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.

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."

Liberalism, the State, and Free Markets

I promised last week to eventually to get to the discussion of Rorty and Rawls. For various reasons, I've decided I'd rather not. But if anyone wants to read the discussion on their own, it goes something like this: Yglesias, Linker, Yglesias, Linker, Sullivan, Douthat.

Also, before getting to my main topic, and because it tangentially relates to that topic, I'd like to throw this in. Christopher Hayes has a column on the merits of bureaucracy and the fine people who inhabit our federal bureaucracy. If you look into the details of the DoJ scandal, it's hard to be as dismissive as Hayes about the lasting impact of the Bush administration on the bureaucracy, but he makes good points nonetheless. An excerpt:

It's slander with a long pedigree--Cicero called the bureaucrat "the most despicable" of men, "petty, dull, almost witless...a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog"--but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that "the government" is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It's far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves. Milton Friedman quipped that "hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned"; Ronald Reagan said in 1966 that "the best minds are not in government" because if any were, "business would hire them away"; and George Wallace expressed his desire to "take those bearded bureaucrats" in Washington who were in the process of desegregating the South, "and throw them in the Potomac."

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

...

But the moral of the Comey story specifically, and of the failures of the Bush Administration more broadly, is the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That's why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

So, anyway, on to the main course. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has a blog post excerpting from a lengthy article by Stephen Holmes in the American Prospect (from a few years back) on the views of classic liberals on the role of government. The basic gist of the excerpts is that the liberal ideals of individual rights and free markets are tied inextricably to the existence of a strong state to protect them. It very much reminds me of my previous discussion with Henry on libertarian paternalism and Rawls where I wrote:

This, in fact, has always been my biggest objection to libertarian theory. I simply cannot see how a libertarian state could ever remain so for any appreciable length of time. The initial structure of the government will not bind it in libertarian form, even if you had a constitution without amendment procedures. It was not a constitutional amendment that allowed the development of the administrative state in the US, but judicial interpretation. And it wasn't just uppity judges responsible for that (although I'm not sure it would be significant to my argument even if it were), but intense political pressure placed on them by political branches motivated by quite serious concerns about social stability and unrest (and rising socialist sentiment). Whether it's a Great Depression and populist outrage or rent-seeking businesses and other economically powerful interests, a state will always be subject to pressures (of varying intensities) to do non-libertarian things. The state will always have the power to do those things; it is inherent in being a state. That power cannot be ignored, and there is no structural way to make it go away. It just sits there begging to be used.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the policies necessary to keep those pressures at bay (to the greatest degree possible) are themselves non-libertarian (e.g. some level of redistributive tax policy and regulation of finances and political speech, etc.). In the end, I tend to believe that our rights (which may or may not be limited only to life, liberty, and property) are likely best protected by a state that overtly recognizes the threat of instability and subversion of state power and is structured to best address that threat, even if that structure is not a strictly libertarian one. The state may need to be more powerful and far reaching than a night watchman state in order to be a stable, free-standing system. What good is the night watchman if it ends up being overthrown by communists or turning into a plutocracy?

Tying in to the Hayes column: a robust state can be less prone to abuse and authoritarianism than a more easily captured minimal state.

One of the fundamental premises of Rawls's political liberalism is that the point of a liberal state is to create a platform for social cooperation that is the prerequisite for everyone to share in the benefits of, among other things, free markets. Libertarians suppose that you can rip away the institutions that result from this political compromise while still gaining the benefits they are meant to provide. This seems to miss something fundamental about human nature and social interaction.

Political compromise is necessary to create stable institutions, and stable institutions are necessary to enforce the rules of the market (e.g. to protect property rights, enforce contracts, settle disputes, and police fraud). Institutions that are not broadly considered legitimate will, as Rawls argues, be subject to instability, as each faction that even briefly manages to achieve power will attempt to tear down illegitimate institutions and replace them with institutions of their own preference.

So it becomes important to try to determine how people assess legitimacy. Rawls suggests fairness as a crucial benchmark. That seems to have a lot of merit. We've had Boys Weekend discussions on the topic before, noting psychological studies to the effect that people are willing to sacrifice their own benefit in order to enforce a system of fairness, even when there will be no opportunity for direct reciprocity. (I thought it interesting to see recently that humans are not alone in this behavior.) This suggests that even if a libertarian institution is quantitatively superior to some non-libertarian institution it might still be regarded as less legitimate if it produces outcomes that are perceived to be unfair.

Returning then to Dani Rodrik. Rodrik's main specialty is economic globalization. He argues that globalization promoters have been shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring populist complaints about trade unfairness, countering these arguments only with statements of the quantifiable benefits of more trade. Economists too often ignore procedural fairness in favor of simple economic gain. Regular people tend towards the opposite. Rodrik argues that domestic political perceptions of the globalization process are the key to further progress on trade. In other words, to create the social platform for cooperation necessary for global markets to expand we will require a more robust social safety net to remedy distributional unfairness and create perceived legitimacy for the whole endeavor. Otherwise the social compromise on which economic globalism is built collapses into a morass of protectionism. The market can only go as far as the state can carry it.

UPDATE (6/25): Rodrik posted again today with further evidence for his thesis on globalization. He cites a recent academic paper studying a survey of people from 18 countries that found an inverse relationship between the size of the state (measured by percentage of GDP) and preferences for protectionism. Rodrik quotes from the paper:

Our results provide microeconomic evidence consistent with the long-standing argument that the state and the market are in fact complementary. Openness and globalization can introduce uncertainty into peoples’ lives, and this additional risk can lead some people to oppose trade. Government expenditure can help to reduce this risk, and thus shore up support for open markets. It would seem that the ‘grand bargain’ that was embedded liberalism is politically effective.

Political Liberalism

A week ago a philosopher named Richard Rorty passed away. I had never heard of Rorty, but his passing prompted a round of discussion between New Republic writer Damon Linker and Atlantic bloggers Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan. Certainly any discussion that involves 3 of the Atlantic's 5 bloggers is likely to catch my attention, but particularly one that involves John Rawls's concept of political liberalism as heavily as this one did. Hank and I had some discussion of Rawls here last winter, but we focused on his two principles of justice rather than the general concept of political liberalism. I thought this might be a good chance to discuss it a bit. I find it to be highly relevent in contemporary politics. Whether or not Sullivan would admit to being a Rawlsian (probably not), there is a strong strain of Rawlsian political liberalism in comments like this one:

Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That's why we mercifully don't have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices.

And when Barack Obama made his highly regarded speech on politics and religion last summer (video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) he went directly to Rawls's playbook for this:

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Rawls first gained notoriety from his book A Theory of Justice. In it Rawls attempted to develop a comprehensive political philosophy. He developed from first principles a full system of political justice and fairness resulting in a well-ordered society. But this required Rawls to make many philosophical commitments along the way. In defending A Theory of Justice from its critics (and there were many) over the next decade or so Rawls came to the conclusion that it was unrealistic to believe that any such comprehensive theory would capture the public imagination such that everyone would adopt it. This was particularly so when he considered that his theory was in competition with other comprehensive theories, namely religions, to which people tend to be quite attached. People had too many existing philosophical commitments.

So Rawls decided that a comprehensive approach to political philosophy wasn't particularly fruitful. What was needed was a way to reconcile the many existing and competing comprehensive theories already present in our society into a workable political theory. This motivated his second major book: Political Liberalism. The goal was no longer to try to establish his theory of justice as being true, but rather to make it a focal point of social agreement among a pluralistic mish-mash of comprehensive philosophies.

Rawls presents a long and fairly complicated theory in Political Liberalism and I won't attempt to sum it all up here. But there are two points I'd like to pull out:

First, Rawls sets a baseline for the participation of any comprehensive philosophy in a pluralistic democracy. Rawls requires that all must be reasonable. He defines reasonable to mean that they a) be willing to abide by rules of fair cooperation as long as others do the same, and b) that they accept Rawls's concept of "the burdens of judgment". The burdens of judgment reflect the fact that on deep philosophical questions (the focus of comprehensive doctrines) our evidence is complex and conflicting, weighting is difficult, many concepts are vague, there is much reliance on life experience and competing normative considerations. So we should expect different conclusions about what makes life good even from perfectly rational and reasonable people. Any comprehensive philosophy that cannot accept this uncertainty, that insists that only its conclusions can be true, is one that cannot peacefully exist in a pluralistic democracy. This is what Sullivan is talking about in the excerpt above (and in much of his book from what I gather). It's a simple concept, but one that went out of fashion with the rise of the religious political right, and is only now making a comeback.

The next point relates to part (a) above. As one of the rules of fair cooperation that Rawls suggests any comprehensive philosophy compatible with pluralistic democracy needs to accept, Rawls proposes public reason. Public reason is a way of talking about political issues in a language that everyone can understand. Obama's excerpt above pulls directly from Rawls's thoughts on public reason. Political actions must be taken for reasons that everyone (regardless of respective comprehensive beliefs) can see as legitimate, even if not everyone agrees on them. Actions motivated purely by artifacts of one comprehensive doctrine will not be seen as legitimate by supporters of other comprehensive doctrines. So, as Obama says, if you want to take such ideas into the public sphere they need to be reseated in principles more broadly accessible to everyone; simply citing chapter and verse of the Bible isn't good enough. Rawls argues that any argument that assumes that the listener shares the same comprehensive doctrine as the speaker (or should convert to the same doctrine) fails to respect the burdens of judgment and is an argument inappropriate for public politics in a pluralistic democracy.

Next time I hope to discuss the bloggers' discussion of Rawls and Rorty...

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.

Total War on Iraq

I was rather shocked today to find a column on CSM from a former managing editor arguing that the reason the US is struggling in Iraq (and didn't win in Korea and Vietnam) is our unwillingness to engage in total war. And what, exactly, does John Dillin mean by total war? The complete destruction of an enemy nation, including massive civilian casualties. As examples he cites the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sherman ravaging the American South. There's certainly a compelling argument that such tactics should never be acceptable (particularly compelling with respect to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for which there is compelling evidence to suggest the bombings were completely unnecessary to prompt Japanese surrender and had far more to do with the Cold War than WWII). But even accepting the premise that such attacks can sometimes be permissible, there's a pretty major difference between those situations and Iraq: in each of those conflicts the US faced an active state opponent, with troops in the field and territory under its control.

The idea of waging such a war in Iraq is not only absurd, but morally reprehensible in the extreme. We don't face state opposition. The Iraq government is our putative ally. We control the entirety of Iraq. For us to target Iraqi population centers for indiscriminate bombing wouldn't be waging war, but rather an exercise in genocide. At least in WWII there was always a means for our opponents to end the slaughter: unconditional surrender. What would signal a stopping point in Iraq? The Iraqi state has already conceded. It would simply be a gratuitous massacre lasting until our bloodlust had been sated.

But would it work? Perhaps if we slaughtered millions of Iraqis the insurgents would throw in the towel (although a couple million dead Vietnamese argue to the contrary). But even if they did, and even if we weren't troubled by the morality of it, where would this leave us internationally? Could anyone ever again regard us as a force for good in the world? Would our standing in the conflict with Al Qaeda and political extremism be improved? It would be an umitigated disaster.

Dillin's argument strikes me as another reflection of the general frustration that our military opponents have evolved and adapted in the days since WWII. The tactics we used there cannot work anymore, and that's no accident. It is precisely because the US military is amazingly proficient at total war that no enemy will ever allow us to bring that proficiency to bear. They know that for all our might in defeating armies and conquering territory, when it comes to holding territory over the long term, we are merely human. They can concede the field then engage us in a knife fight. And in doing so they gain the added benefit of transforming a military conflict into a political one, happily revealing our serious deficiencies in that arena. Our enemies have learned from the wars of the last century and moved on. Maybe it's time we did the same.

Is Experience the New Electability?

In 2004 John Kerry became the Democratic nominee because of a consensus that he was electable. In other words nobody voted for him because they wanted to vote him, they voted for him because they thought other people would want to vote for him. Turns out they were wrong. Electability never had any real meaning in substance, although there were certain traits that people assumed defined it: a long political record, national exposure, lots of money, military service, a boring enough personality to stay out of trouble. But the reality is that no one really knew how any of these traits related to a candidate's general election prospects (and we ultimately found that they relate very poorly). Despite the utter lack of a rational basis for the electability theory, however, there was an overpowering consensus among talking heads and political wags that electability existed and had the basic form described above. I found it infuriating at the time, and still do.

A considerable amount of ink has been spilled in the past few weeks on Barack Obama's prospects as a candidate, and I'm concerned that I'm starting to feel a new, and equally unfounded (and equally pervasive), consensus forming on the matter of experience. Take, for example, this Slate column by John Dickerson. Dickerson's experience discussion is focused on Vladimir Putin's provocative remarks at the recent Munich security conference.

(As an aside I'd like to mention how remarkably refreshing it was to see Bob Gates respond to Putin in a responsible and helpful fashion. It's taken six years, but the Bush administration finally found someone who can talk foreign policy without sounding like a petulant child.)

Dickerson compares Obama to John McCain, who in Dickerson's view clearly has the requisite foreign policy experience to be a good candidate. Obama, he suggests, doesn't have the experience to "sit across from blunt and tough leaders like Vladimir Putin". But the fact is very few Americans do have experience dealing with foreign leaders. Some of them have already been president, most of the others were cabinet secretaries (who for whatever reason rarely run for the presidency), and maybe you count a few senators like McCain (and longstanding senators have hardly distinguished themselves as successful presidential candidates). In general the vast majority of presidential candidates have been in the exact same position Obama finds himself today. Why is his experience level being singled out?

Dickerson gives Obama a backhanded compliment saying that at least he has more experience than Bush did in 2000. But rather than compare Obama to the worst foreign policy president in recent memory (maybe ever), why not compare him to some of the better ones. How much foreign policy experience did Bill Clinton have when he took office (or, if you're so inclined, Ronald Reagan)? It wasn't experience that made Clinton successful, it was his intelligence, diligence, compassion, and empathy. He learned about foreign nations, analyzed problems, and was able to connect with foreign leaders and people.

And how has experience helped John McCain? Dickerson's example of McCain's response to Putin shows that at least he has some judgment, but what about Iraq? McCain has been monumentally wrong for the past four years about the biggest American foreign policy blunder in decades. How has his experience helped him there? McCain, maybe more than any other politician I'm aware of, demonstrates the danger of too much experience in Washington. He's been burned too badly and too many times and is simply not the man he was six or eight years ago. His long exposure to the viciousness of national politics has consumed him.

Obama shares all of the traits that made Clinton one of the most internationally popular presidents in US history. He is phenomenally intelligent, broadly educated and well-read, intellectually curious, and intuitively able to connect with audiences and convey important ideas so that they can be understood by everyone. And his mixed national, ethnic, and racial heritage gives him, as Dickerson acknowledges, a leg up on the competition in terms of foreign perception of him, and, by extension, the US.

As Obama gets further into the process and has to formulate more of a foreign policy agenda, I will certainly be open to substantive criticisms of his positions and plans, but can we please not discount him based on this specious conception of the need for foreign policy experience? At this point he looks at least as good as anyone else in the race on foreign policy, maybe better. Let's just wait and see what he has to say before riding him too hard.

Rawlsian Justice

I want to respond mostly on the topic of Rawls and his theory, but I'd like to briefly address the normative effect of civic institutions. I think institutions can create a much broader range of norms than simple expectation. The U.S. constitution provides a fine example of the sort of impact that civic institutions can have. You can look at the debate over the war on terror detainees and habeus corpus. Modern Americans have instincts about this that I don't think most people would have had in 1787. A lot of our popular conceptions about due process come from our institutions. Consider net neutrality. Right now both sides are advancing plausible moral values-based arguments for their positions. In the next year or two Congress is going to rule thumbs or thumbs down on net neutrality. My guess is that 10-15 years from now if someone raises the moral argument of the losing side of this debate (whichever way Congress goes) our instict will be to reject it (and similarly to accept the winning side's argument). We rely on our political and legal processes to help navigate through the innumerable moral and ethical dilemmas of modern society and to provide some sense of resolution to these sorts of questions. Consequently there are many more norm-setting opportunities for civic institutions than mere expectation.

Moving on to Rawls then. First, it's important to note that Rawls is not a utilitarian. In fact, in A Theory of Justice utilitarianism is the bogeyman against which Rawls argues his case. On the first page he writes:

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by the many.

There is, however, an element of utilitarianism in Rawls's Original Position. The objective of the Original Position contractors is supposedly to maximize their likely outcome in society. This is sort of utilitarian, with a curveball thrown in (the veil of ignorance blinds them to exactly what represents utility to them as individuals).

But Rawls's excursion into utilitarianism, in my humble view, is a mistake. I don't think he actually meant it. It really doesn't follow from his justifications of why we should have the Original Position that it should necessarily be a maximizing exercise, nor does his output from the Original Position (the two principles) reflect a maximizing approach. A maximizing approach would produce, as Henry noted, basically whatever principles would maximize the average amount of primary goods (Rawls's stand-in for utility) for everyone. Instead what Rawls claims the Original Position contractors will embrace is a maximin approach (maximizing the amount of primary goods provided to the least well off member of society). You can see this in the difference principle (part of Rawls's second principle of justice): social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. This would make no sense as output from the Original Position as Rawls proposes it. So something doesn't fit here, and I think there has to be a better explanation linking Rawls's fundamental premises to his two principles of justice.

Rawls's entire argument is motivated by his conception of justice as fairness. At this point I think I need to try to flesh out the basic Rawlsian argument (I am, of course, skipping over many, many details). Rawls views the benefits of social cooperation as the product of everyone acquiescing to a social ordering that allows for and facilitates that social cooperation. Those benefits should therefore be allocated in such a manner as to ensure such cooperation, resulting in what Rawls calls a well-ordered society. This requires that "(1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles." Lacking a well-ordered society various factions will vie for the power to reorder the state to fit their own needs, and the resulting instability will hinder social cooperation and deny everyone its benefits. Rawls conceives of the Original Position in order to satisfy condition (1) above; to create principles of justice that everyone can accept. In the Original Position our theoretical contractors will evaluate the question of social justice in a completely unbiased manner and generate broadly acceptable principles of social justice. He appears to assume (initially!) that what people will all accept will be principles designed to produce the greatest average outcome.

So far, so good. But there's a problem here, one that Rawls acknowledges (and that informs his choice of the maximin approach), but that he strangely does not allow to alter the conceptual setup of the Original Position. There are certain social outcomes that people will simply not accept, no matter how well conceived the principles of justice are. A utilitarian principle (which is what the Original Position as Rawls proposes it would produce) could, for example, result in some people being made slaves in order to improve the overall average utility of the society. No matter what their Original Position alter-ego might have thought, the actual slaves could never recognize this principle as just, and consequently you would not have a stable, well-ordered state.

So the instruction to the Original Position contractors really ought not to be to maximize the average amount of primary goods, but rather to devise principles of justice that everyone can agree to. Of course, that was what we created the bloody thing for anyways. How should that be approached? We can assume (without too much controversy, I think) that the people least likely to agree to any principle of justice will be those who gain the least benefit from it. Hence the maximin approach. These least well off people should certainly agree to a principle that would maximize their welfare.

A first blush approach to maximin would be to simply be divide the social benefit in equal shares. However, as Rawls recognizes, that only makes sense if the social benefit is fixed and unchangeable. But we know that the benefits of social cooperation are not fixed, that by providing people with incentives we can get them to produce greater social benefits. This requires allowances for some inequality so that we can provide those incentives for increased cooperation. Of course, if those greater benefits only go to the well off, we have gained nothing from a maximin approach. Increasing the size of the pie is only beneficial to the extent that some of the increase goes to the least well off. And so we arrive at the difference principle: inequalities that in some way benefit the least well off are acceptable, those that don't are not. And you hopefully by now can see why I say that I don't believe Rawls took the utilitarian aspect of the Original Position very seriously.

Now, with my Rawlsian primer complete let me address your comments more directly. I read your argument to be compatible, in principle, with Rawls's difference principle. It is a 'rising tide lifts all boats' argument. In essence any inequality produced by a free market will operate to the benefit of the least well off. The difference principle would only limit market inequalities or justify redistributive policies to the extent that this is not true. Of course, the other part of the second principle, fair equality of opportunity would also support redistributive policies (public education, for example) that would conflict with your position.

Rawls writes at length about economics in the latter part of A Theory of Justice (which I have not read). Scanning through it, Rawls does not engage in serious discussion regarding exact details of market structure and regulations (and in fact brushes this off to some extent as being dependent on "the traditions, institutions, and social forces of each country, and its particular historical circumstances" and some evaluation of the impact of various policies in practice). But it is clear that he believes that some baseline minimum standard needs to be maintained through redistributive policies to protect against the "contingencies of the market". Beyond that "it may be perfectly fair that the rest of total income be settled by the price system, assuming that it is moderately efficient and free from monopolistic restrictions, and unreasonable externalities have been eliminated."

Rawls also hints at another objection related to the quote at the top of my post regarding the inviolability of individual rights. While he does conceive of the maximin principle being based on long run expectations, he would not allow the justice of particular groups of people to be sacrificed to long term generalized gains. There would need to some line-drawing to determine what is an acceptable short term sacrifice in the long term interests of those least well off, and those sacrifices that treat those people as means to achieve some remote end. This also harkens back to the motivation for the maximin approach. Outcomes that are bad enough to cause social unrest (those that the victims cannot possibly regard as being the products of a just society) need to be avoided even if temporary and in the long run interest of everyone.

To a considerable degree the dispute here has to be an empirical one. Your claim about charitable giving could be interpreted as a counter to many of Rawls's arguments. Suffice it say I find the claim that charity could completely replace redistributive policy somewhat dubious. There would also be arguments about the existence and degree of market failures, of anticompetitive strategic behavior, externalization of costs, collective action problems, behavioral critiques, etc. I think there would also have to be discussion as to the general degree of churn in markets and the degree to which it is possible and probable that some proportion of people would fall through the cracks, including but not limited to those who are disabled or suffer serious health ailments and impairments or possess limited natural talents and abilities. I don't see us resolving such issues at this moment, but to the extent any such problems exist they would suggest a conflict between a minimal state and Rawls's difference principle.

Libertarianism and Paternalism

It is clear to me that there is much involved in a system of torts. I do not claim that the many systematic and idiosyncratic determinations that must be made under such a system are easily made or have obvious outcomes. I acknowledge that the very existence of a system of legal protection requires a great deal of value-laden judgment. Of course the rights of both parties are at stake in a tort judgment. I only mentioned those of the victim because I was highlighting the injustice of that particular situation, where the tortfeasor seems secure in his rights.

As far as Nozick's ideas go, they do sound odd. I will say a thing or two based upon my limited understanding of them, let me know if I'm off the mark.

It seems very odd to suggest that a liberal state is the natural outcome of anarchy. I have often said that either anarchy does not exist or we are living in it right now. People are so accustomed to living under a large impersonal state that they are unaccustomed to think of what government fundamentally is. As I have said before, and as you are surely already aware, government is merely superiority of force. If gangsters have the run of a city and the official authorities are powerless to contradict their decrees, then the 'authorities' are no longer sovereign, and the gangsters are a government unto themselves. Advocates of anarchy, in suggesting the abolition of government, either fail to understand what, fundamentally, government is, or are making the absurd assertion that it is possible to do away with the physical inequality of parties and the resulting power differential. Anyplace where there are two people there is government. The point of this is that anarchy is either an insubstantial philosophical construct or it is universal. Assuming the former, Nozick's assertion is merely a theoretical exercise; assuming the latter, Nozick's assertion is disproved by the repeated evidence of history. Why on earth would power groups, in the absence of formal government, restrict themselves to selling their protection, when they could quite easily force defenseless parties into a state of clientage and then extract whatever portion of the client's production they desired? They wouldn't. The evidence of history shows quite clearly that they haven't. As for such power groups being rights protecting… lol. There is certainly no guarantee that governments will be good.

As far as using defaults in existing programs. I'm all for it. I may doubt that a program is the most effective way to achieve the ends aimed at, but so long as we're going to do it we ought to do it as well as we know how in order to minimize the loss we incur by not following the optimal path. I do think that, in the context of the programs he mentioned, Sunstein's defaults would cause them to realize their ends more effectively. If you sell defaults as a way of making intervention more effective I won't argue. It is only when they are sold as a way of making intervention not intervention that I object.

When I said that "[determining a rational set of defaults] through the auspices of modern democratic government virtually guarantees that we will botch the process", I was speaking in very broad terms. I was talking about culture as a default. It is definitely the government's role to create defaults within the proper sphere of government. I am only talking about government setting defaults in private decision making. When it does this, I call it 'intervention', and I think it a mistake.

Your next point is very important: "a state will always be subject to pressures (of varying intensities) to do non-libertarian things. The state will always have the power to do those things; it is inherent in being a state. That power cannot be ignored, and there is no structural way to make it go away". Absolutely (my discussion of the constitution was not suggesting that a constitution could protect an ideal of government; I was just noting that the idea of defaults provides an interesting insight into why constitutions have any effect at all). One might say that good government is not a state of law and institutional organization, but rather a state of culture. No set of laws can cause a culturally destitute people to govern themselves well and no rule can be so detrimental as to prevent a culturally rich people from doing so. This is why I have lost interest in practical politics. What is the point of struggling for changes in laws when what really matters in not the virtues of government but the virtues of the people? This idea is highlighted in the ridiculous programs of 'democratization'. There are groups of people who are culturally democratic, and with such groups no power can hold them back from democracy. There are other groups who lack the cultural prerequisites for democracy and who will not become properly democratic no matter how hard you shove the institutions of democracy down their throats. This goes back to the recognition that government is power. We tend to confuse government with institutions, but if the institutions do not have the support of the people they do not have power and thus have nothing to do with government.

That idea is at the heart of my political philosophy. Good government is the product of a strong culture. It is a recursive model of societal improvement:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

Confucius, The Great Learning

This is why my own investigations focus not on how to impose change on people externally but rather on what culture is and how it is transmitted. This, I think, is the road to improvement. If we can understand why some groups of people spontaneously generate wealth, creativity, and good governance, while others seem trapped in a state of degradation, then we might actively promote the welfare of mankind.

Finally, I do not agree that such policies as redistributive taxation and financial regulation reduce people's clamoring for more intervention. In fact I think such policies lead to more regulation. I believe that these policies result in outcomes that are the opposite of their intended aims. So if redistributive taxation makes people poorer and financial regulation makes markets more dangerous, then obviously you enter into an unstable feedback loop. One might call it a slippery slope. The more you intervene, the worse the problem becomes, and the more people demand intervention. I think this sums up the story of twentieth century governance nicely. Take the war on drugs as an example. The more effort they put into fighting the drug trade the more valuable drugs become. The more valuable drugs become, the stronger become those who traffic in drugs and the more difficult it becomes to stop them. So the harder you fight the problem the more virulent it becomes (and the harder you try to fight it, ad infinitum). An argument that supplements this perfectly sufficient point is that interventionist concessions create a norm. Interventions give people a sense of entitlement and this begets greater expectations of future paternalism.

A 9/11 Post

I'm reposting this from a forum where I wrote it in response to a posting of this NPR essay by Frank Miller:

Sadly I think Miller had the right of it before the attacks. It is about the ideas. Strip the United States of the ideas of Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, and I will have no attachment to the flag. To the extent I currently have some attachment to it, it is because I believe that it still represents those ideas. I don't believe that lines on a map convey some magic value, or that there is some genetic reason why Americans are more valuable than anyone else. What binds us together and gives us value is our shared belief in concepts about justice, liberty, and equality, government and social institutions; the Enlightenment ideals of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison. When those concepts take a back seat to the flag and patriotism, we have lost something important, and become less than we were.

A nation is the wrong scope in which to view Franklin's hang together/hang separately quote. Our world has gone global. There is no country that can close off the world or effectively protect itself from what happens outside it. It was not a nation state that attacked us, nor will a lone nation state protect us. Globalized business, fueled by multinational corporations, modern transportation, and electronic communications, has limited the role of the nation state in trade and economics, and terrorism has done the same for security and violence. For there is now no border and no army that can stop violence. Violence and instability can spread by interpersonal networks, and even by the simple conveyance of ideas and ideals.

For better or worse, Mankind is in this together, and together we will succeed or together we will fail. We can choose between global brotherhood and global chaos. The more borders we erect, the more boundaries we create, the more sides we choose and groups we vilify, the more separate we see ourselves from others in our minds and in reality, the less the secure our civilization will be. Because our civilization is those ideas of Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, and we will not spread them by building walls, and they will not take hold at the point of a gun, nor can we even protect those ideals in our own nation when we put that nation before them.

Our ideals are our civilization and also its most powerful weapons. The shrinking of the world, its growing interdependence and interconnectedness grants us an overpowering advantage. When given a fair chance those ideals will triumph (and always have) because they represent the best products of Mankind's unique ability to rationally reflect upon his own place in the world. They are not the result of a particular culture or historical heritage, but of the essence of what divides Man from the beasts. And when they spread to another people or another corner of the globe, we have won the most decisive victory possible, because they are now us.

Patriotism to a nation state will not spread our ideals, but it can blind us to our kinship and our shared interests and shared fate with those outside our border. When we choose to cheer for our team rather than our ideals we not only fail to spread those ideals, but we make them unpalatable to anyone on another team. Even the most appealing ideals can be poisonous when packaged in arrogance, pride, and inequity.

There is yet a place for nations and for force of arms. There are threats to be countered, villains to be neutralized. But the state must be an instrument of our ideals, and not the reverse. The state serves our will, and, if our civilization is to endure, we must serve our shared ideals. There is indeed something precious in our civilization, and indeed something perishable. It is not vulnerable to bombs and missiles, but it is vulnerable to our own disloyalty. Terrorism is not a threat to us because it sheds our blood, but because it can cause us to forget who we are and what we hold dear.

Understanding Net Neutrality

This is an issue that interested me even before I started work this summer, but I've certainly been immersed in it these past few months. There is a great deal of confusion over it, and many misconceptions. It's really quite simple, but I think it helps to have a little bit of narrative context. From early on in the development of the US phone network up until the late 1960's AT&T (along with the regional Bell companies (RBOCs) that they controlled) was the telecom sector. Starting in the late 1960's the FCC started giving signs that they wanted to create competition, at least in some limited areas, for AT&T. Taking the hint from the FCC, MCI was created in late '60s with the intention of entering the long distance business, and during the 70's did a remarkable job of plugging themselves into the regulatory and legislative machines in DC. AT&T was not about to take this lying down, and a mighty battle ensued. In the end, MCI won and AT&T, as we all know, was broken up. But they were broken up to break their monopoly on long distance, meaning that the key was to sever their connection with the RBOCs, so that MCI and AT&T could both contract for long distance service with them. It left in place the RBOCs' monopolies on local access to consumers. In 1996 Congress tried to eliminate that monopoly as well. The FCC, in its wisdom, savaged this legislation, leaving the local access monopoly more or less in place. As things turned out, the long distance market was really not worth that much. It's so cheap now that companies can basically give it away, and in the context of voice over IP (VOIP) the entire concept of long distance becomes obsolete.

Local phone service, likewise should not be worth much. But the monopoly on local access allows for more than just the provision local phone service, it allows for providers to tie any other service delivered on those lines to the monopoly. The economic theories now dominant in antitrust law say that this should not be important, that tying of products to an existing monopoly should not allow the provider to milk that monopoly for more money than they could get for collecting rent on the monopoly directly. The efforts of the Bell companies to protect their ability to tie services to their access networks argues to the contrary. When Congress tried to break up those monopolies in the 1996 Telecom Act, the Bell companies spent (if I recall correctly) upwards of $250 million fighting against it in court and in front of the FCC. They won that battle, and for their efforts won the right to tie DSL broadband internet service to their monopoly. The cable companies piggy-backed on their efforts and convinced the FCC to give them similar treatment, ensuring us a duopoly on broadband internet service. Consequently we have fallen far behind competing nations on price/performance in the broadband market.

That brings us to net neutrality. Having extended their monopoly to provision of broadband internet, the Bell companies now want to push their monopoly still further, into provision of services over the internet. High speed internet has the ability to deliver phone and video (the equivalent of cable TV) over IP for very low prices. This threatens the monopoly rent that the phone and cable companies have collected on these services for a long time. Once consumers are purchasing their TV and phone service over the internet, the phone and cable companies will have no competitive advantage over other providers. Consequently, they will not deliver high speed internet access until they are guaranteed the ability to block competing voice and video services over those connections to preserve their duopoly (the pathetic broadband connections they now sell lack the bandwidth to provide video service). They may also try to collect rent from other online service providers like Amazon and eBay, but I don't think that's really the objective. And I would be very surprised if they ever got into the business of restricting free speech, or any of the other nightmare scenarios that some net neutrality supporters have suggested.

I'm as big a fan of net neutrality as there is. But it really doesn't go far enough. The phone and cable companies have got us by the balls on broadband service and are threatening to hold high speed connections hostage if they don't get what they want. And they're more than capable of doing just that. Hell, they've already done just that. Many other countries have 10+ Mb/s DSL connections and are seeing rollouts of 100 Mb/s fiber connections. We're stuck with 1 Mb/s connections and we're being overcharged for them. Congress needs to go back and finish what it was trying to accomplish in 1996: open up the local access duopoly. But it needs to do it right: complete divestiture of the local access loops. The network access business should be run like a utility. If that were done, net neutrality would be a meaningless concept, there would be no need for it. Competitive pressure would prevent any service providers from trying to block access to internet services.

Unfortunately, the phone companies have the DC muscle to prevent this from ever happening. They've already spent $50 million on net neutrality and appear to have scuttled an important telecom bill because Democrats (to their credit) wouldn't let it through the Senate without net neutrality. These are some of the costs we pay for having a government for sale to the highest bidder.

Political Process

Hank, thanks for that post. It will take a while to process, and I'm afraid that my time is pretty limited these days. So I'll try to bite off a few bits at time. The basic question here is about decision-making and the costs and benefits of various approaches and how to evaluate particular issues to determine which approach is appropriate for that issue. The big question of trying to apply some generalized system and draw conclusions about whether we have enough or too much of one approach or another is an important one, but it's more than I'm willing to bite off without working through some of the ancillary issues.

First, I want to agree with you on the stupidity of this unidimensional visualization of politics that is popular in the U.S. There is a left and a right and various points in the middle and on the extremities and that's that. Not only is that inaccurate, but I really believe that this metaphor tends to promote partisanship and stifle substantive policy discussion. A real policy dialogue is founded on common ground, and it is much easier to find common ground with other parties when you visualize policy as existing on many dimensions rather than as a point on a line. And it trivializes everything. Somehow Joe Lieberman becomes a moderate Democrat, when he's not moderate about anything. He is a zealous social conservative and an unrepentant fan of big and aggressive (and irresponsible) government (is it any surprise that he has had a love affair with this administration). But somehow, under our unidimensional view of politics, his two opposing extremisms cancel out to create a "moderate". Hmm.. This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time..

Anyway, on to my main point.. I'd just like to hash out some of the territory here. Some of what you describe about presidential politics is, I think, referred to as the "equilibrium displacement" theory of voter power. Or as it has been referred to in two of my classes it has come up in, the hot dog vendors on the beach theory. Say you have a beach full of people, and two hot dog vendors trying to sell to them. Where do the hot dog vendors inevitably set up? Side by side at the median point of the locations of the beach-goers. That is, I believe, a Nash equilibrium (neither side can unilaterally improve his position). The only power of any individual on the beach is to switch to the other side of median point. The median will shift one person over.

That is really the traditional view of American presidential politics. I think there are some real problems with that model, but to the degree that you subscribe to it, perhaps there is some sense in which the political spectrum is linear. No matter how many dimensions there are to issues, the positions will boil down to the two hot dog vendors and you can define a line that runs through the two points. Of course, I don't think this model properly accounts for a) voter turnout (and not so much strategic voter turnout (i.e. your Shotgun News story) as much as general voter turnout issues) and b) that there is a fairly broad range of "acceptable" policy positions beyond which non-policy issues (the charismatic frontman, the TV commercials, gamesmanship, etc.) are more significant.

The Shotgun News thing raises another issue: strength of preference/logrolling. If owning an AK-47 is worth 25 points of utility to you, having low taxes is worth 10 points of utility, and having high steel tariffs is worth 5 points (and those are the only three policy questions in the election), clearly you're going to be willing to compromise on taxes and tariffs in order to have the gun policy you want. And I don't think that is inherently problematic. People have varying strengths of interests and should be able to express those in voting preferences. I personally will overlook many policy differences in order to find candidates who support aggressive action towards clean and accountable government, campaign finance reform, and balanced budgets. Add in sane foreign policy and that's nearly my entire voter preference list. The single issue voter is only an extreme iteration of this.

Logrolling is problematic where people are logrolling for immediate financial gains. In general I'm referring to situations where commercial interests are engaged in the logrolling, and are using lobbyists and campaign contributions to do it. They may not care about any other policy except getting the earmark that delivers them a $5m contract, or an agency regulation that puts a competitor out of business. I think you have to distinguish that sort of logrolling (the car seat example) from the logrolling involved in individual voters deciding who to vote for (the shotgun example). The former, I agree, is a serious problem, but I have no objection to the latter.

I think that's about all I can handle for now. For next time: policy bundling in presidential elections. And I'll look into updating the general appearance of the blog, although it might not happen for a couple weeks...

edit: I should add, having now read Ryan's comment on Hank's post that my statements above assumed that the car seat law was a result of industry lobbying.

Honest Dialogue

I guess it's predictable, but I'm somewhat irked by all of the coverage of the Palestinian elections suggesting that this result somehow signals defeat for the US's policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East. I'm critical of the naivete of that policy for other reasons (primarily the fact that staging elections does not, by itself, make for a stable democratic government). But I don't see that criticism at play here. To the extent that we can successfully create democracy in the Middle East, I'm all for it. It's the implementation that I object to, not the objective. This was an exceptionally clean election, and one that signaled the importance of honest governance to the Palestinian people. Fatah symbolized the sort of corrupt and autocratic government that undermines democracy. Palestinians cleaned house on them, and now reports say that they are cleaning out their leadership. Palestine going forward will have two legitimate political parties, both of whom understand the importance of responsive, uncorrupt government to their voters, rather than deeply corrupt single-party rule. This is huge step forward for democracy in Palestine.

Moreover, I'm troubled by the assertion that because parties are elected in Middle Eastern nations that disfavor American policy (not just in Palestine; Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as well), this means democracy is bad. I've long thought that the dynamic that the US and Israel have tried to foster in Palestine is absurd. They have rejected talks with Hamas, with Arafat and Fatah, basically with anyone who could legitimately claim to represent the Palestinian people. Instead they would rather hand-pick a representative for Palestine (Abbas) and speak only with him. Indeed, they would frequently grow upset with Abbas for failing to bring the other Palestinians to heel. But how could he? He had no power over them, no democratic legitimacy. Fatah didn't respect him, Hamas didn't respect him, and I doubt the Palestinian people did either. How could he purport to speak on their behalf? How is it supposed to work that an agent in a negotiation is hand-picked by the adversaries of his principals? Under what theory of agency is this legitimate? It's absurd. Even if Israel had reached an agreement with Abbas, it could hardly have been expected to meaningfully bind the Palestinians.

The US and Israel may not like the actual positions of Palestinians, but they cannot hope to produce progress if they refuse to even address them. The important thing in these various elections is not that the party who favors American policy should win, but that the party who accurately represents the views of the voters should win. It's the voters we need to worry about and be engaged with, not politicians. Engaging in dialogue with politicians is important only to the extent that they are effective representatives of their constituents. If the general populace of the Middle East dislikes American policy, that is not a fact that can be swept under the rug based on models of governance. We have had many US-friendly dictators around the Middle East, and it has not solved our problems. In fact it has made them worse by allowing us to ignore legitimate complaints of the general populace. There needs to be honest dialogue, and that can only happen when there are political leaders who can truly represent the interests of their people. To the extent that elections like the one in Palestine produce that, we are all better off.

The Confirmation Process Confirms the Worst

I have paid some attention to the Alito hearings out of professional interest, and this weekend I tried to take a step back and think about what value the hearings have, if any, for the "weakest branch" and for our political system in general. I think the process does have value, but it is not for the reasons that many people might think at first.

First, it is hard to ignore the observation of Senator Arlen Specter that a nominee will answer only as many questions as he or she thinks is necessary to get confirmed. But is that bad? It should not be surprising to anyone that, when the same party controls the Presidency and the Congress, a nominee will be given more latitude and it is really his or her nomination to lose, rather than a burden to prove that the person reaches toward the mainstream. Even where the confirmation process is friendly, it still provides an opportunity to weed out nominees that have bad temperment or really bad judgment, and I think that is the best we can hope for. Judge Alito has good judgment and good temperment, therefore he will be confirmed.

But, some may say, he is really conservative and is bound to overturn important Supreme Court precedent that protects the fundamental rights of citizens. Well, if that were an important value to most people, and if it is true that Judge Alito would in fact work against these things, then he should never have gotten nominated in the first place. The failure, then, is not the confirmation process but the political process that allowed President Bush to appoint him.

Second, no one should accept for a minute that politics does not matter when it comes to judicial decisionmaking. That is to say, the Constitution was not written in such a way that allows individuals to determine the right answer every time, entirely divorced from value. What does "cruel and unusual" mean in an objective sense? "Unreasonable" searches and seizures? Who gets to decide whether the President is "faithfully" executing the laws, and what standard do you apply to decide that? Political leanings, upbringing, morays--these things will always come into play in deciding legal questions. Judges are humans, and the law (in the sense that we talk of it being decided in courtrooms, anyway) is a human creation.

I guess my overarching point is that liberal democrats should assume the worst as far as Judge Alito's conservative views, but it is a little too late to be worrying about that. The best we can hope for is a judge that is humble and willing to recognize that the law is not black and white, and is willing to take other people's views into account. And nothing I saw in the confirmation process gave me too much cause for concern on that score.

Will Judge Alito vote to overturn, or severely cutback on, Roe? Probably. Will he often find himself in agreement with Scalia and Thomas? Probably. But those things would not make him a bad judge, in my view. What matters most to me is that he does not believe the black robe gives him special access to the truth.

Democracy Doesn't Mean You Can Vote for Hamas

Speaking of problems with democracy.. CSM reports that Hamas is appearing increasingly dominant in Palestinian elections. First off, I told you so. That aside, the E.U. and the U.S. are quite unhappy about this turn of events and are threatening repercussions should Hamas gain a majority of the Palestinian legislative council. Not so excited about democracy anymore? It's not at all clear yet that Hamas could win a national majority, but if they do, the E.U. will demand that they renounce violence or forfeit aid money (as if that ever stopped Arafat's Fatah party from doing anything). The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a resolution threatening to cut off all support for the Palestinian Authority if Hamas has any participation in the government.

This is pure stupidity. I've argued before, and I'm sure I'll argue again, that there will not be a peaceful settlement of this conflict without Hamas' participation. They already have an effective veto over the process through violence, which they exercised over the Oslo agreement. It sure seems like it would be better for everyone if they could exercise their veto through voting in the Palestinian legislature rather than through detonating bombs in cafes in Jerusalem. Here there is an opportunity to mainstream Hamas, to bring political leaders within the organization to its front and into legitimate negotiating positions, and to support and strengthen Palestinian democracy, all in one blow. And it looks like we want to squander the opportunity...

The End of Faith, God Willing

I recently finished reading Sam Harris' book The End of Faith. It was a fascinating read that really made me rethink the utility and danger of faith, most prominently demonstrated by religion. In particular, Harris is concerned by faith that is out of reach of both criticism and debate. This is especially dangerous in the Big Three religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), all of which claim that their religion is the only true religion and that those not subscribing to it are damned. Thus the setup for inevitable conflict. The only reason that Christianity has mellowed, Harris claims, is due to secular influences. I would very much agree.

Such criticism of faith and religion is not new. What was new to me, however, were Harris' criticisms of religious moderates. He claims that moderates are complicit in the acts of terrorism or harm done by religious extremists. Because moderates believe in at least some of the dogma of a given religion, they have no grounds on which to argue against a completely literal interpretation of the religious text. In other words, they are on the same spectrum of belief as the extremist, where at some level their faith becomes dissociated from reason.

Harris covers a broad range of topics in the book. One I would like to mention is torture, given the recent press coverage and Joe's recent post (see Torture Nation, 10/7). Harris' arguments were a little harder to follow here, but I believe his main thrust is that torture is no different than collateral damage caused in a war. In other words, in fighting a war, both are potential unfortunate consequences necessary to succeed. He seems to forget about intention through all of this: there is certainly no intention to kill innocent bystanders in a war (although we might expect this to happen), but there is clearly intention to torture someone as a means to an end.

With that said, I continue to struggle with the torture issue. In the oft-cited example, a captive holds information about a bomb he has planted that will kill thousands of people, but he is unwilling to give that information. Should he be subject to torture that we might save thousands of lives? Assuming we know him to be guilty and involved, the answer is clearly yes from a utilitarian perspective. And yet, therein lies the potential of gross misuse of torture, for how can we ever truly know whether we have the right man? Is the information gained by torture reliable? From a practical standpoint at least, there are many doubts about cost-benefit of torture.

I would encourage everyone out there to read Harris' book (by the way, Harris has a degree in philosophy and is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience - I love him already). I would also love to hear any discussion on these issues. Some excerpts from the book you might enjoy:

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.” (page 19)

“We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words— ‘Jesus,’ ‘Allah,’ ‘Ram’—can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.” (page 35)

The Murtha Discussion

Aside from the laughable attempts to tar Congressman Jack Murtha as a coward or Michael Moore, the more serious conservative response to Murtha's proposal to leave Iraq is well stated by neocons Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol in this Weekly Standard article. Murtha gave no consideration to the consequences of our leaving Iraq, they complain. The Iraqi military lacks the capacity to stand on its own, they argue (sidenote: but haven't we been constantly hearing about the many thousands of Iraqi troops who have been trained for a couple years now? I guess that was all BS. But then we already knew that..). There could be civil war, and in any case it will be a huge victory for Al Qaeda, they worry.

I think these are good considerations and important points, but they miss a fundamental preliminary question: can we still win in Iraq? Because if we can't, every point raised by Kagan and Kristol is utterly irrelevant. Murtha argues that it is a lost cause. Unless that point is rebutted, his position must prevail over Kagan and Kristol's. They answer this charge with the flat statement that "victory is in fact possible, though it will require a longer war than anyone would like." That is not at all clear to me.

I have been (and remain) reluctant to abandon the mission in Iraq owing simply to the magnitude of our current obligation to the Iraqi people and the high stakes that Kagan and Kristol detail. However, I am becoming increasingly doubtful about our long term prospects for success in Iraq. I see no signs of the insurgency slowing or Iraqi government gaining control. As Murtha noted, the Iraqis don't want us there, and, in fact, at least some Iraqi leaders view the insurgency as legitimate resistance to occupation. There was a column by Helena Cobban (a CSM foreign affairs columnist) that I thought I had blogged (although it appears I never did) from the summer that presents a credible argument that our presence in Iraq is no longer helping matters. At this point I think we have to look very seriously at whether it is worth staying. I am on the threshold. The prospect of a civil war in Iraq worries me greatly. But if all we are doing is delaying it until our eventual and inevitable withdrawal, we are performing no great service. No matter the stakes, if we can no longer win this war, or if we are making matters worse by staying, we must withdraw.

In this case, Kagan and Kristol's points only go to underscore the general stupidity of the Iraq war in the first place. It was always a gamble of the highest stakes with dubious prospects of success. We have paid a high price for it already in many regards (casualties, money, reputation). Now whether we choose to remain or withdraw, the price will only escalate. I wonder if it is only now that the magnitude of this blunder is beginning to settle in for the neocons.

In the end, I believe this to be a more costly mistake than Vietnam. Where in Vietnam our policy was driven mostly by paranoia of communist dominoes falling (which never actually occurred), here I agree with Kagan and Kristol that this would be a victory for Al Qaeda of real importance. Al Qaeda has operated under the belief, drawn from U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, that the West is weak and has no stomach for fighting. This is a fundamental element of their strategic approach and philosophy. And here, in the most high profile arena possible, we may prove them right. Nonetheless, we cannot allow this to obscure reality in making our choice. If truly this is a lost cause we must not throw more good lives and money after bad. Our military has been courageous and true, and we owe it to them. To quote John Kerry (from when he used to be cool): "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

A Defense of Intellectualism

I've been absent here for over a month now (just haven't had much inspiration for posting), so I thought I'd copy over something I wrote for a discussion I was having elsewhere. Brief synopsis: the discussion revolved around violence in black culture in America (I'm sure you can guess the basis), and after a couple of people (not me) introduced references to books and studies and such they drew several replies critical of their "book learnin" and their air of intellectual superiority as compared to common sense and life experience. My reply follows:

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
-H.L. Mencken

I find this very interesting, I was having a discussion last night with a friend on nearly this very topic. Bertrand Russell in his classic book, The History of Western Philosophy, frames the last several hundred years of Western philosophy as a struggle between the Enlightenment empiricists and reactionary Romantics. It's a theme I've recently run across (in nearly identical terms) again reading Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, and very distinct threads of the same issues popped up in the documentary about the neocons, The Power of Nightmares that I posted on over the summer.

The basic idea is this:

The millenia before the Enlightenment (basically from the end of the Roman Empire on) was a vast wasteland for thought and discovery. For various reasons (mostly relating to the dominance of religious philosophy) little of value happened in the realm of philosophy or science. Eventually empiricism happened along (thanks in no small part to John Locke) and the Enlightenment was born.

Philosophers and intellectuals realized they had uncovered a tool of amazing power to learn about the world around them, and science as a meaningful discipline was created. These early Enlightenment philosophers were awash in optimism believing that in no time they would map out all of the knowledge to be had and perfect mankind in our interactions with the world and one another. As time went on what they discovered that while empiricism was able to unlock the secrets of the physical world at a phenomenal rate, human interaction was a different story. Human society is too complex, has too many variables and dimensions and does not yield to the scientific method in the straightforward way that physics or chemistry does. Empirical truths, they felt, do exist that govern the relations of man, but they would be painfully slow in yielding to empirical study (which is not to say that they did not develop important advances in government and economics). In the meantime we would simply have to live with the uncertainty of knowing that the truth is out there, but that we don't necessarily yet know what it is.

The Romantics, beginning mostly with Rousseau (who is the villain of Russell's tale) rejected this uncertainty and opted instead for answers that were simple, neat, and wrong, based mostly in existing cultural or religious values or in the naive sort of philosophy the preceded the Enlightenment. Rousseau rejected empiricism as the means to discover truth, and held science to be incompatible with virtue. Rousseau believed that truth should be found, not "from the principles of a high philosophy", but "in the depths of my heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable characters." He thought that conscience and intuition should be the only guide and "we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy; we can be men without being learned; dispensed from wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human opinions."

Fast forward 250 years and we are still locked in this same battle between empiricism and romanticism. The terms have hardly changed a lick. The Lockian empirical perspective has descended through our Founding Fathers and the ever-increasing reach of scientific discovery, while Rousseau's Romanticism has passed down through Kant, Hegel, the Transcendentals, and the Straussian neoconservatives. We see it expressed in battles between empirical relativism and absolute moralism, between the scientific method and truth by revelation (intelligent design), in the clash between modernity and traditional cultural values (a thread that manifests itself both domestically between red and blue politics and internationally between the modern West and extreme Islam), and in the certainty of neocon policy in face of contrary data. The conflict between Locke and Rousseau is the defining conflict of mankind these last 250 years and looks to be nowhere near resolved.

And here we are arguing over whether common sense intuition is superior to book-learnin.

I don't mean to be rude, but I do think that intuition informed by book-learnin is superior to naked intuition. I believe in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the importance of empiricism. I choose Locke.

And I would note that empiricism does not dismiss the importance of intuition. Intuition is a critical element of the Scientific Method and guides its every step. But it is not an end point. It is the starting point. It provides the questions and the hypotheses that empirical study then attempts to evaluate. Intuition anchored by evidence, is to my mind, clearly superior to intuition alone.