of the "marketplace of ideas" only in the same sense that Stephen Colbert has decided that global warming is real because the success of Al Gore's movie indicates that the market has spoken.

Certainly the Obama model of fundraising, garning small contributions from a huge base of donors, is an improvement over the traditional big donor approach. Some of the concern over influence is abated when the contributor base is more diffuse. But the sums of money involved have only increased in this cycle (in fact, more money has already been raised than was spent in total in 2004), and that itself represents a loss for the civic dialogue. A debate conducted via TV advertising is an impoverished debate. Even Barack Obama's message is necessarily infantilized by translation to ad format. As Matt Yglesias noted of Obama's first general election ad, the message boils down to: "My mom is white! And I'm from America!" If this is our marketplace of ideas, it's pretty clearly a bear market.

I recognize that TV advertising is an important tool for candidates. It's one of the only ways for them to directly reach a mass audience to answer attacks and spread their message. The Obama ad, for example, is probably quite necessary given the breadth of the campaign of misinformation that has already been waged against him. It's a tricky problem, and I don't plan to offer any easy solutions here. But I do think we need to be clear about what we're discussing, and in the discussion of campaign finance regulation I think we can do without any grandstanding about the cherished role of political speech. The sort of political speech we cherish is not the sort that gets funded by this money.

Update (6/23): This amusing Slate video on cookie-cutter political ads seems rather appropriate to this discussion.

A Positive Story from the Blogosphere

I don't have much of point to make with this post, I just think it is a really interesting story demonstrating the meritocratic impact of the internet and blogging. I'm referring to the meteoric rise of Nate Silver as a respected name in election-year journalism. Silver began as an unknown, posting on DailyKos under the name poblano. Before the voting began poblano penned diaries on a broad variety of primary-related topics. He gained a reputation on the site as a thoughtful and insightful Obama-backer. But it wasn't until late January, after several states were in the bag and super Tuesday loomed large that poblano's brilliance as a number-cruncher really emerged.

A pair of super Tuesday previews (initial diary, updated diary) drew huge amounts of attention, and deservedly so. poblano's previews included polling numbers, but greatly exceeded the depth of analysis offered anywhere in the commercial press, incorporating endorsements, fund-raising, and in-state campaign presence. While some of the delegate spreads were off, poblano correctly called the winner in every state (he considered AL, CT, and MO to be toss-ups). Super Tuesday itself provided a wealth of voting data to be mined, and poblano was soon off to the races, dissecting the results and turning them into projections for the general election. Again, the analysis found here was hands down better than anything I encountered in the commercial press.

Having gained considerable notoriety among political bloggers during January and February, in early March poblano moved off DailyKos to his own website, FiveThirtyEight. There he continued providing projections of the primaries and general election, and he also did something professional political writers never do: hold pollsters accountable. In May, poblano crushed the professional pollsters with his projections for Indiana and North Carolina, identified himself as baseball statistician Nate Silver, and finally began to garner attention outside the sphere of political blogs. Not only will Silver likely be a mainstay of election coverage for the rest of the year (and following election years), but I suspect that he has an awful lot of professional analysts reconsidering their methodologies and approaches to political projection. Oh, and, by the way, the projections for Obama at FiveThirtyEight are looking awfully nice these days.

Resistance is Futile

Tim Wu on the state of the wireless market:

Who would have guessed that Apple—onetime victim of IBM and Microsoft—would today be an agent and symbol of industry consolidation? I don't know that it's fair to say this is Apple's fault. A telephone monopoly has been the norm for most of American telecommunication history, except for what may turn out to have been a brief experimental period from 1984 through 2012 or so. Like the short British experiment with republican government under Oliver Cromwell, it may be that telephone monopolies in America are a national tradition. In this larger story, the iPhone matters just as one of the last nails in the coffin of Bell's would-be competitors.

Brutal, but true. AT&T and Verizon cleaned house in the FCC's recent 700 MHz auction and appear to be scooping up spectrum and independent carriers faster than they can consume them. Sprint has been driven, in its desperation, into a last ditch joint effort with Clearwire, Comcast, Time Warner, Google, and Intel to offer an alternative data network -- a high stakes gamble that faces numerous business and technological obstacles. T-Mobile, the only other nationwide wireless carrier seems content to slowly sink into irrelevance. If the Sprint gambit fails, AT&T and Verizon will stand alone atop the wireless market. And even if it succeeds, the three viable national wireless networks will, by no coincidence, be under the control of the same four entities that have established total dominance over wireline voice, video, and data service in the United States: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. Either way, the mass extinction of competition in the American telecom marketplace is all but complete. To make matters worse, on the wireline side Comcast and Time Warner have few (if any) overlapping markets, and the same is true of AT&T and Verizon. To the extent that consumers prefer quadruple play offers (voice, video, data, and wireless), a proposition all the major carriers are betting heavily on, the vast majority of consumers will have only two options, if that. What has befallen the telecom market over the past 10 years is a disaster.

While we can only hope that help will be on the way once Democrats (hopefully) take over the White House and the FCC, it may be too little too late. To undo what has been done would require drastic measures. It would mean breaking up these big four, forcing some open access regime on them, or (best of all) forcing a separation of their physical network assets from their content and service delivery businesses. Any of these options would entail a major battle fought simultaneously on political, legal, and regulatory planes that, in all likelihood, would take the better part of a decade to play out. I doubt even an enlightened Democratic government would have the stomach for that. The only real alternative will be for the FCC to increasingly re-regulate these businesses. When the market cannot enforce discipline on providers of necessary services, regulators have to step in and assume the task. Net neutrality will only be the beginning...

Back from the Dead: Obama and Political Process

As a first step to reviving this dormant blog, I'm going to cobble together various thoughts from discussions in email and elsewhere over the past half year or so. These thoughts are perhaps less novel and certainly less timely now with the primaries concluded than they were when they initially occurred to me, but I think they're still worth discussing.

Back when the Democratic primary was still hotly contested between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards (who, let's not forget, was the clear favorite among the netroots), Obama was not infrequently attacked as a "process" candidate. This charge was advanced derisively, with suggestions that such focus on process was a sign of vanity with little appeal beyond upper-middle class young white professionals who don't care about Real Issues. Typically it was accompanied with comparisons to other such vanity candidates like Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas, and Eugene McCarthy.

In response, I first must concede that I believe these critics are correct: Obama is a process candidate. While some conservatives have looked to Obama's liberal policy positions and scoffed at his supposed post-partisanness, Obama's post-partisan approach is a matter of process, not policy. Post-partisanship has to do with refocusing the process on substantive issues rather than the partisan circus we've seen the past 10-15 years, with having amicable disagreements, treating everyone with civility and decency instead of demonizing political opponents, with having a willingness to critically analyze issues without viewing them solely as an opportunity to score political points, with prioritizing competence over patronage and loyalty in government bureaucracy, with not letting elections be dominated by hot-button bullshit issues (e.g. Terry Schiavo) instead of the actual and quite serious issues facing our nation. This is really the defining attribute of Obama's campaign, particularly in comparison to his Democratic opponents with whom he had relatively few policy differences. So, yes, Obama is a process candidate.

I must strenuously disagree, however, with the position that Obama's process-focus is a matter of vanity, or is in any respect a political weakness. John Edwards thought that the Democrats needed to move left and take more populist positions in order to win. Hillary Clinton initially seemed to think we needed to move back towards her husband's centrist approach (i.e. the Democratic Leadership Council position). Later she seemed to adopt the Edwards populist angle, and later still she decided the Democrats needed be more ... white. The reality is that Democrats don't need to do any of that. What Democrats desperately need to do is fight back against the political circus and force people to look at real substantive issues. This is what Obama's post-partisanship is meant to achieve.

Along with criticism that he was too process-oriented, one of the chief netroots complaints about Obama was that he is insufficiently harsh on Republicans. He failed to call them out for being the repugnant, evil, spiteful people that, in the eyes of the netroots, they so obviously were. Obama failed to demonize the opposing party. What Obama understands that the netroots failed to grasp is that this road leads to tribal politics. That's the Republican way, the grand political circus. Everyone will retreat to their old familiar identity groups and fling flaming dog poop at each other and we'll rehash the same election we had in 2000 and 2004. In a year where the fundamentals so strongly favor Democrats, we might even win with that approach. But as a long-term strategy, it is a loser.

Bitterly divisive partisan politics is a game that Republican will always ultimately win. It's the game they've chosen and written the rules for, and they did so because it best fits the philosophy of their party and the memes they're trying to sell. It demeans politics, belittles the political process, and sows cynicism and distrust of politicians and government alike. For Democrats to fight back on the same terms concedes a decisive advantage to the Republicans right up front. For Democrats to succeed people need to believe in government, and for that to happen they need to first believe in the political process.

In order to break out of the long downward spiral of hyper-partisan politics it will be imperative to get some people to vote on issues rather identity. This is a difficult task, because it so easy for people to flee to the comfort of their identity groups. But the upside is we don't need a lot of them. All it would take would be to flip 10-15% of voters who've gone Republican in the last two election cycles to win a landslide victory. And here's the real key: these voters already agree with Democrats on all the major policy questions. A large majority of Americans favor universal health care (including a majority of Republicans!). A large majority of Americans believe the government needs to take serious action on climate change. A large majority of Americans want our troops out of Iraq within a year. A large majority of Americans agree that we should have diplomatic meetings with Iran without preconditions. Let me say this again: Democrats do not need to change their policy positions to go after independent and Republican voters. They already agree with us! The only key to victory is to figure out how to bust people loose from identity politics.

If Democrats can only break off a chunk of the Bush voters and get them to vote on issues instead of identity, they will win big. Hillary Clinton could never have succeeded in this task because she is a creature of hyper-partisan politics. Her political career was born of it, the hard feminist core of her support was built on it, and she personally revels in it. Her pitch to the primary voters was that we should support her because she could play this game better than anyone. And John Edwards, having failed with a more moderate, centrist approach in 2004, embraced identity politics himself this time around, pulling together an odd alliance of white working-class union voters and the most vociferous leftists of the netroots. But the fiery rhetoric and demonization of others required to win these groups was self-limiting, and Edwards consequently had no success extending his appeal beyond these identity groups. Neither of them could have avoided the trap of hyper-partisanship. Neither of them could have significantly altered the playing field. Either probably could have won, given the overall dynamics of this election, but neither would have been a game-changer.

But Obama did something different. Obama has built a campaign around rejecting the circus. His campaign is constructed from the ground up precisely to be a game-changer. He properly understood that concern over the political process is not a vanity issue; it is the difference between continued frustration for Democrats and clear political dominance. Obama treats all Americans with dignity and respect. He discounts no one and tries to engage everyone. He wants voters to believe that under his administration the government will take into account all of their views, positions, and beliefs and negotiate them in a reasonable and sensible manner. He recognizes that people don't always need to win every argument as long as they feel the system is fair and that their voice is heard. His campaign is built around these basic values.

It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to break the cycle. I think the approach is right, and Obama personally has demonstrated a level of wisdom, charisma, and leadership that leads me to believe he can really pull this off. But I don't underestimate the difficulty of the task. The Republicans wouldn't have invested so much in this approach if it didn't work so goddamned well. But if Obama prevails, this could be an incredibly meaningful victory, and a breath of fresh air that we all, at this point, desperately need.

Update (6/12): just for added emphasis, check out this Obama quote that they've put at the top of their anti-smear page: "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, or patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first."

The Battle for the Bottleneck

Since Peter and Henry each independently forwarded this Wall Street Journal article on cell phones to me, I thought I should respond here. First off, it is a truly excellent article, and I agree completely with Walter Mossberg, the author. He does a fine job laying out the key issues in an easy-to-understand manner. With respect to the upcoming wireless spectrum auction there, the odds of open handset rule going through went up this week when Verizon bailed on its attempt to sue the Commission over it.

Since Mossberg did such a good job discussing the state of the market, I thought I might discuss why I think the market is like this. The short version is this: while the Internet revolution has created a profusion of telecommunications that a short time ago would have been unimaginable, at the same time it has threatened to make telecom providers more irrelevant than they have been since their inception and so they fight it tooth and nail. And now for the (really) long version:

The problem with the Internet viewed from the perspective of the telecoms is that it is an end-to-end network, meaning everything interesting happens at the endpoints and they're stuck in the middle. The stuff in the middle is designed to be transparent and fungible (particularly in the case that some of it is vaporized by a nuclear bomb). This is very different from what we had before the Internet. Previously any goods or services traveling down the phone line into someone's home or office were controlled by the phone company, be it phone service, long distance service, voice mail, video, advanced data services, etc. Even if you just wanted to communicate data between you two office sites, the phone company would set this up then charge you out the wazoo. It was a good business, and they made a profit for each additional application they could develop and provide to consumers over their lines.

But when the Internet comes along, even though the number of applications now skyrockets and the benefits people gain from their telecommunications links grow immeasurably, the telecom companies are no longer in control, and are therefore no longer profiting directly from the provision of services. Whatever the telecom companies were charging people an arm and a leg for can now be done on the Internet for peanuts. So to the extent that telecom providers did provide unique services, now anyone who can pipe in an Internet connection over any medium can eat their lunch. You don't have to rely on the phone company for voice communications or cable for video anymore. And many applications the phone companies hadn't implemented yet or hadn't even dreamed of are now out there being heavily used for free. It seems like it should be their shining hour, but it's really more of a let-down. Sure they are still selling and making money on the basic connectivity that underlies all of the Internet, and in record volume, but they'll be selling that in any case. It's the add-ons, the profits coming from provision of actual commercial services to end-users they want. So while openness is what has made the Internet great for us users, there has been a very consistent effort on the part of telecom companies to maintain control where they haven't yet lost it, or to regain control where it has been lost.

At the start of this thing the big telecom companies didn't even want to deal with home consumers; for them data services were things to be sold to corporate customers at outrageous prices that no home user would contemplate paying. So when PC ownership took off and it became apparent that there was a market for online services, other companies got involved. The initial generations of modems were built to work over the phone lines by converting their digital signals into analog beeping and squawking (converted back to a digital signal by the modem at the other end of the line) so that they only needed a normal voice line to operate. Phone company participation was not required. The initial big corporate providers of dial-up online services (Microsoft, America Online, Prodigy) ignored the Internet and each built their own walled garden, each providing their own proprietary services to customers. In this sense they adopted the same model as the telecoms. Everything that passed down that line was to be provided by them, and they'd get paid for it. Of course, the fact that dial-up modems require no significant physical infrastructure (all you need is an office with a bunch of voice lines and some computers) meant that the barrier to entry to the online services business was very low. So small shops opened all over the place. They, of course, didn't have the infrastructure to create a bunch of proprietary content and services the way the big guys did, but there was this Internet thing they could hook people up to for pretty low costs that had a lot of content on it. It didn't take consumers long to figure out that there was a whole hell of a lot more interesting stuff outside the walled gardens than inside them (in large part because the users went out and created it themselves). So the walled garden model was soundly defeated (although it took AOL the better part of a decade to admit it).

So we all got onto the Internet and the phone companies had lost control over content and services and so had the ISP's. Everything was free and open and we went crazy with entrepreneurship and had the dot-com bubble. But while that was happening, we were also developing technologically. The networks were trying to keep up with our demand for faster connections to get all the cool new stuff on the Internet (which is to say mostly online gaming, pirated MP3's, and porn). So we moved from dial-up to DSL and cable modems. This is an important transition, because, unlike dial-up modems, DSL and cable modems require physical infrastructure in the telecom networks. There needs to be actual equipment sitting in the local office of the phone or cable company for them to work. All of the sudden the phone companies had a way to take back control over everything. But wait, luckily for us Congress was out ahead of the game and had made arrangements for this in the 1996 Telecom Act. That sounds sarcastic, but isn't; Congress had achieved a remarkably balanced and well-designed compromise. The Act required, among other things, that the regional phone companies play nice with competitors and rent out the equipment needed to make a DSL network function, so that competitors could get at the same customers the regional phone companies served. Problem solved, competitive pressure will prevent the phone companies from reestablishing control over the Internet and abusing their market power.

Sadly it didn't work out that way. The phone companies didn't like this part of the '96 Act (big shock), so they launched an intense campaign of lobbying, foot-dragging, and lawsuits that lasted until a few years ago when Bush's FCC appointees decided to use the Telecom Act for toilet paper and the Supreme Court cheered them on. Internet access is no longer considered a common carrier service and is not subject to open access requirements. Now instead of thousands of ISP's in direct competition with each other, Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner basically own the consumer side of the Internet in the US. And, to varying degrees, they may be able to start rebuilding their walled gardens and capitalizing off of all the wonderful services people enjoy on the Internet, and turning our wonderful network into something a little less wonderful. This is what the fight over net neutrality is about.

One of the interesting battles in net neutrality is just how far it reaches into a provider's infrastructure. The case for net neutrality is most clear when it comes of an ISP's actual Internet service, where they're blocking a service or web site they don't want you to access. But there are other ways for an ISP to go about this. Consider cable. The cable companies set up their networks so that only a small part of their pipe is allocated for Internet service. The vast majority of it is carrying video. If they wanted they could scrap a few cable TV channels and expand the datastream to their cable modem subscribers. Now let's say that on-demand TV becomes a very popular service. Comcast has two ways to go about this. They could provide on-demand video pretty easily over the Internet, except they probably don't have enough bandwidth on their Internet service to handle it. So they would need to eliminate some video channels and expand their bandwidth first. But if they did that, anyone could sell on-demand video to their customers over the Internet, and Comcast would get nothing for it. They would have to compete for every customer, and the wouldn't have any real competitive advantage over other video providers. Alternatively, Comcast could keep their Internet service throttled down, and develop a proprietary on-Demand system that would occupy the same bandwidth but run independently of their Internet service. Now they have no competitors and get to tariff users for every use. Oh, happy day for Comcast.

All of this brings us, finally, to the mobile wireless market. There are three key points to notice. First, for technological reasons data services took quite some time to arrive in the mobile wireless market. So they got to sit by and watch all this other stuff happen. Second, like DSL and cable, wireless Internet service requires special equipment, meaning the wireless service provider is necessarily also the Internet service provider and has total control over the network. Third, the cast of the characters is fairly similar (AT&T and Verizon, again, plus a couple other big national companies). So what you have are companies that have learned that what they want, more than anything, is control and the ability to tariff users for every bloody thing they do on the network, and who technically have the capability in this market to make it happen. They have fought bitterly to maintain this control and will continue to. These are concentrated markets, so the threat of competition isn't that great, and clearly the fear of loss of control their users is much greater than their fear of competitive harm. And the big wireless companies are all moving in lock-step on this anyway, so there is no real competitive impetus to stop fucking with customers and actually give us what we want. This is the sort of thing that happens in concentrated markets…

On some level they know they'll eventually have to let their users onto the Internet for real (the iPhone is a concession to that reality, although AT&T saw to it that they get their pound of flesh from iPhone users anyway). But the longer they can keep customers off the Internet, or only let them on some borked up version of the Internet, the better. I mean if people can download ring-tones for free, who's going to pay their provider $3 a pop for them? If you can buy MP3's for your phone from iTunes for a buck, why would you pay Verizon twice as much for their proprietary music-to-phone system? Now they can sell you GPS-based mapping, sports scores, online games, SMS, emails with pictures from the camera phone, and every other damned thing you'd get for free on the Internet. If they provided good Internet service or allowed phones with WiFi capability onto the network, this would all come crashing down.

In the end, the simple reality is that the communications market is deeply dysfunctional. It's highly concentrated, has many components that are or were natural monopolies, and is littered with regulatory detritus from past battles with abusive monopolists (too many of which didn't come out the right way for the good guys). These are markets that desperately need oversight and consumer protections. Frankly, a lot of the physical infrastructure would probably be better off in the public sector. The Internet is an incredible economic engine and allows for so much innovation and competition, it's sad to let these crotchety bastards be the gatekeepers. The analogy to superhighways isn't that far off. It doesn't have to be like this. In other countries (generally where regulators have forced open access on the phone companies) people regularly pay about the same we do for Internet service that is ten times faster, they have mobile phones that can do WiFi and are interchangeable among providers, and they have no real issue over net neutrality because Internet providers don't have enough market power to abuse it. I'll be very curious to see what happens if the Democrats take over at the FCC in a couple years...

What if the government subsidized the employment of displaced workers?

I was contemplating where I disagreed with the previous post when the following idea occurred to me. It could probably use a more rigorous development, but I think it’s at least interesting.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with the concept of government run retraining programs.

One major problem is figuring out what to train people to do. Do those being retrained get to choose what they are trained for?

If so, what will stop them from seeking training in a field for which they are unsuited, or one in which the demand for workers is little stronger than the field they just left?

If not, then it seems that the government would have to specify what fields show sufficient demand to bear an influx of newly trained workers, and then place workers in training programs that are best suited to their skills and abilities. I dislike this idea both because of its impact on the self determination of the workers, and because it would have a distortionary effect on the economy (as the training programs would act as subsidies for the selected industries by increasing labor supply and hence reducing labor costs).

Another issue is that an artificial training program might be a very ineffective way to train workers.

Even in many fields where formal education is routinely required, I suspect that the majority of learning tends to take place in the field, after placement. I think that this would be even truer of blue collar workers than others. So something along the lines of an internship/apprenticeship might be most efficient.

Yet having the government take industry partners and place workers in artificial internships, again, is not to my taste. It seems too likely to result in inefficient placements.

Instead, think briefly about the relationship between an industry with a growing demand for labor and an unemployed person. It’s likely that the unemployed person would gladly accept a position at a reduced wage in exchange for the opportunity to master the trade. Likewise, the firm would like to obtain another trained employee so long as they could make up the cost of training through the production of the worker. So both parties stand to benefit by working together on this. But there is a problem.

In a way the problem is akin that of intellectual property.

If I develop a new product or manufacturing technique I do so at some cost. If a competitor is allowed to use the fruits of my development and produce the same product or use the same technique they will be able to sell the output profitably at a price such as would require me, with my sunk cost, to take a loss. So, without a patent to protect my innovation, I have little incentive to develop it in the first place.

Similarly if I train an employee, I do so at some cost. If I am to retain that employee at a net benefit to my firm, I must therefore compensate the employee less than one which we had hired fully trained (i.e. with no training cost). But if the employee achieves the status of fully trained before I have recovered the full cost of her training, another firm will be able to entice her away by offering her compensation equal to her productivity, while I could not do so without suffering a loss. So unless I can monopolize her labor, I have little incentive to offer her training.

My desire to monopolize her labor is equivalent to an innovator’s desire to monopolize the use of their innovation through the use of a patent. But employees have rights that innovations do not. I cannot simply apply to the government to secure my right to exclusive use of this employee. Rather I must contract with her in order to ensure that she will stay with my firm. Of course, she would have little incentive to accept the contract after her training is complete, so we would have to agree to it before her training began. But here a couple of problems arise.

There is asymmetrical information.

The employer does not really know how productive the employee will be after training, so they will make an offer that would be appropriate for the average employee. But highly able workers will recognize that the contract would not benefit them as much as it should. So they would tend to refuse the offer. This would bring down the average productivity of the workers accepting the contract. So the employers would have to readjust the contract to account for the new, lower, average productivity. This would begin to push the next tier of most productive workers out of the contract, etc. And the spiral would continue until the market broke down.

Even without asymmetrical information there would still be a moral hazard problem. Provided with long-term contracts the workers would have less incentive to exert themselves in the service of their employers. Again this would lead the employers to make lower offers, in effect pushing the hardest working employees away from the contracts.

Between these two problems it seems unlikely that such arrangements would come about. In some industries, where an intensive amount of expert attention is required during the training process these problems may be fatal to in-job training. If the employer cannot break even over the duration of the training process, even if they provide zero compensation, then there is little to be done. But in some other cases there may be a solution. Now we return to my opening question.

What if the government subsidized the employment of displaced workers?

In the above scenario, it was not true that no training took place. Training could and would take place if the firm could extract sufficient benefit from the worker’s labor during the training process to break even prior to the worker becoming sufficiently trained to be attractive to other employers. By subsidizing the work of untrained workers (e.g. for some fixed period of time paying them some quantity per hour worked in addition to the compensation offered by the firm) and thereby reducing the compensation the firm must offer to retain the services of the employee, the government could increase the quantity of training that a firm could viably provide without loss, and thus give workers the opportunity to overcome larger experience barriers. Of course such a program would require monitoring to ensure that the employees were only being subsidized for skilled labor in which they were inexperienced and that the industry retained a sufficient proportion of the trainees to justify the subsidy. But I think that this monitoring would be much easier than hand picking industries and developing government implemented training programs. And I believe the outcomes would be much better.

The Role of Work

Andrew Sullivan pointed out this fascinating article on the psychological impacts of employment (and unemployment). I take issue with many of the conclusions the author, Arthur C. Brooks, draws from the data he presents, but the data is worth taking a look at. In particular I'm drawn to the studies on the devastating impact of unemployment, as in the case of the Marienthal villagers or the University of Chicago survey that found that even a brief bout of unemployment drastically increased the tendency of respondents to feel hopeless or worthless.

Brooks concludes his survey of the data by stating that the only thing we need to do is "protect the free market so that people can find and choose the types of employment that suit each of us best." I find this conclusion difficult to reconcile with the data on unemployment. The implications of that data suggest to me that employers have a devastating non-economic advantage to wield over employees, and that normal market churn can have significant psychological externalities that aren't generally considered in economic models.

One need not be a bleeding-heart sympathizer with the poor or the unemployed to be concerned with such issues. Witness the current political dialogue on topics such as economic globalization, outsourcing, and immigration. I would suggest that the rising populist positions on all of these issues share two traits: they are motivated by fear of unemployment and all its consequent harms, and they are deleterious to the overall health of our economy. Note also that these issues tend to span across the usual political divides. You can find vehement opposition to immigration on the right, fierce opponents of globalization on the left, and distaste for outsourcing on every side. People have a tremendous fear of losing their jobs, a fear that viewed in purely economic terms may seem irrational, but taking into account the additional psychological effects perhaps it is not so irrational after all (although I guess you could conclude that the psychological impact is itself irrational).

Brooks points out that remedies such as welfare do little to address the psychological harm of unemployment. He also notes that making jobs more secure comes at a price. Brooks argues that more secure jobs tend to be less meaningful. I don't see the data for that, and I'm not sure it's right although I can see where he's coming from. In any case, certainly there is an economic price to be paid for making it more difficult for employers to adjust their workforce (European economies demonstrate this).

These considerations about welfare and job security seem to drive Brooks's conclusion that nothing should be done other than to support the market. And certainly, the market may provide enough of a remedy for some of the unemployed, particularly the highly skilled and well-educated. However, that does not address the whole of the topic. Particularly where globalization and outsourcing are concerned and where we see massive shifts in the market, people may find that skillsets in which they had invested a great deal of time, effort, and money are no longer needed, not just by their previous employer, but by any domestic employer. There is room here for the government to be involved in retraining and job placement for displaced workers. If we know that job churn is necessary and healthy for the economy, but that the impact on individuals of this churn can be severe, that seems the most sensible route to pursue. Not only can this have direct impacts on the social welfare of those affected, but the existence of such a safety net may also help reduce the fear that drives the dialogue on economic policy in the wrong direction. There is an obvious connection between this suggestion and our past discussions of Rawlsian fairness and political compromise (as seen here), but I'll leave that as an exercise for readers...

Islam Isn't the Problem

Well, I haven't been posting as much as I'd like lately. I just haven't crossed that much that sparked my interest lately. But I think this is important (and it ties in to my previous post as well). This global Gallup poll of Muslims is significant, as its title says, in framing the war on terror. Gallup found that Muslims in the Middle East actually have a lower tolerance for attacks on civilian targets than do average (non-Muslim) Americans. The poll found only a weak link between religiosity and political extremism among Muslims. Gallup notes that while those who found the 9/11 attacks to be wrong often seated those beliefs in religious sentiment, those who thought the attacks justified relied on political rather than religious justifications. The summary of poll concludes that "the difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety."

These are important findings, not only in countering the rhetoric of the more jingoistic right wingers, but also in countering certain middle ground positions (i.e. Andrew Sullivan) that reject the more extreme policies that arise from such rhetoric while still embracing the framing of Islam as the root source of our problems. This conflict is and always has been about political differences. The pollsters find that the Muslims who sympathize with extremism tend to be those who believe that the West does not reciprocate their concerns and is unlikely to ever act on them, creating a siege mentality. This is not a new idea, at least on this blog, but solid data is always a welcome addition to the argument. We cannot hope to end this conflict without at the least understanding the motivations of our adversaries.

Understanding Al Qaeda

One of the key battlegrounds in developing a strategy against Al Qaeda and its affiliates is the matter of defining who Al Qaeda is and what Al Qaeda seeks to achieve. From the early days after 9/11 the Bush administration sought to cast Al Qaeda as part of a epic struggle between cultures. And in order to build a properly ominous threat to justify military adventures and belligerent policies and cultural attitudes the administration's allies have sought to play up Al Qaeda's aspirations of conquest and the creation of a new Caliphate.

The reality, however, is that Al Qaeda has no such aspirations, and the only way Al Qaeda can be a player in an epic clash of civilizations is when we make them one through our own actions and rhetoric. This was one of the key points made by Larry Wright (author of the seminal work on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower) when he spoke at the Miller Center last year. According to Wright, Al Qaeda has virtually no policy platform or objectives. What drives young men to Al Qaeda is not a desire to accomplish any particular end, but a deeply seated sense of cultural humiliation by the West. This is the same factor that creates rioting and violence in response to perceived Western insults against Islam like the Mohammed comic, or the Koran in the toilet story. Al Qaeda holds out no promises of accomplishment or conquest, it promises recruits one thing: the opportunity to die as martyrs fighting the West.

A review on Slate last week of Raymond Ibrahim's Al Qaeda Reader confirms Wright's account. The reviewer, Reza Aslan writes:

While these writings provide readers with page after page of, for example, arcane legal debates over the moral permissibility of suicide bombing, they do not really get to the heart of what it is that al-Qaida wants, if it wants anything at all. Al-Qaida's nominal aspirations—the creation of a worldwide caliphate, the destruction of Israel, the banishing of foreigners from Islamic lands—are hardly mentioned in the book. It seems the president of the United States talks more about al-Qaida's goals than al-Qaida itself does. Rarely, if ever, do Bin Laden and Zawahiri discuss any specific social or political policy.

What al-Qaida does lay out, however, are grievances—many, many grievances. There is the usual litany of complaints about the suffering of Palestinians, the tyranny of Arab regimes, and the American occupation of Iraq. But again, legitimate as these complaints may be, there is in these writings an almost total lack of interest in providing any specific solution or policy to address them. Indeed, al-Qaida's many grievances against the West are so heterogeneous, so mind-bogglingly unfocused, that they must be recognized less as grievances per se, than as popular causes to rally around. There are protests about the United Nations' rejection of Zimbabwe's elections, the Bush administration's unwillingness to sign up to the International Criminal Court, and America's role in global warming. (To quote Bin Laden: "You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases, more than any other country. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.") Zawahiri's many complaints include the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, which he calls "a historical embarrassment to America and its values," as well as the United Kingdom's anti-terrorism laws, which "contradict the most basic principles of fair trial." There is even a screed against America's campaign-finance laws, which, according to Bin Laden, currently favor "the rich and wealthy, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts."

Most Americans would agree with many of these complaints. And that's precisely the point. These are not real grievances for al-Qaida (it does not bear mentioning that Bin Laden is probably not very concerned with campaign finance reform). They are a means of weaving local and global resentments into a single anti-American narrative, the overarching aim of which is to form a collective identity across borders and nationalities, and to convince the world that it is locked in a cosmic contest between the forces of Truth and Falsehood, Belief and Unbelief, Good and Evil, Us and Them.

In this regard, al-Qaida has been spectacularly successful, thanks in no small part to the assistance of the divisive "Clash of Civilizations" mentality of our own politicians. In fact, far from debunking al-Qaida's twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive "us vs. them" rhetoric.

Ultimately Aslan came to the same conclusion Wright did:

Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida's.

Keep this in mind next time some talking head tries to sell you on Al Qaeda's quest for a new Caliphate. Far from thwarting Al Qaeda, these pundits, through their rhetoric, are giving Al Qaeda exactly what it wants.

I'm Back (with some Comm'r Copps Content)

Sorry for the lengthy absence. Certain other events were occupying my time... Posts here will probably continue to be infrequent for the foreseeable future, but there shouldn't be any more month-long gaps.

Anyway, having helped build his broadband policy arsenal last year, I'm always happy to point out when FCC Commissioner Michael Copps goes on the broadband policy warpath as he did this past week at the YearlyKos convention. Slashdot coverage here. Matthew Yglesias discusses it here (and the happy former Copps intern in the comments section isn't me). I have to disagree with Yglesias's comment that Copps is not a good speaker. He may not be the most captivating speaker, but he writes some very good speeches and delivers them effectively. I won't argue the point about his jokes, however. It is nice to see that media and telecom issues have a big following at YearlyKos. It's important stuff, although, as Yglesias notes, somewhat obscure. Let's hope that after the 2008 election Copps will have the power to do more than climb up on a soapbox about these issues.

As a random aside, I also wanted to link to an interesting column on Slate, co-written by UVA professor Jim Ryan, on Clarence Thomas's sincerity as an originalist. Both Scalia and Thomas have struck me as less principled and more political of late...