Federalism/Localism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

Matt Yglesias has a number of long-running themes on his blog. Two of them are fairly interrelated: Local government has far more impact on people's day-to-day lives (mostly through zoning and business and parking regulation) than most people recognize, and Americans tend to vote on far more issues, both in terms of direct ballot issues and electing people to office, than voters are willing to care about. Those themes collide in this post by Yglesias guest-blogger Jamelle Bouie. Bouie argues that state and local government officials are far more susceptible to corruption than elected federal officials. I disagree with his aside in the final sentence that Congress is less corrupt than we think it is (see the Lessig post from a few weeks ago on that), but generally, I think he has a good point.

There typically seem to be two motivating ideas behind pushing government authority towards state and local government: one size doesn't always fit all and vesting power locally will increase accountability. I think there's often a lot to be said for one size doesn't fit all. But I tend to agree with the Yglesias/Bouie position that localism does not increase accountability. It certainly increases the power of individual voters (you now represent 1 out of the 100,000 votes in your city instead of 1 out of 300,000,000 votes in the nation), but that increased influence has to compete with a huge gap in public attention. Not that many people truly pay to attention to national politics, but many people sort of pay attention to national politics, while almost no one pays any attention to local politics. And with the death of local newspapers (and the atrocious quality of local TV news), even if you wanted to invest in local politics, it's not easy to find good information. I think there are starting to be more blogs focused on the topic of local government (e.g., this excellent Arlington blog), but I'm not sure how widespread this sort of thing is.

So it would seem to make sense that power should typically be pushed towards the federal level unless it doesn't make sense from an administrative standpoint (e.g., zoning) or there is a compelling one-size-doesn't-fit-all justification for keeping it local. The counterpoint is to look at how absurdly dysfunctional the federal government is at present. But I see that as a separate and distinct problem in that, if we don't solve that problem we will all be seriously fucked regardless of how we distribute power across local, state, and federal government.

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...

We All Want Out of Iraq...

...but we can't shirk our responsibilities.

I'm going to stick with Matthew Yglesias (who I've been reading quite a bit of since The Atlantic picked him up as one of their regular bloggers), although many people have expressed similar sentiments about the Iraq funding bill, particularly at the major liberal blog sites. Yglesias was disappointed that Democrats didn't fight on the funding bill to the bitter end. I dissent. I was hugely critical of the Democratic votes in favor of the original Iraq war authorization bill, and my bitterness on that front has not receded a bit these past five years. But I think that Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done with this funding bill. They fought a good fight in the public eye, passing a bill with benchmarks and defending it in the media although it was doomed to be vetoed from the start. They forced Republican congressmen to stand up and publicly support the president's policy in Iraq (a stand many of them will regret next year). They pushed the president to negotiate with them, and were rebuffed. He was not going to negotiate. And if we have learned anything about George Bush, we should know that he would not have backed down, regardless of what the Democrats did. They simply didn't have the votes to overcome a veto, and everyone knew it. That left them with but two options: capitulate or defund the Iraq war.

I want out of Iraq as much as anyone, but I would not have us abandon our responsibilities there. A precipitous and complete withdrawal is just not an option. Extricating ourselves from this mess will be a delicate operation. I believe we need to get our troops out soon, because as far as I can tell all they are accomplishing is to maintain a miserable status quo. Our presence is inhibiting any progress by the Iraqis and preventing the situation from evolving. But I have no confidence with respect to what happens when we leave. Things could move in any direction from there. Some of what might happen (and here I have visions of Rwanda) would be utterly intolerable. If we see things proceeding in that direction I feel that we will be obligated to bring the troops back in to put a lid on things and try again. Even if it costs us, even if we don't have a clear path to success. We have a responsibility, an obligation to the Iraqi people that I hope we do not forsake. We will need to be careful with our withdrawal and keep sufficient force in the region to react to events as needed. We will need to maneuver deftly to retain enough influence in Iraq to nudge things in the right direction without appearing to interfere. Defunding the Iraq war will not accomplish that. What we need is open heart surgery, and the only tool the Democratic Congress had was a sledgehammer.

This means, of course, that we will have to continue to live with Bush's management of the war for the time being. So be it. Elections have consequences, and the American people voted for the war in the 2002 midterm election and ratified that decision when they reelected George Bush in 2004. Last year's midterm doesn't erase all that. Now we're stuck with the president we have. Maybe over the next year enough Republican congressmen will defect to allow Congress to force a responsible withdrawal on Bush. If so, great. If not, then we just have to live with him until we can get a president who can deal with this conflict like an adult. The hardline "bring the troops home now" positions I see on so many liberal blogs these days are no more responsible than the policies Bush is pursuing in Iraq today. It's no cause for celebration, but Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done, and I respect them for it.

The Alternate Reality of the Right

In considering the "fighting them there so they won't come here" argument, Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious conflict between symbolism (retreating from Iraq makes us look weak) and reality (staying in Iraq causes us to actually be weak). He seems perplexed by the Right's tendency to "view national security policy as something that takes place entirely at the level of symbolism". This is, I think, not so difficult to understand. American conservatives live in an alternate reality, unable to distinguish between symbolism and reality. To them, symbolism is reality. If you listened to enough conservative radio and watched enough Fox News you'd live in that alternate reality too. Never was this more clearly illustrated than in Ron Suskind's famous discussion with an undisclosed White House official (Andrew Card, perhaps?) about how the Bush administration was in a constant process of creating its own reality. This was never a matter of the Bush administration being able to fundamentally alter the state of the world directly through their pronouncements and news releases, but rather an expression of the belief that if they can control news cycles and assert a concept of reality strenuously enough, everyone else would have little choice but to accept it as real, and the world would adjust itself to the White House's vision. It was Wag the Dog transformed from satire into official state policy. They could reshape reality through symbolism by convincing people that what they thought was true actually wasn't.

Obviously this doesn't work. There are too many competing sources of news and reality does eventually trickle in to displace this fictional presentation. The reality-based community inevitably gets the last laugh, as Suskind pointed out. This is why the administration and their supporters were always so furious about the media reporting on bloodshed in Iraq and missing the "good stories"; the media was deconstructing the administration's carefully constructed alternate reality.

But it's not hard to see why conservatives got suckered into this belief, and why they still can't seem to let go of it. Most conservative news sources are mere propaganda outlets. Witness the old Pew study finding that the more people watched Fox News the more likely they were to believe that we had found WMD's in Iraq or that Saddam was behind 9/11. Or this more recent Pew study that shows that while liberals see Republican presidential candidates in exactly the same way conservatives themselves view them, conservatives, by contrast, see all of the Democratic candidates as raving left-wing lunatics. American conservatives have replaced their own reality with symbolism, so why wouldn't it be natural for them to think the same is true for everyone else? Their own echo-chamber media has relegated them to a world that only exists in their own minds.

Honduras

The Detroit Free Press yesterday wrote that Honduras announced it plans to withdraw all its troops (370) "in the shortest time possible." Reuters reports here that both the Dominican Republic and Honduras are leaving in response to the spiraling violence and pressure from Spain. Said Honduras's Defense Minister Federico Breve: "I do not see any reason why relations between Honduras and the United States should deteriorate."

In completely unrelated news, Reuters noted here that President Bush appointed John Negroponte as future embassador to Iraq after the Coalition Provisional Authority hands off the baton on June 30 of this year. Wikipedia provides this biography and notes that from 1981 to 1985, he served as embassador to--of all places--Honduras. Some of Negroponte's critics (the Human Rights Watch, for instance) have accused him of ignoring human rights atrocities that were being committed by US-trained military (the Baltimore Sun ran this article back in 1995). Strangely enough, those allegations aren't contained in Negroponte's bio at the U.N. And I'm sure it is entirely coincidental that Honduras decided to withdraw its troops the day after Negroponte was appointed embassador.

Update: Here is what American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias has to say about Mr. Negroponte.